22ns might be about 100 processor instructions. Somehow I doubt that any programming language can parse 50 strings in 100 instructions, let alone with naive code.
I don't get this. I have a megabyte or two of plain-text notes, and going through them and maintaining them and extending them is fun (apologize to the person who doesn't like threes). There are notes for a novel, ideas for future personal projects (way too many to do in my remaining lifetime), attempts at capturing my understanding of great scientific and philosophical problems, weird things I invented in my dreams, various ideas which didn't fit anywhere else. Guess what, the novel will probably never get written, projects will never get done, I will not make a philosophical breakthrough. So what?
Some ideas on how am I supposed to start hating my notes:
* They grow to 100MB, then it starts to be a burden
* I switch from notepad.exe to a dedicated application which somehow exploits my hobby of writing notes
* I develop OCD or something else
None of this seems very relatable. At this point, I might be writing a new note with these ideas, updating it when I get more ideas or when the one, most plausible explanation jumps out at me. Then I would read it years later and have something to think about before bed and have a good feeling that I didn't lose something and I am not left with thougths about the last episode of a TV show. Or is that supposed to be a bad feeling?
> going through them and maintaining them and extending them is fun
It’s fun for you, not for everyone else. There, it’s as simple as that. All you need to understand is different people enjoy different things.
> Or is that supposed to be a bad feeling?
It’s not “supposed” to be anything. It will be good for some, bad for others, neutral for others still. There’s no objective right answer. If you enjoy something and it doesn’t harm anyone, do it. If you don’t enjoy it and it isn’t necessary, don’t do it. Other people will have different preferences.
Oh, the OP pretty much told me that they didn't like taking notes. I am trying to understand why, what is the mechanism? Is it like burning out? Can it happen to me and my notes when I start doing something wrong? Why is "just do less of it" not a solution? Why is "just expect less from it" not a solution? Am I an exception? If so, why?
Impossible with just the basic inductive principle of tokamaks, yes. Some years back I learned that you can keep the current going with microwaves, not sure about recent progress. You can also approximate steady state by reversing polarity of the warp - ehm - magnetic field regularly.
While temperature may be in the stellar ballpark, pressure should be much lower. That is fine because we are not trying to do proton-proton fusion (that one is very slow even in a star) but a much easier deuterium-tritium fusion.
So, deuterium needs to be obtained from sea water through distillation and electrolysis - both energy intensive operations. And tritium comes from nuclear reactors.
I have always wondered - assuming that the confinement problem is solved, how does the cost of the fuel compare to fission (or other generation methods?
The energy cost to extract deuterium from seawater is about 1/238000th (0.00004%) the energy released from fusing that deuterium.
Nuclear fusion breeds its own tritium from lithium.
Running a 1 GW thermal fusion reactor for a year would consume $483,000 of deuterium and $1300 of lithium. At 40% conversion efficiency and 5 cents per kwh, the fusion reactor would produce $175 million of electricity in that same year.
For comparison, fuel is about 5% of the cost of electricity from fission, and about 50% the cost from coal.
Ability to perceive your own thoughts. Access to your own debug logs.
I think this is distinct from "ability to perceive green, which doesn't exist". A neural network trained to distinguish green in the output of a spectroscope will perceive green without ever knowing there is something like a "neural network" or "thoughts".
Also, this probably can be detected from the outside via debugging. What cannot be detected may be the thing that distinguishes a hypothetical "philosophical zombie" from a truly conscious human, but I don't think anything like a philosophical zombie exists. Once it is physically identical to the human, it will also be thinking identically.
As a next step, you may observe humans around you and realize that the thoughts you perceive seem to be running inside the head of one of these humans (which you will call "me"). However, I don't think knowing what you look like from the outside is necessary for consciousness.
They're talking about ratios of unit-strength, which correlate directly to odds of success in a battle, not to numbers-of-units or anything more fuzzy like that. Given which, 20:10 and 2:1 have identical odds of success.
Do they, though? It depends on how the combat works.
Suppose, for example, that each side has 5 hit points, and repeatedly you roll a 2:1 die to decide who gets 1 point of damage, until one side reaches 0 hit points. The chance of an "upset", where the weaker side wins, is not 1/3; I compute it to be roughly 14%. If both sides start with 10 hit points, I compute the chance of an upset to be 6.5%. The law of large numbers means that, the more die rolls the combat involves, the less likely an upset is.
Or. Suppose that, at each step, one side has N soldiers and the other has M, and repeatedly a random soldier gets a kill; so that's an N/(M+N) chance that the first side gets a kill, and M/(M+N) that it's the other side. This would make advantages compound within the battle. Then I compute that a 2:1 initial matchup has a 5/6 chance (83%) of victory, and a 10:5 matchup has a 98.8% chance of victory.
(edit) I guess you could say I'm challenging the idea that "unit strength", such that when strength A fights strength B it's decided in one step with probability A/(A+B), makes sense as an abstract concept.
(defmemo meh (a b p)
(if (is b 0)
1
(is a 0)
0
(+ (* p (meh a dec.b p))
(* (- 1 p) (meh dec.a b p)))))
(defmemo nub (a b)
(if (is b 0)
1
(is a 0)
0
(+ (* (/ a (+ a b))
(nub a dec.b))
(* (/ b (+ a b))
(nub dec.a b)))))
Sure, you could design a system where it's more complicated, but Sid Meier didn't. In the video he's talking about Civilization Revolutions, in which combat is just "attacker's Attack stat vs defender's Defense stat" to form a probability-of-success, which is then rolled to see who won the battle. There's no hit points or anything like that, just those stats.
More than "players don't understand math", this might be a UI or tutorialization issue. I.e. presumably it was unintuitive because people imagined more complicated ways it might be working behind the scenes, causing large absolute stat-disparities to feel like they should work differently despite being in similar ratios. It's a case where showing an explicit odds-of-success display might have helped, though XCom famously showed how that can backfire...
(Revolutions was a deliberate simplification of the Civ formula, so they could try to appeal to console / mobile gamers rather than the traditional hardcore PC audience.)
> presumably it was unintuitive because people imagined more complicated ways it might be working behind the scenes
I think this is exactly it. And then Sid Meyer calls his players stupid and irrational for assuming the game had more depth than it actually had. For assuming a celebrated game designer would put even a modicum of thought into making a combat system that was balanced, made sense, and felt good.
It's like selling a gallium spoon and then calling people stupid when it melted in their soups. Sure, if you know a lot about gallium, you wouldn't be so stupid and irrational as to put it in your hot soup. But it's a metal spoon that you bought from a reputable vendor. Spoons go in soup. They were being completely rational; it's just that they were tricked into assuming a product was less crappy than it actually was.
> I think this is exactly it. And then Sid Meyer calls his players stupid and irrational
I think this is overstating what Sid Meier says in the talk. His original goal was to make his simple combat stat system clear to users by describing its odds as odds conventionally are described.
> For assuming a celebrated game designer would put even a modicum of thought into making a combat system that was balanced, made sense, and felt good.
That's exactly what he did, through player testing! Through practice and player feedback seems to me like a perfectly reasonable way to uncover an intuitive notion of unit strength. It's not like he said 'they're odds, stupid! learn how to understand odds.'. He recognized that player intuition and fun was the real goal, and his team gradually made the combat system more sophisticated.
> His original goal was to make his simple combat stat system clear to users by describing its odds as odds conventionally are described.
Except that odds values don't add on to each other. It sounds like the numbers only worked like odds in a single way, and not in other ways. The system was inherently contradictory, and confusion is not irrational in that situation.
And it's easy to clarify something as odds by making it two opposing percentages out of 100.
1:3 (one to three) odds aren't the same as 1/3 odds (1 in 3 odds).
1:3 means the second outcome (that on the right-hand side of the ':' symbol) is 3 times as likely as the former outcome, which is true when the likelihood of the first outcome is 25% and the likelihood of the second outcome is 75%.
1/3 describes the chances only of one of the outcomes, and fixes it at 33⅓%. If there's only one other outcome, its likelihood is 66⅔%.
Is the 'addition' you're talking about just one of the readings of the first syntax, or did I miss something else in the video that made the initial presentation of those odds figures surprising?
Sorry if my terminology is off; it's been a long time since I did any stats
Human laws do not follow laws of nature, or laws of logic. Trying to rationalize why something is or isn't owning or stealing is a misunderstanding.
"It is not missing anywhere, so it isn't stealing" does not apply. What applies is more like "This paper says it is stealing, so it is." The paper says it because a human wrote it there, as a result of whatever complexity going on in their natural neural network.
Please notice I didn't say "right", "wrong", "good", or "bad" anywhere.
To me, it sounds more like you're saying the same thing as me: It is not a law of nature, it is text on paper, a human fiction. Yet, somehow you manage to disagree with me. How did that happen?
