It's true that set operations form algebraic properties, I wouldn't characterize topology as looking "current state" (?) and "boolean relationships" "only". In fact set theory is pretty much taken for granted for most of point set, and certainl you dont talk about the algebraic structure until measure theory

It just comes across as incoherent to me. Multipliers? Does he mean topology doesn't depend on a metric? Maybe, the way he weaves in stupid "subjectives" stuff though makes me think he's just high.

You don't talk about any of the things he's saying in math research, because the terminology as he's using it is mostly meaningless.

Have you ever talked to an aging engineer who learned all their terminology 40 years ago in college and never tested whether or not their own jargon had anything to do with what actual researchers mean when using the same words?

He's making it up (or made it up a long time ago when he reasoned what these things mean to him privately).

Bitcoin fans don't seem to understand finance or economics past a superficial level. Many of them believe Bitcoin is immune to classical market failures, and not for especially convincing reasons. One blog article I read suggested that Bitcoin was immune to deflationary spirals because, among other reasons, "deflationary spirals are bull**** and never happen anyway". Most seem to agree that Bitcoin is immune to almost all problems because it doesn't have a central bank (even though it totally does have one, it's just run by computers instead of humans, and it's not able to react to problems).

The really sad thing is - even if most of these people don't lose big on Bitcoin, it just means they won't have learned anything from the experience, and then they'll be able to go even deeper on some other speculation scheme.

Not really, the people I interact with in engineering use phrases like "thinking outside the box" and "work flow", rather than mathy terms.

The grandaddy of this kind of inpenetrable jargon built out of formerly meaningful terminology, but appropriated for the author's own private understanding: http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/Langan_CTMU_092902.pdf

The kind of person I'm talking about would never use those phrases. They'd be more likely to operate ham radio or try to build <really complicated consumer device> from scratch.

This person is grey and bearded, definitely single (most likely divorced), possibly wealthy but also possibly destitute, and is wearing the same stained t-shirt you saw him wear all last week.

Interestingly, getting used to another's language and working with them is an important part of research. People all over use different notatons, definitions, etc., the purpose of seminars and talks is to bring private language and understanding forward as much as new mathematics.

Pretty much any two differential topology texts will use different notations, since the subject is a huge mess of maps and symbols, and there's no standard on even like how to denote the differential lol.

Here, I found his photograph. He's the guy in the first few rows of the rightmost column.

http://www.ams.org/bull/1994-30-02/S0273-0979-1994-00502-6/S0273-0979-1994-00502-6.pdf

BTW, Chris Langen is a /sci meme. He took an IQ test and believes he is one of the smartest people in the world, leading him to publish a theory of everything despite being a bouncer. Search YouTube to see him being interviewed. I find it mostly sad, but his insane theory is quite elaborate. It's like he took every advanced topic in math and physics out there and thought about it a ton without calculating anything, and then just write up his thoughts using the same language in what looks more like philosophy.

He's a bit different from a crackpot in that he doesn't claim to have proven anything false true. It's just that at most one person in the world knows wtf he is even talking about.

The offensive thing, though, is when people like Langen then start to try to sell their incomprehensibly as authority via faux expertise, which seems to be what McAfee is doing.

The whole "central bank" thing is really, really ignorant too:



The federal reserve does a bunch to help keep prices stable. It's sheer delusion that it's creating massive inflation.

In light of McAfee's galaxy brain quote:

Oh **** dudes:

https://www.patreon.com/KnowledgeDistiller

The math cranks are on patreon now

Bitcoin is going to become self-aware and start investing in itself, and that's how the singularity will start.

0
patrons

huh

I suppose it's evidence of the financial ineptitude of most people that average people are buying into Bitcoin where there are over 200k unconfirmed transactions.

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

It's totally broken, ****ing amazing.

What is the significance of that?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news-analysis-us-data-suggests-new-paradigm-is-here-to-stay-1120286.html

For posterity's sake.

I'm no expert, but I think it means there's "2 billion" dollars worth of coins that hasn't changed hands. There could be people waiting to make moves, so prices could be really off right now.

I think.

https://www.theonion.com/bitcoin-on-path-to-functioning-just-like-real-currency-1821128169

The Onion has been on fire lately.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-medicare-ryan-20171208-story,amp.html

Off with their heads. This is class war and we are losing.

Maybe it would be more fitting to blast them with X-rays and block them from getting cancer treatment.

Thanks Wookie!

Thanks Google!

I should probably change my mobile search engine after reading that..

Though I find a line odd: "an organisation 100 per cent funded by the Russian government and classified as propaganda by the Columbia Journalism Review and by the former US Secretary of State"

They mean Hillary Clinton?

I find the whole line of reasoning a bit odd though. If RT is propaganda serving Russian state interest, because it promotes (usually factual) stories in a biased way, doesn't that make like, a huge amount of publications propaganda since many do that? Since Fox tells really biased stories towards the benefits of a small minority of rich people, and is privately owned by one person, wouldn't we count that as propaganda as well? Especially since Fox's "pro-business" (really pro-class warfare) stances are not in the best interest of the American people.

Of course, it's not as if RT is.. "good" or anything, but I feel like it gets a particularly bad rap based on it's association with Putin more than because it serves as a propaganda factory.

The thing is, too, Russia's propaganda front is less organized and coherent than people seem to think. They're about sowing discord, whether or not it has any basis in reality. The problem is, many people think that any movement Russia has promoted through propaganda is therefore "un-American" and bad. Sometimes their propaganda is off the mark, sometimes it's on the mark, and you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater on things like class warfare. But overall, I don't think the effect is really that significant, it just provides stories that feed into people's biases.

Is firefox really the best browser? I actually use chrome on my desktop, but I'm getting frustrated because I tend to leave tabs open and the thing is such a huge memory hog.

Chrome is spyware.

Firefox recently became very fast and stable, especially now that every tab runs in a separate process (which chrome has done for a long time).

Unfortunately they broke most existing extensions when they adopted WebExtensions, which is basically from Chrome. The important ones like uBlock are there though. They also work on mobile which is important.

Oh good, that was the reason i preferred chrome when i switched years ago. Firefox here I come!

Also nice feature in Firefox is containers. It's like having an incognito tab but with history. E.g., open Facebook and Google each in separate containers to avoid tracking, since the container isolates the cookies.

As for your problem about the browser slowing down with too many tabs open, I suggest buying more memory, and as a last resort closing the browser and restarting it (so long as you have it set to save your session upon closing).

Edit: They killed off all the old extensions, but there used to be ones where you could pause all javascript in background tabs, and even unload all objects in unused tabs from memory. Alternatively you can just run NoScript and by default block Javascript and you'd be fine, but I'm too lazy to whitelist every page that uses Javascript.

Also for DuckDuckGo (set it as your default search engine so you can use it with CTRL+K or CTRL+L), you can easily search various other search engines by prefixing your query with a bang operator.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

This is actually better, since I can hit the HOME key and then DELETE a few times and change the operator after I type it in the first time. So maybe first I want to go directly to Wikipedia or IMDB, or maybe Google Maps, or I can delete the bang operator altogether and just press enter to go to the DuckDuckGo results page.

I use the bangs all the time, like !mo for Math Overflow, or !so for Stack Overflow, or !mathse for Math Stack Exchange, etc.

What I am bummed about is that they killed tab groups. I'd like to see something like tab groups replace profiles, so I can restore arbitrary subsets from tab groups, if for no other reason than to avoid opening a gazillion tabs every time I fire up the browser (even if they don't load until I click on the tab, since it still takes up space in my window manager).

Really what needs to happen is for somebody to modify the browser or write an extension to merge bookmarks / history with tab sessions, and then to organize history based on arbitrary spatial clusters of your choosing, rather than chronologically. Then, once history and tabs are indistinguishable, you can readily open and close browser windows and tabs and have a perfect memory of the pages you visited AND their sessions, so long as the server bothered to keep it alive on their end.

Yeah, Firefox rules now