One of my guilty pleasures in life is coming up with convincing conspiracy theories. A personal favorite of mine is flat moon theory - the idea that the moon is a thin disc, not a sphere. A surprising number of people struggle to provide convincing counter arguments. Next time I’ll link them this site!
Here’s my understanding as a native Texan with examples (don’t take this too seriously):
Y’all -> group of people (howdy yall)
All y’all -> everyone (all yall need to listen up!)
All’s yall -> only thing (alls yall need is another beer)
All y’all’s -> singular possessive of everyone’s stuff (put all y’all’s shit away)
All’s y’all’s -> plural possessive of everyone’s stuff (alls y’all’s cars are blocking me in). This one is a bit awkward and most people just use all y’all’s instead
What if instead the manager was saying: “hey team I need you to all buy as many lotto tickets as possible!”
I feel like that’s a better analogy. Some charlatans are buying fake tickets, but as a manager who wants to win big, I’m ok with some chicanery so long as the average person is trying to honestly meet my directive.
It sounds to me like the safe assumption with software is that no matter how solid your stack is, there are vulnerabilities, potentially catastrophic. A question to folks more experienced than me - if my business depends on software, and I know that my software is almost certainly exploitable, how do I posture my business in such a way as to minimize the impacts of exploits like these?
When Windows was the predominant desktop OS in the 90s and maybe early 00s (ok, maybe still is), it was so badly insecure that you could be pretty much sure that it would be easy to compromise.
That's when firewalls were widely deployed to provide some layer of protection.
So you can ask yourself, what is the (possibly metaphorical) firewall in the software you depend on?
Is there any way you can decrease attack surface, separate out the most important data in extra-secure (and thus less accessible) systems?
I’d like to point out that TF2 was part of the Orange Box bundle that included Half Life, Portal, and TF2. Those single player games were never given away for free, so as a purchaser of the bundle, I wasn’t miffed TF2 went free to play. In fact, quite the opposite. Because TF2 is free, there are like 50k people to play with me everyday. I think $0 is the right price for TF2.
I agree CS is icky re: skins and gambling. But to say “refuses to control” is disingenuous. They’ve done many things to curtail gambling, like preventing tourneys from displaying gambling sponsors and adding trade restrictions that hampered bot activity. Valve is between a rock and a hard place here- they recognize gambling is a net negative on the value of their game (hence the curtailing and remonetization efforts). Remember, valve didn’t create skin trading with the expectation of third party gambling, so this is something unprecedented they’ve had to figure out as they go. Despite its drawbacks, the gambling market has some positives that valve can’t ignore. It creates liquidity and demand for the skins. People who pay hundreds of dollars for skins hate to see their value plummet. So if valve nuked gambling today, it would upset a lot of folks. I think valve has done a phenomenal job balancing their business needs with the social obligations with the players.
It’s also one of the thinnest floats IPO’ing. They’re only selling less than 5% of the company. That introduces a lot of sensitivity in the valuation, not to mention there exists a bit of game theory around fund managers needing to join in to maintain nominal returns with their peers.
Thank you for sharing! What are your thoughts on intentionally degrading service over the course of an hour instead of a hard cutoff? Like implementing an increasingly restrictive cap on download speeds/intentionally dropping a % of packets over the hour. Might be a little less jarring than a hard stop.
Hey - plugged this into chatGPT 5.2 and it seems to think this theory needs more work.
“As written, this looks closer to sophisticated curve-fitting (numerology with constraints) than a legitimate geometric unification, mainly because the claimed “ppm agreement” is often not assessed against experimental uncertainties and because several integer/constant choices function like hidden degrees of freedom.”
Thanks for running this on GPT 5.2. It is fascinating to see AI critiquing AI-assisted work.
The critique regarding hidden degrees of freedom is a fair point. However, in curve-fitting, parameters are continuous: one can choose 4.1 or 3.9 to make the data fit. In this model, parameters are topological invariants (integers like 4 faces, 12 vertices, 20 faces). They are discrete and cannot be tuned.
The fact that this unadjustable logic yields results agreeing with experimental data within ppm implies either a massive statistical coincidence or a structural aspect.
It would be very interesting to run independent tests on different AIs with the whole context of the model and a standardized, consensual prompt. Beyond formal verification, this methodology could open paths that are difficult to navigate without AI assistance, helping to determine if the model stands as a possible foundation for a 'broad explanation of the observable', since the term 'ToE' instantly raises red flags. Kind of a pioneer peer-centaur-review. Just an idea.
I think a succinct way to describe my thoughts on linear algebra/language is that language has high dimensionality (ie many different basis vectors that may not necessarily be orthogonal) and that individual languages use a unique coordinate system to express thought. Each language is a lossy approximation of all conceivable thought and some languages can more efficiently represent the “all thoughts” vector space because they have basis vectors that point in more uncommon directions (like the go to japan example). So while you can more or less point to any thought in any language, some thoughts are easier to express in certain languages, which the post (and me) agree to be untranslatable words.
I tried to find the really interesting article about language and color that describes how some cultures use different naming schemes for colors but couldn’t find it. It talked about how back in the day we don’t know orange as a color, we just thought it was red-yellow and only after the fruit was distributed did the word for the color catch on. Here’s the best article I can find that talks about this phenomena https://burnaway.org/magazine/blue-language-visual-perceptio...
Each language is a lossy approximation of all conceivable thought...
This ultimately boils down to the private language discussion started by Wittgenstein. If you admit public language is a lossy approximation of meaning, you're taking a position on the existence of private languages.
> Each language is a lossy approximation of all conceivable thought
I'm not quite sure I understand this—I do have mental sensations/processes sans language, but I would not characterize them as "thoughts". To me, a thought is inherently linguistic, even if they relate to non-linguistic mental processes. So to me, learning a new language is very literally learning how to think differently.
I think we’re in agreement, but I’m afraid I don’t have the philosophical language to precisely pin my mental model into words (what a meta conundrum lol). I’ll try my best here, but I may come back in a few days with an edit if I can more coherently write my ideas.
I take a slightly more narrow definition of “thoughts” that may be more akin to “expressions” - ideas that can be communicated, so excluding non-linguistic mental processes. I think that may be where we disconnect. A lot of my idea about thoughts comes from the Borges story, Funes the memorius (short story about a dude who could not forget - interesting read and really clarifies my feelings on my definition of “all possible thought”). In the story he talks about tree leaves, but instead imagine needing a unique linguistic scheme for every single unique snowflake you ever see. It would be a linguistic nightmare! Therefore language must generalize otherwise it becomes noncommunicable and that generalization to me induces the “lossy approximation” I attribute to language in my prior comment.
So, in my head Funes’s mind represent the abstract space of all possible thoughts. When we use language, we are stacking words/sentences/paragraphs/etc together almost like vector addition trying to reach a particular point in the thought vector space. Some languages have really clean ways of getting to certain thoughts while others take a mouthful and still don’t get you exactly there (物の哀れ example from link).
I agree with your statement on new languages being different thinking. As you follow that vector addition process to get to the “thought,” different languages will take you on different paths to get to your destination thought because languages encode those vectors differently, even if the destination thought is the same. In my mental model, the act of thinking is putting those language vectors together and tracing their path to get to your thought.
And if my comment still makes no sense - I might have to incubate this thought a bit more :) but I do recommend the story- it’s a quick, thought provoking read.
> I take a slightly more narrow definition of “thoughts” that may be more akin to “expressions” - ideas that can be communicated, so excluding non-linguistic mental processes.
I was glad to read this because it seemed too neat and tidy for "thought" to necessarily be able to be encoded into language, especially in the presence of frequent miscommunication between people that share language, culture, and context.
On language and thinking, I agree that new languages promote thinking differently. But it seems that the difference has to fall short of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of informing perception or experience. Which would then limit the extent to which thought, as informed by language, would influence the way one would compose a linguistic representation of some thought/idea/"blob of meaning to be communicated." All to suggest that there is a broader landscape of "thinking-like activities" than those which would be able to be encoded linguistically.
Maybe it's simpler to say that I think of language as more lossy than thought.
I would argue that you can consider those thoughts. But this is the difficult bit, I've had the experience before of thoughts/feelings whatever ypu want to call them where words fall short. Knowing multiple languages helps a bit but it still falls short sometimes (very rarely).
Language is very effective at this, but I don't think thought is inherently linguistic.
To me language is just a way to label, group or organise these things. So when you learn a new one you learn a new 'labeling system/taxonomy' does that sound familiar?
