colorint

5 ms·

1.
by colorint 8y ago
As a general matter, you can't prove a predicate true or false by automatic means. Logic programming is just as "artful" as imperative or functional programming, because they all run into the same problem: it's impossibl
2.
by colorint 8y ago
The drawback of hash tables is that they're bad for inexact matching. Likewise, when I go to the library, I usually go to the section I'm interested in and let my eyes wander. So something that pseudorandomly organizes books but l
3.
by colorint 8y ago
Risk of borrowers defaulting is the entire ethical justification for lending with interest. Collateralization reduces the risk of the loan, but doesn't eliminate it; after all, cars lose value over time, and businesses may or may not b
4.
by colorint 8y ago
That's Dr. Gene Ray, Cubist and Wisest Human to you.
5.
by colorint 9y ago
Ironically, the postapocalyptic world will probably still use US dollars. And when it turns out that not enough physical dollars survived the apocalypse, dollars will be the way credit is accounted, with whatever dollars remain being used t
6.
by colorint 9y ago
In this case it's probably justified: one of the hallmarks of "modern" bubbles, or at least of modern speculative hype that doesn't work out, is that renaming a company based on the hype increases its stock price without
7.
by colorint 9y ago
I was playing Pai-Gow poker at a casino with my parents and some friends. The game has side bets, which pay out if you get a good hand, independently of whether you win or lose, and (inversely) proportionate to the probability of the hand.
8.
by colorint 9y ago
Keynes sort of sums up this sentiment, just replace economist with philosopher: >Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authori
9.
by colorint 9y ago
I'm going to issue a coin for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.
10.
by colorint 9y ago
>national debt [...] no money to go around Let's imagine that I'm a government that reserves the right to be sole issuer of my country's currency (though for political reasons I've delegated that power to a government
11.
by colorint 9y ago
Cash basis is accepted for the purposes of taxes, but my understanding is that it's not acceptable for legally-mandated reporting. That is, cash basis is not among the generally accepted accounting principles.
12.
by colorint 9y ago
Banks can't print money either, and this isn't some "ackshually it's the Mint" thing: banks have the power to create debt. But this isn't special, because you and I also have the power to create debt. What make
13.
by colorint 9y ago
It's more of a technical note, but probably the last really important change was the accrual basis, which, as far as I know, was popularized in the 20th century. This is the system of accounting where you record revenues and expenses w
14.
by colorint 9y ago
The technical definition of inflation is raising prices. It's only a strictly monetary phenomenon if output and velocity are fixed with respect to the money supply. In other words, inflation meaning "more money" is only a tec
15.
by colorint 9y ago
The biggest sin of the Boomers is, they grew up in a world that was carefully curated by their parents, and became convinced that this was the natural state of things.
16.
by colorint 9y ago
He probably means "unity of experience" in the sense that, one's experience is a unity. Look at the whole sentence: >Its nature and import can be expressed only by art, because there is a unity of experience that can be ex
17.
by colorint 9y ago
It's proven unsolvable for computers (i.e., Turing machines). Whether that makes it impossible for humans to solve (as a matter of course, or as a matter of Turing's proof) depends on whether you believe that we are isomorphic to
18.
by colorint 9y ago
>but am curious as to what the arguments against it are There's a "philosophical" problem to the effect of, at some point, what are you indexing? But what seems to me to be the more practical issue, and forgive me for this
19.
by colorint 9y ago
Well, Minsky's financial instability hypothesis is at least interesting. His argument is, basically, that there's a cycle wherein: during normal times, people want to beat the averages, so they engage in more speculative bets; as
20.
by colorint 9y ago
Debt is an asset to the lender, and in case of default (and no hope of renegotiation) the asset is written off. Whether this is "someone paying it" is like asking whether the owner "pays for" a truck that's struck b
21.
by colorint 9y ago
Yes, that was Turing's proof. Church's more indirect proof is that it's impossible to prove the equivalence of two lambda expressions. But the real essence of the problem is more like, you can't generally know ahead of t
22.
by colorint 9y ago
It turns out that the problem of deciding whether a predicate is universally valid in an axiomatic system is also undecidable (and, appropriately enough, called the decision problem). That is to say, declarative systems "corresponding
23.
by colorint 9y ago
Yes, so given this, do you (i.e., people optimistic about AI) believe that computer programs will be able to generate meaningful, novel computer programs, given that even the most cursory subproblem is impossible? Obviously I don't jus
24.
by colorint 9y ago
Do you believe that artificial intelligence will be capable of deciding, given an algorithm and a set of inputs, whether the algorithm will finish running?
25.
by colorint 9y ago
The global financial crisis showed that insurance isn't the answer. The problem with "hedging against all futures" is that the hedging is part of the system, and when the hedge grows to the scale of the thing being hedged, yo
26.
by colorint 9y ago
I'm acquainted with the general manager of a local hardware chain in my small town that used to run a gas station. The sense I have from talking to him is, the gas station shut down because 1. Kroger put in a gas station that nobody ca
27.
by colorint 9y ago
This is all a funny (i.e., sad) thing to have happened: the usual suspects have created a mythology that labor is a "marketplace" that optimizes according to naturalistic laws of supply and demand, which turns into a canard to att
28.
by colorint 9y ago
There is a serious concern to keep in mind about adaptive cruise control or automatic braking, which is, their inelegant failure modes. For a simpler example, consider that new cars have started including blind spot sensors, which light up
29.
by colorint 9y ago
Obviously words are a matter of intersubjectivity; we can only understand them from their use, so anything can be money if enough people call it that. If you want to understand why cryptocurrency is not a financial asset, that's becaus
30.
by colorint 9y ago
The "solvency" of a government (that issues its own currency and only issues debt in that currency) is the same thing as its credibility. Or to tie it to what you said, a government is exactly as solvent as its ability to collect

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