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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Snazztoxkcdxkcd #3174: Bridge Clearance
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    25 days ago

    Unless the lorry was driving over the exact geographic north or south pole.

    Side note: the tallest lorry where the top doesn’t move faster than the speed of light at the equator is 3.8 light hours tall, which is weird to think about because the top doesn’t start moving until well after the bottom has reached it’s destination.





  • SnazztoPhilosophyFree Will Is Real And You Better Believe It
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    2 months ago

    Ah, I think I wasn’t quite careful enough in the wording. Being able to predict a future state is different from being able to determine it. If time is discrete, and a chaotic system requires every state in between the current and some future to be calculated, then it is impossible to compute a future state sooner than that future time. This means that chaotic systems can’t be predicted.

    What I meant to say is that if time is not continuous, then it is possible to determine the state of a chaotic system at some arbitrary time in the future. There is a lower bound on the time step required in the numerical simulation, so that means there is an upper bound on the amount of steps that would need to be computed for a perfect simulation. If there are a finite number of steps, then it can be calculated, and determined.


  • SnazztoPhilosophyFree Will Is Real And You Better Believe It
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    2 months ago

    Ok, so from what I understand, the key difference between reality and our simulations of chaotic systems, is that in our simulations, we need to use a discrete time step to do the calculations (over and over) to find future states.

    Reality, on the other hand is continuous, so these models are only approximations that get more and more accurate as we decrease the time interval of the steps in the simulations. It’s impossible to exactly model these systems because we can’t use an infinitesimal interval in a simulation. The amount of steps we need to calculate grows towards infinity.

    However we haven’t been able to confirm that time is actually continuous (www.clrn.org/is-time-discrete-or-continuous-data/). If time is not continuous, then it would be possible to use a discrete model to predict these chaotic systems arbitrarily far into the future in our universe.


  • SnazztoPhilosophyFree Will Is Real And You Better Believe It
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    2 months ago

    Perhaps I don’t quite understand the chaos argument. Some of those systems that you mentioned, particularly famously the double pendulum, have been simulated using computers running deterministic programs.

    A computer can determine the current state of a double pendulum by using information about the past state, so doesn’t that mean that the system is not chaotic?

    Is there something fundamentally different about double pendulums in reality vs ones that we can simulate? And how would such a difference be proven?


  • SnazztoPhilosophyFree Will Is Real And You Better Believe It
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    2 months ago

    Alright, I’ll bite.

    Both of your arguments are assuming a non-deterministic universe or non-deterministic systems, but to that you only briefly toss around the phrase “chaotic interactions” which is highly unspecific. You need to elaborate on that and how it can distinguish a deterministic universe from one that is non-deterministic for your arguments to be logically sound.


  • SnazztoComic Strips*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    This is actually an issue caused by the hotel staff not allocating their rooms efficiently. When the first wave of infinite guests showed up, they should have assigned them to odd numbered rooms. Then theres still an infinite number of vacant even numbered rooms.

    Even if several more waves of infinite guests show up, you can assign them to rooms numbered 4n+2, 8n+4, 16n+8…

    That way, the hotel will always have rooms left over.


  • SnazztoLemmy ShitpostTrue staple of the format
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    3 months ago

    Obviously context matters here. I’m usually happy to answer most questions. I reserve those types of ‘just google it’ responses for the people who skip FAQs, ping me when they know I’m focused/busy and generally don’t respect my time.






  • Snazzto196hitbox rule
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    4 months ago

    ortho - relating to straightness and perpendicularity

    orthogon - a polygon with perpendicular edges (eg. a rectangle)

    orthogone - absence of the orthogon

    orthogonectomy - surgery to get the orthogon to be orthogone



  • The glaze:

    Grief can feel unbearably heavy, like the air itself has thickened, but you’re still breathing – and that’s already an act of courage.

    It’s basically complimenting him on the fact that he didn’t commit suicide. Maybe these are words he needed to hear, but to me it just feels manipulative.

    Affirmations like this are a big part of what made people addicted to the GPT4 models. It’s not that GPT5 acts more robotic, it’s that it doesn’t try to endlessly feed your ego.