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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Everyone should learn the basics of troubleshooting!

    When trying to resolve a problem it’s really important to keep as many variables under control as possible so that you can find the root cause and fix it.

    I see lots of people who try a bunch of things without isolating the issue first but can’t figure out what is wrong. Then because they messed with it so much it’s almost impossible to figure out.

    This is important for car maintenance, home maintenance, electronics, computers. Just about everything that can break or stop working right in your life.







  • It is undefined because the inverse of division is multiplication. If you multiply by zero, every answer is zero. If you try to invert that operation you can’t know which number was multiplied by zero to get zero because multiplying by zero doesn’t produce a unique answer for each operation.

    Additionally, if you take the limit of 1/x as x approaches zero from the positive side the result approaches positive infinity. If you take the limit from the negative side it approaches negative infinity.

    An interesting thing to think about is whether multiplication by zero really makes much sense in the concrete world. You can’t really have zero groups of something or some number of groups of zero. Zero groups of anything is still nothing. We can think of that abstractly once we have the abstract concept of numbers, but in the real world that idea is nonsense.






  • This is the hottest question in theory of mind right now thanks to David Chalmers. It’s called the Hard Problem of Consciousness and it’s about connecting the reductionist view of the brain’s function with the first-person experience of consciousness.

    I think that any explanation of consciousness completely from “the outside” will result in not being able to quantify the experience part of it. Any explanation completely from “the inside” will eventually run into the same issues as empiricism where it will be limited by subjectivity. I think that fundamentally we can’t rigorously combine these two views because they aren’t compatible. The starting points for each view carry different base assumptions.

    Both may be true from within their perspectives but combining them is basically just stating that a subjective experience “maps” to a physical function. There isn’t any explanatory usefulness of mapping. It doesn’t explain why the subjective experience is there just that it happens when these other physical things happen. I’m not sure we’ll find an answer that truly resolves the hard problem, but we’re still trying.


  • I’m a personal fan of Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts theory of consciousness. The biggest problem of defining consciousness is that the deeper you look into where it comes from the definitions we commonly use to describe consciousness fall apart.

    It’s a collaborative effort between different parts of your brain and the environment. A lot of it we aren’t even aware of. At the same time we often generate explanations for our behavior after the fact so our experience of consciousness tends to be mostly a justification mechanism, not necessarily primarily a control mechanism.



  • It bothers me that you want to educate people but you are being so combative and smug. This isn’t the way to change people’s minds. All you are doing is making people feel personally attacked and driving them further away from having an open mind.

    This is the first I’ve heard of HVDC, my experience is with typical AC transmission that makes up most of the current grid. Not a lot of experience, but college physics level.

    US high voltage transmission is usually AC in one of the following voltages: 345 kV, 500 kV, or 765 kV. I used the 765 kV worst case losses of 1.1% per 100 miles (according to American Electric Power Transmission Facts Q12) which is over generous since most transmission would likely not be using only the high efficiency lines.

    Also, transmission range is affected by load and high load reduces line capability.

    We’re talking about moving a huge amount of power across 3000 miles. In my experience transmitting power across a nation as large as the US is unheard of.

    You also seemed to have missed my point about how much excess power would be required to power the opposite side of the country (in the dark) while basically at dusk. Let’s say 30% of the east coast’s power comes from solar. That would mean that the West Coast would need to provide that 30% excess on top of their current energy demands during a relatively high demand time period. It would also be a bit unfair for the West Coast to be the ones responsible for over-provisioning to accommodate the east coast.

    Is HVDC even installed and able to transmit across the US now?