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[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Post:

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

Comments:

u/Noumero:

According to my rigorous statistical analysis based on the first 200 of r/rational's top entries and caused by [this joke](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/8advus/rthfdcthe_last_sovereign_deconstructing_nsfw_game/dwyg86w/?context=3), this subreddit consists of:

* 25% *Mother of Learning*
* 20.5% miscellaneous short stories
* 16.5% *Worth the Candle*
* 7.5% *Pokemon: The Origin of Species*
* 5% *A Practical Guide To Evil*
* 4.5% picking at non-rational fiction
* 3.5% transhumanist propaganda
* 3% *Unsong*
* 2.5% *SCP Foundation*
* 2.5% other longer stories
* 2% deep discussions regarding all forms of fiction
* 2% *Worm*
* 1.5% *Harry Potter* fanfiction
* 1.5% porn
* 1% recommendation threads
* 0.5% r!Animorphs
* 0.5% picking at r/rational
* ≈0.5% other

(All of the short stories were probably written by one single author, of course, so it could likely be simplified to "38.5% Alexander Wales".)

u/None:

[deleted]

u/ShannonAlther:

I haven't run a marathon yet, but it's on the to-do list. At my current pace, I think I can crack 3:00:00.

The length of [Run the Jewels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8DuXELzXhw), [Run the Jewels 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKXIPsfiJ0o), [Run the Jewels 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saR7SYa6nAs&list=PL9hYR5qRkc2whsqANLMnk_418SF60df6b), and [Cowboys from Hell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAFbNIyxIls) all together is just about 3 hours, which makes a convenient training timer.

Other workout music I've added recently: [Crypt of the Necrodancer OST](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZU6F0srCl0&list=PLhFC8pd7oZvwJYhjmpZVyaKG7CUNoVvae) (which has several remixes in different styles), [Walk off the Earth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV5KAbV34NU), [Eminem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2_PAW_8fos), [Nine Inch Nails](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccY25Cb3im0), and select music (usually boss themes) from [Splatoon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPZz6oJi8yE), [Undertale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcoqR9Bwx1Y), [Bastion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-aexLJKwME), [Bravely Default](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLBTIUzPpEQ), [Touhou](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOz-T3NPtLA), and a few others. Just off the top of my head.

[Representative Run the Jewels song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6GyTBVAF4w), if you needed the pitch. Turn the bass up!

u/None:
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u/None:

[deleted]

u/ShannonAlther:

> What's your training like?

I'm currently in speed training, which involves sprints on Monday and Thursday, and fast 5 & 10 km on Tuesday and Sunday. Cross training is every weekday, and that's the usual gym workouts (the specifics of mine matter less than going out and developing the habit). It's a slog.

> You should let me know what you think of this one in particular though.

Nice song. Probably wouldn't add it to a workout playlist, but everyone has different tastes.

u/GlueBoy:

Some (mostly) instrumental albums that I've been listening to:

[Kikagaku Moyo - House in the Tall Grass](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elHrJAvNq_E)

[tomppabeats - harbor lp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76PHzENMQ04)

[Föllakzoid - II](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn1HtEmqsIA)

[ KASHIWA Daisuke - Stella](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei7cdynwRMA)

u/xamueljones:

Random thought. Do people here think radically longer lifespans (at least 15 years) is possible within the next 50 years?

Edit: Please note that I am referring to maximum lifespan not the average.

u/None:

[deleted]

u/ShannonAlther:

Human tissues have a maximum serviceable life of about 120 years. Once you're a centenarian, it stops mattering exactly what killed you, since you'll be collecting serious co-morbid issues like baseball cards by that age. Getting over that hump will require solving thousands of engineering challenges, most of which I suspect will see zero progress on before 2030.

u/xamueljones:

I agree with you about the necessity of exercise and the main exercise I reliably do is running. Usually 2 miles but I'm shooting for 3 miles on a regular basis.

u/CCC_037:

Yes.

In fact, I believe it's achievable today, on average; if we get everyone to follow a healthy diet, exercise often, get all their scheduled checkups, all their flu vaccinations, and so on, then I expect the *average* lifespan to shoot right up! (Mind you, it won't do much for the *maximum* lifespan)

u/Timewinders:

The U.S. life expectancy has been going down for the last few years because there's no nationally coordinated response to the opioid epidemic. So many deaths are completely preventable. Universal healthcare, nationally standardized prescription drug monitoring to ensure no one is getting opioids from multiple doctors across state borders, more social worker funding, more methadone clinics, reduction of agriculture subsidies for corn, taxes on junk food, and tax incentives for exercising would all help a lot but very little gets done.

u/_brightwing:

Fifty years ago, the first heart transplant was done. Medical science has been advancing steadily and many things that were in the realm of fiction have pretty much become common place.  I am hopeful that the trend is going to continue and we will see better utilized stem cell therapy, effective cancer and AIDS treatment in our lifespans. We are a long way off from telomere preservation though.

u/MagicWeasel:

>  AIDS treatment 

AIDS is already there, more or less: you ask doctors if they'd rather be HIV+ or have diabetes, and they say that HIV would be preferable. I mean, yeah, it's better to cure it, but HIV has gone from a death sentence 30 years a go to a stable (if fabulously expensive) chronic disease today. It's amazing to think what the future might hold if unfriendly AI doesn't manage to kill us all.

u/_brightwing:

Guess I should crawl back out of lurking..

I just resorted to ordering noise cancelling earmuffs, pretty much giving up on my roommate. I tried being assertive and directly confronting the situation.. But some people in life just seem to be charismatic enough to get away with everything. Anyone else really sensitive to sound and people - how do you guys generally cope?

u/FriendlyAnnatar:

At night I would suggest a very loud, cheap fan (or there are supposedly white noise machines); personally I find it hard to sleep with ear muffs or ear plugs.

>I tried being assertive and directly confronting the situation.. But some people in life just seem to be charismatic enough to get away with everything.

Out of curiosity, does this mean your roommate talked their way out of this, or that they're just ignoring you / not following up on staying quieter? Because the first is impressive, the second indicates poor character and getting away from them ASAP.

u/_brightwing:

It's not like he is completely unapproachable. He has made some concessions like not watching sports with a bunch of guys in our tiny room anymore. 

 But it's like he'll be all reasonable to your face, but he'll go around getting his way anyway. Like repeatedly bringing his girlfriend over despite my protests, being really loud over his phone, his music. He usually talks to his folks at night - and it can't be an another time because they are a different timezone away. 

I made felt like a bad person when I brought this up and asked him if we could do something about this. It looked like he was trying to for a while but he then resumed his antics. That was the second time I tried to move out of this dorm, but it wasn't possible. This has been ongoing for a few years.. I can't afford to have bad relationship with him either cause I'm stuck in the same classes and social circle as him. Sigh.. Now I'm rambling.


Great idea about the fan. I do listen to a lot of white noise on my headphones, but I'm starting to get worried about my hearing from so much headphone use. So I figured I'd give something made for just noise cancellation (3M X4A) a try instead of an over-the-ear headphone.

u/noimnotgreedy:

> It's not like he is completely unapproachable. He has made some concessions like not watching sports with a bunch of guys in our tiny room anymore.

This sentence suggests to me that it's not his charisma that's the issue-- but rather, your own lack of.

Since socializing doesn't seem like your forte, your best bet might either to cancel the noise so you won't hear it, or amplify the noise so everyone hears it and complains.

u/GaBeRockKing:

I'm going to second a white noise machine. Before my roommate lost weight and stopped snoring, I piped white noise through my PA speaker every night and wore earplugs, which in tandem significantly increased my ability to fall and stay asleep.

For the rest of the time, I'm just constantly listening to music anyways, which allows me to drown out most background noise even at lowish volumes because I'll focus either on the music or what I'm doing and ignore everything else.

u/xamueljones:

If you are in college you can apply to transfer rooms. I would consider constantly losing sleep because of a roommate to be sufficient cause to do so.

u/SvalbardCaretaker:

>But some people in life just seem to be charismatic 

If its just between you and him, what does his charisma have to do with it? Are you unduly influenced from his charisma?

u/_brightwing:

Perhaps manipulative would have been better phrasing..

u/CouteauBleu:

That's... still on you, isn't it?

u/DaystarEld:

Ehh. Sort of a little, but manipulation works even on people who are looking out for it. Real manipulation uses people's values against them, and for people who "value their values," so to speak, it's exceedingly difficult to break with your values just because you know you will benefit from it.

u/None:

You know it's been a long week when you found yourself looking through Reddit early Thursday afternoon, wondering why the Friday threads haven't been posted.

u/GaBeRockKing:

I've always resented the fact that discussion threads get posted midday-ish (depending on timezone) because I do my best (creative) thinking within an hour or two of midnight, so it's a pain having to wait until the next day to post.

u/callmesalticidae:

I save my posts in an email for later when that happens.

u/GaBeRockKing:

I usually save planned posts in google drive, but then I still need to remember to post them on time...

u/xamueljones:

You could post about it to the main page and if there's enough people with that problem who outnumber the rest, then the timing of the posts can be changed.

u/_brightwing:

Funny, the Friday discussion threads were always midnight at Saturday for me. Got to love the time difference.

u/CouteauBleu:

Screw this week. I hope I never see it again.

u/MagicWeasel:

If anyone was curious about happened to my boss and the Saga of the Sick Note, I basically showed up at work after the long weekend, filled out my timesheet, submitted my timesheet, and he didn't ask for a sick note and I didn't mention it. So, all in all, I made a whole series of posts about something that became completely irrelevant - though is that a surprise to anyone?

u/DaystarEld:

Glad to hear it didn't become an issue. I just hope that doesn't mean something worse ends up forcing a conversation :P

u/xamueljones:

Congratulations! The crisis *haaaaaaas* been adverted! ;D

Hope the cheesy TV-show host-style congratulating helps.

u/CouteauBleu:

Hey, I actually was wondering how the Saga ended!

Another win for the power of mild awkwardness and conflict avoidance!

u/sicutumbo:

So I browsed through r/theworldisflat for curiosity's sake. See if there were any ok points raised about there being a flat Earth, or much more likely just to laugh at people being dumb. And it surprised me, their arguments were much better than I expected, which is to say that they were abysmal and failed at even basic experimental design or consistency, but they did actually perform a few experiments. Also, their videos are too fucking long for the amount of entertainment they bring. 

One video in particular was about how you could have sunlight on the bottom of clouds in a flat Earth model. The video surprised me because it demonstrated that the mechanics of it aren't impossible. The person set up a flat piece of plastic parallel to the table, a light source taller than said plastic, and the camera pointed at the bottom of the plastic. Moving the light source back made it eventually light up the bottom of the plastic. What the person failed to account for is that he performed the experiment on a white plastic table, and that the actual ground wouldn't reflect the light. Just so dumb and funny that these people take themselves seriously.

Also, one of their top posts is about how a flat and divinely made earth would be better than the actual model. Not why it was an accurate model, just why it would be a better place to live in. Yes, so convincing. That's also why I have a banking app that always displays my account balance as $100000000 instead of what it currently is, because I prefer to believe the higher number.

I know this is the intellectual equivalent of beating up the handicapped kid, but the people who believe this stuff are nominally adults. And also brave enough to show their faces against what they believe is a global conspiracy with easily verifiable counterevidence despite which there is no large group of opponents.

u/CouteauBleu:

By curiosity, how much of that sub do you think is serious, and how much is just people roleplaying, SF-like, "How could we explain our world if it were flat"?

u/sicutumbo:

I think most of it is serious. For one thing, long videos aren't the kind of effort you would see from people who don't take these things seriously, and most of the posts are videos upwards of 10 minutes each. Also, the answers just aren't very creative, and I would expect that more from people with disfunctional reasoning over people intentionally using bad reasoning. Why would you come up with boring answers? Take the question of gravity, for instance. The somewhat novel answer for why things fall down on a flat Earth is that the entire world is accelerating upwards at 1g. You could experimentally show that to be false, because actual gravity gets weaker the higher up you are, but it would be rather expensive to disprove. The answer they ACTUALLY give? Things don't fall, they sink because they are more dense than the air. And they sink downwards instead of sideways because that's the direction things fall. Not even barely defensible the way that you would expect from intelligent people espousing intentionally false beliefs would be.

There are lots more examples of arguments that are much more likely to come from a diseased mind than a mind in it for the laughs. Arguments that simply wouldn't occur to a normal person. The above is just the tip of the iceberg.

u/xamueljones:

I probably should save this question for the Wednesday World building thread, but I'm too impatient to wait.

I'm working on this time travel story where the protagonist has the power to induce Stable Time Loops which means she believes that time is immutable in the sense of [Timeless Physics](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rrW7yf42vQYDf8AcH/timeless-physics). The antagonist is someone with a different time travel power, but unlike hers he can change the past and thus sees time as mutable in a Branching History Model.

The [Good vs Good Conflict](http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing/moral-conflicts) practically writes itself where the protagonist is horrified at the antagonist seemingly murdering trillions every time he changes the past and the antagonist thinks the protagonist could destroy the world if she abuses the Stable Time Loops to create an [Outcome Pump](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ARaTpNX62uaL86j6/the-hidden-complexity-of-wishes).

The part I'm ashamed to need help with...is the ending. I wanted to come up with a model of time travel that could permit both mutable and immutable types of travel and I've been having trouble coming up with explanations for how both can occur. Clearly a conflict can't be written if I can't explain how it's possible to have both versions of time travel in the same world.

The best ideas I have are related to how we can have both the [Many Worlds Interpretation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9cgBF6BQ2TRB3Hy4E/and-the-winner-is-many-worlds) and Timeless Physics at the same time, but I don't have a good enough physics background to reconcile the two. I know enough to explain on a pop-science level, but not with what I consider sufficient mathematical rigor.

u/alexanderwales:

I've got two ideas, neither of them physics heavy (so maybe not what you're looking for).

The first is that it's all branching timelines, it's just that *some* branching timelines fall into stable configurations, where a branch will create a "clone" of itself. In this model, the real power the "stable time loops" person has is creating (or finding) branches that are sufficiently self-creating, such that they *look* like they're loops, but are in fact branches creating branches. (This is my preferred reconciliation for the Terminator timeline.)

The second idea is [hypertime](https://qntm.org/hypertime), which could work well because of how easy it is for an observer to not be able to make sense of what's happening with time travel. Not that much different; you'd have a huge "stack" of self-creating timelines, then the interloper "branching" out divergences in them. Hypertime models take a ton of work though; I plotted one for a fanfic I was writing, and while I got one that seemed to work, I wasn't sure that I could do the "this is actually hypertime" reveal correctly.

u/xamueljones:

I-I...I...my think-meats hurt...

I understand how hypertime is just time-travel set in a universe where time has two dimensions. But I cannot wrap my head around what is happening to the time line(s) after one jump. I really want a diagram to explain it.

It's a really good idea though, because while I can't explain *how*, I do see that there is the possibility for multiple types of time travel and it would permit mutable and immutable versions.

I'm curious about the fanfic you mentioned plotting. Any chance I could have a look at the notes? It's fine if you don't want to.

Thanks for your suggestions!

u/alexanderwales:

I'd have to dig out my scanner, because they're mostly paper notes; a lot of it is in the form of diagrams plotted with time on both axes. What I found helps most is thinking of universes in "stacks" and then migrating a diagonal line of the "jump" down and to the left, assuming that the lower left corner is "Past - Past" and the upper right corner is "Future - Future".

Here's [a cheaply done MS Paint version of one](https://i.imgur.com/sPBxewe.png), a rather simple case of Jumper 1, going back in time 200 years, and Jumper 2, going back in time 600 years from 300 years in Jumper 1's future. This also assumes a "top" timeline where no time travel took place, and further assumes (or doesn't show) any jumpers from within the three divergent histories, which further complicates things.

In short, it's possible for someone to go back in time and end up in a timeline whose *past* does not resemble the one that they remember or have records of, which is one of the neat possibilities of hypertime. You go from 2018 back to 1963 to stop the Kennedy assassination, only to find that in the 1963 you ended up in, the Nazis won WWII, even though that's got nothing to do with you.

u/xamueljones:

Thanks! That helped me realize a lot of different things about how hypertime would work and the picture was excellently suited to its purpose.

Looking back at sam's article on hypertime, this is amazingly well-suited to the show *Doctor Who* and I think it could be used to explain a lot of the time travel shenanigans that occurred in it. I could be wrong, since it's been years I last saw it.

Was your fanfic a Doctor Who one?

u/alexanderwales:

Nope, it was for a somewhat forgettable cancelled-after-one-season show called Timeless (it got uncancelled and is currently airing its second season, but I'd be shocked if it was able to pull the numbers needed for a third).

I also drew up a model for applying hypertime to Back to the Future, namely the "Other Marty" scenario, but never really found the ending I was looking for, which ideally would have had OT Marty show up. The diagrams were *really* complicated, because you need to account for the subjective experience of at least four characters who are all hopping to and from different timelines with causal relationships being muddied by hypertime. (e.g. Doc goes from 2015 back to 1985 to tell Marty that it's his kids, and shows up in a 1985 created by a totally different Marty going to 1955 -- a 1985 where he was shot to death by the Libyans.)

u/ShiranaiWakaranai:

I'm not a physicist, but I think there's a "world is a simulation" type of answer to this problem:

Think of the world as a server, while every sentient being is a client. The state of the world is stored server-side, while the state of a sentient being's memory (experiences of reality) is stored client-side. 

The world has infinite processing power, which it uses to construct an infinite timeline based on its near 100% accurate predictions of the future actions of every client. Each client only has access to one part of the timeline (the present), and uses data from the server to fill up its memories.

When a client time travels back to some time t, they are basically hacking. They are now exchanging data with a different part of the timeline than the server expects. Whenever that happens, the world detects the mismatch between client and server data as a time paradox and so it:

1. Destroys the timeline starting from the point of time paradox all the way to future infinity.
2. Rebuilds the infinite timeline with different random events happening. 
3. Pushes data to the clients to rewrite all their memories to match the new timeline.
4. Checks if the new timeline still contains a time paradox: if so, restart from step 1.

Normally, this would just result in the act of time travel being erased. The odds of the new timeline still containing the time traveller's attempt to time travel are near zero, so the client just ends up having his memories overwritten and has no memory of attempting to time travel.

But some clients have memory protection. For example, your protagonist's client-side data is read-only: whenever the timeline is rebuilt, the world server can't overwrite her memories. So it has to keep destroying and rebuilding the timeline over and over again until it happens to construct a timeline that matches her memories. From the point of view of the protagonist, she only gets to see the final timeline that matches her memories, so as far as she can tell, time is immutable.

On the other hand, your antagonist's client-side data is private: whenever the timeline is rebuilt, the world server can neither overwrite nor read his memories. So it doesn't detect a paradox even when it constructs a timeline completely incompatible with your antagonist's memories. And doesn't overwrite his memories to match the new timeline. From the point of view of the antagonist, he has clearly changed the past, so time is mutable. 

And in both cases, trillions are murdered over and over every time someone time travels.

u/xamueljones:

> And in both cases, trillions are murdered over and over every time someone time travels. 

Heh, that would be an *amazing* [Break the Cutie](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BreakTheCutie) for the protagonist when she realizes that she's unknowingly guilty the same crime as the antagonist.

I also like the nature of your simulation idea, because the time travel devices aren't meant to be unexaminable black boxes like we see in many different stories, but rather devices with underlying principles that can be used for alternative technology. A big part of the derivative technology is incorporating [time loop logic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle#Time-loop_logic) into computer algorithms which is a big part of the story.

u/Dwood15:

So, I'm quite late to this thread (> 17 hours, by the looks of it).

Hope you all enjoy your weekend. 

I've been learning so much new crap for work lately, it's been pretty ridiculous. I haven't really touched the Javascript programming scene in ages, but new frameworks and platforms are being released faster than I can shake a stick at. 

I'm going to discuss how... schizophrenic I feel from all this.

I was hired as an intern in Sep, having never touched PHP or Javascript. Since then, I've learned about the web framework Laravel, (Web frameworks are p. awesome, if you ask me...) and become intimately familiar with it. 

I've learned Javascript, jQuery, and datatables. A month ago, our team began to make a strong-ish push to move from the Frankenstein that is our current Javascript 'base to the Javascript frontend framework Vue.

That stuff is _pretty_ slick. It's strange to wrap your head around, has some interesting gotcha's (don't all js frameworks?), but overall Vues is pretty sweet. So nice to have a data-driven workflow.

Our stuff is still Frankensteinish, but it's becoming more and more structured every month. :P

To add, I've been reverse-engineering Halo 1. I've also got a number of projects in that vein as well.

u/space_fountain:

I'm traveling to San Fransisco Sunday. I'm doing it for an interview, but I'm very conflicted about whether I'd take an offer. I almost said no when they offered to fly me out. At a minimum though I'm sort of exited to get a free trip to SF out of it.

u/blazinghand:

Anyone in the SF Bay Area looking for a D&D group? Mine has a spot open since one of our players moved out of town. Mountain View / Palo Alto area. Still looking, so let me know! :)

u/noimnotgreedy:

I did not get any comments on my previous question about *Influence*. https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/8a0gwc/d_monthly_recommendation_thread/dwwvqse/

I'm trying again. More generally: I'm curious what highly recommended books (amazon's top sellers?) do hold their value over time.

29 KiB Raw Blame History

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Post:

Comments:

29 KiB

Raw Blame History