Seeker of Carcosa

  • 11 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • It’s fine now but some “staples” of our cuisine are trash. If you value your low blood pressure, don’t go into threads about people asking for food recommendations while visiting Britain. It’s just full of people recommending actual garbage like fish and chips from a take away. Are people delusional? I’ve been to dozens of chippies across the country, and save one meal at the Magpie in Whitby, I’ve never had a chippy tea that’s lived up to expectations.

    Recommend a good haggis or something rather than the bland meme food.


  • Sorry if you’ve seen this already, as your comment has just come through. The two sets are the same size, this is clear. This is because they’re both countably infinite. There isn’t such a thing as different sizes of countably infinite sets. Logic that works for finite sets (“For any finite a and b, there are twice as many integers between a and b as there are even integers between a and b, thus the set of integers is twice the set of even integers”) simply does not work for infinite sets (“The set of all integers has the same size as the set of all even integers”).

    So no, it isn’t due to lack of knowledge, as we know logically that the two sets have the exact same size.



  • The niche story/support communities were a real staying power for me until they started taking a nosedive ~5+ years ago. Suddenly power-users were showing up, posting their creative writing exercises in all tangentially related subs, and it got ate up because over the top drama is more entertaining to some than true (or at least very plausible) stories.

    It began with users policing others. You called out a fake story and you got half a dozen people playing devils advocate asking how you knew the story was fake. The poster being a serial poster who has dozens of box-ticking ragebait stories (per week) across multiple subs isn’t a clear enough indicator that this is a creative writing exercise for them.

    Before long, subs were seeing much more engagement due to copycats and drama seekers; suddenly the rules prohibited calling out fake stories. Suddenly your support subreddit for offloading about your abusive parents has turned into the personal playground for creative writers with 58 part epics about their mother getting arrested for the fifteenth time for brandishing a knife at a baby at the family dinner.

    I’ve already unsubbed from a community on Lemmy because I’ve seen one creative writer is cross-posting to Lemmy under the same name.


  • I admit the only time I’ve encountered the word utility as an algebraist is when I had to TA Linear Optimisation & Game Theory; it was in the sections of notes for the M level course that wasn’t examinable for the Bachelors students so I didn’t bother reading it. My knowledge caps out at equilibria of mixed strategies. It’s interesting to see that there’s some rigorous way of codifying user preference. I’ll have to read about it at some point.


  • Actually, the commenter is exactly right. The real line does contain the open interval (0,1). The open interval (0,1) has the exact same cardinality as the real numbers.

    An easy map that uniquely maps a real number to a number of the interval (0,1) is the function mapping x to arctan(x)/π + 1/2. The existence of a bijection proves that the sets have the same size, despite one wholly containing the other.

    The comment, like the meme, plays on the difference between common intuition and mathematical intuition.