https://web.archive.org/web/20110613215143/http://plover.net/~bonds/objects.html

Today I thought about Stephen Bond's essay "Objects of Fandom". Then I thought about Donald Trump. Then I thought about Stephen Bond's essay "Objects of Fandom". Then I got off the bus.

(worth noting that in http://lesswrong.com/lw/z4/do_fandoms_need_awfulness/ Robin Hanson turns the idea into a signalling explanation which makes a lot more sense than that essay itself)

Random thought from when I was falling asleep last night: Is there a way to select a random element from a set such that, if you had the same random seed but some subset that still contains that element, you'd still pick the same one?

As in, if you had random seed 123 and the set {"hello", "there", "world"} and your selection procedure picked "world", then with seed 123 and the set {"hello", "world"} it would still pick "world". We're not interested in what it would pick from {"hello", "there"}, except that it should still work and pick something.

Also, being that we're talking about random selection, it should be, you know, random. I'm not sure how to define that. Uhh... if we only knew the selection procedure and the set but not the key, then we expect each element to be selected with the same probability?

Anyway, trying my hand at it now that I'm awake:

One pretty obvious procedure, assuming you can generate random objects uniformly drawn from the universe the set is drawn from, is to keep generating them until you come across one that's a member of the set. That's not applicable to the example above, though, since we didn't specify a length bound, and without a length bound it's kinda hard to generate random strings with a uniform distribution.

Or you can do what was my actual first thought (which led to the above one), which is to take the hashes of all members of the set and keep generating random integers in the hash function's range until you come across one that's the hash of a set member. But then you have hash collisions to contend with: If "hello" and "world" hashed to the same value, you'd have to somehow make a choice between those!

In any case, both of these approaches only really work for sets drawn from some fairly small universe, otherwise they'll pretty much take forever. At least the first approach should be a nice existence proof that at least for finite universes there's some way to do this, even if it's horrible.

One other thought: If you have not only a way to draw random elements from the universe but also a distance metric, you could just generate one random object, and then choose the set member that's closest to it. But that seems hardly likely to be uniform. Intuitively, if your set is a small cluster drawn from a bigger universe, then you're more likely to select elements that are at the edge of the cluster than inside it.

Or maybe there's some way to sort this out with sorting. Pick a random permutation from set of the universe's permutations using the seed, and select the first element that shows up in that permutation? Thaaat's... just a repetition of the first idea, actually.

Anyway, that's pretty much where I am right now. I have spent basically no time on this beyond writing this post, and although I have absolutely no practical use for a solution, I'd still be glad if it turned out I'd overthought this and there's actually some really simple and good solution. I might ask about this on /r/compsci or somewhere later if I can't come up with anything better myself, but meh, probably better to just forget about this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_RZJUAQY4

Random fantasy setting concept, possibly something that I read somewhere else and forgot (and something I don't intend to do anything with regardless):

Emotions form physical substances in the human body, and these substances are what causes the physical feeling of the emotion (so, for instance, being in a frightening situation causes the body to produce fear substance, which then causes rapid heartbeat, butterflies in the stomach, etc.). These substances then generally exit the human body, probably through appropriate-sounding means - sorrow through tears, fear through sweat, etc.. As the substance exits the body, so does its physical effect.

These substances will normally decay fairly soon outside of the body, but there are ways to stabilize them, and they can be extracted, refined, mixed, bottled and sold, and perhaps even used for further chemistry. Some emotions are hard to come by, some easy - you don't even need humans for things like fear, pain and sexual arousal, you just keep a bunch of dogs in cages and you'll get enough of those. But something like the joy of discovery can rarely be found in large amounts, and the highest quality of love, it seems, has to be extracted from the dead.

<deer-spangle> I STARTED DOING A CROSSWORD, AND I HATE IT, BUT I HAVE TO FINISH IT
<deer-spangle> 2 WORDS REMAIN TO COMPLETE IT... THE FIRST IS: 8 LETTERS, MOVIE RELATED, d\w[uiop]vi[^a-f]* THE SECOND IS 9 LETTERS, MOVIE RELATED, s[a-j]{1,}n?nd[^a-ce-km-z]*er
<deer-spangle> WAIT, I MUST BE WRONG
<deer-spangle> SECOND REGEX MUST BE s[a-j]{1,}dner
<deer-spangle> SECOND REGEX MUST BE s[a-j]{4}dner


http://qz.com/520414/the-high-earning-poor/

Ah, but if you really want to go into a breathless panic over this, consider the fact that pogs are, in fact, the only savings vehicle that exists. Everything else can be just tacitly assumed away. How many people do you know who who have the foresight and responsible nature to keep thousands of dollars around in pogs?

Verdict on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, written with probably a higher-than-warranted degree of confidence that I saw most of the significant dialogue and events in the game:

Okay, so you took the classic "augmented people leave naturals behind -> most people get augmented -> naturals end up as an oppressed underclass" story and reversed the roles. That's great. Except that, uhh, you just took the end state, and didn't actually bother selling me on the idea of aug oppression making any sense.

The game just refuses to be science fiction, with regard to the question of how you get such a dichotomy between augmented and non-augmented in the first place. It doesn't even try to answer even the most obvious questions I had about its setting. Why is everyone still using weird creepy tech that can make you go nuts, instead of lower-tech solutions? Why is the idea of being natural-passing so completely ignored that not even ideas like wearing gloves to hide cyberhands come up? Is there really no degree of in-betweenness, like, does having a pacemaker make you the worst self-mutilator ever? Do all of the police really hate augs that uniformly?

I mean, I guess at least there's one character who got their augments removed. And if how it went for them is an indication, that does sort of explain why there aren't more. So there's that.

The game wasn't exactly great as Downtrodden Minority Simulator, either. In fact, it was just about good at it as you'd expect from a game where you're a badass transhuman secret agent who has access to everything and can just about fly off (or become invisible, or jump up to a balcony two floors up, or just punch everyone out, etc.) if they get in trouble. Though it wasn't quite a 100% perfect failure at this, either: Once I realized that the cops don't stop you to check your papers at the metro stations if you just keep to the aug side, why, I became a good aug citizen for the rest of the game. But even then, ehh, it's literally a difference where on the one hand you can be mildly inconvenienced, or on the other hand can take the red door instead of the green one. I'm not really feeling the all-natural boot treading on my face there.

Anyway, as a badass transhuman secret agent power fantasy game, it was pretty great. Get down from your fifth floor apartment by jumping down to the courtyard, go to work punching terrorists in the face in Switzerland, hack into every storage locker in the city, breathe poison gas, eat cereal, uncover an Illuminati plot with your boss involved, and so forth. Being spoiled enough to know beforehand when the story ends helped make it feel like a complete enough experience.

Also there was some stuff with microtransactions, and after a bit of thought, I think I'm taking the side that yes, Eidos are very naughty boys. Yes, it had literally had zero effect on my experience that there apparently was a way to buy in-game stuff for real-world money if you clicked the right option in the main menu... and maybe that excuses this particular naughtiness, but if they go any further, they'll go very quickly from naughtiness to bullshit. If the middling Steam reviews send a message that this kind of thing is not received well, it hopefully means that buying the next game in the series will still be playable with just what you get by just buying the game normally.

Dear G+: Today I would have posted about something someone wrote that I thought was stupid, but ended up holding to the virtue of silence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiJycy6dFSQ

Amusing even if you don't know Scala (I don't - though I did lean on Haskell knowledge a lot to follow what's going on). I do hope that this guy is normally really nice, though. Well, actually, I'm not sure, since that would imply that Scala deserves all this slagging. But, hell, it probably does.

Also, after the bit about the bug in Set's hashCode() I'm suddenly somehow happier about Set not being a Functor in Haskell.

Actually, regarding Set not being a Functor, until now I'd always thought that it was just a lack-of-a-feature in the type system: fmap doesn't have an Ord constraint, so you don't get to have your Functor instance for Set. But it turns out that you can make Set break functor laws by writing a more liberal Eq instance, for instance like https://www.schoolofhaskell.com/user/chad/snippets/random-code-snippets/set-is-not-a-functor, so I guess now I'm doubly happy: Even if the instance could be defined, it wouldn't go in the base library since it's illegal!