I’ve used Thomas Wang’s integer hash functions for years for various purposes. Using techniques invented by Bob Jenkins for general hashing (e.g., hashes of strings), Wang derived several hash specialized for fixed size integer input. His 64-bit version is| naml.us
There’s a story I like to tell, which I vaguely remembered as originating at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. A researcher had a rubber duck in his office. When he found himself stumped on a problem, he would pick up the duck, walk over to a colleague, and ask them to hold the duck. He would proceed to explain the problem, often realizing the solution himself in the middle of the explanation. Then he would say, “Thank you for holding my duck”, and leave.| naml.us
I’m in the middle of the third book in Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. The books are amazing; I can’t thank David Luan enough for recommending them. In brief, Caro’s thesis is| naml.us
Retraction (15 April 2022): Greg Egan has kindly explained on Twitter that I was misinterpreting the narrator’s statements, and specifically that from the “from within” part means that morality is in part a result of human internal mental processes but that those processes of course condition on the external world. I am happy to stand corrected!| naml.us
Thanks to a recommendation from Dandelion Mané, I recently read “Sapiens” and| naml.us
The Long Now Foundation is a wonderful organization| naml.us
I make weird typos when writing. Sometimes I substitute an entirely different word in place of the correct one; otherwise times I simply a word. Both kind of typos are more common than misspelling a word, indicating that the typo mechanism is operating at a higher level than the spelling or typing itself.| naml.us
(This is an expanded version of a Facebook comment, because Jeremy asked.)| naml.us
I am writing this in Mac OS X, having momentarily given up getting Linux satisfactorily configured on my laptop. So, in the spirit of escapist fantasy and cracking nuts using sledgehammers, I am going to write about what a world with strong AI would be like. Warning: I am in a very lazy, rambling mood.| naml.us
I went to the Rootstrikers conference yesterday, which consisted of a few panel debates/discussions plus questions from the audience. I also got to hang out in a bar at a table with Lawrence Lessig for a half hour or so after the conference, which was pretty cool. I’ll summarize the conference here, and include links for anyone who wants to follow the movement or get actively involved.| naml.us
The normal scheme for donating to charities is to divide money up among several different charities. The following argument shows why this strategy is often wrong. Both the statement and the proof will be extremely informal:| naml.us
In the scale free government post, one of the completely unresolved issues was what to do about the federalism axis. There are two scale free extremes to choose from: completely uniform democracy and pure libertarianism (i.e., anarchy). This post will ramble about the anarchy option without getting anywhere very useful.| naml.us
A past girlfriend and I would occasionally (cheerfully) quibble over the optimal strategy for extracting toothpaste. It occurred to me recently that the disagreement was fundamentally about amortized vs. worst case complexity.| naml.us
The phrase “everything happens for a reason” came up in a couple contexts recently (conversation with a friend, Radiolab, etc.). It’s a good example of an obviously false statement that contains plenty of useful insight, and is interesting to think about in that context.| naml.us
In well designed cryptographic security systems, the attacker needs to do exponentially more work than the defender in order to read a secret, forge a message, etc., subject to appropriate hardness assumptions. Maybe this is true for many non-computer security-ish systems as well, like choosing good representatives in a voting system or avoiding overpaying for advertised merchandise, and we simply haven’t reached the level of intelligence as defenders for the exponential effort of attacker...| naml.us