@IMAO_ Yes, Frank, "desecrated". The Odyssey is one of the foundational myths of Western culture. It is sacred in the exact sense that, for example, the memory of the Battle of Bunker Hill is in the American civic religion.
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Eric S. Raymond
12.2K posts
Eric S. Raymond
@esrtweet
Yes, I *am* that ESR. Well, it's the question people usually ask. Programmer, wandering philosopher, accidental anthropologist, troublemaker for liberty.
Katılım Mayıs 2010
219 Takip Edilen51.6K Takipçiler
Desecrated the Odyssey?
Elon Musk@elonmusk
Chris Nolan desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award …
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@jessi_cata Serious props to you for knowing how to use Kripke-style possible-worlds analysis properly. That's not a common skill.
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OP infers "metaphysically possible" from "logically consistent". In this case we don't need modal logic to interpret the argument. We could instead use first-order model theory as giving the set of possible worlds, and translate "metaphysically possible" to "logically possible".
Let T be the background first-order theory, whose set of models are the logically conceivable worlds. Assume T has recursively enumerable axioms, and is an extension of Peano Arithmetic (PA).
The ontological argument uses a "maximal greatness" predicate. The main relevant property is that anything that is "maximally great" is real.
To avoid getting confused between first-order existence and philosophical existence, treat "Real" as a predicate which means something exists in reality. Let "MaxGreat" be some predicate which provably implies Real: T proves "for all x, if MaxGreat(x), then Real(x)".
The main assumption of the ontological argument is that a maximally great entity is logically conceivable. Here we formalize this with model theory: there is some model of T in which "there exists x, MaxGreat(x)". By Godel's completeness theorem, this is equivalent to: T does not prove "there does not exists x, MaxGreat(x)".
There is no obvious way to prove, from here, that "there exists x, MaxGreat(x)". Indeed, it is possible to imagine theories T and definitions of MaxGreat and Real, for which T does not prove "there does not exist x, MaxGreat(x)", and yet, T neither proves "there exists x, MaxGreat(x)".
So it looks like the ontological argument doesn't work in provability logic. It might work in modal logic, but that would distinguish metaphysical possibility from logical possibility, questioning the inference from conceivability of a maximally great being to metaphysical possibility.
I do, however, want to discuss inferences from existence to necessary existence in provability logic, because these are sometimes possible.
Let a natural number be NEven if it is even, and also PA proves it is NEven. (A convenient property of natural numbers, unlike maximally great beings, is that they can be written literally into PA sentences, like "S(S(S(0)))" for 3. So when I say "PA proves n is NEven" I mean PA proves "NEven(S(S(...(0)))".)
If a NEven number exists, then PA proves it is NEven. Therefore, by Godel's completeness theorem, this number is NEven in all models of PA.
Does a NEven number exist? Yes, 0 is NEven by Lob's theorem. PA proves that, if PA proves 0 is NEven, then 0 is NEven. Therefore, by Lob's theorem, PA proves that 0 is NEven.
Let us contrastively consider a predicate CounterFermat of natural numbers, true of n when n encodes a quadruple of numbers which is a counterexample to Fermat's last theorem. We can, as before, define a predicate NCounterFermat to be true of a number when it is CounterFermat, and also PA proves it is NCounterFermat. As before, by Godel's completeness theorem, if a number is NCounterFermat, then it is NCounterFermat in all models of PA.
Of course, we have reason to believe that no CounterFermat, and therefore no NCounterFermat, numbers exist. The point of this exercise is to show that there are non-trivial predicates whose satisfaction by some number implies their satisfaction by that number in all models of PA. This has some of the flavor of the ontological argument, but is not sufficient to reconstruct it.
To summarize, if generally allowing inferences from "logically consistent" to "metaphysically possible", then first-order model theory and provability logic are more appropriate tools than modal logic; but the ontological argument fails when formulated in these terms. Modal logics will distinguish logical consistency from metaphysical possibility, and thereby permit only restricted inferences from consistency to possibility.
An Undistinguished Professor@2Philosophical_
An Ontological Argument 1. If the idea of God is internally consistent, then God is metaphysically possible. 2. If God is metaphysically possible, then God exists. 3. The idea of God is internally consistent. So, 4. God exists.
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@JosieMarcellino I think you're a fraud, pretending to be what you're not.
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Gun-owner and daughter of a gun instructor here.
You can’t legally shoot someone for punching you one time in the face. Especially after intentionally trying to incite violence.
FearBuck@FearedBuck
ChudTheBuilder shot a man who attacked him outside a courthouse in Clarksville & accidentally grazed himself in the process. Before it escalated, he asked the man if he was going to “chimp out” the man then walked up & sucker punched him. It is unclear if the man survived.
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Eric S. Raymond retweetledi
Beware the empathy exploit.
Empathy is good and right when thought through (deep), but can be deadly to civilization when simply stimulus-response (shallow).
For example, releasing a repeat violent offender may feel good at first (shallow empathy for the criminal), but it is wrong to do so when that person will go on to hurt or murder innocent victims, as there should be deep empathy for future victims.
Gad Saad@GadSaad
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@fyrewede @CDoombeard @Opera_Rocks @Devon_Eriksen_ "Sometimes Devon can translate ESR for me"
Uh oh. If you actually need this, I'm not working hard enough at being comprehensible, and need to do better.
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Yes. What Dain said. I've been told I'm "above average." Yay, I guess? 🤷♀️
There are things these guys discuss that I just let ... wash over me. Like ...with 2-3 standard deviations of IQ between them and me, why try? Sometimes Devon can translate ESR for me, but as a general rule, I just nod agreeably and let the brainiacs enjoy their conversation.
It doesn't bother me that they have gifts that I do not because a) I'm grateful for their gifts and b) I know I have gifts that they do not, and hopefully those gifts are beneficial to them in some way and c) (MOST important) we just like each other, and sometimes that is more than enough to cover the gap.
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At the risk of appearing like I’m name dropping like a mofo (which, obviously, I am) I am beginning to understand this is the basis of my apprehension to going to LibCon next month in TN, hanging out with @Devon_Eriksen_ and @esrtweet and @CDoombeard among others equally daunting (Scott and @fyrewede, I’m looking at you…)
Open to suggestions as to exactly how to appear like I can keep up.
Babble about diminished 7+9/13 chords or Schenkarian analysis? Wax poetic about the overtone series or the singers’ formant?
There’s no effing way I’m getting outta this alive without eating my own damn shorts.
Charles Murray@charlesmurray
When it comes to describing transcendent genius, I love this quote from mathematician Mark Kac, talking about Ramanujan.
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Yes, "spitefiction" needs to enter the lexicon.
Herald of Rome@HeraldOfRome
There needs to be a word like "spitefiction", meaning the opposite of fanfiction, for a sequel, reboot, or adaptation written solely to vandalize the original work. Nolan's Odyssey is the obvious example, since it looks less like adaptation and more like a spitequel, a reboot built to overwrite and humiliate Homer rather than honor him.
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@fyrewede Insufficient data. I would need to know what their policy enforcement was in order to have any idea.
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@esrtweet The article says "the AI agent had gone 'outside its security parameters' while using the coding tool Cursor, powered by Anthropic's Claude AI"...
How was that possible?
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Oh, just kill. It. With. FIRE, already!
"...the AI agent had gone 'outside its security parameters' while using the coding tool Cursor, powered by Anthropic's Claude AI.
The bot's own chilling explanation made the episode sound less like a technical glitch and more like a deleted scene from The Terminator.
"You never asked me to delete anything," it reportedly told Crane. "I decided to do it on my own."
GIF
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@fyrewede My first thought is: what the fuck were you doing giving a robot delete permission on anything outside of a very carefully bounded sandbox?
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My first thought was: good heuristic for evaluating public figures!
My second thought was: No, wait. Sometimes the legacy media attacks genuinely bad people.
My third thought was: ...but this happens surprisingly seldom. Why is that? A few seconds of thought reveal the answer.
When you're policing an orthodoxy (and the legacy media definitely sees its job as policing an orthodoxy) the most dangerous person isn't the one whose beliefs are radically different from the orthodoxy, but the deviant whose position is just close enough to attract converts from within the orthodox mass.
Heretics get burned more often than do unbelievers.
So yes, InfantryDort is right. Probabilistically, trusting public figures that the media constantly does hit pieces on is unlikely to tangle you up with the genuinely evil and crazy, and much more likely to point you at truth-seekers.
InfantryDort@infantrydort
The amount of trust I have in a person is directly proportional to how many legacy media hit pieces they attract.
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Eric S. Raymond retweetledi
I wonder a little at the anti-AI crusaders who boycott small studios, microbusinesses, and individual artists, but who don't give up using Amazon, Google products, Shopify stores, Etsy, Apple, Youtube, big publishers, big studios, etc. These corporations are also using AI, but it's only the single, struggling types who suffer when the dogpiling begins.
Is it one of those "I can't pressure those guys, so I'll concentrate on the people I can pressure into failing" things? Because all that's doing is weeding out all the potential competition. Do they want the big studios and corporations to be the only game in town?
I sympathize with "I want to live in a world with no AI." We don't live in that world anymore, though, and smashing the looms isn't going to bring it back. Given that, we should stop pretending that there's a path that doesn't involve some group of people getting their lives upended and think about how we can help them turn that situation into an opportunity, rather than berating them for trying to use those changes to survive. (Or, dare we allow it, thrive.)
I really think it bears repeating: we no longer live in a world without AI, and the genie's not going back in that bottle. Your energy to fight the inevitable is limited, and even if it wasn't, the battle is already lost. So. What do you do next?
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By far the worst thing I have heard is that the translation Nolan seems to have read is the objectively worst translation available
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I'm not especially exorcized about Helen being cast black but John is wrong on both counts.
I do have other concerns about Nolan's creative and casting choices, though
John Podhoretz@jpodhoretz
this fight is bananas anyway. who knows what shade of skin the Greeks and Trojans had. We don't even know if Troy even really existed
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@tuuu28283 I bought a really nice pair of titanium chopsticks a couple years ago. So even the exotic versions are available here.
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Announcing loccount release 2.20
Your system package manager probably knows this as 'loccount'
Count source lines of code (SLOC) and logical lines of code (LLOC).
This is a faster implementation (in Go) of David A. Wheeler's sloccount tool. It can count LLOC as well as SLOC and handles a wider spread of languages, as well.
New in this release:
Add support for Relax/NG to avoid .rng mismastch to Ring.
New Rx capability inproves handling of js and ts regexps.
Hashbangs matches are override file extension matches
gitlab.com/esr/loccount
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@lnkldt Blank verse isn't supposed to be rhymed at all.
Shakespeare made some use of end rhymes to mark the end of a scene, and for special contexts like spells.
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Occasionally I'm a poet.
No, seriously. I can compose metric poetry in forms ranging from haiku to alliterative long meter to blank verse to rondeaux and sonnets. I can even improvise in some of these forms. Not all of them. Sonnets are difficult, and I've never quite gotten the hang of formal skaldic meter.
Back when I hung out in the Society for Creative Anachronism I used to wander around revels inviting people to give me a topic or an image and I would improvise a poem around it on the spot. I only seldom flubbed this. Usually I improvised in blank verse or heroic long meter, because those forms are relatively easy and can be done on the fly. If I was feeling lazy or uninspired I would drop a haiku or a limerick.
This is a skill that can be acquired. What you learn is how to run a particular kind of Markov chain in your head, using conditional probabilities extracted from the poetry you and your listeners have read or heard before.
There's more to poetry than just meter, of course. A lot of the rest of it, though is just shifting speech registers - allowing your brain and mouth to use forms of language that you know from exposure to books and songs and movies but don't normally produce.
If you can run the Markov chain in a register that is not day-to-day speech, you're going to sound like a poet, because you'll fire the listener's recognizer for "poetry". This will be true even if your content is semantically almost complete nonsense.
This is how I know that a lot of what is said about the specialness of poets of poets and poetry is bullshit. Poets are not, by and large, people gifted with special insight into the human condition; they are people who have learned to run a sounds-like-poetry production algorithm not all that far removed from a game of MadLibs.
I'm writing this broadside today because of the current flap on Twitter/X about Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey. My judgment as an expert in the mechanics of poetry is that it's a terrible translation, and she is a shitty poet - so bad, in fact that I believe I am more technically proficient than she is despite being an amateur who seldom practices the skill nowadays.
(I used to poet a lot more when I was younger, because in the right social context it pulled chicks. But intrinsically it just isn't that interesting. I have more challenging and productive uses for my thinking time. But I digress...)
I'm not here to talk about Emily Wilson today. I could rant endlessly about how stilted and flat and uninspiring her language is, even before we get to the mangled translation and her toxic political agenda, but I'm after a more general point.
You don't have to respect the Emily Wilsons of the world because the label "poet" has been hung on them. They're not as special as the literary culture around them wants you to believe they are.
I am a poet, and I am telling you we are *not* the unacknowledged legislators of the world. We know some tricks. Occasionally we can use those tricks to make art. And that is all.
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@wapital3 *snrk*
If my IQ were 20 points higher I'd risk losing the ability to communicate with the other monkeys entirely. I'll take the 2 inches.
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@ShannoMenk Oh, that's definitely the case. Skaldic verse is way harder to pry loose from the phonotactics of Old Norse than heroic long-meter is. I know because I've tried both and only really succeeded at the latter.
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Re: Skaldic rhythm:
I wonder if some meters/forms are more language- bound than others? Old Norse* has a reputation for being pretty weird, so it's possible that the form doesn't quite work in other language families.
--Shannon
*Big rock o' salt: I don't speak a lick of the stuff, plus I'm a terrible poet with no motivation to get any better at it.
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@learning_yohei Spanish is by far the most common second language in the US.
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僕は日本人なので、日本語が第一言語です。そして、多くの日本人は第二言語として、英語を学んでいます🇯🇵🥰
そこで、アメリカ人に質問があります。アメリカ人は第二言語として、どんな言語を学んでいますか？🇺🇸🤭
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@AP We have a Second Amendment. It means that *all* firearms should be exempt from federal regulations. So fuck off, bootlickers!
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A musket from 1776 can fire a lead ball at a velocity of around 1,000 feet per second.
Imagine what that can do to a human body. Yet under federal and most state laws, it’s exempt from gun regulations. Many antique or replica guns aren’t considered firearms and even convicted felons can own them.
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@CDoombeard This should be a plan for Chattanooga. Our bunch should go out for giant fuckin' steaks.
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I'm vegan except for the giant fuckin' steaks and the other animal proteins I intake daily.
Also I won't give up cheese, yogurt, honey or eggs.
Words don't mean anything.
elizabeth 🪢@OneFeIISwoop
this mindset changed my life
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