> "what would you say if I asked you whether [this door] leads to the castle?".
Very clever. If the goblin is lying, the double negation cancels out. If the goblin is telling the truth, the truth remains unchanged.
Personally, I didn't find the article very clarifying. Instead, I like to think of the goblins A and B as functions that take in the truth value of a statement and output an answer.
One goblin's function yields the boolean not of the result, and the other passes it through unchanged. You don't know which goblin has which functions, so the two ways to get a reliable answer out are:
A(A(question))
A(B(question))
The former is your answer here, which does the double negation. The latter is the answer in the movie where you pass it through both goblins which means the answer will reliably have its truth value flipped exactly once.
The nice thing about the latter solution is that it scales up to more goblins and an arbitrary ratio of liars. Let's say there are four goblins, Ann, Ben, Cat, and Dan. Two always lie and two always tell the truth. You can ask "Would Ann say that Ben would say that Cat would say that Dan would say that door 1 leads to the castle?" In other words:
A(B(C(D(question))))
In this case, the answer tells you if door 1 is correct because there are an even number of liars so the negations cancel out. If the number of liars is odd, you flip the result.
> The nice thing about the latter solution is that it scales up to more goblins and an arbitrary ratio of liars. Let's say there are four goblins, Ann, Ben, Cat, and Dan. Two always lie and two always tell the truth. You can ask "Would Ann say that Ben would say that Cat would say that Dan would say that door 1 leads to the castle?"
> In this case, the answer tells you if door 1 is correct because there are an even number of liars so the negations cancel out. If the number of liars is odd, you flip the result.
That's worse scaling than the alternative approach, not better scaling. You need to increase the size of your question every time the number of goblins increases. But "what would you say if I asked you whether [this door] leads to the castle?" shows perfect scaling; it works without changes no matter how many goblins there are. It also isn't necessary to know how many of the goblins are liars.
I was thinking that if there are multiple goblins, asking a question that only relates to one of them doesn't give you enough information to determine which goblins are liars. But you don't actually need to know that. You just need the truth value of the final answer.
I should point out that your all-inclusive question also doesn't give you enough information to determine which goblins are liars. In the general case that will always require one question per goblin, plus one more if you also care about the doors.
> The internet users of the late 90s just don't exist any more.
We still exist, we're just a very small slice of a much larger pie. Also, we are likely a less profitable target for advertisers so aren't an important demographic for ad-driven companies.
I take it more to mean "people who have to be technically inclined to a degree to get online in the 90s" don't really exist as a category that is self-selecting.
The other thing you mention is huge, too, of course. All the "famous" things from the 90s were basically labours of love by individual hackers who then looked for ways to fund it. Now everything is all about ad-revenue dollars.
If you're in the 15-25 nerdy computer demographic that waxes lyrical about the latest window mangaer, you are likely to be going into an insanely high paid job for a major corporation. The computer thing you are nerdy about is normal, you're more like a car or football nerd now - being in depth in a common subject
GenX-ers and Millenials who have been in tech a long time are likely doing OK financially, but are also likely at the age where they have kids which eat up a huge fraction of their disposable income.
Historically, advertisers have really loved late teens and early 20-somethings. They're starting to earn money, but don't have a lot of obligations or expenses yet, so they have a lot of discretionary income.
I also disagree that being into computers is a "common subject" these days. Everyone uses computers (some of which have keyboards), but most people aren't "into" them any more than the average commuter is into cars.
In 2017, Trump and Scott Walker did a whole dog an pony show about how they convinced Foxconn to spend $10 billion in Wisconsin on a factory that was going to employ 13,000 people. Trump got a giant pile of good press about it.
Then nothing happened, then the agreement was scaled down, then more delays. A couple of buildings were built then left empty and eventually sold off.
But Trump supporters never followed up to see what happened. They just saw the initial press releases, declared a win, and forgot about the whole thing. Now we're doing it again.
> You're old as soon as you see imperfections as permanent
Conversely, you're young as long as you believe you have control over imperfections.
Last year, I slipped in a puddle on my bike. Last week, my orthopedic surgeon told me I can never be a runner again. There is too little cartilage left in my ankle.
Yesterday, Strava told me I logged my 250th entry. Scrolling down my activity stream past the walks I logged recovering from my ankle injury, I saw the hundreds of runs I went on when I took jogging seriously. One of those runs is now the best run I'll ever do.
Not being able to run is an imperfection that is "permanent" and that I will never "grow" past regardless of how much I care to do so. That's what getting old feels like.
Hopefully my story will help you with your situation, I know how it feels. I’m 30, need double hip replacements as I’ve got no cartilage anymore, tumours in my bone etc etc.
I couldn’t run, I sometimes couldn’t walk. People used to think I was a personal trainer because I was so fit. Diagnosis was 5 years ago.
Went through grief/trauma getting diagnosed with arthritis.
Now 5 years later, from just walking shorter distances more often and processing the grief, I’m back at the gym and started soccer and ran for the first time in ages. Felt very weird but I just work within my limits. I also cycle at least 30 minutes of intense cycling 6 days a week.
You’ll learn to adapt and adjust, it does get better, you just have to become a child again and approach it differently.
I ultimately will still need joint replacements at some point in the next few years, but I’ve had a complete mindset shift. My current goal is to become even fitter than my previous state.
I agree, there is a big mindset shift needed to make peace with our body not being entirely under our control. To me, that mindset change is a big part of what it feels like to not be young.
If think of a lifespan as an arc, it's something like:
1. In early childhood, you are gradually mastering the physicality of your body. Learning to control elimination, getting more coordinated, learning physical skills, etc. I think of it like learning to control a sailboat, harness the wind, operate the sails, etc.
2. When you hit young adulthood, you're at a sort of peak where your body can be an abstraction. You can do what you want in the world without having to worry too much about your body getting in the way. At this point, you are a skilled sailor on the open ocean.
3. Then as you get older and/or unlucky, things outside of your control happen to your body in ways that materially limit your own agency. You may want to do X, but your body means that's off the table. You can still do Y. Now you are navigating shoals. You can still control the sailboat, but there are rocks there and you must navigate around them whether you want to or not. Some places simply can't be reached anymore.
4. I'm not there yet, but assume that as we age, the number of rocks increases and we increasingly focus our attention on the sailing we've already done in the past and make peace with our limited journeys going forward.
That first time you crash into a rock and move from 2 to 3 is hard.
Given that we struggle with even a basic consensus about which humans are better at art than others, I don't think this sentence carries any meaning whatsoever.
They were uninformed then, but people are misinformed now.
I think the latter is worse, because it means those in power now have an information lever they can use to manipulate the masses. When there were no broadcast or network media sources, those levers didn't exist and the powerful had fewer tools to control people.
> people only seem to demand a fair piece of the wealth after a world war.
I think it's more that war has a tendency to literally destroy capital which is effectively a tax on the rich. When factories get bombed, factory owners lose out more than people who don't own factories.
War is horrible but it historically has at least been somewhat of an economic equalizer.
One of the real tragedies of the pandemic was that it turned that upside down. The virus didn't touch capital but destroyed humans, and the humans hit the worst were those in "essential" but low-paying jobs who couldn't socially isolate. The effect was that the pandemic increased economic inequality.
Are you sure it's true that the pandemic increased economic inequality?
The humans worst hit were by far the elderly, and the elderly tend to have more assets than the young in industrialized countries.
Among working-age people, lower-paid "essential" workers were exposed to more risk, but by a significant margin, old people are the ones who died more.
Individual old people may have died more, but we are talking about economic inequality. They had huge gains in their wealth due to asset inflation. Working people were by far the worst hit by the devaluation of their labour.
Boosting the ISO will increase noise, but it won't have any effect on focus. Of course, low light means a wider aperture and a shallow depth of field, but as long as the subject is right at the focal distance, that won't matter much either. There is definitely visible noise, but you nailed the focus.
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