“The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order — dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism — was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?”
To me, this suggests rather clearly something similar to the OP’s interpretation. His drawing on of this story as allegory for our future occurs to me also as apt, and what I imagine as what Borges would have envisioned.
I also don’t quite follow your assertion that “social perception obviously wholly creates the real and only reality”, as social perception clearly varies by each persons’ distinct society - and anyhow even if considered on the level of the entire society, such a vast, sprawling perception could hardly be considered a singular “only” reality.
"the real and only reality" would be better stated as ~"the small finite set of realities" (basically, each "tribe's" trained "take" on a given situation)...but even then, it is always possible to point out a trivial, causally unimportant object level difference such that one can miss the point.
Whether it is possible to circumvent this remains to be seen. Science has demonstrated it can to some degree, but it only covers a portion of reality.
Yes, I've always read the story this way as well. Borges may have not been interested in politics, but politics was interested in him, and he clashed with the Peronists (who fired him from the library) and repeatedly criticizes fascism and anti-semites in his nonfiction especially, and when he was writing this in 1939/1940, obviously all of this was quite imminent and topical.
So what I take TUOT as being is an exploration of the Idealism idea, where Borges puts a twist on it: the (dialectical) beliefs of the communalistic idealists of Tlön turn out to be true, on a certain level, because sufficiently compelling ideas and totalizing ideologies make their claims true. In that way, 'perception' becomes 'reality'. Only that which the ideology or state can perceive is real, and everyone is required to see like a state. (As much as he loved Idealism & Platonism, Borges always seemed to accept them only on a literary level, as applying to fiction and literature - there is indeed 'Man' in fiction, but there is not an actual Man in a Platonic region of forms, there is only a term 'man' we nominalistically apply to entities as convenient.)
That is, idealism is correct, in a sense, and the artifacts of Tlön become real because the savants of the conspiracy 'perceive' them (in their minds) and create them. And as Tlön takes over the world and gains power, it gains more realness and more of its artifacts come into existence - or people just lie about them or pretend they exist and falsify documents to accord with the new party line, and doublethink their way to 'seeing' the new labyrinthine reality forged by their fellow humans.
One might say that _hrönir_, especially, are a savage Orwellian parody of how things go in totalitarian dictatorships: the description of the experiments with the prisoners could as easily be set in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, where the real story is that on the fourth try, after turning up only the equivalent of fishing for a muddy boot, everyone has figured out that, to satisfy the decrees from above, they need to buy or forge some ancient artifacts of unconvincing antiquity (and so no counter-revolutionary skeptics can be permitted near) and that is how _hrönir_ are discovered. The same way Lysenko manufactured agricultural miracles or innumerable falsifications like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_from_Dazhai_in_agricultu... became official policy, doubted only on pain of death.
Those who disagree and wish to maintain their integrity, can only retreat into quietism or 'internal exile', and spend their time on topics with as little political relevance as possible and avoid even publishing (except as samizdat), and let "a scattered dynasty of recluses take over", as it is too late to stop the Tlön revolution, and "the [whole] world [will] be Tlön".
Instead of directly editing the unified diff file, make a copy and edit the copy. Once you’re done, call rediff original-patch edited-patch to get a patchfile with fixed offsets.
Note that rediff only fixes your offsets, and doesn’t remove empty hunks. patch is not happy about empty hunks existing, so if you happen to revert all changes in a hunk, remember to delete the hunk after rediff. Probably this ought to be contributed back upstream.
Hi, I’ve read the DBSP paper and it’s a really well-thought out framework; all the magic seemed so simple with the way the paper laid things out. However, the paper dealt with abelian Z-sets only, and mentioned that in your implementation, you also handle the non-abelian aspect of ordering. I was wondering if you guys have published about how did you that?
Apologies about the confusion. We indeed only solve incremental computation for Abelian groups, and the paper is making a case that database tables can be modeled as Abelian groups using Z-sets, and all relational operators (plus aggregation, recursion, and more) can be modeled as operations on Z-sets.
Yes, I might have misworded my question. My question is in relation to this paragraph on page 12:
"Note that the SQL ORDER BY directive can be modelled as a non-linear aggregate function that emits a list. However, such an implementation is not efficiently incrementalizable in DBSP. We leave the efficient handling of ORDER BY to future work."
My understanding is that Feldera does indeed support ORDER BY, which I imagine it does incrementally, thus my question.
The statement in the paper that ordering is not efficiently incrementalisable seems to makes sense to me. It is clear that even though Z-sets are not naively able to represent diffs of ordered relations (since Z-sets are unordered), ordering can be modelled as an aggregate that first builds up the first row, then the second row, and so on. Even as formulated this way however, I fail to see how the entire "incrementalised" computation would still be practically incremental, in the sense that the size of the output diff (Z-set) is small as long as the diff of the input is small.
For example, consider the query `select x from y order by x asc`, and the following values respectively occur in the stream of x: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Now, consider the incremental diff for the last value of 1. If presumably one models order by a list aggregation, then the Z-set for the entire computation seems to be
- [ 2, 3, 4, 5 ]
+ [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ]
which grows with the size of the output set rather than the size of the input diff. If presumably one models order by e.g. adding an order column, the diff would be
Your explanation of why ORDER BY is not efficiently incrementalizable is spot on. At the moment Feldera ignores the outermost ORDER BY clause, unless it is part of the ORDER BY ... LIMIT pattern, which is SQL's way to express the top-k query.
Happened to me too… Yes, it happened during syncing. I searched up on how to disable Kindle auto update and it’s happening less, but last time I bought a book from Kindle store I got bit again. I guess it’s a sign to stop feeding the hand that bites me.
For myself, I just make a directory `workflows` and put all my scripts in it, and organise related scripts into subdirectories, so that I can use tree and filesystem tools to check what subcommands are available.
Is there any potential that indexes could be created over foreign key joins in the future? I know that as of today, no multi-table indices or statistics exist for Postgres, which has had led me to do some further denormalisations.
I’ve known them through their work on Wish List and Flash List. They’re one of the bigger supporters in work on list rendering in React Native (a vital, devilish, and often overlooked area).
To me, this suggests rather clearly something similar to the OP’s interpretation. His drawing on of this story as allegory for our future occurs to me also as apt, and what I imagine as what Borges would have envisioned.
I also don’t quite follow your assertion that “social perception obviously wholly creates the real and only reality”, as social perception clearly varies by each persons’ distinct society - and anyhow even if considered on the level of the entire society, such a vast, sprawling perception could hardly be considered a singular “only” reality.
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