> The idea that "life is meaningless" means that society cannot rely on you, because you'll do whatever strikes your fancy, whatever the consequences.
How does "life is meaningless" imply "life is useless"? Also, why would nihilism entail radical individualism? The core of nihilism is that since the indifferent universe is without meaning humans have to give it meaning, quite the opposite of what you're implying.
The fact that expected utility theory isn't nearly as scrutinized as the labor theory of value, whilst being at least as flawed, tells you something about the "value free" nature of modern econ.
Regex is a family of languages each of which can have various implementations. You could have a regex implementation that instead uses mutually recursive functions etc.
What is true is that regexes are typically not turing complete and can be represented with simple state machines.
It’s due to return on energy investment going up due to new productive technologies, aka “capital”. “Capitalism” is an orthogonal issue. To put it in Marxian terms, you can have a socialist community with a capitalist mode of production.
The way new capital reaches the third world can be attributed to globalization of market circuits, for instance, China is currently investing into Africa much like the first world did to China in the past.
Of course, if you define the terminology differently, say you’re an Austrian Economist, the above explanation might appear unintelligable.
Does there not exist some ridiculously parallel equivalent of Bresenham or Wu? I imagine with the right datastructure you should be able to do pixel/line intersection tests in the pixel shader?
On a tangent, the Mixed Mental Arts podcast episode with Diamond is _very_ entertaining.
They also interviewed Peter Turchin, who proposes an alternative vision to why certain nations succeed, namely multi-level selection (aka group selection) which I find just as interesting. Diamond seems pretty controversial among anthropologists, likewise multilevel selection is topic of debate among evolutionists. I don’t know enough myself to make an informed judgement in these matters.
The national debt can wait, the private sector is more indebted than at any point in recorded history, and getting worse. In the US especially you can see the seeds of debt servitude being sown.
One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics by David Berlinski
Often gets low ratings because people mistake it for an educational book. It’s a mix of history, biographies and verbal exposition on the development of mathematical theorems, with a good poetic slant.
Reminds me I really need to look into his other books, his writing is scarily good.
Laws of power is nice but what always bothered me about it is that there doesn’t seem to be a system to the laws, it merely sums up a bunch of them without investigating underlaying foundations.