Viewing profile — colorint

As a general matter, you can't prove a predicate true or false by automatic means. Logic programming is just as "artful" as imperative or functional programming, because they all r…

The drawback of hash tables is that they're bad for inexact matching. Likewise, when I go to the library, I usually go to the section I'm interested in and let my eyes wander. So s…

Risk of borrowers defaulting is the entire ethical justification for lending with interest. Collateralization reduces the risk of the loan, but doesn't eliminate it; after all, car…

That's Dr. Gene Ray, Cubist and Wisest Human to you.

Ironically, the postapocalyptic world will probably still use US dollars. And when it turns out that not enough physical dollars survived the apocalypse, dollars will be the way cr…

In this case it's probably justified: one of the hallmarks of "modern" bubbles, or at least of modern speculative hype that doesn't work out, is that renaming a company based on th…

I was playing Pai-Gow poker at a casino with my parents and some friends. The game has side bets, which pay out if you get a good hand, independently of whether you win or lose, an…

Keynes sort of sums up this sentiment, just replace economist with philosopher: >Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usuall…

I'm going to issue a coin for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.

>national debt [...] no money to go around Let's imagine that I'm a government that reserves the right to be sole issuer of my country's currency (though for political reasons I've…

Cash basis is accepted for the purposes of taxes, but my understanding is that it's not acceptable for legally-mandated reporting. That is, cash basis is not among the generally ac…

Banks can't print money either, and this isn't some "ackshually it's the Mint" thing: banks have the power to create debt. But this isn't special, because you and I also have the p…

It's more of a technical note, but probably the last really important change was the accrual basis, which, as far as I know, was popularized in the 20th century. This is the system…

The technical definition of inflation is raising prices. It's only a strictly monetary phenomenon if output and velocity are fixed with respect to the money supply. In other words,…

The biggest sin of the Boomers is, they grew up in a world that was carefully curated by their parents, and became convinced that this was the natural state of things.

He probably means "unity of experience" in the sense that, one's experience is a unity. Look at the whole sentence: >Its nature and import can be expressed only by art, because the…

It's proven unsolvable for computers (i.e., Turing machines). Whether that makes it impossible for humans to solve (as a matter of course, or as a matter of Turing's proof) depends…

>but am curious as to what the arguments against it are There's a "philosophical" problem to the effect of, at some point, what are you indexing? But what seems to me to be the mor…

Well, Minsky's financial instability hypothesis is at least interesting. His argument is, basically, that there's a cycle wherein: during normal times, people want to beat the aver…

Debt is an asset to the lender, and in case of default (and no hope of renegotiation) the asset is written off. Whether this is "someone paying it" is like asking whether the owner…

Yes, that was Turing's proof. Church's more indirect proof is that it's impossible to prove the equivalence of two lambda expressions. But the real essence of the problem is more l…

It turns out that the problem of deciding whether a predicate is universally valid in an axiomatic system is also undecidable (and, appropriately enough, called the decision proble…

Yes, so given this, do you (i.e., people optimistic about AI) believe that computer programs will be able to generate meaningful, novel computer programs, given that even the most …

Do you believe that artificial intelligence will be capable of deciding, given an algorithm and a set of inputs, whether the algorithm will finish running?

The global financial crisis showed that insurance isn't the answer. The problem with "hedging against all futures" is that the hedging is part of the system, and when the hedge gro…