If the purpose of a system is what it does, then it seems the purpose of democracy is the self flagellation of the masses.

Idk how easy it easy to just build a nuke… I feel like the long range missile is the hard part, right? The actual nuclear part isn’t quite so complex. Maybe I’m wrong.

yhwh looking suspiciously like an LLM

Yeah the track pads are so cool! I don’t use mine much, but for RPGs with a lot of abilities being able to setup little touch menus is indispensable. Considering the deck has the same interface it makes complete sense for docked mode to have an equivalent device.

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One downfall of what I only hesitantly refer to as modern feminism (although really I’m talking about terfs and the terf-adjacent) is that it has painted men as dangerous by default. I’m also a trans woman so I’ve seen both sides of the coin, too… I do feel less safe now, this is true. Many things were easier when I was living as a man. But I was never dangerous or an abuser.

Nonetheless, a former partner used accusations of abuse against me and turned so many people on me. The only ones that stuck by me were former romantic partners, who knew the accusations couldn’t have been true. For everyone else, it was so easy to accept that a man - even a clearly gentle one - would be an abuser.

In reality I’ve been a victim of abuse - physical, emotional, sexual… All long before I transitioned.

Yes, and given infinite monkeys no doubt they will eventually evolve into something that allows them to escape!

A monkey could type any infinite sequence of letters if it types at random. Since infinite sequences of single letters, repeating patterns, and those containing hamlet except one letter is wrong every time are all possible infinite sequences, it’s possible that the money produces one of them.

Probability behaves strangely in infinite situations. A single monkey will almost surely produce the complete works of Shakespeare in infinite time… But this is partially a flaw of infinity in general.

As another example, let’s say your monkey produces an infinite sequence containing hamlet. What is the probability of that particular sequence arising? It’s 0. There is no chance of any particular sequence arising… And yet that one did arise! It was almost surely not going to be that one, but it was. The probability of any single infinite sequence arising is 0, but nonetheless one of them will be the outcome.

I thought that at first… But then for every infinite series with exactly one hamlet in it, there’s an infinite series where one character is wrong. And there’s another one where a different character is wrong… And so on and so on. Even if the series contains an infinite number of hamlets, you can replace one character in each in a huge number of ways! It starts to seem like there are more options with almost Hamlet than there are specifically with Hamlet.

In fact, I begin to wonder if almost any constraint reducing the search space in the infinite set of such infinite sequences, you will inevitably have fewer items within the search space than without… Since you can usually construct multiple non-matching candidates from any matching one.

But… Honestly I’m not sure how much any of that matters in infinite contexts. Since they are impossible it boggles my mind trying to imagine it.

I gotta agree, I tried 4 or 5 times and just never got into it. Doesn’t help that I’m not great at party RPGs, but yeah the story was slow and I remember being unimpressed with the dialogue options… It always felt like you were kinda pushed towards and inevitable outcome rather than really influencing things.

Eh, I don’t think it’s irrelevant, I think it’s interesting! I mean, consider a new infinite monkey experiment. Take the usual setup - infinite monkeys, infinite time. Now once you have your output… Do it again, an infinite number of times. Now suddenly those near impossibilities (the almost surely Impossibles) become more probable.

I also think it’s interesting to consider how many infinite sequences there are which do/do not contain hamlet. This one I’m still mulling over… Are there more which do, or more which don’t? That is a bit beyond my theoretical understanding of infinity to answer, I think. But it might be an interesting topic to read about.

The probability is 1 but that does not mean that it will happen. There is a set of options where it does not happen. It happens “almost surely”.

One monkey may never produce it even given infinite time. It could just produce an infinite string of the letter a and never change it’s mind. That’s less likely that it writing hamlet, or even many hamlets… But nonetheless, it could. In fact all of the infinite monkeys could do that. If you repeated the experiment and infinite number of times, it’s likely that one of them will simple produce an infinite number of infinite strings of only the letter A. Or, idk, ASCII art.

No, that’s not how probability works. “Any probability times infinity is infinity” doesn’t even mean anything. Probabilities are between 0 and 1, and you do not multiply them by fixed factors. Infinite probability has no meaning.

I explained the infinity monkeys in another comment more clearly than I did above -here you go.

No, it isn’t, that’s a misunderstanding of how independent random variables behave. Even with an infinite number of trials, in this case there is never a guarantee of a particular outcome.

Consider a coin flip, 50/50 chance of either getting heads or tails on each flip. Lets say we do an infinite number of flips, one by one, so that we end up with an infinite ordered set of outcomes, like so: {H, T, T, H, … }. Now, consider the probability of getting a particular arrangement of heads/tails in this infinite list, like the one I wrote before. You can’t calculate a probability for each arrangement - there are an infinite number - but it should be clear that each arrangement is equally likely, right? Because {H, …} is just as likely as {T, …}, same with {H, H, …} and {H, T, … } and so on and so on. In other words the probabilty of getting all heads on infinite coin flips is the same as the probability of getting any other combination.

In the same way, the infinite monkeys are doing ‘coin flips’ involving more than 2 options. Lets just assume they have 26 keys, one for each letter, and assume they hit each of them with equal probability. In the same way, for an individual monkey the probability of going {a, a, a, a, a, a, …, a} is the same as the probability of the same sequence with hamlet somewhere (in a particular position that is - the probabilities are only equal when we consider exactly one arrangement). What might make it more intuitively clear is that even after an infinite number of trials you only have one sequence of letters (or set of sequences, with infinite monkeys). It’s clear that there are other possible sequences - like only the letter a - and these all have a non 0 chance of having arisen given a different infinite set of monkeys for a different infinite time period.

It’s easy to be misled here! If we return to the coin flip example, the probability of flipping at least 1 head after infinite coin flips approaches 1. The limit of P(at least one H) as the number of flips approaches infinity is 1. But this is a limit! You never reach the limit, even considering infinite situations.

Not necessarily. Each monkey is independent, right? So if we think about the first letter, it’s either going to be, idk, A, the correct letter, or B, any wrong letter. Any monkey that types B is never going to get there. Now each money independently chooses between them. With each second monkey, the chances in aggregate get smaller and smaller than we only see B, but… It’s never a 0 chance that the monkey hits B. If there’s only two keys, it’s always 50/50. And it could through freak chance turn out that they all hit B… Forever. There is never a guarantee that you will get even a single correct letter… Even with infinite monkeys.

I get that it seems like infinity has to include every possible outcome, because the limit of P(at least one monkey typing A) as the number of monkeys goes to infinity is 1… But a limit is not a value. The probability never reaches 1 even with infinite monkeys.

No, that’s also a measure of size used primarily for those big fords with the tiny beds.

Oooof. I feel like trying to figure out what’s wrong with some regex I didn’t write is much harder than writing it myself personally.

No Peter, this isn’t an electron, this is the power of the sun

Rhyming slang isn’t really supposed to be funny, rather obfuscatory. It’s almost like a cipher, so that anyone not in the know doesn’t understand. That’s a theory, anyway.