I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true. I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it and relied on an LLM too much. That was a mistake.
Some of these were my own supposition - 1% felt about right for how casually they are mentioned in story.
> Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
> I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true.
Hah, fair enough. Thanks for getting the Culture back on the front page of HN :)
> I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it
If you were actually referring to the Sleeper Service - I think you still remembered something like the opposite idea of what happened in the story. The twist was - (Spoiler!) - the Sleeper Service was actually not Eccentric at all, and had not built up a small army as a Mind that had gone rogue, but had actually done this as a planned failsafe in conjunction with a number of other Minds. Hence the multi-level pun of its name.
> I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
I'm afraid I can't remember exactly which books this was explored in, though Inversions, State of the Art and Player of Games are books where the Culture is explicitly compared to other civilisations and so more likely to have mentioned it.
Also Banks' essay /A Few Notes on the Culture/ covers it quite well if you haven't come across that yet. Very short but I think very readable and interesting.
Almost certainly. As a longtime member of Ian's Patreon, I recognize more than a few specific techniques being used here that he's posted tutorials for on it. Not that the inspiration takes away at all from the final product! The fact that a 16yo made this would be insanely cool even if it was a shot-for-shot remake of an existing movie scene, so any originality that it has beyond that only makes it more cool!
What I love about Ian's astonishing work and performance is the sincere, spectacular excitement and enthusiasm he conveys, that shows how tremendously fun it is to be that skilled, talented, and well practiced. It serves not just as a proof of what's possible, but also as an inspiration to put in the hours to learn Blender that well, whichever of its many facets appeal to you.
Yeah. Definitely in that vein - Ian's work draws on a whole lot of sci-fi/cyberpunk forebears.
He's got a pretty fantastic series of short, hilarious, and extremely useful and practical tutorials for Blender on his channel, and his Dynamo Dream project is hugely impressive - just the credit sequence of the latest episode is interesting enough that I wish it was a whole miniseries itself.
A better example I've seen for the theorem is that if you take a paper map of a country, messily schrunch it up into a ball and drop it somewhere in the country, there will be at least one point on the map that is exactly above the corresponding real point in the country.
As others have said, it's meant for mappings of the space to itself. So stirring the water, but not moving the glass.
But anyway, the theorem works only for continiuous mappings. The moment they started mentioning "water particles", instead of some hypothetical fluid that is a continuous block, the theorem no longer applied. You could break it by mirroring the position of every particle. There's still a fixed point (the line of mirroring), but there's no obligation that there's a particle on that line.
Another practical example is that you're guaranteed to have an annoying spot on your head where the hair sticks straight out and you can't brush it down.
That's actually the one that helped me visualize the theorem. If you look at your scalp from above, you can divide all the hairs into "points left" or "points right" and draw a boundary between them of hairs that point neither left or right. Then you can do the same thing with "points up" and "points down." Where the two kinds of boundaries cross, you have a hair that doesn't point up, down, left, or right - it points straight out of your scalp.
This still doesnt make sense to me. Imagine a continuous line whose positions map to the real numbers between 0 and 1. If I "move" the line over 0.1 wrapping the end back to the beginning (i.e. x2 = (x1 + 0.1) % 1), there will be no points that are in the same position as they were in before.
EDIT: If you need a continuous function, wouldnt expanding the space to a line from -Inf to +Inf and then using x2 = x1 + 0.1 do the trick?
Brouwer's fixed point theorem only applies to compact convex sets.
Infinite lines don't work, as they are not compact.
Similarly a circle would not work as it is not convex (you're close with your example, you just need to glue together the endpoints to turn it into a circle and make the map continuous).
I read Potassco's Answer Set Solving in Practice book [0] but it's pretty dense. I suspect it would be easier to digest if you read it while also following their course materials, which are all online [1].
These days I recommend people start with the Lifschitz book [2] and read through the Potassco book [0]. Lifschitz's book is a much gentler introduction to ASP and logic programming in general and its examples are in ASP code (not math). It's also more geared towards the programming side than the solving side, which is probably better for most people until they really want to understand what clingo/gringo/clasp are doing and what their limitations are.
There are other more applied courses, like Adam Smith's Applied ASP course at UCSC [3]. The problems in that course look like a lot of fun.
I second the recommendation to start with Lifschitz and move on to the Potassco book from there. To add: One does not need to know Prolog to get into ASP, the semantics are unique and more minimal. That said, I personally struggled with ASP before it clicked, it takes time to grasp the lingo and grok the semantics if you have never worked with something similar. Best to have a guide that introduces the concepts one at a time ("What do you mean, there's more than one type of negation?!")
The "Easy ASP" [0] tutorial from Potassco can walk you through some examples, if you'd like.
The playlist is aimed at a general scientific/business audience, the presenter suggests that a lot of natural and business systems can be described in this manner. The presenter also mentions how a Clingo program was used, without modification, to optimize radio frequency band allocation.
Here's a repository [1] of ASP programs in clingo. Under problem classes, I see mostly: game AIs, graph problems, various puzzles, so on.
I think you've misunderstood. Megabyte scales better with context window length. I don't know if they're saying the training data / compute are any more efficient.
I know programmers are prone to legal hacks that don't make sense, but I'm curious whether the following would work.
As I understand it, it's ok to reference a Pantone Color by name without a license (nominative fair use), but that gives you no idea how to use or display it. So photoshop files could store both the pantone color name (for printing and profressional color matching purposes) and a substitute color for display on screen when unlicensed.
The UI would either prompt users for the substitute color, or automatically fill it if they did have a license at the time they selected the color. That way files wouldn't break quite so horribly when licenses expire.
It means round-the-clock as in "it works during the day and night", rather than literally non-stop. For example, if I said that security did "round the clock patrols", you wouldn't assume they patrol every second of they day, but rather regularly through the night.
The fact a few people might misinterpret it is a marketing bonus, but surely negligable, because no one could believe that.
Some of these were my own supposition - 1% felt about right for how casually they are mentioned in story.
> Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.