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It amazes me that people think this version of events makes the Church sound better, when it makes it sound worse.

It is not about better or worse, it is about correcting myths created later on that were intended to paint the Church as epitome of backwardness.

Galileo's affair wasn't about noble scientist going against stupid masses and oppressive institution designed to keep people in dark, while providing strong evidence for revolutionary theory, and being punished for his great genius.

But it is often presented like this.


Agreed. I'd also say that I think our habit of canonizing whoever happens to be perceived as the 'good guy' in history, and demonizing the 'bad guy' tends to make history much more difficult to learn from, because the people involved go from being real humans to actors in a very artificial Hollywood style story of good vs evil.

The real story here is one that has played out endlessly in history in various contexts. And is a great example of why The Golden Rule is something valuable to abide, even if you're completely self centered. It also emphasizes that all people, even the Pope, are human - and subject to the same insecurities, pettiness, and other weaknesses as every other human. And more. It's a tale of humanity that has and will continue to repeat indefinitely.

But when you turn it into a story of good vs evil, you lose all of this and instead get a pointless attack on one institution, which is largely incidental to what happened. For instance you can see the Galileo story clearly in the tale of Billy Mitchell [1] who went from suggesting that air forces would dominate the future of warfare (back in 1919!) to getting court martialed and 'retired' for his way of trying to argue for such. His views would go on to be shown to be 100% correct in 1937, the first time a plane downed a capital naval ship. However, he died in 1936.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#


Galileo is a noble scientist going against a Pope who had his fee-fees hurt, which then banned the truth. It doesn't make the Church any less backward.

How so?

Because the Church didn't even have a good theological reason for siding against Galileo. It was a fit of pique.

But people have so completely internalized the idea that truth must bow to power that they think the fact that the Church condemned Galileo's ideas because he was rude somehow exonerates it as an institution.


The patron and professor funds a paper, and it contains claims of proofs that don't exist and ad hominems against the patron. The patron then sabotages the author. Sure, not very professional by the patron, but still understandable.

I was wondering what this meant, so I googled '"rho type" concatenative', and the only hit was this thread.

Maybe reflective high-order calculus (ρ-calculus). Found this paper, though even the abstract is incomprehensible to me.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106610...


The rho type is the aggregate stack effect e.g. (int int — string) will pop two ints off the stack and push a string.

I asked on LM Arena. I got two models I never heard of, and they split on whether I should walk or drive. Ernie 5.0 said I should walk, and then trash talked me for thinking about driving. Octopodus pointed out I had to drive to get my car to the car wash.

Erdos was an incredibly prolific mathematician, and one of his quirks is that he liked to collect open problems and state new open problems as a challenge to the field. Many of the problems he attached bounties to, from $5 to $10,000.

The problems are a pretty good metric for AI, because the easiest ones at least meet the bar of "a top mathematician didn't know how to solve this off the top of his head" and the hardest ones are major open problems. As AI progresses, we will see it slowly climb the difficulty ladder.


I don't know how Polymarket works. Were people betting against Polymarket, or was Polymarket just making book and someone else is on the other side of the bets.


> Is Polymarket The House?

> No, Polymarket is not the house. All trades happen peer-to-peer (p2p).

(from https://docs.polymarket.com/polymarket-learn/FAQ/is-polymark...)


> Is Polymarket The House?

This term is a bit ambiguous, and there's some nuances that make it different from both sportsbooks and poker.

They don't ever take a nominal cut, their revenue model is in holding USD deposits and making money of interest.

> No, Polymarket is not the house. All trades happen peer-to-peer (p2p). The documentation is purposefully misleading, but it's true that unlike a sportsbook, they don't take the risk of bets. It's a classic case of a blockchain company exaggerating to what extent they are on the blockchain and to what extent they are centralized and just minimally wrapping the blockchain, like when NFTs were actually a URL to an image.

Trades do NOT happen p2p, polymarket functions as an escrow, payments are sent to polymarket accounts and released by polymarket. Each prediction market does have their own contract, but Polymarket staff rules on each event through off-chain (although they are based on the wording used in the specific event).

New events are solely released by polymarket staff (although users can 'suggest' markets).


> Polymarket staff rules on each event through off-chain

Theoretically, no. Predictions are resolved through UMA, a decentralized stake-based oracle system, which is at least theoretically decentralized.

Practically, I have no idea how big the overlap between Polymarket staff and UMA stakeholders is.


Oh, my bad, thanks!


I think most questions on polymarket use order books now. But they used to use AMMs (where people bet against polymarket) and their FAQ says some questions still use them


Were the liquidity pools backing the AMMs actually operated by Polymarket?


At the beginning, yes. Or polymarket employees, anyway


The latter. The other side now wins, in theory.


The tone of this answer explains everything why people fled SO as soon as they possibly could.


What "tone"? Why is it unreasonable to say these sorts of things about Stack Overflow, or about any community? How is "your questions and answers need to meet our standards to be accepted" any different from "your pull requests need to meet our standards to be accepted"?


It's hard to explain, but immediately clear to enough people that it explains why so many people aren't sad to see SO fall on hard times.

I get that there have to be some rules, but it comes across like you derive some sort of satisfaction in enforcing rules. Successful sites with user moderation start out with a big population of people who will tolerate the rules in order to participate in the goal of the site, but eventually they end up dominated by people who feel that the very act of enforcing rules is an important contribution. All of the talk of "community" comes across as a thinly veiled version of Cartman's "Respect my authority" from South Park.


You can’t see that, and that’s the problem.

The obnoxious tone and the assumption to be on the right side.

I’m so happy StackOverflow is dying :)


Man, if this was irl, you'd be punched in the face or ostracized. That's a quick way to assess if your tone is right.

If you don't have a mental capacity to do that (nothing against you, some people are just born that way) — I pity you, but still, try to be 'helpful' over 'correct'. That's how civilization is built.

Wikipedia also have this problem, with moderators using some 'wiki-speak' jargon to 'win the comment battles'.


I actively hated interacting with the power users on SO, and I feel nothing about an LLM, so it's a definite improvement in QoL for me.


It was sad to read that the store has closed (though they still managed to do some seasonal events with the organ).


The Friends of the Wanamaker Organ society is doing work with the new owners towards preservation. I doubt it's going anywhere, but concerts will be sporadic for a while.


There's a couple of problems that were solved that way a while ago, and they have been formalized, but not in Lean:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_conjecture


It's not that obscure, even in the US. Anyone who takes French in US high school has probably read it in French (it's very easy to read), and even in English it's one of the most common classic children's books.


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