timorl @timorl@social.cleverlibre.org

@freemo

The jars with papers inside represent a permutation, every piece of paper points to the next jar in the permutation, say we number the jars from left to right. As all permutation, this one can be represented as a collection of cycles. Two key insights about these cycles:
1. Every cycle containing the jar numbered $k$ neccessarily contains the piece of paper with $k$ written on it, otherwise it wouldn't be a cycle.
2. At most one cycle has length greater than $50$.
With these insights the solution is simple. Your assistant looks at the whole permutation, and if any of the cycles has length greater than $50$ they switch the pieces of paper to break the cycle in half. They do nothing if there are no big cycles. Now you get told the number you are looking for and go for the jar numbered with it. Afterwards just trust the pieces of paper to lead you to the correct jar.

Thanks for this puzzle, solving it gave me a very needed confidence boost. *smugness incoming* Especially since I didn't even need to use paper.

@freemo With pleasure, although my response times withing the next couple of days might vary wildly. It should get better around Monday.

Aleph released the proof-of-concept implementation: https://gitlab.com/alephledger/proof-of-concept ! I helped writing it, so this is a bit of a brag.

Transaction validation time was ~6s with 256 machines all around the world, so pretty nice. Since then, we have been working on a proper implementation in Go (this one I am even more involved in), but it'll take a while before it's published.

#cryptocurrency #alephzero

@freemo what is your reasoning behind setting up a discourse instance? I thought these work best when focused on a specific topic, and I cannot see what this topic would be in QOTO's case.

@angelobottone @SecondJon I don't quite see how the child is worse off in this situation compared to a child that is part of its genetic family?

@angelobottone @SecondJon Actually this post answered my question! I did not see how one can have an intuition that what Annemarie is doing is more problematic, but if you frame this situation as "baby selling" then it makes some sense. It's much harder to say that either Anne or Marie are selling the baby, but you can conceivably say this about Annemarie.

But I also feel this shows that the framing itself is forced. I think of this kind of surrogacy rather as selling ones bodytime (mostly), and this framing works for all three of the women.

Obviously neither of the framings is a proper moral argument in itself, they are just attempts to get some intuition about the issue.

@angelobottone Heh, I guess if it's about religion in America, then the contents make perfect sense. I got only 14, I confused Mecca and Medina. ^^*

@angelobottone That one quite heavily focuses on christianity, if there was at least one question as specific as the transsubstantiaton one about a non-christian religion I would have done much worse.

@angelobottone I don't quite see why this would be problematic. Even though the phrasing sounds bad to me, after thinking about it I cannot see what the problem with the situation itself is.

But this is irrelevant to my original (perhaps imperfectly phrased) question. What is the difference in what Annemarie is doing as opposed to what Anne and Marie are doing, that makes it so much different? I cannot think of anything that could be considered problematic in the Annemarie case that wouldn't be equally problematic in either the Anne or the Marie case, usually both. I think the "commodifying" issue is applicable just as much to all of them.

@SecondJon I have similar problems with your answer, it still doesn't differentiate the Anne&Marie from the Annemarie situation (and, once again, this might be the fault of my phrasing of the original question).

I do agree that adoption is a better solution than surrogacy to the problem of a couple wanting children, but @angelobottone seemed to imply that it is bad in general, in a vacuum, even when adoption is not an option.

I should probably point out that I see some problemes with surrogacy, but none of them make the act itself bad. They mostly make it harder to exacute in a way that does not hurt anyone. The problems I see are mostly related to emotional bonding that happens due to pregnancy and birth for most (I think?) women.

@angelobottone I completely cannot see why what Annemarie is doing could be considered problematic, could you give me an intuition as to why you feel that way? You seem to be stating it as self evident, which makes the assertion all the more confusing to me.

My new paper "Detecting Spiky Corruption in Markov Decision Processes" is now on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.00452 . It has also been accepted for AISafety 2019. It was a pleasure to write, especially with such a great group of colleagues! #ai #aisafety #ml

@freemo That's why I prefer "treat people how they want to be treated". As a bonus this aligns really well with utilitarianism.

Got a pair of socks at #gogoconf, finally conference organizers noticed we don't only wear shirts. Hoping for shorts next.