While some problems are actually solvable with just pencil and paper, this is not a requirement and the intention of the project is that problems will be solved with a combination of insight and coding.
From the Project Euler website:
"Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."
The game is a bit weird. It often offers very bad deals, without an option not to invest. For example for the Gibraltar strait, the game gives the information that the probablity of success is between 90% and 100% and that it’s been traversed 31 times with a 90 % success rate. Then it offers me the choice between an investment of different sizes, where I cannot win back more than my investment, so I have to risk money for no possible gain (invest 167 ducats in shipment worth 167 ducats).
Author here. Huh, you're right. 13 turns into the first scenario I opened[1] I get offered very weird deals, such as investing my full 184 ducats in a shipment worth only 182 ducats. Or! Investing 1878 ducats when I only own 184...
I wrote this game a few years ago, and it didn't use to have this bug. I can't take the time to figure it out now, but clearly something went wrong along the way!
I think the size of the crowd matters here. Streaming feels more personal because you are doing it by yourself and the total number of people watching the same stream is probably quite small. You could even message them and they might respond. It's more personal than watching a movie or TV show. On a slightly grosser level you know deep down that there is zero chance of ever hooking up with Megan Fox, but with a random OF model that feels like it might be possible. Even if it really isn't.
An interesting comparison is K-Pop singers who are at the same time megastars with millions of devoted followers, but also carefully managed to always seem available for a relationship. A truly difficult bridge to cross, but they somehow do it and make bank.
You can like Ryan Gosling and catch every movie he's in. But if you're buying a tabloid so you can see photos of him getting coffee at Starbucks, that's parasocial.
It is also parasocial if you just like Ryan Gosling and watch all his movies. You still have one-way feelings for a personality. It is just that it is not pathological.
Parasocial relationships are not bad per se. Let's say you are thinking about Donald Knuth when working on a computer science problem, nothing bad here, taking inspiration from the leaders in the field. But it is also a parasocial relationship, it is like imagining Don Knuth next to you, helping you solve your problem, even though he has absolutely no idea about who you are. It is a one way connection, but here, it is actually productive.
There’s no neat boundaries - read a Ryan gosling autobiography. How about an autobiography of Einstein. Or a biography? What about watching a film of a historical figure? Do I have a parasocial relationship with Anne Boleyn because I saw Six?
If you’re ignoring the “believe you have a two way relationship” then everything could be defined as parasocial.
Most people who form parasocial relationships don't actually believe it to be two-way.
It feels like it is two-way, in other words, it is an illusion, but just like with optical illusions, you don't have to believe them. For example, mirages may look a lot like water, but people who are familiar with them know it is just a trick of their senses and don't assume there is water there. Same thing for parasocial relationships, even the most intense. Proof is, parasocial relationships with fictional characters is common, and most people who feel a bound with Harry Potter are not crazy enough to believe the feelings are shared, as they are aware that Harry Potter doesn't actually exist.
And yes, I believe that parasocial relationships are extremely common and in most case, positive or at least harmless. I don't believe reading biographies is always parasocial though, it could just be the search for academic knowledge, without any feeling of connection, but done repeatedly, in can become one, which is again, not necessarily a bad thing.
You can absolutely have a parasocial relationship with Anne Boleyn, and I suspect most people who study her in depth do, as picturing oneself with her can help better understand her life and its historical context. It is essentially a mind hack, instead of just using logic, you also use emotions.
I wouldn’t say that movies per se are parasocial, but if you behave and feel like you have a relationship with somebody in a movie, then it’s probably parasocial.
To a degree it’s also quite normal to have parasocial reactions to personaes from media, it only becomes problematic once people substitute actual social relationships with extreme parasocial relationships.
I've never subscribed to any only fans so my only exposure is checking out twitch. I assume there's a difference in that movies don't act like they're talking to you as an individual person. Also, parasocial is a fairly newly emerging term and I don't think we can clearly define everything that facilitates it, but we can easily identify some of the outcomes
On the assumption that there is a relationship (believed to be) involved: yeah, I would say so. Streamers (often) have a chat, actual interaction is possible in a way movies do not allow.
The closest equivalent you would get with a movie is to send fan-mail and get a response. Which people do, but I think it's safe to claim the frequency is much lower.
Characters in a movie only last during the viewing. When following a Twitch streamer, you keep following this person or character over many months or years (since many of them are playing character).
If you feel a strong connection to a character and they barely know anything about you (or barely feel anything towards you), that's not truly social.
>So like, movies are more para social because they have less interaction?
More live TV/streaming series than movies, IMHO.
How many times have you heard someone say they just finished watching $SERIES and will miss their TV friends?
And with OnlyFans (I'm guessing here, as I don't use the platform), at least the sexual stuff there (is there other stuff?) it's like going to a strip club, except it's all recorded (and sometimes? mostly? more explicit) and instead of dollar bills in the garters, it's tips/subscriptions.
As far as I know, it is possible to have the entry "ohne festen Wohnsitz"(without a permanent residence) instead of a mailing address in a German passport and he's legally not allowed to use his parents address, if he's not there for at least 183 days a year.
But I don't really understand how this small legal detail would change the whole character of his life experience, in any case. No matter what is written in his passport, he spends the whole year in a train.
Because there are real nomads, people without any address that run into all sorts of legal difficulties, difficulties that are belittled when people write about how easy it is to live on a train 24/7. Some are "homeless" others are from cultural groups that roam. And a large number are children in government care who then must transition to adult life sometimes without the convenience of a fixed mailing address. Our systems of government and assistance are still based on legal residency at a particular point on the map. Despite all the stories about mobile professionals working wherever the please, this is a privilege enjoyed by those who retain fixed support infrastructures to which can return as needed.
Look at the "Van life" trend. The people are forced to live in their cars/vans really do not appreciate those who glamorize it. It is not an easy thing.
Anyone with two brain cells can tell the difference between a homeless person and an adventurer. Pretty much anything people do to challenge themselves sucks for someone who's stuck doing it without a choice.
Are there, in Europe? I'd love to hear more about that if you know of something. I'm living in a van (by choice) and I have had issues with getting a mailing address. Currently registered at a friends place, but won't last forever. The post forwarding service is also not reliable and does not forward all mail anyway.
I found Clevver, which appears to have a few dozen locations available in Europe. Possibly based in Germany. It looks similar to EarthClassMail in the US. https://www.clevver.io/clevvermail-pricing/
Cool, I never found anything like this when I searched. I wonder how they get around the legal issues of it.
With the upgrade to "Registered Address" it costs a whopping 79.95€/month though, so it is not really a really an option for me. But good to know that it exists.
I just wanted to say, I stumbled upon your website a few years ago through the Tromp-Taylor rules of Go and found the things you do impressive and inspiring. It’s a nice surprise to see you commenting here.
I’m not talking about the AfD here, but trying to quickly answer the question how banning political parties can seen as justified in principle:
Banning a political party is an important instrument in a wider philosophy known in Germany as “wehrhafte Demokratie” (defensive democracy). This philosophy states that democratic states should have legal tools with which they can defend themselves against people, who want to attack the democratic order itself.
Wehrhafte Demokratie is a very well established and accepted concept, here, partially because of a wish to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Weimarer Republik. It’s also justified by the belief that democracy is not just a dictatorship of the majority, but that even a majority of voters is limited in what they can do and that democracy also includes for example the protection of minorities.
> biased actors who should already be constrained by the rule of law
Banning a political party works by the rules of law.
The legal barriers for banning a political party are quite high in Germany. Basically for a ban it must be proven that the party as a whole, not just single member, have the goal to attack key elements of the democratic order itself and that there is a real danger that they could succeed.
The last condition can also be a legal reason to only ban a party once it actually gets popular: As long as it is unpopular, judges don’t see the condition fulfilled, that the party presents a real danger, so they won’t ban the party. This happened with Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), which was ruled to be verfassungsfeindlich (an enemy of the constitution), but not banned because it was so ineffective und unpopular.
This is fascinating, and seems to be a very wrong strategy, if the goal is to defend democracy. The law should indicate that if there is evidence a party wants to dismantle democracy, action should be taken to dissolve and ban the party as soon as possible. A law stating that courts should be waiting for such party to grow and get support is dumb and dangerous, from the pro-democratic viewpoint.
That sounds more like the BahnCard 100, which costs 4.339 Euro per year. The Deutschlandticket is only valid for slow, regional trains, not faster long distance trains.
In the UK, a LNER season ticket (unlimited journeys) on just one route (York to London, 2 hours) on the “fast” trains (200km/h) costs nearly 20,000 Euro per year.
is the Bahncard 100 popular?
Asking because it seemed to me recently every 2nd passenger (#samplesize) pulled out their Klimaticket for the ticket checks.
I'd expect the 4k option for all of germany to be less popular (in % of ticket holders/population) due to pure odds (aka chances are high an average person won't regularly need to journey from hamburg to munich, but they might regularly journey somewhere inside their Bundesland. so it's less likely it's "worth it" for people?
Very few people own a Bahncard 100. It's only useful if you need it for your job/business, otherwise it probably won't pay for itself. Most people prefer the car or plane (if you frequent between big cities) anyway
I am a BC100 owner. Work pays for it in lieu of a company car, so I only have to pay taxes on it, which comes out to about 160 euros per month. Like you say, I'm in the "it doesn't pay for itself" camp, but like the thread starter says,
> It's a great peace of mind to just hop onto any bus/tram/train in the country and not have to worry about tickets
It's like with theme parks: I prefer paying one big sum at the start and then getting to enjoy myself for the whole day over being nickle-and-dimed at every ride.
I don't do it very often, but I've more than once visited other cities in the area on a whim because the marginal cost is zero. That specialty shop in another city 400 kilometers away? Suddenly within reach, if the only cost to get there is time. And being on a train instead of driving a car means I can work while getting there and back.
And then there's the other perks of the BC100 that make travelling generally more chilled: Large stations have frequent-travelers' lounges with free drinks and working spaces. On long-distance trains, there's a section of the train (usually a quarter of a railcar) that's reserved for frequent travellers and BC100 owners, so I don't have to worry about seat reservations even when the trains are crowded. The purchase price for a 2nd-class BC100 also gives enough bonus points for 8-9 free upgrades to First Class per year; I use those when I know I'll be going for a particularly long distance.
Internet connectivity is surprisingly poor on German trains. In 1st class, between Basel and Hanover, most of the time my phone (with Swisscom SIM) got better connectivity than the onboard wifi. Considering that this route connects Zurich and Frankfurt, you'd think there would be a smidgen more investment in bandwidth.
If there's one thing Germany is uniquely terrible at, it's internet connectivity. Absolutely mindblowingly bad, speaking as someone who grew up with Telkom monopoly in South Africa in the 90s.
100% agree. I was in Frankfurt last week for the first time in many years (I live in Asia now). Roamed in Germany's largest and most expensive cell phone network, Deutsche Telekom T-Mobile.
In the city centre near Goetheplatz I had... drumm roll. EDGE. 2.5G
In July 2023.
This is the home of DE-CIX, the European continents largest internet exchange.
The wifi on the trains comes from the cellular network, too. If you experienced cell phone working better than the on board wifi, that was almost certainly some other issue, the performances are very correlated. The problem is not so much with the trains, it's just that cellphone coverage is just terrible in Germany generally, especially compared to Switzerland.
There is also bahncard 25 and 50. It basically means how much of a percentage you get off the ticket price. Bahncard 50 first class is quite good if you travel a few times a month. Soon pays off and first class is usually not bad..
I went to uni in Cologne and a lot of banker types who would daily commute from Cologne to Frankfurt always had one. Very popular with business people doing these mid-range round trips. For regular travelers too expensive though.
The thing that made me transition from a mindset of “I have a body” to “I am a body”, was actually Zen meditation. This was surprising to me. Before I tried it, I thought of meditation as a purely mental thing, I didn’t expect that the first really noticeable effect of regular meditation would be a changed relationship to my body,
Much later I discovered contemporary dance, quit my phd in machine learning and became a professional dancer, which really deepened my body awareness and transformed my relationship to being a body even more.
I remember, in the beginning of my dance career, after a three month dance intensive I applied to a (Haskell) programming job again to finance my dance education and went to a computer science conference. It was a bit of surreal experience. The people at the conference were very nice and intellectually curious people and I liked them, but the contrast to the environment in dance communities was very strong. I felt like almost everybody there thought of them-self as a brain, piloting a body like a big mecha. In the dance environments, even during lunch breaks etc., it always felt like there was a lot of subtle awareness in everybody about their own body, the other bodies in the space, the distances and empty space between bodies, a non-verbal channel full of quiet energy and information. In the computer science conference this channel was just dead.
"The thing that made me transition from a mindset of “I have a body” to “I am a body”, was actually Zen meditation."
Checks username... yeah that checks out. ;)
Something that struck me years ago was in the documentary about Philip Glass - Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. He did a weekly physical class that is meant to tie mind and body together (I forgot the name, I watched this like 15 years ago). As he said he did it for like 5 years and felt like he got nothing out of it but did it regardless, until one day it just all synced up and he 'got it'.
A similar thing happen with me over the years, the more I got out and moving, the less I found myself involved in the realms of high intellect. Not in an 'ignorance is bliss' kind of way, but not identifying with it as much. It went from "why dance, lift, walk etc - it achieves nothing" to, that is it. It is the flow of the world. It doesn't achieve anything because it doesn't have to, it is a happening, like all life and the universe itself is but an happening. I have had a very similar experience to you with these conferences, it just feels kind of dead in a way, or more you can sense the lack of potential.
That disconnect between the bring and the body is something I have seen many times with those that partake in Buddhism and its many flavors. It was Ajahn Brahm said when he was in university and beginning his path, that one day he was talking with other students and professors and suddenly realized that he did not want to be like these people and that the same path as them, to be a brain and nothing more. He is now a Theravada Buddhist in Western Australia.
I'm not sure what sort of yoga you practice, but if it is more based in Hinduism then this would be one of the major differences between it and Buddhism. [1] In all schools of Buddhism there is the teaching of anatman, that there is no self or soul. [2] So the attitude around 'I' is a bit different, mainly that there is no permanent 'I' to identify with. Still, you're right in that 'I am a body' isn't quite right either.
From a non-spiritual, non-religious perspective, as an atheist I don't believe that souls exist, I don't subscribe to any religious teachings and I don't do any kind of meditative or spiritual stuff.
That said, weight training completely transformed my relationship with my body. You can only lug a big hunk of iron into the air so many times before you start thinking about how much we really have in common with a gorilla. Yeah we grew opposable thumbs and a much more active prefrontal cortex, but 96% of our DNA is the same as theirs after all. By the pound we're mostly monkeys or something like them and it's a bit conceited to imagine otherwise.
If you're a knowledge worker who sits in a chair and thinks all day it's easy to believe you're nothing like a monkey, but strenuous exercise dispels that notion because it recruits all of your body's monkey systems and makes all of the parts of you work together. In retrospect it shouldn't be surprising at all that letting most of your anatomy wither away is unhealthy and puts you out of balance. It's like getting your car serviced but telling the shop that you only want them to look at the electronics.
> I don't subscribe to any religious teachings and I don't do any kind of meditative or spiritual stuff.
It sounds like you're conflating meditation-the-exercise with spiritual and religious approaches.
Fundamentally they are unrelated. Taking it to the extreme one can consider the mind to be a process produced by the brain+, no soul involved. Taken that way, meditation is no different than weight lifting. The same way a muscle+ specialises itself depending on training (endurance vs strength vs explosive vs volume) the brain (and thus the mind) also specialises in whatever it gets most exposed to. The same way one can lay out a physical workout plan for a specific desired outcome (including rest), one can lay out a mental workout plan for a specific desired outcome (including rest). The latter is meditation.
Meditation may exist in religious contexts, e.g Buddhist or Zen, but even then many forms are in practice detached from any religious belief, with no koan or mantra. e.g Ānāpānasati (sit, and simply watch the breath) and Sōtō shikantaza (meditation with no objects, anchors, or content, striving to be aware of the stream of thoughts, allowing them to arise and pass away without interference). These are fantastic tools to unlearn bad (sometimes traumatic) mental habits, just like one learns to have smooth but effective muscle action instead of being tense and twitchy and forcing it through.
+ I'm using "brain" as a shortcut for a system that is vastly more complex, just as I use "muscle" for a system that is equally as complex.
This is a completely off-topic tangent, but as a fellow non-religious person I'm sorry: Being non-religious and being an atheist are mutually exclusive positions.
Being non-religious means you are apathetic to religion thereof. God(s)? Souls? Afterlife? Commandments? Nope, you don't care about anything concerning religion one way or another.
Being atheist means you believe in no god, no souls, no afterlife, no commandments, and so on. This is, ironically, a form of religion. You care about believing in no religion.
This distinction between non-religious and atheist is new to me and sounds like an Americanism. Over here in Europe if you don't believe in a god you're an atheist, simple as that.
Some people are agnostic, meaning they are religious but don't subscribe to a particular god or doctrine. However no one makes the distinction between atheism and non-religious that you're making here. It may have something to do with the fact that society in the US is so pervasively religious that the only way to escape it is to explicitly identify yourself as an atheist.
You're confusing agnostic with what is usually termed spiritual in the UK. People who are spiritual sort of "pick and choose" whatever they fancy, or just feel there's some greater being but don't think any religion gets it right. Sometimes it's monotheistic, sometimes polytheistic.
Agnostic means you believe it's impossible to know whether god exists or not.
I do agree with what you're trying to describe, that many people in some European countries just don't care one iota about religion. I don't think Americans can really understand that without living in a secular society. It's such a non-thing in our lives that, non-religious, agnosticism and atheism, etc. all tend to get mixed into one.
Society has become so secular that those technical definitions have become essentially meaningless. God doesn't exist/I've given it no thought/I don't know if a God exists/I don't acknowledge the existence of supernatural entities all are essentially the same position because it takes up so little of our time or brain power and has so little consequences on our lives.
I stress "some" countries as some European countries, or just small parts of those countries, are still fairly religious.
Uh no, not in 'Europe'. Where I am in Europe, 'atheism' is being convinced there is no god. Agnosticism is not knowing whether there is a god at all. Not that you're religious but not to a particular god or doctrine like you claim - I've never heard of that concept before, how can you be religious but not knowing what it is you believe in? I'm not much in the know on the exact nomenclature, but your definition of 'agnosticism' is not in any way supported by the way Wikipedia describes it, and the way I've always understood agnosticism is what is called 'apathetic agnosticism' on Wikipedia - and that is, from my perspective, the predominant understanding of it in 'Europe'.
I'm Japanese(-American) and thus have that perspective on it, more Japan than America.
Being non-religious means you simply aren't concerned. Are there gods? Great. Are there no gods? Awesome. Jesus is the one God? Okay. Zeus leads his pantheon of gods? Nice.
Atheism meanwhile is a deliberate belief in no religion. It's different from simply not caring about religion at all, because you do care about religion insofar as to not believe in it.
Implicit atheism is still concerned with not believing in religion.
The way I see atheism is that a belief in no religion is, by its nature, a religion. Joe is a christian and believes in Jesus, Bob is an atheist and believes no god; both are merely two sides of the same coin. You can't call yourself non-religious if you believe in a religion, whatever the specific form.
Being non-religious means you don't care; it's not that you don't believe, you simply could not care less one way or another. Wikipedia appears to call it apatheism[1] and more broadly irreligion[2], but semantics aren't the focal issue here.
While the phenomenon you describe is certainly real, I think that you may also have been misperceiving part of it: Having a deep belief/understanding that your self is your whole body does not require having a highly-trained body or a strong kinesthetic sense. There could have been many people at that conference who shared your belief, but had not taken the years of physical training to make that externally apparent.
That sounds like a fascinating journey that I'd love to read; have you written anything about it? I'm a born-and-raised software engineer (read: meat mecha mindset), but I recently became interested in dance when I moved to Brazil as many people there have this unconscious connection with dance and their body that I envy. In my case, I'm dimly aware of that non-verbal channel you mentioned, but I struggle to comminicate on it and - if I'm being honest - doing so makes me feel vulnerable and awkward.
A great thing is when you can mobilize your vulnerability and akwardness to some degree. What’s important if you may decide to say something like dance is to find a community and teachers who are supportive and in a way able to vulnerable as well. So choose “wisely” in that regard.
I did a lot of teaching of yoga and my primary responsibility was giving people space to be that.
It was tai chi for me, but I started that after Buddhism and zen. I could never get comfortable. Not as in 3 out of 10 pain scale, but 7.5-8.5 out of 10. Having people tell you to ignore the pain is unhelpful when they imaging paper cut and you’re feeling knife wound.
Tai chi has a warmup that’s an easy shift into standing meditation.
I don't feel I can achieve this in my flat therefore instead of switching my whole career as you did, I'm trying to move to a big peace of land we're I can be / have to be more active.
I do think so that IT is growing more in a less super nerdy (I don't move) area.
Plenty of my friends got more active over the years
My 3 sports are mountain biking, climbing, and snowboarding. I always describe them as managing panic under fatigue and high cognitive load. I need the focus and problem solving, it tickles some part of my brain in a good way.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
From the Project Euler website:
"Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."