I don’t understand Rice’s Theorem and it’s killing me.

Lord there is indeed some big confusion here. It’s amazing that people like this can do math that I could never do but can’t understand things that seem fairly simple to me, like Rice’s Theorem.

Rice’s Theorem doesn’t have much to do with the real world as this person is imagining it. It’s only about how languages and such work in some idealized world. How it does relate to the real world is that it’s all about why there is no general algorithm (decision procedure) that can look at a computer program and for anything non-trivial determine what it’s going to do. To determine that, you have to run the damn program. That’s in a nutshell all that Rice’s Theorem means.

Anything that happens in finite time is decidable, by the way. Whether a program halts after 10 steps or 4,000 steps is the same is if you have pizza or a hamburger for lunch tomorrow. This is what I mean by Rice’s Theorem doesn’t have much to do with our reality. You are running the program, so you are “deciding” all the time!

Where RT relates to the halting problem is that like that problem, it just means that there isn’t any method to evaluate all programs in advance to see if they halt or just run infinitely. Here’s an infinite loop in Python:

i=0
while i<=10:
     print("I will run forever")

Nothing about that violates the laws of physics but it'll go till the computer breaks or till the universe ends -- whichever comes first. But (assuming this were actually more complex example), you don't know that until you run the program -- and it halts. Or does not, as is the case with this one.

In the real world of programming, Rice's Theorem actually deals with more complex features, but the above is a good-enough that is not brain-breaking.

Rice's Theorem is often interpreted by people to mean: we can't determine anything about programs. Which is wrong. Run them, and you have determined. QED.

I understand how people get into the, “I’m not really rich” mindset. The other day I was thinking, I could buy a plane now if I really wanted one. (Spoiler alert: I don’t. Not really)

But then I thought, But I couldn’t buy a jet. And that’s exactly how rich people come to think they are not really rich, right there.

Le dialecte du français parlé au Maroc sonne plutôt bien.

Thinking about this post and the fact that many Americans take the absurd decrepitude and early senescence of the people around them as some sort of given, of the way it just has to be. In reality, though, it’s a consequence of living in an obesogenic and extremely unhealthy environment and doing nothing to counteract this.

No, your body doesn’t just magically decay at some enormously advanced rate when you hit 40. Bones don’t just start breaking and cognitive decline doesn’t begin accelerating at some frantic pace, either. Not as some natural and ineluctable fact, that is. Neoliberal propaganda and those behind it want you to believe this hooey of course, because it’ll keep you mindlessly consuming. But it definitely is not just how it must be.

The Fat Acceptance movement is really a brilliant psyop. It leads people to hate themselves while pretending to be happy, causing them to consume more, thus they despise themselves yet more as their health and physical appearance decays further, thus causing more consumption, including of medical services, in an endless cycle of capitalist-friendly self-hatred, all while they loathe those who manage to escape all this.

The “inevitable sharp decline” narrative is a false one that allows the cycle above to continue. Anyone who supports it is just a propaganda mouthpiece.

Since the decline of religion in the West, I wonder how many people who hate fun and the idea of anyone having a good time migrated from the religious right to the left? Just thinking about how much fun-hating and prudishness there is now among “liberals,” and realizing that as religion became less of a home for the fun-haters they must’ve migrated somewhere.

Don’t know how much of the liberal turn to illiberalism and such that explains, but probably some of it. The fun-haters are going to go where their weird obsessions are the most productive, after all.

Strangely, there are many people who are just completely incensed by anyone having a good time, and the liberal side used to just mock those types mercilessly. Now they are those types.