I can't read substack on my phone, so I can't see the article, but the correct statement that is closest to what you have written is just that d is any real number satisfying this inequality. We define a subset U of AxBxR by

U={(a,b,x):x>|a-b|^2}

and then were looking for the infimum of (the image of) U under the third coordinate function

d(a,b,x)=x

obviously the difference is between the artistic merit of MLP and discworld.

This is probably not a loose thread we should be pulling on the grand sweater that is the nature of art. ;)

That's ridiculous, this is a discussion abour taste. It will obviously depend on your taste.

That's pretty much what I'm saying.

There's a fun series of YouTube video essays called "The Whole Plate" that discusses film theory and critique through the lens of Michael Bay's "Transformers" movies. Pretty fascinating stuff, ranging from cinematography shop-talk (you can't remember what happened in a Bay movie because there are rules for holding audience attention and he breaks them on purpose to make you feel anxious) to critical lenses and how the same movie tells a different story depending on the preconceptions you bring in.

The author, Lindsay Ellis, uses Bay's work for a couple of reasons: she actually enjoys the films, they're pop-culture relevant so her target audience is likely to be familiar with them, they have been heavily criticized as having little artistic merit... and they grossed like $4 billion worldwide, so at some point the conversation of what art is becomes irrelevant if the guy doing it bought a mansion off the work.

(As you noted, any debate over the artistic merit of MLP and Discworld will reveal far more about the biases of the debaters than the works themselves, so what would be the point?)

they were sprinting covertly. Thats why this happened.

it seems to be a pretty safe place to be mossad.

It has also been a disaster in the US, to be fair.

I'm fairly certain it's a natural law carved into stone that the "Bigger" the Enterprise, the more their software is held together with duct tape, shoe string, and band-aides.

Even domestically - if you interface with a big Enterprise software vendor - you're in for a massively expensive bad time. The sweet spot seems to be smaller, not-yet enterprise tech companies that focus on doing one product very well.

This likely happens when internal politics completely replace whatever somehow objective quality metrics, and the sales force becomes persuasive beyond reason.

«The engineer wants to build a thing cheaply enough that it functions, and then cheaply as can be while maintaining function.

The MBA wants to build a thing as cheaply as can be while extracting maximum value from the process. Maintaining function is only relevant inasmuch as is necessary for marketing. Enshittification is offensive to the engineer, and is a deliberate calculated tactic for the MBA.»

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367281)

Additionally, it seems the big enterprise vendors will cook up any solution to whatever problem (perceived or real) a customer says they have - no matter how out-of-domain it might be for the expertise of the enterprise vendor.

We can observe this with the old-school enterprise juggernauts such as IBM. "What does IBM actually do?" is a hell of a great question today - and the answer pretty much is "whatever you pay them to do".

We also see this with our own domestic governments - where every single problem looks like a Microsoft solution - and the sales people rejoice.

I would argue metrics, even objective quality metrics still lead to enterprise software. Hanlon's razor never fails.

Just because your software ain't throwing exceptions, doesn't mean they don't wish death on 3 generations of the developers family.

And real users, that are actually productive in their employ, aren't the ones taking surveys

I have a rule of thumb that the more a piece of software costs, the crappier it will be.

the average human is good at something, and sucks at almost everything. Human performance at chess and average performance at chess differ by 7 orders of magnitude.

Your standard model of human needs a little bit of fine tuning for most games.

Maybe DFW wasn't as smart as he thought he was.

honestly refreshing take.

you cannot prove the consistency of a system of proof within that system, ie at all.

There are systems that we can proof the consistency of just fine. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presburger_arithmetic

Presburger Arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency inside of itself, but that doesn't mean we can't prove its consistency 'at all'.

What on earth do you mean by prove, If not within a system of proof?

You can prove the consistency of PBA, But you cannot prove that you cannot prove the inconsistency of PBA, because The inability to do both is the definition of consistency in the larger system.

But it's not really relevant for anything to be able to prove that you cannot prove the inconsistency.

But proving inconsistency can be done - show that a contradiction follows from the axioms.

the maypole group is indeed a subgroup of a braid group. juat add the pole itself as the rightmost strand.

Ah ! Of course.