The ref is impartial and their only job is to manage the game according to law. If a team's fans are misbehaving to the point the game must be abandoned, it doesn't matter one iota to the ref if those fans are tanking on purpose. The league can deal with that.
That's placing a lot of faith in the maturity and tactical awareness of a teenager. I don't know about the games in Romania, but here in the US, the youth soccer referees are mostly older youths.
In the US, only the youngest games have teenage refs (U10 and younger). And even then, it is only common in the lower competitive tiers. Competitive travel/select league games generally have adult refs (national and regional leagues).
The money is pretty decent for two hours of work (and you can work games back to back to back).
Your comment implies the youth refs are the exception, but the VAST majority of play are at these lower competitive levels, and it is FAR more common to have youth or inexperienced refs than otherwise.
I’m saying that when you get to have games involving kids older than 10, that having teenage refs is more uncommon.
In my area, there are a number of leagues. Only one has a large number of teenagers in the ref pool and they only are center refs for the youngest players. For the more competitive leagues, you almost never have a ref crew made up of only teenagers. Here, young refs are generally protected by having older refs as part of the crew. There is a whole system behind referee scheduling that most people don’t know about.
(Also, this about soccer in the US, I have no idea how other sports schedule their officials)
When you say “teenage” refs I assume you are meaning kids 16or younger. A lot of adult-sized college-age teenagers ref games and you probably don’t realize it.
You’re right about the scheduling aspect. If you’re in a healthy area and the leagues are playing according to US Soccer rules (using the IFAB bible plus approved grassroots modifications), the scheduling system is good and makes sure to keep refs assigned to appropriate matches (pro-tip: they keep track of the worst teams for abuse and only schedule the most grizzled refs. If none are available, then “sorry no refs are available for your match”).
Also, I don’t know if it’s US-only thing or a worldwide FIFA thing, but for the past few years refs with less than 2 or 3 years of experience are supposed to be wearing a special armband that coaches are supposed to recognize - if the ref gets abuse from fans they tell the coaches and the coaches have to go deal with it. If it’s not dealt with, the match is abandoned.
I have a feeling gaming is quite harmful for spatial skills in the long run, because you learn many different maps (often transient ones in rng-ed games), rather than one fixed one. I would not be surprised if an epidemic of early mental decline begins to show in gamers in coming decades. I'm 36 now and feel like my spatial reasoning is declining in a strange severe way.
I wonder if it's actually anything to do with mentally mapping digital areas per se, or if it's more to do with the fact that you're not engaging your senses in the same way as when you're moving around a physical space.
If I go to a new place, say a gas station, there's a specific route I took to get there. There's smells and sounds and sights that will be specific to that time and place. I feel like that will generate a memory that's much grittier for the brain to hold on to, than one where I've digitally moved through a place. When I jump around a Quake map, I know where I'm going, but there's no wind in my face and I'm actually sat in a chair.
Sure there's sounds and sights in digital spaces, but they don't smell like anything and you're not actually touching anything but your mouse and keyboard. And the sights and sounds are less textured than real life - repeating assets, limited number of sounds etc. You're not gonna be surprised by a new birdcall, or a sudden burst of smell when the gas station guy opens the grill.
Knowing how important smell alone is to memory, I wonder if what's actually happening is that you're mentally engaged in a pretty narrow way when gaming, and that that's not really the best way for a brain to operate for long stretches of your life.
I think this is definitely part of the problem. The senses are designed to all be involved in navigating a single, mostly-permanent world. Proprioception is supposed to orient within this permanent space. Whereas my proprioception has "nothing to do" in video games, and all my senses are only experiencing the world outside the game, which I am giving none of my attention.
Subjectively, it gets much worse when I play a lot of of video games, and I am rapidly losing the ability to develop facility at new games. Of course this could just be said to be aging, or some other malady of the mind, but it feels distinctly related to the gaming in particular.
Psychological state is key, and I think you're understating it.
The human mind is always passively working on problems. We are not necessarily aware of how much working memory is "tied up" on background computations, but when it's a lot, we will feel a natural aversion to new learning, it will be exhausting, and we will lack for curiosity. This is fine, working as intended.
When in this state, what one usually needs to do is a different part of the learning process: not absorbing new information or abstractions, but making sense of what one already knows, working out contradictions, assembling larger-scale theories--synthesis, basically. "Learning" is only one part of the arc of "thinking".
Usually this is best done by writing, and usually comes easiest when trying to convince someone else or what we believe. If you can't find the energy to learn, try writing instead.
Kinetic energy is, strangely, quite a bit like a least squares cost function in an optimization problem. The "dt"s in "dx/dt" hardly matter; it basically represents "dx^2" between the current state and the next.
If I follow you, that's not strange. That's exactly how Lagrangian mechanics are formulated (minimizing the action which has exactly the kinetic energy as a term to be minimized against a potential energy term) which rests on well-founded symmetry principles.
Action is linked to spatial symmetry too, and you can find the square there.
Since space is isotropic, a Lagrangian can only depend on a speed vector through its norm. A Lagrangian must also be decomposable into independent orthogonal components, so you end up with an energy term that is shaped according to:
f(√(a^2 + b^2)) = f(a) + f(b)
And you end up with f being proportional to v squared.
Note: the components do not need to be independent and orthogonal for this to hold.
Well, you can repeat this argument and apply it to Galilean invariance. Start with a boost induced by changing inertial frame whose relative velocity is perpendicular to the original velocity vector and you end up with the same additive requirement above. Allow the relative velocity of the new frame to be in any direction and you get the same kind of affine relationship I alluded to when I mentioned non-orthogonal basis.
v -> v + u
without u ⟂ v
|v+u|^2 = |v|^2 + 2 v•u + |u|^2
K(v+u) = 1/2 m|v|^2 + m v•u + 1/2 m |u|^2
With the difference
K(v+u) - K(v) = m v•u + 1/2 m|u|^2
that is traditionally derived with a Lagrangian approach to the problem.
Note that it also holds for polar coordinates (radial vs tangential components), complex coordinates, rotation matrices (RᵀR = I => (Rv)ᵀ(Rv) = vᵀv), etc...
> it doesn't hold relativistically
I understand that you allude to Einstein's theory –and I agree–, however it seems you also point at reality as the ultimate arbitrator as to what energy is exactly – and that's why you referred to the most accurate theory we have. Not false either, but this oversteps the idea that we can only make sense of energy as a measurable conserved quantity through the apparatus of our theories, that, in order to give a complete account of reality, must be compositional with respect to how the phenomena but also the mathematical tools combine, can be decomposed and recombined into something else without losing that invariant in the process.
Under this view, energy is something that emerges (not the thing itself, its invariance) under some kind of description closure. From within our theories, energy is invariant not just because the physical reality is. They are invariant also because the different perspectives they can shed on a phenomenon form a closure within a conversion graph. You can convert from cartesian to polar and back to cartesian coordinates and you will find the exact same conserved quantity. or from one inertial frame to another. This closure is what constitutes the domain of a theory: a graph that describes how to convert one perspective into another in order to make sense of another conversion graph, telling us how to convert from one energy type to the next (kinetic energy to position as potential energy in classical mechanics). You can't have one without having the other.
Conservation of energy is also conservation of the means of description, since energy is a locally exhaustive account of reality. And these local pieces must be glued additively otherwise there are holes or redundancy in the resulting composition since the invariance we call energy is inseparable from the closure of the transformations under which the theory identifies it.
I know close to nothing about relativity, but from the principles I sketched, I expect that I can shift rotation into a relativistic context and use the same additivity argument as above, and that the relationship between the energy we have from Newtonian mechanics and the one we gain in this new setting will be additive too. And this is what we have:
Euclidean rotation becomes hyperbolic rotation
Euclidean norm becomes Minkowski norm
The energy-momentum invariant replaces kinetic energy taken in isolation
Newton reappears as a term in the expansion
And in the equations 1/2 mv² composes with the rest via addition:
How could it be any different? New energy and a new theory can only come as additive corrections to a previous account of energy if we want to conserve what it already explains. And under this new light any observed deviation from an old theory (for instance the precession of the perihelion of Mercury) naturally appears as an additive deviation from the original action functional (S_new = S_old + ΔS).
In fact, I think you can you can see the emergence of action, stationarity, and energy conservation just from a compositional bridge between two theories, T1 extending T0 with:
- two functors between the theories:
I: T0 -> T1
R: T1 -> T0
- that compose into an identity:
R ∘ I = Id_T0
Indeed, if T1 can offer another way to decompose a phenomenon h,
I(h) = b ∘ a
and we want to be able to recover T0 from the segments, not just globally once recomposed (i.e. there is no holes in our functorial bridge), then
R(b ∘ a) = R(b) ∘ R(a) must hold too
And the only way to translate this into a composition-preserving scalar account is via addition:
Z(b ∘ a) = Z(b) + Z(a).
Once this additive balance of composable conversions between T0 and T1 is made continuous (by the requirement that the bridge has no holes), you have action. Stationarity appears as the stability of internal gluing points ("∘" in R(b ∘ a) = R(b) ∘ R(a)), and energy follows from invariance with respect to temporal translation.
Energy as the Epistemic Invariant of Theoretical Extension. Mmmhh.
I read this kind of essay as a certain part of the arc by which new thoughts are formed: an act of large-scale pattern matching, laying out a bunch of cases which resemble each other, searching for the essential basis of the resemblance.
To post such a pattern allows the thought process to become distributed. Perhaps someone else will see the insight.
I suspect that, in reality, it is the indignity of poverty which motivates people to take up arms against each other. So long as dignity is retained, poverty may be emotionally bearable (perhaps to the point of actual starvation, when dignity becomes unsustainable).
That's pretty wise. I never considered that. During the very late part of the edo period China had the Taiping Rebellion, the deadliest religious civil war in human history by some meansures.
I've read that it was caused by a very complicated mix of things, one of which was resentment of the northern Manchu ethnic group which ruled China, combined with terrible floods and famine. Perhaps that's a case where lack of dignity helped cause war. People were starving, but in addition they felt disgruntled. I have a 1000 page book on that which I've been meaning to read for a year, so I'm sure I'll look back on this analysis and cringe when I finally get around to it.
Don't leave us hanging! Please mention the book's name and author so others like myself can mean to read it too.
I'm just half joking, I suffer from a large historical blindspot for that part of the world and I'm trying to collect a list of books to read over the next two years to address this perceived (by myself only) issue.
Its by Augustus F. Lindley and called Ti-ping tien-kwoh; the history of the Ti-ping revolution Volume I and II. And its actually 955 pages. Its an account written by one of the generals fighting for the rebels, who was also a British guy. Its part history part memoir. Kind of a weird book.
I suspect those other books people mentioned are probably better if you want a good understanding of the war that's not one sided and written in 1866. But its one of the very few contemporally written first-person works available.
These are not 1000 page books (but combined they can be):
- God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (more about the Taiping and their leader)
- Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (more about the west's actions)
I just saw this book on Amazon and haven't read so might be a good read to round out the history: Struggle for Empire: The Battles of General Zuo Zongtang (Qing statesman and army officer, General Tso's chicken was named after him!)
Overall, I would say good English material on this conflict is a bit thin. I would recommend reading more about the Qing dynasty, Opium wars, first Sino Japanese war, Boxer Rebellion, Xinhai Revolution. /r/askhistorians always have good books recommendation.
It makes sense. Otherwise people would never become monks in certain sects, because there’s an innate indignity to poverty but subsuming yourself to a higher purpose negates the indignity.
To hold this view you have to think of information as "not real", not like "real" molecules and receptors, the mind as distinct from the body, and then restrict the legal definition of harm to only "real" things.
This is an odd thing to do, because :
- information is real, it exists in the universe.
- the harm of social media is real, as measured by many of the same measures as the harm of smoking
Why not do something about ads? No, that's a good thought, we should do that too.
I think a decent conceptualization here is "psychic damage", as in a video game. These things deal a lot of it.
The other side of the view is "information is real and I don't like some of it ("it's harmful/addictive/blasphemous") so it must be controlled and regulated."
I don't think it's an odd thing to be opposed to that line of thinking.
People in here are casually linking social media to cigarettes, a product that kills half its users, and in previous iterations I've seen people compare social media to using heroin. It's completely hysterical.
I expect tabloid journalists and grandstanding politicians to do this, it really scares me when HN users that should know better do it.
Depression is real, I'm experiencing it right now reading these comments.
You know what, why don't you go buy a carton of cigarettes and some heroin, and go use that for a few months. Since it's the same thing as looking at a news feed you shouldn't have to worry about addiction because you've already done that and not gotten addicted to it, so you should be fine, right?
> Depression is real, I'm experiencing it right now reading these comments.
No, you aren't. You are trivializing what Depression actually is by making flippant comments like that. You're also letting everyone know that you are utterly ignorant to what Depression actually is.
You're mad at me for being flippant about depression while you're being flippant about social media, pot calling the kettle black. I'm not the one that started flattening every bad habit or unhealthy technology into "basically cigarettes and heroin".
If everything addictive is treated as morally and medically equivalent to hard opioid abuse or crippling nicotine addiction, then the language we use to talk about actual addiction stops meaning anything. There are people whose entire lives, bodies, families, and futures have been destroyed by heroin. Cigarettes killed my grandfather, I had to sit there and watch him die as a machine sucked black liquid out of his lungs.
Comparing that reality to doomscrolling on your couch cheapens the severity of one problem while oversimplifying the other. Internet overuse can certainly damage mental health. But pretending that checking TikTok is the same category of damage as opioid dependency is not awareness, it's insanity, and it's actively dangerous. It's also mostly happening because lawyers figured out this might be a way to sucker people into going around Section 230.
If people stop breathing the fumes of the vibes of this idea and start to process how any of this would actually work, they will eventually discover that they are proposing an internet police state where police with guns tell people what they can and can't do on internet forums. If you don't think that will slippery slope into something you don't want, please read more history. Government is fundamentally a dangerous monopoly on force and it needs to be treated with deep caution. People that want government regulated social media (remind me, who is the current US president?) so they can "own the Zuck" are playing an incredibly dangerous game, and I really hope they come to their senses soon, because the irreparable damage this idea will create will far outlive Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.
I agree with you, please don't read any of this. Not wanting a government controlling online content (with police with guns!) on a false pretense that "Instagram is cigarettes" is apparently a fringe opinion now and I wouldn't want to damage your brain and make you addicted to my terrible posts.
To everyone else reading this: go back to when you were a teenager, and ask yourself how cool you would be with your government saying you can't look at web sites and forums because they're "too addictive", or you can't listen to Nine Inch Nails because it's "for adults only", or Geocities has to be shut down or you need to be carded to use it because it has "adult content" (it had a lot of adult content, including a robust LGBT community when it was very much not safe to host that content). How would you have felt about that?
One of the best improvements to my life was adding the following to my LLM Prompt: "Please respond as Jeeves from the P.G. Wodehouse stories".
Not only are the LLMs quite excellent at emulating the valet, the actual dynamic fits fascinatingly well. Jeeves was always both perspicacious and enthusiastic about whatever task he was given - be it ironing a shirt or seeing to Bertie's continued wellbeing.
Archer has a whole load of obscure literary references that are easy to miss.
e.g. in the very first episode, the flight attendant's dog is named Abelard
> The name Abelard is a reference to Pierre Abélard, the French philosopher and monk, who is famous for his work in the fields of dialectic and theology, along with his tragic romance with Héloise d’Argenteuil. Additionally, Abélard was known for the studies of the Greeks, which is referenced when Abelard (the dog) "laughs" at Sterling's Greek joke.
The episode title itself is also a literary reference. I’m sure there are many cultural references that went over my head while watching the show; I really should watch it again.
It is absolutely wild and baffling to me that people don’t make connections like that, and so I wonder what kind of equally obvious (to other people) connections I haven’t made.
This is such a good pairing! Part of the fun of the stories is that its never clear whether Jeeves' suggestions are genuis, or overconfident but insane japes, I feel like this dynamic puts LLM hallucinations into a role where they're just part of the fun.
I’m building a private chatbot for myself so as not to be tripped every time Claude has an ”update”, andthis was one of the first things I implemented. With very strict system prompt of no sycophancy and calling me Sir, it works really well.
Has anyone tried Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me these silly questions." Could be fun.
I use Marvin from the Star Force space opera book series. He loves sensors and information, and adds a level of challenge to counters the llm obsession with answering in over happy terms. I had Claude write me a character bible that I can include in projects to keep it consistent.
I think about six months ago I commented on an AI thread to the effect of “I’m happy that after a 30 year effort and hundreds of billions spent, AskJeeves finally works as intended” - Jeeves is totally ripe for LLMing.
Completely baffling that after keeping ask.com going for this entire time (some two and a half decades of irrelevance) they shut it down at the point at which it can actually be made to work.
There was a period in the early 2000s where AskJeeves’ answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?” was an old Eliezer Yudkowsky essay saying that because we weren’t smart enough to work out the meaning of life ourselves, our highest purpose was to build smarter AIs who might be able to answer definitively. Time to close the loop!
I'm loving the Wodehouse references in this thread.
In case there are folks unaware of it, there is an excellent TV series called "Jeeves and Wooster" (Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie) -- highly recommended!
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