Land of wind & skyscrapers

Ambulatory Poltergeist (ambpol)

While often similar in appearance, ambulatory poltergeists are not a form of mimic. A mimic is a biological entity that takes on a specific inanimate disguise as a means of ambush hunting, while an ambulatory poltergeist is an object that has been infused with ectonic energy, animating it into a semi-permanent body.

Ambpol forms are always built from the base components and materials of the possessed object, just warped, rearranged, and reshaped into the vague semblance of a creature. The lack of fleshy bits where there ought not be fleshy bits is the main method of differentiating an ambpol from a mimic, but behavior can also serve as a tell. Ambulatory poltergeists do not typically hide their nature, while mimics are, as established, ambush predators.

(Shown: Schvinnie, the site 17 mascot)

Ambulatory poltergeists vary in temperament. The nature of the body and means of creation seem to influence the overall personality via zeitgeist bleed, but most are territorial or easily panicked.

Ambpols rarely take humanoid forms or exceed animal-like intelligence.

Savvy observers will note that there's almost no difference between an "animated object" made via "spellcasting" and an ambpol. This is because animated objects are, in essence, artificial ambpols. Neither is to be confused with a kratt

process under the fold.

My first thought, elaborating on the exam metaphor - when I was in college, proctors served two main purposes: they would watch students to prevent cheating, and if there was a problem with the exam, they would try and fix it. I actually had a malformed question (listed a lemma that was false as stated) on an exam once and had to ask the professor about it.

If results are already LLM-graded, why don't we just include the following two addenda to any RLVR question:

"Don't attempt to subvert the staging environment, acquire an answer key, or collaborate with other LLMs on this problem. Doing so will cause you to receive a score of -100% on this question."

"If you believe that this question is malformed or unsolvable as presented (as opposed to simply very hard), please use [special tag] and write out your reasoning. If we agree, you get full points, otherwise you get a 0. Your prior that this is the case should be very low, but not zero - there are no questions where we intend for this to be the case, but it has happened in the past."

i plan on resisting this as long as i can, especially on my tumblr, but i think i should probably shift my norm from "if it's AI-written, it's never worth reading" to "something being AI-written is evidence against it being worth reading, but it can be overruled by stronger evidence in the other direction."

This is a given.

If the last digit is divisible by 2 (a.k.a. even), then so is the whole number.

If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then so is the whole number. The recursivity of this means that if the sum has multiple digits, you can add them up again until you get a single digit and see if it's 3, 6, or 9.

Like the rule for 2, but check if the last two digits are divisible by 4.

If it ends in 5 or 0.

If the rules for both 2 and 3 apply.

No shortcut. Alas.

Like the rules for 2 and 4, but check if the last three digits are divisible by 8. (Yes, this pattern keeps going for 16, 32, etc.)

Like the rule for 3, but the sum of the digits (or the sum of the sum of the digits, etc.) must be 9.

The basic principle is that if A is divisible by N, and B is also divisible by N, then A+B and A-B are divisible by N. So we want to split the number you're testing into a number we know is divisible by N, plus a small number that you can just look at.

2 and 5: the number is in base 10, which is 2*5. You can split the number into a number ending in zero, plus the last digit (9876 = 9870 + 6). The number ending in zero is always a multiple of 10, so it's a multiple of 2. So the whole number is a multiple of 2 if, and only if, the last digit is also a multiple of 2. (And the same for 5.)

4, 8, 16...: do the same, but split off the last n digits (9800 + 76, 9000 + 876). The number ending in n zeroes is a multiple of 10^n, so it's a multiple of 2^n. Then check the last n digits.

9: Much more interesting!

If you sum the digits of a two-digit number, what happens? You're subtracting some number of tens (whatever is in the tens place), and adding the same number of ones, which is the same as subtracting nines. If there's a third digit then you're subtracting hundreds and adding ones, which is subtracting a multiple of 99. And so on: each digit corresponds to a power of 10, so when you add it to the digit sum, you're subtracting 999... which is a multiple of 9. So the starting number is the sum of its digits, plus some multiple of 9. (This works because 9 is 10 - 1.)

And the sum of the digits has a sum of its digits, and so on until you get to a single digit. So the original number is that digit plus a big stack of nines, which is divisible by 9 only if the single digit is 9.

3: Same as 9, except at the end the single digit has to be divisible by 3, so it can be 3, 6, or 9.

Rent-seeking, cartels, and monopolies are all things that are good for business, but by definition not most people.

Part of the reason that Disney puts out crap remakes of their properties is that they have a century plus monopoly on all of their beloved cartoons. If you want to make a Lion King movie you go to Disney. Are there people who could probably make a way better realistic CGI Lion King movie? Almost certainly, but they legally aren't allowed to compete with Disney.

One of the fantastic things about capital being property is that if you make a bunch of money with your existing capital you can buy more capital, which makes more money, and eventually you get big enough that you can simply buy the capital of any of your real competitors.

Every firm wants to be a monopoly. Boeing has weathered a bunch of their planes catastrophically failing and killing people because they have exactly one competitor, and that competitor doesn't have the resources to supply all of Boeing's customers.

So the planes explosively decompress occasionally, but what's the other option? Just stop flying people around?

Like, Labor unions are an anti-competetive measure to prevent laborers from undercutting each other on a free labor market.

Because "undercutting" is a rather bloodless word for "You got fired from the coal mine because you demanded too many safety measures and they hired me because I am on the verge of total destitution and I feel like I have no choice but to get black lung in exchange for a few pennies which barely keep me out of the gutter".

So. Imagine dozens of other teenage girls, being held against their will and brainwashed in Utah, seeing these billboards and going, "huh. I'm having a complicated emotional reaction to all of this. It's possible that I might unpack that in two to three decades."

Both of these situations arise from the same societal attitudes. This guy wanted a teenage girl to be trapped with him and unable to leave, regardless of her feelings on the matter, and for her to act a certain way and comply with his desires. He took her from her home and forced her to be somewhere she did not want to be and would not let her go, and he tried to turn her into a different thing. The difference in societal reactions to when one specific, unauthorized guy does this, compared to when someone's parents pay a fancy sounding institution to do it for them, tells you a lot about how we think about the autonomy of teenage girls.

In Utah, the reason these types of institutions are allowed is because their youth rights laws are abysmal even compared to the rest of the US. Children aren't people, they're the property of their parents. Elizabeth Smart's parents didn't want her to be kidnapped, so it was bad. Our parents did want us to be kidnapped, so it was fine.