What if you believe (correctly) that a corrupt government intends to punish you exorbitantly beyond reason for possession of these zines? Is it still immoral to move the zines? Is it so immoral that it therefore justifies 30 years of imprisonment for moving the zines?
Hacker News is for people who believe in the hacker ethos "It is immoral to do anything the government takes issue with and you deserve whatever punishment you get for doing so, unless it was breaking regulations to make money, the highest calling".
A lot of people in these Hacker News comments are accepting the framing that moving the zines is evidence tampering and therefore deserves a 30 year sentence. What crime are zines evidence of?
This is like how one often wants to distinguish the points of an affine space from the vectors representing displacements in that space (there is no distinguished origin for the physical world, but there is a distinguished concept of zero displacement). One can add a vector to a point to get a point, or a vector to a vector to get a vector, but cannot add a point to a point to get another point. Yet, it is meaningful to treat a linear combination of points in an affine space as yielding another point in the same space when the weights of the linear combination sum to 1.
The exact same thing is happening here, only multiplicatively, where z1^(1/2) * z2^(1/2) is a combination with two weights of 1/2 (thus, summing to 1). It is geometrically meaningful to treat 2d vectors (displacements in a plane) as complex numbers, raise them to exponents summing to 1, and then multiply these together to get another vector in the same plane. But it is not generally geometrically meaningful to just multiply one vector by another vector to get a third vector in the same space (because this would require distinguishing some particular direction and magnitude as "1").
The basic issue with geometric algebra is that geometric vectors generally do not have a distinguished notion of unit magnitude (is unit magnitude 1 meter? 1 mile? 1 inch?), so it is silly to work in a framework that requires pretending they do (since the definition of the geometric product of two vectors is dependent upon this choice). Dimensional analysis (a very handy way of tracking mathematical symmetries and thus sanity checking results) goes out the window when working with mixed grade multivectors.
This is not an issue when working with non-mixed-grade multivectors, for which dimensional analysis works just fine in the ordinary way. As the linked article notes, exterior algebra/the wedge product is great. Thinking about exterior powers of vector spaces is great. It's the further move of forcing everything into a Procrustean bed of Clifford algebra that is misguided for almost any application other than some spinor stuff.
The stock market is not definitionally "reality" in the sense being used. It's perfectly fine to look at the stock market and consider it "detached from reality", in the sense being said.
I have a PhD in category theory and know what the Leech lattice is and I still don't understand what is going on here. What is the value of using the Leech lattice to store memory?
That's fortunate for you that what you enjoy doing and get meaning from is capable of providing you a living via market income. That's not true of many others. I try to make time for what I enjoy doing and get meaning from. But for me as for many, it does not provide income.
Many of us do not particularly enjoy the work our employer has us do, nor believe in what the company we work for is trying to achieve. It's not like we get to choose its aims, and it's not like we have alternatives where we get to do so either. Our lives are spent working on someone else's goals.