613style

They're saying you can't find a ruler accurate enough to be sure the number you measure is sqrt(2) and not sqrt(2) for the first 1000 digits then something else. And eventually, as you build better and better rulers, it will turn out that physical reality doesn't encode enough information to be sure. Anything you can measure is rational.

Non-physicst here. Hopefully someone can correct me or elaborate. My understanding is that what's being described is smaller scale decoherence inside the proton. Normally, the universe only asks protons the question: "are you a proton?" and it's like "Yep I'm a proton." (What's your baryon number? What's your charge? etc)

When we blast it with higher and higher energies, we're asking new questions: "What are the momenta of your quarks? What's your color field arrangement?" There are many possible answers to those questions and we're now starting to see the landscape of them.

So having different answers based on how you look is really answering different questions, just like asking an electron: What's your momentum? What's your location?

He's not making it up and there's no reason for that tone. Strings are more straightforward to isolate compared to vocals/horns/etc because they produce a near-perfect harmonic series in parallel lines in a spectrogram. The time/frequency tradeoff exists, but it's less of a problem for strings because of their slow attack.

You can look up HPSS and python libraries like Essentia and Librosa.

Agreed. My experience is GPT5 is significantly better at large-scale planning & architecture (at least for the kind of stuff I care about which is strongly typed functional systems), and then Sonnet is much better at executing the plan. GPT5 is also better at code reviews and finding subtle mistakes if you prompt it well enough, but not totally reliable. Claude Code fills its context window and re-compacts often enough that I have to plan around it, so I'm surprised it's larger than GPT's.

Why are you monitoring your colleagues’ water intake?

These models still have guardrails. Even locally they won't tell you how to make bombs or write pornographic short stories.

Bell's Theorem (1964) describes an inequality that should hold if quantum mechanics' randomness can be explained by certain types of hidden variables. In the time since, we've repeatedly observed that inequality violated in labs, leading most to presume that the normal types of hidden variables you would intuit don't exist. There are some esoteric loopholes that remain possibilities, but for now the position that matches our data the best is that there are not hidden variables and quantum mechanics is fundamentally probabilistic.

I believe that those who justify cruelty with rhetoric and spread hate will one day look into the mirror and be horrified at what they see.

The sharpest cries of, "that's not thinking!" always seem to have an air of desperation about them. It's as if I'm special, and I think, and maybe thinking is what makes me special, so if LLMs think then I'm less special.

At some point the cry will change to, "It only looks like thinking from the outside!" And some time after that: "It only looks conscious from the outside..."

> Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding

It doesn't matter. There is literally no assignment you can give students that they won't cheat on. In an intro college astronomy class, "Look at these pictures of planets, what do think is interesting about them?" or "Walk around your house and look at the different types of light bulbs, what kinds do you have?" Both of these will include 20% ChatGPT responses.

megaparsec (1 million parsecs)

This is exactly what I got wrong when I started learning jazz piano as an adult. My wife is a lifelong musician and I got to the annoying point where I'd be playing and she'd walk by and go "that third chord sounds wrong." I'd ask why and she'd be unable to elaborate until she sat down and played the better version intuitively. Then she'd retroactively analyze what she did to explain it to me. I understood the theory, she understood the sounds. It was always humbling and helped me understand that intellectualizing comes second.

Yet it remains true that not having magic evil talismans in my house makes it very unlikely that my family or I get cursed by accident.

I didn't say and don't believe those things.

> changing how you in particular perceive the world does not actually change the world that you are a part of

It's impossible to change yourself without changing the world, because those two things are not separate.

Further, much of the world exists only as abstract ideas in my mind. When I change how I relate to and perceive them, I do change them in every way that matters.

What is this "statement" you speak of?

(if (= 2 2) :OK :nope)

> otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have so much done inside such a small volume, with such small amounts of energy

That's interesting. Could you share your source?

This feels a lot like a standard line of muddy thinking we see in youtube videos about consciousness (for example): "we don't understand brains, and we don't understand quantum mechanics, so they're probably related."

It's easy to speculate, but it's not easy to find any evidence at all to back up those guesses. It's still not clear that this has anything to do with consciousness or information processing or AWS datacenters.

Like all writing, proofs have a target audience. If you don't know what a Galois group or a modular form is, it's not the author's job to teach you.

Formal verification is getting more mainstream, but it's not there yet.

> That's a pretty extreme interpretation. Anyone who downloads the IDE can create and publish a game. If kids are using the tool, making fun games, and sharing them with other people, than I think that's a good thing.

It sounds like you might be lacking some context on this. Here's an article with more details: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-wi...

I think this is correct. I play Go at a strong amateur level, and on the 19x19 board, I can often fully recall 200+ move games against "normal" opponents, because the moves tell a story that makes sense. But if I play someone much weaker or much stronger who makes a lot of unexpected moves, I'll have trouble remembering those moments.

Here's Mike Battaglia playing a cover of "House of the Rising Sun" on a 31 EDO synth setup which I always loved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlZv13YZzSM

I'm not sure if you intend this as a helpful analogy for an undergrad or as an argument in favor of groups/homomorphisms being created to match reality, but I don't think it applies very well to either.

(Though it is very interesting!)

Definitions are created to be useful or interesting or both, and sometimes those specifiers overlap with physical reality. But that doesn't mean they're created to match reality or to tell you anything about it.

I remember struggling as an undergrad to come up with a metaphor for visualizing what a group homomorphism is, aiming to develop better intuition when working with them. It's hard because the real world doesn't contain any, and all the "it's kind of like X" types of examples you can think of aren't really useful when mapped back to the mathematical domain. If math described the real world, I'd expect this type of thing to be much easier.

Mathematicians don't "believe" in real numbers. They're part of an abstract logical framework, not a statement about the nature of reality. Mathematical objects arise from definitions, not measurements and observations.

It's audible in the sense that it exists completely in an audio modality.

But it's not audible in the sense that human ears can't discern it.

It sounds like you might disagree that the room I'm in right now is filled with air or that my cup is full of tea.

This article is trying to help laypeople have better intuition about things from the quantum point of view. It's full of evocative prose. Arguing about the definition of the word "full" is completely tangential to the point.

>The electron cloud on it's own is an empty volume except where the electrons are at any given moment.

The article specifically rejects this way of thinking and makes the point that the electrons are not in the cloud. The electrons are the cloud. Thinking of them as little balls whizzing about so fast that it seems cloud-like is wrong.

It's also nice to get an error when you `recur` from a non-tail position rather than the function just quietly becoming truly recursive.

The simple point is that the fundraising banner is intentionally misleading. People believe they are donating to the cause of keeping Wikipedia online and significantly less than half of their money is going to that.