QuantumRoar

Yes, the current understanding is that general relativity breaks down inside of black holes and, to understand how it really works, we need a quantum theory of gravity.

However, I would not call it gossip since, by your reasoning, anything could be gossip then. I understand gossip as being something unimportant but the Schwarzschild solution was a major milestone in the understanding of general relativity. Moreover, all scifi movies considering wormholes and such, can be traced back to the usual visualization of the black hole distorting space time. Pretty consequential discovery I'd say.

This is not true as often you find surprising things that are not general which ARE NOT GOSSIP. To stay with the physics theme, the Schwarzschild solution of general relativity is a very special one and I don't think anybody thinks that black holes are gossip.

And it is certainly not surprising that amateurs in general forget that F = ma is only valid if the mass does not change. The more general expression is F = dp/dt, where p is the momentum. But this, of course, is also only valid in inertial systems. It's not really important to the article but it does kind of annoy me that he uses the most special case of an expression in an argument about it being general.

He could have actually made the point about generality by comparing this expression to the most general one for the force (in a frame of reference that accelerates). That would have also shown why generality can quickly become infeasible in practice. If he knew how many approximations people make in the real world, not because they want to, but because they HAVE TO, his worldview might be a different one.

I feel like he's trying to make a point about a very specific scenario but doesn't mention it explicitly. Instead he tries to be general and therefore fails to understand that his view doesn't actually apply in general.

No. Usually you talk to your colleagues and you help each other -- especially in the same department.

If I remember correctly, there are needle-like implants with around a thousand contacts and it is quite a difficult task to get the signals out of the brain. Either you have the ADCs directly at the contacts, which means you can't get your density of contacts up, or you have the ADCs outside which will give you a nightmare of wiring. In either case the technology to actually have an interface read out individual neurons is still quite far off, as far as I know.

I'm not quite sure about all of this, so maybe someone with up to date information on the technology can help me out here?

You're mixing up programming with computer science. The former is a task that does not necessarily need any math (e.g. web development), the latter is literally math (e.g. category algebra).

Edit: clarification

The questions are actually pretty clear. The problem is that you lack a general understanding of mathematical concepts and therefore you don't know what to do with it. But that's fine and that's actually what the exam is for, i.e. only those may pass who understand these things.

>This is probably not a view shared by many here, but if math problems were to be communicated in more natural ways, far more people would be interested in the sciences.

I would argue the opposite. If more problems could be as well posed as mathematical problems, we wouldn't have people bullshitting their way through arguments that are in dire need of some scientifical rigor (see climate science, psychology, and other disciplines that are too complex to isolate phenomena completely). You can't handwave your way through a math exam and you shouldn't be able to do it in other fields of science.

I never needed to bother with a filter where I live. So everybody uses them where the water is chlorinated?

The water in the US is chlorinated (at least where I was in Washington, DC). It smells and tastes really terrible.

I strongly believe that we should not easily segregate people into a smart kind and a not-so-smart kind. Intelligence comes in many ways and the genetics and upbringing of a person will make their intelligence manifest in different ways.

Someone being good at something, does not automatically equate to a high level of intelligence or smartness but rather a high degree of familiarity with the topic. Familiarity can be acquired either through a lot of practice or from a predisposition to understand quickly, which is intelligence or smartness.

However, what can be said is that a person who is good at almost everything, necessarily has to be smart because there wouldn't be any time to practice everything in depth. Conversely, I'd never call a person smart who's good at one thing but doesn't understand anything else.

The author says that smart, successful people are cursed with over-confidence due to them knowing one thing very well. But how can you call a person smart if they do not even possess the ability to properly self-reflect. Is that not the one thing that should define smartness?

Rationalizing things away, ignoring signs that interfere with one's world-view, and being over-confident are all traits of not-so-smart people. Just because you know how to code, does not mean you are smart.

I'd say the result of this anecdote should've been that it turns out that people can be good at their jobs and be idiots at the same time.

Nope, not fake. Just another way to look at it. From the paper: "One of the deepest insights about quantum gravity that emerged in recent times is that it is expected to be holographic [1–3], meaning that there should be an equivalent description of the bulk physics using a quantum field theory with no gravity in one dimension less. One may thus seek to use holography to model the very early Universe."

I think you wanted to say: "Are we simplifying things in software development?" All of the points you have made are actually simplifications of what might be the optimal solution.

Imagine the solution space as some multidimensional space where there is somewhere an optimal solution. The dimensions include the habits of your programmers, the problem you are trying to solve, and the phase of the moon. Microservices, a special form of redundancy, continuous integration, agile development are all extreme solutions to specific problems. Solutions which are extreme in that they are somewhere in the corner of your multidimensional solution space.

They are popular because they are radical in the way they conceptualize the shape of the problem and attempt to solve it. Therefore they seem like optimal solutions at first glance when really they only apply really well to specific toy models.

Take e.g. microservices. Yes, it's really nice if you can split up your big problem into small problems and define nice and clean interfaces. But it becomes a liability if you need too much communication between the services, up until the point where you merge your microservices back together in order to take advantage of using shared memory.

Don't believe any claims that there is a categorically better way to do everything. Most often, when you see an article about something like that, it is "proved" by showing it solves a toy model very well. But actual problems are rarely like toy models. Therefore the optimal solution to an actual problem is never a definite answer from one of the "simplified corner case scenarios" but it is actually just as complex as the problem you are trying to solve.

Once you own data centers, energy consumption becomes a major consideration.

I'm not doing stuff like that but I assume the train of thought concerning the economics of energy consumption is like that: You buy new hardware and from experience you know it's going to last on average a few years. During the lifetime of your new hardware you can save some amount of money on electricity because your new hardware is more efficient than the old one. So it would make sense to hit the buy button for the new hardware when you can save money:

(Savings in electricity over the lifetime) - (Price of new hardware) > 0

I assume after a few years the savings may become significant.

You can view things like abstract concepts as information. You can create information by using energy and e.g. encode it onto a surface or encode it in a human brain. There is a minimum amount of energy necessary to store information defined by Landauer's principle for irreversible computation. So in that sense the idea of "Occam's Razor" really does exist encoded in your brain as information (a form of energy) manifested in connections between neurons or so.

I see your point. What I meant was that existence and interaction are equivalent. But I see that I didn't express myself well there.

Let us presume that existence and interaction can be separate. Let us also assume for a moment that there is a definition of 'existence' without interaction. Then a reality with a thing that exists but doesn't interact is equivalent to a reality where this thing doesn't exist. If a thing's existence and non-existence yield equivalent realities, we can always assume that it does not exist. Therefore, we can set 'it interacts' and 'it exists' to be equivalent for all practical purposes.

That's my line of thought, which of course still doesn't exclude that things can 'exist' but not 'interact'. But if you would press me, I'd ask for a definition of the word 'existence' without using any form of interaction. I wouldn't know a proper answer to that.

The kind of predictive statements that all physicists are making for quite a while now and on which all of our technological progress is founded.

If there were some other fundamental means by which reality might be modified besides the basic interactions we know, our standard model of particle physics couldn't work so well, right? So to our knowledge, interaction is the one and only thing that puts a thing into existence or not.

As a side note: that is also the reason why WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are a candidate for dark matter. The idea is that there might exist a form of matter that only interacts very weakly and thus it is incredibly hard to confirm its existence. Furthermore these WIMPs are massive (compared to other known elementary particles), so they might be out of reach of our particle accelerators.

These kinds of predictions follow from that.

> By the same token, consider an ultra-relational metaphysics such as that of Bruno Latour, who tells us that a thing is nothing more than whatever it modifies, transforms, perturbs, or creates. If this were true, then everything would be nothing more than its current effects on everything else; the surface events and interactions of the world at this moment would be its only existing layer, with nothing held in reserve and no possible engine of change.

But that is precisely how it is. Things that do not interact, do not exist.

Nothing about this makes any sense. The cat is an analogy, the box is an analogy. Everything about that thought experiment is an analogy.

The moon is still there, even if noone looks up into the night sky. The cat is either alive or dead because it is constantly "observed." That's why there's no differnce between a glass box and a metal box. Observation in the quantum mechanical sense doesn't mean that the author has to eyeball an object. It means that the object interacts with its environment (e.g. the particles of the cat interact with each other and the particles in the air).

The analogy with statistics, that quantum mechanics is simply the evolution of "what we know" is not correct either. A superposition is much more than that. When a particle is in superposition of two states, it can interact with itself as if it was in one state and as if there was another particle in the other one (but there has never been a second particle).

If you simply assume that you "don't know" in which state it was and that it would still behave classically, you would not be able to explain the double-slit experiment. You also wouldn't be able to explain why light is slower in a dielectric. Also, physics would be way easier.

P.S.: What the hell are those little snow flakes on that website. At first I thought I was seeing stars and that I was about to pass out...

Typically, when people think about the future, they think about what they're doing today and how technology could transform that.

But when predicting the future, you need to figure out what we won't do anymore because of technology.

Aixtron hasn't been doing too well lately. So there is definitely a positive side to an acquisition.

From Aixtron's website on November 17 [1]:

>CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] informed the parties that it plans to recommend to the U.S. President that the transaction be prohibited based on CFIUS’ conclusion that there would be no reasonable way to mitigate the U.S. national security risks perceived by CFIUS on the basis of the mitigation proposals submitted by the parties to date.

> Both, GCI and AIXTRON have decided not to follow such recommendation as a result of which the matter has been referred to the U.S. President for decision in line with CFIUS statutes.

If I understand that correctly, Aixtron SE has investments in the USA and the CFIUS is now moving to block the acquisition because they think if GCI owns these investments that the national security is threatened.

Or am I misreading something?

[1] http://www.aixtron.com/en/press/press-releases/detail/aixtro...

Do not use the Internet. Do not use phones. Do not use bank accounts. Do not travel by plane. Do not enter public spaces. Do not show your face.

Otherwise you accept our Terms of Service.

Thank you for trusting us.

(Is it just me or is it actually very hard to figure out whom I've given consent to do something with something that is mine?)

Insulting millions of people serves no other purpose than to point out your own superiority in some way. I can't fathom how much hubris is necessary to do that without feeling ashamed of yourself.

How can it be so hard to be nice to others? Everybody disagrees with everybody else on something. Everybody has false ideas about the truth. Do we toss a kid in a meatgrinder when it has a weird idea about society? No, we include it in our discussions because opinions change when they are challenged. But when they cross the age of 16, or is it 18?, then they suddenly become demons that we need to get rid of. The cancer of our society. Where do you draw the line?

If you honestly think that you have a moral superiority that gives you the right to tell people what to do just because they are stupid (or pick any other negative attribute), then know that there are a lot of people to whom you are literally stupid (they are more intelligent and know more than you). Would it be okay if they told you what to do? If they tried to silence you? Ignored your desperate calls for help, which they think are stupid and wrong?

Of course, you're right.

They stopped doing the age related holiday amount thing at German universities about 4-5 years ago (I'm not sure if everywhere but at least where I'm at). Their argument for stopping was, as you said, that it discriminates by age, which they deemed unacceptable.

Now, everyone gets the same amount of holidays, i.e. younger employees get as much as the older ones, not the other way around.

Asking to turn off the adblocker and at the same time showing the following quote:

"I'm doing the thing that scares me the most every single day."

Like what? Browsing without an adblocker?

Apple has a lot of developers. I wonder what they think about the new MBPs. There are so many complaints from developers that I cannot believe that all Apple engineers are happy with their new choices in MBPs. I wonder if a lot of displeased Apple engineers can change the direction the Pro stuff is headed.

Arch Linux + XMonad is the way I run my stuff.

I still have a MacBook Air lying around that I use when I'm on the road. The amount of visual clutter, annoying UI animations, the nagging from notifications and alerts surprises me every time. I didn't notice it before I started using my current XMonad setup. So either Apple is making it worse or you just don't see it when you don't have a clean and minimal system as a comparison.

First, from Wikipedia [1]: "The Armitage–Doll model is a statistical model of carcinogenesis [...]"

Second, the paper itself [2] talks about cancer rates and uses experimental data for it (I just glossed over it, so I can't give a decent summary). This is a statistical model.

I think we disagree since you misunderstand what the term statistical model means. Furthermore, you are misusing the term "first principles." First principles really means that you start from a well established theory that describes how something works. From there you predict mathematically, or with a computer simulation, what the reality is. Using experimental data is strictly forbidden.

From Wikipedia [3]: "In physics and other sciences, theoretical work is said to be from first principles, or ab initio, if it starts directly at the level of established science and does not make assumptions such as empirical model and fitting parameters."

I generally have no idea about cancer research, so I have to trust you and cannot comment on the usefulness of the approach.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armitage%E2%80%93Doll_multista...

[2] http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v91/n12/pdf/6602297a.pdf

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_principle

> Every time a cell divides there is some chance of a genetic error occurring.

> Activities that damage tissue, etc and necessitate cell division to replenish the cells will contain cells with more errors.

I don't see how your explanation could enable anything but a statistical model.

The underlying processes I'm talking about would be molecular interactions modeled through the domain of theoretical chemistry or even mechanical processes, probably involving the quantum mechanics of many particle systems. This is probably the mysterious and complex part that is not well understood. Your example does nothing to explain how that works.

Damage happens, yes, this much is clear, but how do the molecules of smoke interact with the cells in the lungs and other places in order to cause the mutations? Can we compute what happens when a nicotine molecule hits a lung cell? Probably not... because it is too complex and mysterious.

There is a difference between using statistical models and understanding the underlying processes. I can tell someone that when we smash together Muons and nucleons that there is a certain chance that we will produce Kaons. That, I believe, many can understand.

What I cannot explain briefly to a general audience is how quantum field theory and the standard model of particle physics works and how we can compute the probabilities from that.

Just because you know that something is happening, doesn't mean you understand anything about the underlying processes involved.

They, too, wondered that at some point. Even if you have an improbably low fail rate, the defects should break every single chip, right? Turns out, defects in manufacturing chips are not randomly distributed but very much localized. The chances of finding a defect next to another one is larger than finding one anywhere else. Thus, usually only a few chips are affected per wafer.

There are a lot of ways to achieve a higher yield rate, e.g. to increase operating voltages. Although most of the transistors produced could operate at lower voltages, thus being more energy efficient, they tend to apply a higher operating voltage just to be sure that the variances of the manufacturing don't impact the operation.

And there are a lot of other tricks, like identifying corner cases. What are the most affected paths through your ciruits? Or something like this one (don't know if it's still true): Intel never uses the first and last transistor of a row, since they always turn out worse than the others.

Then you start tweaking parameters for a few months and then you hopefully get a fab that can manufacture chips at a yield rate high enough to make a profit.