ahelwer

That's an interesting idea about a built-in ordered opaque value type. You should bring it up at the next monthly TLA+ foundation community call on November 14th![0] It would be interesting to hear peoples' feedback on it.

[0] Details hidden in the google calendar link on this thread in the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/g/tlaplus/c/CpAEnrf-DHQ/m/YrORpIfS...

The shortest possible answer is that qubit states are modeled as two-dimensional vectors on the complex unit sphere. We arbitrarily designate two orthonormal vectors on this sphere as corresponding to classical states 0 and 1. If the qubit vector isn't in the 0 or 1 state, it's in some linear combination of them. This is called superposition. Since most people don't know what linear combination means, superposition is explained as "sort of both at the same time". Upon measurement the qubits are collapsed to 0 or 1 with some probability proportional to how close they are to the 0 and 1 states. The precise probabilities are given by something called the Born rule. I gave a longer talk aimed at computer scientists if you're interested beyond this explanation: https://youtu.be/F_Riqjdh2oM

You're talking about the difference between a scientist making like $50-150k/year salary and entities making millions or billions of dollars a year in profit. These are in no way comparable.

I hope this counts as productive feedback if the author of the blog is reading this - the post you put so much effort into writing truly deserves a better presentation experience than this: https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/110/923/56...

Using a static site generator is surprisingly simple!

Undergraduate physics hasn't changed much in the past two years.

Using math to model a system instead of learning math qua math does wonders for ease of understanding. Derivates and integrals become easy if you're using them to model the relationship between position/velocity/acceleration. I don't think I really got linear algebra until using it to learn quantum computing.

(am also on the spectrum)

> neuro-typicals mistake my intent and refuse to believe me

This is an idea I had to unlearn. We struggle as much understanding ourselves as understanding other people. When people react negatively to our behavior often times we immediately jump to extending unlimited benefit of the doubt to our own intentions. In reality, our perception of our own intentions are often post-hoc fabrications to preserve our self-image as a nice person. Letting go of this assumption was helpful to a better understanding of interpersonal interaction.

Time zones and shared language/culture disagree? Or if you think you can get a 90% margin on the competition with the same result, go start a company and see how that works out for you.

That's just... all of medical care. The procedures are almost all done by residents and, yes, med students under supervision of a full doctor. How do you think we get new doctors? Nobody wants to be the person who is used for teaching new doctors but that's how it is.

With each passing year my dread increases that this is all headed toward intensive solar radiation management schemes that will forever rob us of a beautiful blue sky. Anything to avoid real changes.

Incredible to post this in a year with record numbers of forest fires. When trees burn they release all their sequestered carbon. Climate change makes forest fires more common.

Regardless planting trees is still a good thing and I don't actually know of any liberals who are against it, very strange thing to believe of them.

These things are interlinked. Developing addiction or mental health issues makes you less able to keep an income. If housing is more expensive it's then that much easier to not be able to make rent. And if you're homeless then it's quite easy to develop drug addictions or mental health issues. Housing prices are a single dial that turns up the heat on the whole system.

Honestly we don't have to intellectualize this very much. A child can understand this. If housing is more expensive it will be harder for people to afford it! And people who can't afford housing become homeless!

The author cites the BNEF energy transition investment trends report a few times, and I encourage everybody to flip through it. It contains many interesting facts, and you certainly have to take an extremely skewed view to arrive at the same conclusions as the author: https://about.bnef.com/energy-transition-investment/

Notably, the banner fact that 2022 was the first year - ever - where global investment in renewables equalled investment in fossil fuels[1]. This was primarily championed by China, which produced one of the most astonishing graphs I've seen in recent times[2]. It entirely upended how I view leadership on this issue and what countries are taking it remotely seriously. Canada isn't even in the top 10!

Anyway, given that - again - this is the first time ever that investment in renewables has matched investment in fossil fuels, it is not surprising that fossil fuel usage has continued to grow.

[1] https://imgur.com/B2QBY6u

[2] https://imgur.com/OlMAKVd

This is learned helplessness acquired from the past decade where the internet became five megacorp websites. No different from your siblings or parents saying they aren't good at computers. It isn't a complex system. You are surely capable of figuring it out.

You have to fix conflicts either way so what's the difference? I suppose when merging you only have to fix the cumulative conflicts, while when rebasing you have to incrementally fix the conflicts introduced by every commit which is annoying. I usually squash a branch (rebase on where it diverged) before rebasing to fix this.

Pretty conclusive evidence that human creativity is the source of current "AI" power, no? Many people claim the plagiarism inherent in this product is no different from you paraphrasing & remixing material you've read elsewhere, published by other people. But no, humans don't degenerate when reading material produced by other humans. They improve upon it and use it to create things that are genuinely new.

Maybe this won't always be so for AI. But it's pretty hard to square an account of LLMs as more than fancy data compression when they exhibit the exact same tendencies as all compression protocols when run on their own outputs.

The first chapter of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is a harrowing fictional account of living through one of these. Can't recommend it enough if you're in the mood to add another existential risk to your list of concerns.

Personally I'm a fan of the one where in the middle of talking about how smart he is he mixes up Cartesian and Euclidean.

The truest mark of an ideology is that its adherents don't even think they're being ideological, just reasonable.

Every good ideology needs a "Big Other" which subsumes all ordinary moral concerns. How could you think about something so trivial as the atrocity you see before your eyes when wealth formation/history itself/divine will/trillions of future human lives are at stake?

I know you're asking this question in bad faith because you posted the same thing elsewhere in the thread, but the answer here is because they will be outcompeted by companies that don't offer that policy. In much the same way, businesses that use child labor will outcompete those that do not. Of course a great many people are against child labor, but you don't see people telling them to go start their own company that doesn't use child labor if they're so against it.

If you aren't careful you'll find yourself making an argument against maternity leave, like you just did.

I'm happy you've boiled your recharging needs down to a science but none of this compares with long contiguous periods of unstructured time you can choose to use as you wish. Three months off every decade? Really?

We do have that, it's called the global south under neocolonialism.

Prolonged periods of time spent without obligation to work for pay is one of the greatest luxuries you can have in this life. People shouldn't have to wait until retirement to enjoy it. Sabbatical, basically, although even sabbatical often comes with obligations for self-improvement serving the company offering it. A lot of discourse on working hours revolves around decreasing the hours worked per week. I would also like to see people talk about a right to take 6-12 months of unstructured leave after 3-4 years of service. Seems unrealistic? What is all this wealth and automation and productivity growth for, then?

The will of the majority of people in the military is irrelevant, because they don't call the shots. The military is not a democracy.

The purpose of the military is not to be an effective fighting force. That is, at most, a happy side effect. The purpose is to shovel as much public money as possible into the private companies comprising the military industrial complex. So your efficient-market-hypothesis-but-for-the-military idea is essentially just not even wrong.

You fundamentally approach social networks with a producer/consumer mindset. Which is great, for some social networks. Except consuming content isn't very social. People aren't friends with a performer on stage (I believe this relationship is derogatorily called "parasocial"). I like social networks that involve people I can viably interact with in a friendly way, not in a way that constantly requires them to perform for their audience. See popular twitter accounts complaining about reply guys or people trying to riff with them generally. There are plenty of these friendly interactions on mastodon, because you can literally have them with everybody! The platform doesn't suffer because self-styled creators don't use it!

> but understanding concerns of others (evidently) is not

Your concerns can be understood without being catered to. Not everything has to be fit for your purposes. The world keeps turning without your permission.

Look fundamentally this argument is pointless. If you like mastodon then use it; lots of people do, certainly enough to make it worthwhile, and arguing about whether it will fail is a pointless exercise in trying to predict the future. Whining about how it doesn't meet your standards doesn't matter. It isn't a product that a company loses out on profit by failing to sell to you. From our brief interaction here I can tell you the platform really isn't greatly diminished by your lack of presence.

Some people are fundamentally product-brained and fail to metabolize the concept of federated social media. That's fine, it's better without them.

> You can say "oh what a tragedy", but I'm easily in the top 1% of users on reddit with nonzero karma by either post/comment karma/number of comments/amount of text typed; so people like me are what keeps a platform alive.

I'm sorry but I audibly laughed when I read this.

Mastodon is where you go to hang out with friends, colleagues, and fellow hobbyists. You go there to have a good time and learn from others. People obsessed with building their personal brand or audience or upvote score embody much of what people hate about other forms of social media. The platform is much improved without them.

If choosing one of several instances requires too high of activation energy then that legitimately is a "you" problem. You've circumscribed your own abilities to such an extent that it limits you to centralized for-profit social networks.

> They lost me as a potential user

Since mastodon instances don't profit off of users (actually they cost money), this isn't really a tragedy. You're approaching mastodon with a customer mentality. This isn't a sale being made! Nobody is losing out on profiting off your time & attention! This is you choosing whether you want to keep feeding from the intentionally-insanity-causing trough of social networks that monetize attention.