at_a_remove

Hi! Physics BS, but they let me take some grad courses, including a Spacetime and Relativity class. I can help.

The word "mass" is used in physics in three different general contexts. First, we have mass in mass-energy, as in "how much energy can I get for trading in this mass?" Mass-energy is the coin paid as the price of existence. If it exists, it has mass-energy. Mostly mass for us. Mostly. We can skip that one for now.

The second context of mass is inertial. Mass has the property of inertia, of resisting a change in its direction or speed. It resists stopping if it is motion, and if it is stopped, it resists moving. The degree of the resistance is also called mass. Put a pin in this one.

The third context of mass is gravitational. Two masses, attracting one another because a force between them, a force which is not based on charge or the relatively nearby exchange of some more exotic bosons, no, just attraction based on how much mass is present. Nothing more special.

Now, curiously, values of each one of these seem to agree!

Einstein's absolute core concept in general relativity, the idea from which all else is built, is that inertial mass is identical to gravitational mass, not merely in number, but so fundamentally intertwined that there is no real difference between them, other than being two faces of the same coin. Now, that does not sound like much, but it gives birth to experiments such as an elevator which is falling toward versus an elevator floating far from gravitational sources, and that they are, from the inside of the elevator, impossible to differentiate.

Einstein then constructs general relativity from this, that the "m" in "F = ma" is identical to the first m in "F = -G m1 * m2 / r^2"

In MOND, the two ms are not identical, they only appear close most places, and so you cannot construct general relativity atop it. You will get most correct approximations but you're missing out in some cases.

The problem is that Serious Space Enterprise is very costly, ongoing, relative to the actual return on the operation. Not the invention of the tech to get you there. We've probably made most of what we'll get. In the sense of, "If there were a gold brick on Mars, would it make sense from the cost of the energy required to move the brick from Mars to some orbit and down to the surface of the Earth, versus the comparative energy required to go out, dig for, and refine the same quantity of the gold from the place we're just standing on right now?" manner, to be more specific.

Once you start thinking in that fashion, you can start asking yourself, "Exactly what object or material do I want to bring back from Mars, and could I do it more cheaply in, say, Minnesota?" Like in the way that once lab-made diamonds which are identical to mined diamonds and become cheaper, the mining is going to slow down unless the process is encumbered by tariffs, regulation, artificial constraints to preserve a business are imposed.

I still feel burned by EESTOR.

It was probably the last time I allowed the, uh, implications of such a technology to overwhelm my judgment about whether or not it will actually happen.

In my personal life, I have found great satisfaction in finding out how different people's jobs work, all of the things I wouldn't expect or know, and so on. I think it's fascinating. Whatever it is I think I can figure out from first principles might have been how the field started, and then there's the other ninety-nine percent that comes with it, the non-obvious stuff. But I am a very curious cat.

Dark matter does not mean "we are in the dark about this," at all.

It's astronomy. It means "anything that is not shining like a star but we can detect it via inference." Light matter is stars. Dark matter can include MACHOS: neutron stars, black holes, brown dwarfs, rogue planets. No new physics required for MACHOs, as opposed to WIMPs.

Could be! But then there are ambushes, driving prey into the claws of hidden allies, and so forth. Modeling the behavior of other animals will have to occur without place for many instances.

"Where are we going to find the equivalent data set that will train this other kind of thinking?"

Just a personal opinion, but in my shitty When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One (and others) unpublished fiction pastiche (ripoff, really), I had the nascent AI stumble upon Cyc as its base for the world and "thinking about how to think."

I never thought that Cyc was enough, but I do think that something Cyc-like is necessary as a component, a seed for growth, until the AI begins to make the transition from the formally defined, vastly interrelated frames and facts in Cyc to being able to growth further and understand the much less formal knowledgebase you might find in, say Wikipedia.

Full agreement with your animal model is only sensible. If you think about macaques, they have a limited range of vocalization once they hit adulthood. Noe that the mothers almost never make a noise at their babies. Lacking language, when a mother wants to train an infant, she hurts it. (Shades of Blindsight there) She picks up the infant, grasps it firmly, and nips at it. The baby tries to get away, but the mother holds it and keeps at it. Their communication is pain. Many animals do this. But they also learn threat displays, the promise of pain, which goes beyond mere carrot and stick.

The more sophisticated multicellular animals (let us say birds, reptiles, mammals) have to learn to model the behavior of other animals in their environment: to prey on them, to avoid being prey. A pond is here. Other animals will also come to drink. I could attack them and eat them. And with the macaques, "I must scare the baby and pain it a bit because I no longer want to breastfeed it."

Somewhere along the line, modeling other animals (in-species or out-species) hits some sort of self-reflection and the recursion begins. That, I think, is a crucial loop to create the kind of intelligence we seek. Here I nod to Egan's Diaspora.

Looping back to your original point about the training data, I don't think that loop is sufficient for an AGI to do anything but think about itself, and that's where something like Cyc would serve as a framework for it to enter into the knowledge that it isn't merely cogito ergo summing in a void, but that it is part of a world with rules stable enough that it might reason, rather than "merely" statistically infer. And as part of the world (or your simulated environment), it can engage in new loops, feedback between its actions and results.

I only got my undergrad in physics, but I think there is something there to be mined between time as a dimension and the second law of thermodynamics. Why this one?

First, I will render a quote which never failed to amuse me: "The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations -- then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation -- well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation." (Eddington)

Why such honor? For one, in statistical physics, you can more or less derive the second law of thermodynamics, from scratch. No need for observation. It's just there the same way the quadratic equation is. Somewhere I have a cheap Dover reprint which contains a relatively easy to follow construction of the second law. It's the math. You can measure things badly, you can find one phenomenon creating the appearance of another, but you cannot fool The Math.

And so the statistical physics you can get from just math gives you this arrow of time, flying only one way, just as we see from spacetime.

To me, and again, I only got a few grad courses under my belt in it, this suggests not just a deep connection between entropy and spacetime, but the inevitability of it from the basic math (really, a talented high schooler could be coached through it) means that there is something about large (for n = ?) numbers of particles losing the reversibility which is so often present in particle interactions where n is smaller. What gives there? How do we go from this "trend" emerging to it being a property of spacetime even if no particles are sitting in said spacetime.

Not that I would have dared write the great Wheeler, but I have wondered if his "geon" concept would have fit in with this sort of thing. It seems so fundamental. One can imagine a universe with a different number of un-unified forces, or gravity dropping as the inverse-cube, or varying physical constants, but the math is still the same in these universes and it then suggests that there's no, uh, room for an option wherein the time facet of spacetime is anything but an arrow flying forever on towards entropy in its many masks.

A great task, or perhaps a very alluring windmill, for someone younger and brighter than I.

Or as I tell people, kidding on the square, we're trapped in a time machine hurtling us into the future at the rate of one minute every sixty seconds! It is important you say that last bit in a panicked, breathless voice.

My God, that means every three hundred sixty-five days or so, we'll have gone forward a year!

I have tried that, and no luck. I think, for me at least, it's the head cooling that matters most.

The method works, and I am going to elaborate on it a little. As the poster said, start warm, work your way down to cool, then cold. Very cold.

But what really seems to kick one off to dreamland is not drying your hair, instead putting a towel down on your pillow. As your hair dries, you'll get some more evaporative cooling strictly for your head, and that helps even more

I long for something that would help me. I have a rare metabolic disorder where the recommendation is high carbohydrates, very high, and to never diet. Even a ten percent reduction in caloric intake can end in hospitalization, during which I am put on a frankly enormous amount of glucose or sucrose, among other things. The end result has been an insidious weight gain. Exercise? Well, aside from the fact that you can't outrun your fork, it sets off the same metabolic pathways that caloric restriction does and I am back to square one.

Artists do not need to justify their existence. They do need to justify their desire to obtain access to other people's money.

By all means, donate to your local artist. Tech gets all of this funding because it produces tangible results, tech provides what people ask for. Piss Christ, however ... well, give money to the artist if it pleases you.

There's a sculpture park not too far away from me. It has very large metal polygons, gently rusting. It certainly fits my modern art criteria: is it ugly? Is it incomprehensible?

And then comes the question of "What do you get out of this particular bit of art?" The standard defense is "anything you like." Which sounds great until you realize that only one piece of art is ever required, the rest being superfluous. That one piece is "anything you like," which is congruent with any other piece's identical "anything you like." No need for anything else.

With these sorts of things, modern art is backing itself into a corner. It isn't surprising that people aren't eager to open their wallets.

I am preparing to get into the digital thing, but I just ... love a car CD player. Used to have a multi-disc that seated twelve in a cartridge, so I would have a dozen-disc mix for one kind of mood, another if a particular friend was in the car, and so on.

I would have transitioned early, but I found most headunits to be queerly useless when it comes to playlists. They just don't seem to do them, and I've regressed down to a playlist with a single track with a one-word title. (I did manage to get playlists working on a Roku, at least.) Playlists are a natural descendant of the album order, so you would think it would be a priority.

I know that .m3u and .m3u8 are in that realm where many dialects exist to support, but I just think that headunits could catch up in this area.

When I was a tutor, mostly doing math, when it came to polynomials and that range, I would trick my students into deriving the quadratic equation. It's not even a full page. Almost all of them finished with a strange expression, and then we had the little "it was always there, waiting for someone to find it" chat.

Some people care about the history, some don't. I find when people talk about astrophysics stuff, most of them do not know the history and ought to, because most of their interpretations fall into the "Yes, that was a question in the 1960s but eventually ..."

If you want one for relativity, I strongly suggest Was Einstein Right? by Clifford Will. It dates from 1986, so it is nearly forty years behind now, but it covers the many experiments and tests of relativities special and general.

Incorrect. Wildly incorrect. I used to co-lo servers, it has been a long time. SSH Keys were not in vogue back then. I did use them at one point and, because I haven't done it in a while, it slipped my mind. I'm just rusty.

There's just nothing wrong with adding a few steps to do your keygen, upload your public key, save your private key on a thumb drive or whatever, and so on. Please, tell me why that should NOT be added to a tutorial. Whom does it harm? What is the downside?

I can't see anything but Crappy Gatekeeping, but please, come up with a decent reason not to add just a few more instructions.

(Although now, apparently, keys are out for some folksand certs are coming in vogue. Who knew?)

When I dip into little histories of how one thing or another came to pass (example: ten days to design Javascript) in our history of computing, I wonder if advanced civilizations do things like undertake mind-bending projects like, "Hey, let's redesign our computation from scratch, from Turing (or whatever They call it) machines on up to processors to implement these machines, and on up."

A language would be next, and with it the idioms.

HTML, starts off as a markup language for document display (and a fairly primitive one) but has morphed into an application-over-the-Internet, by adding CSS, Javascript, and so forth. What if the aliens designed a technology with this endpoint already in mind? After a few hundred years, they probably have a full list of controls (radio buttons, checkboxes, dropdowns, sliders, and so on).

I just have this terrible feeling that everything we have is built on layers of cruft, "I need this by Monday" decisions, not-quite-optimal algorithms, and so on. And that we're probably wasting enormous amounts of computation and energy on this. Just think of how much invalid HTML is out there, and how much harder each browser must work to figure out the tag salad.

This is wrong. I may not be "ready" for it, but I need it anyway. What then?

What is the reason NOT to educate me about SSH keys instead of just telling me to go home?

Everyone has to start somewhere.

I believe it increases the speed of the coding, but not the quality. It doesn't do your QA for you. It doesn't do your UX for you. And if you're a code monkey assigned to implement a feature you know will drag the product down, well, you'll get that out the door faster. AI won't force the marketing people to make good decisions, or create sane deadlines, and so on.

I think this may be one of the wares I looked at when I was hoping to build a catalog of at least my visual media. Something in the sense of "I have this on a DVD, I have that on Blu-Ray" or "I have this as an .mp4." However, this was complicated by looking for something open-source enough that I could stick my fingers in the database and go from there to bring the catalog, or something like it, to a webpage.

What I cannot seem to find is a comprehensive list of similar events, Code of Conduct takeovers. Otherwise, concerns can be dismissed with "Well, that was a one-off situation," whereas a long history of such things would be more convincing to those in the middle.

Perhaps one could even honeypot the code to find out if the CoC types might be looking at you next. Include terms like blacklist and master and whatever else triggers them, see if you get some requests to change them, and there you go.

And I find this to be mean-spirited ("snarky") and the opposite of instructive. Perhaps I am new, or rusty, and I do not know about SSH keys or remember them. Bang! Trapped! And then how is a newbie to trust the rest of this, much less learn?

Good instruction will tell you why and the consequences of missing a step. Perhaps some options.

But perhaps I want too much, the title does include the word "terrible," after all.

"If no one will pay for the solution, it may be because of a base factor of reality itself has collided a near universal facet of human nature," wherein the first might take the value of although information might require the expenditure of resources to create, replication of the created information is often difficult to stymie and lacks even the approach to similar levels of consumed resources and the second value of most humans are, unsurprisingly common as a trait of great objective value in any species with a history of billions of years evolving in environments wherein at least some resources are painfully limited, often unwilling to expend resources if they do not have to.

The former is the nature of data itself, the latter having come into the existence the first time a creature with more than a handful of neurons was capable of making the choice to take what was right in front of it as opposed to venturing far afield for something similar. Both predate humans by millions of years at the least, and do not require the abstractions of market and money, or even the homo sapiens which first coined these concepts.

While these two give rise to the freeloading scamp who attempts to read entire magazine at the news stand if they can get away with it, the printing press or coinage are not specifically required, and, if we were to ever meet other aliens with some kind of civilization, they would likely have situations parallel enough to end up in our eventual xenoanthropology textbooks. Assuming they're not so busy coming up with their own copies of To Serve Man that we haven't the time for us to write said texts.

I disagree, for a purely practical reason: given the number of people on the planet, multiplied by the average number of views and opinions they might hold, gives me so many arguments I could spend lifetime upon lifetime evaluating were I to take them each in full seriousness.

Faced with this flood, I must then, if I am to get anything done at all, develop many methods of winnowing on which of them I might spend my time, which on this Earth is without doubt limited. Hypocrisy suggests at least two excellent reasons to immediately discard.

First, if I take the option that the person who puts forth the proposition were proselytizing in good faith, then I am left to wonder if this position is consequently so burdensome that even its champions find it too difficult to bear. Never cause harm to any other living thing, and as you extend this past the miniscule deaths of the wee crawling and flying things the broom and mask of the Jain hope to avoid and on to microscopic deaths of the hapless bacteria, it is simply not something tenable, you will fall short simply as a matter of existing, and you have no examples to follow, despite the exhortations.

On the other tine of this fork, perhaps the person is operating in bad faith, and wishes to covertly establish an imbalanced set of transactions or relationships, favoring them or their ilk, all via the mechanism of disapproval. Give away your property and do not be chained by material goods. Why, yes, I am picking up what you have dropped but pay no mind to that, you ought to focus on your own sins, you know, now that I have explained them to you. You may have noticed how so many of the people with rude behaviors will deflect to your uncivilized and impolite faux pas of pointing out said rudeness. A virtue, yes, but especially good to possess for people who are not me.

More and more I am starting to wish I had gone ahead with the novel I had sketched out in the 1990s. The backdrop was a kind of post-imitative-AI collapse of trust in society, because it had become effortless to fake up, say, your least favorite political candidate talking about the merits of eating babies, so the various echo chambers bore a kind of ghastly fruit, each stance finding its own "evidence" for its beliefs, right down to the flat earth types. Paranoia runs rampant, and so on.

It looks like we're heading in that direction.

It's a useful fiction, but the map is not the territory. This sounds blithe but ... it is as close as you will get to the truth.

I only got the bachelors' version of physics, though I did take some grad classes, so here is what I will tell you:

The human mind learns from experience and it thinks of things in terms of the past experiences it has had. We are big assemblages which exist in a narrow range of temperatures (think in terms of Kelvin). Our experience is classical, in the Newtonian sense: we move at not a particularly notable fraction of c, we are too warm to note the strangenesses which happen below, say, twenty or four or a thousandth of a Kelvin (superfluids and BECs are out), we are too cold to have a great internal experience of plasma, leaving us to be creatures of solid and liquid, with a sort of inferred understanding of gas. We are too large to feel the quantum realm, in the sense that the uncertainty principle is not obvious to us from what we have felt.

So, we must make do with abstractions, with fictions, with approximations. Conscious that we are the epitome of the six blind men trying to understand the elephant through touch alone, we try to break our understanding, to search for flaws in our inferences. Yet this does not grant us true experience when we run across, say, the electron. We try to think of it like a billiard ball, but we can say that a billiard ball is this wide, yet we are fairly sure at this time that the electron has no radius, no diameter, that it might as well be a geometric point. Every time we try to measure, we can only establish a smaller and smaller upper bound for the confounded thing's radius. That's not like our lives at all!

The reality of this electron is that if we get it going fast enough, it stops getting much faster no matter how hard we smack it. That's not like our reality. If we try to pin down where it is, the more we do it, the harder it is to figure out how fast and in what direction it moves. And as we work to ascertain the velocity (and therefore momentum), we lose sense of this bit of weirdness' position.

You eventually have to develop an understanding based not on experience at all.

Perhaps this was unique to me, but the first time I understood integration in calculus, I had a brief moment of dizziness as I apprehended this new thing. You know how you are working a math problem and you have a good idea of what the answer is already, a sense of what the magnitude and direction might be? I had ground my way through vector and tensor calculus, and had been working a problem in gravitation and relativity class when I sensed what the resulting tensor would look like, the shape of it, in the sense that I would know if my figures were way off. I nearly fell off the chair, my head spun so.

If you care to, you can do this for a particle.

"Artisan" is covering a great deal of ground.

At a previous job, probably fifteen years ago, we were replacing one bit of niche software (the company was gone, it was unsupported, and it had some very antiquated methods of ingestion, like faxes) with another, mostly similar bit of software. Continuity was desired.

Different philosophies went into structuring the two databases, so it was like lifting a vast set of webs made by social spiders from one tree and placing it on another, just for the data import. I interviewed various people who were in different roles as to how they they used the old system. I checked the databases to see what they did not tell me about how they actually used the system. I scoured over the incoming data feed sources and made robust ingestion processes, validating and correcting and logging. Knowing the vagaries of software vendors, I wrote bits to detect changes made by vendors to the database structure, or at least the portions I cared about, and whine when those occurred. I grokked how the several different roles people had in interactions with the system led to differing needs and desires, incorporating as much of how things "used to work."

The eventual juggernaut which resulted was something of a force of nature, a compilation of my best thoughts on my best days, outperforming me. It would tell you if a new type of data appeared which had not been announced, whom to ask about this data, and where to put it. It functioned for a decade of my oversight, occasionally murmuring that it wanted this or that, but without changes to the code.

That was the artisinal bit to me, that it was carved to fit some very exacting spaces, such that you hardly knew it was present. Yes, it took extra time. Yeah, it was just me. But the fit was tight and the finish was smooth.

(Naturally, some bright spark got a touch of the New Broom Syndrome and blew it and all of the documentation away after I left, I am told that there are continual complaints about the system now. Sadly, with even minimal prompting, the various tiny details arose from memory, prompted by the SMS messages.)

I haven't touched it in years.

I didn't have problems, uh, thinking in parametrics, but lordy was the rendering slow. I might try it again.

Yeah, it sounds like she only regrets the swings she took that didn't land. I am not surprised, she was so often busy cranking the wheels of the Euphemism Treadmill. Anything, I suppose, to distract one from the burden of self-awareness.

I have a checksum, uh, dream for lack of a better word, but I fear I lack the talent to pull it off. The problem with a checksum is that it only tells you that an error exists (hopefully), but it does not tell you where.

Imagine writing out your stream of bytes in a m x n grid. You could then make checksums for each 1 through m columns, and 1 through n rows. This results in an additional storage of (m + n) checksum bytes. A single error is localized as an intersection of the row and column with bad checksums. One could simply iterate through the other two hundred fifty-five possibilities and correct the issue. Two errors could give two situations. The most likely is four bad checksums (two columns, two rows) and you could again iterate. The less likely is three bad checksums because the two errors are in the same row or column.

I ran the math out for the data being rewritten as a volume and a hypervolume (four dimensions). I think the hypervolume was "too much" checksum, but the three-d version looked ... doable.

Someone smarter than I has probably already done this.