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Not to worry. I will not comment anymore. Please delete my account.

True. That's why we probably need another mechanism for incentivizing high-risk/high-reward/multi-decennial research. Perhaps, even if LK99 is not real, something interesting will mutate out of it: some kind of platform merging arXiv, Twitch, Patreon, making the researchers to be more transparent, more willing to share partial results, failures, and even be rewarded to fail. Some time ago had this "fail database" in mind, where one would upload all the data of the experiments that didn't work. I see there is a "FailCon" [1].

[1] http://thefailcon.com/about.html

Sure, it doesn't spread down to 1901, but the uptick started around 1970s [1].

Anyway, my main rant was about the inefficiency of giving awards to "lone geniuses", at most three, of expecting said "lone wolves" to exist in the first place, and then comes the discussion if the wolves are male or not. Unfortunately it got derailed into talking about pseudoscientific scalars such as IQ and sex binaries.

[1] "large scale changes began around the 1970s", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_STEM_fields

"In no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons." [1]

Sad state of affairs to expect a reward for brilliance and to have science bottlenecked by a merchant of death. Just the fact that the merchant of death gives "peace prizes" should have made the entire affair laughable a long time ago. Perhaps it's time to move on from this ancient and limited understanding of appraisal, awards.

I'm in no position to ever receive a Nobel prize, but I'm fairly certain I am moral enough to reject such a grandstanding award coming from such a troubled tradition. Yes, I just virtue-signalled calling immoral every recipient of the Nobel Prize, mostly out of sheer distaste for the ceremony, but also thinking of the terrible inefficiency which has plagued science and research in the last 122 years. How many discoveries were missed because following the course to unveil them was not "Nobel-worthy". How many scientists had their careers ruined for pursuing the Nobel award without being granted anything. Just the fact that only 1.8% of the Nobel Prize in Physics were awarded to women [2] shows the entire thing as the charade it is, no other context needed.

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/frequently-asked-questions/#:~:te...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_Nobel_laureates

Interestingly enough, penny pushing also destroys capitalism, see The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy [1].

[1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Man-Who-Broke-Cap...

Regardless if LK-99 is truly a Room-Temperature Superconductor or not, only 112 years passed since Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity on April 8, 1911, 4 PM [1] [2]: resistance not futile, but "practically zero". The first loaf of sliced bread was sold commercially on July 7, 1928 [3]. The rate of progress is astonishing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heike_Kamerlingh_Onnes#Superco...

[2] 2010, "The discovery of superconductivity", https://www.ilorentz.org/history/cold/DelftKes_HKO_PT.pdf

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

There is no use in synthesizing (C6H6O·CH2O)n [1] (or LK-99, to be actual, real or not) that is not cost effective.

It's precisely this penny pusher rhetoric which in the end will make China win, deservedly so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite

Economic limits are imaginary, secondhand effects of the ideological goggles one's society decides to wear at a certain time for arbitrary reasons. USA during the Manhattan Project knew of no economic limits, i.e. they could arbitrarily push them according to the greater goal; China today, for instance, knows no economic limits. But yes, today, in the "Western" world a speech such as "we choose to get 160 zetaflops (10^21) [1] under your desk in 10 years because it is hard" [2] would be unimaginable, also because you can count on the fingers of an amputated arm how many politicians know what a FLOP is.

[1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/04/26/a-per...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon

We are ridiculously far from physical limits in our current artificial computers (both theoretical [1], and practical [2]). For more technical details see Jim Keller: [3] [4] [5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation

[2] The ~12 watts computer inside each living human adult skull (and perhaps each eukaryote cell [6]) is still the state-of-the-art, for quite some time.

[3] 2021, Jim Keller: The Secret to Moore's Law, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x17jIKQf9hE

[4] 2019, Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc

[5] 2023, Change w/ Jim Keller, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzgyksS5pX8

[6] Our computers aren't yet able of polycomputation, where the computation topology, data, and functions depend on the observer, instead of computation in a passive implementation, once done forever set in s̶t̶o̶n̶e̶ silicon, 2023, Michael Levin, Agency, Attractors, & Observer-Dependent Computation in Biology & Beyond, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whZRH7IGAq0

"I am the publisher now."

Until a synthetic agent will be here we can only guess. The current best guesses seem to have to do with the free energy principle, active inference, Markov blankets [1]. It might be just that simple: it's what happens when some proton gradient reduces ferredoxin [2]. Also related [3].

[1] On-going series of lectures, "Physics as Information Processing" - Chris Fields

Lecture 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpOrRw4EhTo

Lecture 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkWIqpxWRM4

Lecture 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZp_XNYijQ

[2] "How does chemistry come alive?" - Nick Lane, Alkaline hydrothermal vents at 18:44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmvS7tgvy6U TL;DW at 52:00 "How does chemistry come alive? It happens when a focused, sustained environmental disequilibrium of H2, CO2, and pH across a porous structure that lowers kinetic barriers to reaction continuously forms organics that bind and self-organize into protocells with protometabolism generating catalytic nucleotides which promote protocell growth through positive feedbacks, favouring physical interactions with amino acids, a nascent genetic code where RNA sequences are selected if they promote protocell growth so genetic information has meaning from the beginning"

[3] "Origins of the RNA-Protein World – Lost in Translation?" - John Sutherland, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSjIDStlZg8

Just avoiding the inevitable I suppose: June 22, 2023, "Ford agrees to $9.2 billion US government loan" [1].

That's the joke in the end: there are no companies (and there is no government), just a bunch of chaebols [2], at least South Koreans don't lie to themselves.

[1] "Ford previously took out a $5.9 billion loan under the program in 2009. That loan was fully repaid as of last year (2022), according to the DoE. [3]", https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/22/business/ford-department-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

[3] https://www.energy.gov/lpo/ford

Can I, just a random citizen, get a loan from the government for not even billions or hundreds of millions but let's say $100,000? I will of course repay "in due course, at the appropriate juncture, in the fullness of time" [1], at 0% interest.

There is nothing loan-like in government "loans" (of 2008, or of 2021, see the PPP heist [2]) almost by definition: no interest, no shares changing hands, not even a share buyback restriction (how most of the government loans are spent anyway).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYEUXlYcSI

[2] "How Did PPP Scammers Steal $100+ Billion", https://www.aura.com/learn/ppp-loan-fraud

It's in the first paragraph of the linked article [1]. They were called "loans" in the government-speak of the post-2008 crash, but if you look at the semantics, they were just risk-free bailouts.

[1] "the U.S. Secretary of Energy will be giving details about the first loans to come out of the government’s $25 billion program to help auto manufacturers. Ford got a $5.9 billion loan, but Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley’s electric car manufacturer, is receiving $465 million from the program"

An "everything app" is just an operating system. There is nothing to picture, we've been having them since the 1950s [1].

We could imagine some new way of operating over systems: for instance the Alan Kay original meaning of object-orientedness [2], or instead of a compiled binary to have some stable diffusion model + large language model which hallucinates the OS on the go [3].

But that's not what the quantifiably greediest person on the planet has in mind, by "everything app" they just mean "everything must be controlled by me, not by you".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_operating_systems

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjJaFG63Hlo

[3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/opena...

Not lucky, subsidized [1].

[1] Company with $15 million revenue in 2008 gets $465 million "loan" in 2009, https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-throu... https://www.statista.com/statistics/272120/revenue-of-tesla Of course, Ford got $5.9 billion bailout, because capitalism is the lie profiteers tell to the wage slaves as they privatize profits while socializing losses.

Not quite. Corruption is the side-effect of interpersonal relationships. Once the cluster of the organization's/society's leaders are random, and with a sufficiently aggressive random culling function, there is no ground anymore for fostering interpersonal relationships. Take it one step further and replace judges, prosecutors, lawyers in the same manner with a random retribution function. Now you have a third level of metastable phase control just through randomness.

The current bar is so low, so artificially kept low (just on one dimension, around 800 millions of people are starving [1] while around 1 billion are obese [2]), almost anything would be an improvement, especially dispersing power through randomness.

[1] https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/the-hunger-crisis/world-...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/obesity

Watched 1978, Blue Collar [1] recently, given also the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, and was thinking on the forced master-slave dialectic [2] between the union representative and the worker, the proliferation of middle-management, the micro-dictatorship of the foreperson, and how to solve this vicious cycle. As for the democratic societies at large, the only long-term viable solution seems to be sortition [3]: don't elect leaders, union reps, forepersons based on perceived or real qualities, instead randomly select and also, perhaps more important, randomly cull; both random moment in time and random individual.

If I have one sociological curiosity is this: how much better (in pure KPIs) an organization/society would be if its leaders would be randomly cut from power, sine ira, studio, vel ratio [4]. Given a wide and deep enough structure of power, the individual good (in an extra-moral sense) has a diminishing impact, while the individual bad gets only amplified as power increases. The meta-principles of the structure ought to control this asymmetry and random selection/culling seems, weirdly enough, the most fair, perhaps even the most efficient.

[1] "Three workers try to steal from the local union, they instead discover corruption and decide to use this information for blackmail", https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077248

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%E2%80%93bondsman_dialecti...

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

[4] "without hatred, partiality, or reasoning", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_ira_et_studio

There was a trend in the paper blogs, the diaries of 1930s [1], probably when they were at peak, of authors whining about authorship, perhaps due to an esprit du mal of the epoch: to whom does one write for? And the answers were usually, (i) one writes for the others of today to obtain worldly benefits, which is gauche in the eyes of the diary writer, (ii) one writes for the others of tomorrow, which is somewhat more acceptable, (iii) one writes for oneself, which is the pure form of the art.

However, a fourth option appears today: one writes for the language models. The language models will always care about your blog.

[1] Julien Green is probably the most famous for his Diary, 1919–1998 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Green

"I suggested we use a strong cloth tape to close seams, and make tab of same. It worked fine, I showed it to different government inspectors they said it was all right, but I could never get them to change tape." Vesta Stoudt to President Roosevelt, February 10, 1943 [1]. History is full of "never get them to change" stories, probably one of the more famous is Napoleon's dismissal of the steam engine, although the story is a bit more complicated, "Fulton (and his design) failed at the worst possible time" [2]. As we found out recently, submarines are hard.

And on a completely unrelated note, one of the greater stories of quasi-forgotten sacrifice of a mother for her son is the story of a woman in 1850s travelling around 2,000 kilometres by foot, by horse, by any means to get her son enrolled into university, dying shortly after: her name was Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, her son's name was Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev [3], that Mendeleev.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_Stoudt

[2] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/13154

[3] https://chemaust.raci.org.au/article/julyaugust-2019/mother%...

Curiously enough, not really, from the post:

    Excuse me, is it "duct" or "duck" tape?
    I mean sure, "duct tape" and "duck tape" are both fine. "Duct tape" is the more common name today. The older name is "duck tape" after the duck cloth under the adhesive.

    As an aside: If you care about such things, make sure to read up on how today's common version became popular. A 51-year-old woman named Vesta Stoudt, mother of 8, mailed her idea for a better ammunition box seal to the president (who approved production) after her bosses didn't do anything with the suggestion.

Again, haven't brought up nihilism or cynicism.

Incidentally, just to give you some more to rummage about, staying away from the voting booth seems like the best thing to do and civic engagement is indeed worthless. Unless you are able to say and vote "No", effectively banning all the "sides" from political action, forcing new sides to emerge. No people will ever be free, representational democracy or not, if they can't even say "No". Not being able to say "No" is also the root of the cynicism.

Not sure where you picked nihilism in my reply, referencing the "we live in a society" meme I actually smiled. Nevertheless, stopping the pretence today, painful as it is, realizing the state of the world is far from perfect, is the first step for a better tomorrow.

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Hope at least you are getting paid and you don't deploy such ridiculous amounts of bad faith for free.

My reply from above "Most of them already don't get paid, hence the strike" was specifically in the context of the streaming platforms not paying residuals in the same manner the studios do, hence the reference to the article.

What I find most funny is that you don't even know or care about alternative solutions, you just assume the copyright laws is for the best in the best of all possible worlds [1] and anything else would be chaos.

[1] Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide

If it's genuinely news to you that exploitation is a normal day-to-day part of any industry, perhaps these pointless replies should end here.

Yes, writers have been working for free [1].

[1] "In October 2015, Wil Wheaton created a stir when he declared that he had turned down an offer to write for the Huffington Post. He refused, according to him, because they had declined to pay for his work, in keeping with their policy of reimbursing writers with "exposure" in lieu of payment." https://www.vox.com/2016/2/26/11106006/writing-for-free Guess what writers who aren't famous have to do? Work for free, for "exposure".

I'm not quite sure why you are not understanding that with the streaming model of business the writers, and even the actors, no longer get residuals, here is another article [1]: yes, they get paid nothing.

I am advocating for the abolishment of copyright laws, not for not being rewarded for one's work.

[1] Euphoria actress Sydney Sweeney revealed in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter that "They don’t pay actors like they used to, and with streamers, you no longer get residuals.", https://nofilmschool.com/streaming-services-residuals

"there is no evidence"

As quoted above, "Ithaka's total revenue was $105 million in 2019, most of it ($79 million) from JSTOR service fees". All those $79 million and more JSTOR has stolen from the authors. Although JSTOR should have been dissolved long before this for effectively killing Aaron Swartz. But yes, there is no justice in this world. I suppose that's my main contention, why pretend anymore, we live in a society, yada yada.

From what I understand they are not getting paid since the paradigm changed: "the way it's changed is most of these streaming services focus on a metric called ARPU, which is the average revenue per user", "the main difference is it used to be that the incentives were linked. So the writers and the studios were trying to get people to watch the show and get high ratings and get people to pay attention to the show. Today, the streamer is trying to get people to subscribe to their service, so they're looking more at the aggregate of the service versus the individual show." [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/05/03/1173612099/why-writers-are-ha...

Most of them already don't get paid, hence the strike [1].

[1] "Writers say they want a living wage as streaming devalues their work even as it demands more of their time.", https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/writers-strike-2023-...