quantadev

Bekenstein-Hawking entropy goes up when an Event Horizon increases in radius. That means some mass "falling onto" an EH. So this implies, if our universe is actually a 3D EH, both time and increasing entropy can be explained by one thing: Increasing size of our EH. That is, mass falling onto our EH from outside our universe. It also happens to elegantly replace the Big Bang nonsense theory with something that makes sense. It explains the universe expansion as well. Assuming our universe is a 3D EH makes lots of things make sense that don't otherwise make sense.

An observable is always the strongest evidence but there's also the improbability of a mathematical coincidence that can serve as almost as strong evidence. For example the fact that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of an Event Horizon comes out to exactly be the surface area divided by plank-length-square units, seems to me almost a proof that nothing really falls into EHs. They only make it to the surface. I'm not saying Holographic Theory is correct, but it's on the right track.

My favorite conjecture is that what happens is things effectively lose a dimension when they reach the EH surface, and become like a "flatlander" (2D) universe, having only two degrees of freedom on the surface. For such a 2D universe their special "orthogonal" dimension they'd experience as "time" is the surface normal vector. Possibly time only moves forward for them when something new "falls in" causing the sphere to expand.

This view of things also implies the Big Bang is wrong, if our universe is a 3D EH. Because if you roll back the clock on an EH back to when it "formed" you don't end up at some distant past singularity; you simply get back to a time where stuff began to clump together from higher dimensions. The universe isn't exploding from a point, it's merely expanding because it itself is a 3D version of what we know as Event Horizons.

Just like a fish can't tell it's in water, we can't tell we're on a 3D EH. But we can see 2D versions of them embedded in our space.

Gravity doesn't interact, other than to simply set the shape of the spacetime in which particles move.

The way I do most of my coding nowadays is by describing (in English) to Claude LLM what I want done, and it just does it, while I sit back and watch it type. It's amazing. You should learn to code!

I don't think RPN is as simple as parenthesis.

All RPN does is replace the easy to get right parenthesis with difficult to get right newline characters.

RSS XML file format could've also been written "before lunch". And yet it changed the world. Sometimes the right "simple thing" at the right time, used in the right way, can change the world.

My favorite example of this is XMLHttpRequest (Ajax). It existed for about 5 years before everyone started using it to create SPAs, which also changed the world forever, so it's always good to see people experiment with different patterns of existing ideas.

The reason I say LISP is close to English is because it's syntax is purely a verb followed by objects, and there's [practically] no other symbols in the language other than parenthesis.

Since the word "best" always gets everyone's dander up on HN, I was very careful to point out we have to define our metrics (of comparison) before we can use that word, and that's precisely what I did.

I wouldn't exactly call APL simpler than LISP. Just because there are some things in APL that _can_ be coded with less characters doesn't make it overall simpler or even more compact in the general case. It's just axiomatic that for a language you need the ability to define and call functions, and it's just a debate about whether there's a simpler syntax than LISP or not, and I say there isn't.

The point about `(+ 1 2)` v.s. `1+2` is about the fact that the LISP syntax generalizes to all computations, whereas mathematical expressions do not. The beauty of LISP is that one simple syntax solves everything about computation in the axiomatically simplest way possible.

* I use "English Language" as a synonym for "Human Language". However even if you want to be pedantic and interpret all my words in the literal sense, everything I said is still literally true.

* I never said LISP format was widely understood.

English Language is the best general purpose conveyance of arbitrary ideas, and it has syntax rules just like programming languages. It's "best" by the metric of being "easiest for humans to understand". That's what I mean by best, in this case.

I think one can argue that LISP is the "best" computer programming language based on a set of metrics that revolve around simplicity and composability. There's no simpler language. There simply cannot be, because there's nothing "extra" in LISP. It's the most compact (while still being human readable) way to define and/or call functions.

You can also argue that LISP is closer to English than any other programming language, because in English we use parenthesis's and lists to enumerate things related to what has been said. For example "(add, 1, 2)" is axiomatically the best way to express adding two numbers, in a way that scales to arbitrary numbers of operations. It's superior to "(1+2)" because the plus sign is a single character (cannot scale), and therefore there are a limited number of them, and using symbols means humans have to memorize them rather than simply reading their name. But "add" is a name one can read. Also "add one and two" is a valid English sentence, so all LISP programs are similarly valid English language expressions, where the parenthesis is merely used for grouping language "clauses".

If the world were ever to be forced to agree on one single high level programming language, it would necessarily need to be LISP for about 10 other huge reasons I could name: Everything from ease of writing parsers, to compression of code, simplicity, ease for learning, even as a young child, etc.

I've been realizing lately that we're already to the point where LLMs can basically take written English language and create the computer code it's describing. I think in the future perhaps most (and eventually all) software can be written basically the way we write method/function documentation today. You describe a function, give it a name, describe it's inputs/output arguments. And with enough specificity there will be a [perfect] function that can be written (multiple of course actually) which accomplishes what's described. So we can create entire applications this way. I guess this is already being called no-code or low-code systems, but I think perhaps as a universal language where instructions MUST be given, perhaps LISP is indeed the best because anyone can learn the syntax in basically a couple of minutes.

I can't see how, in 100 years (or maybe even just 50) humans will still need more than ONE computer programming language. Or at the most two. We might always need C++ to exist for low level stuff, but we only need ONE higher level language.

I just saw the click-bait garbage headline, and from that alone I knew it was a lie, so I never even clicked it to read any articles.

People are intimidated by large tasks because they're thinking about the entire task all at once. This blog post points out the key element which is that you have to think about small easy tasks instead. Once you move your focus to small easy sub-tasks, it becomes much easier to start doing them because it's not hard.

The truth of the matter (especially with ADHD or HFA people) is that once you even start doing a small sub-task, you then quickly become addicted to or motivated to getting more and more of it done, and before you know it, you've gotten many sub-tasks done or even accomplished a large task you'd been procrastinating about.

I always knew this story was fake. Even if you have a trillion expert developers it would still be impossible to get fast enough answers to "Fake an LLM". Humans obviously aren't _parallelizable_ like that.

There's a specific frequency of brain waves which are always correlated with wakeful consciousness. I never looked up whether 'binaural' stuff is normal in that same freq range or the lower ranges. The lower freq ranges are still present even during unconsciousness (or anesthesia), and so focusing the brain on those frequencies would either 1) help concentration or 2) help sleep? I'm not sure which.

The important discovery is not that sensory experiences correlate strongly with specific areas of the brain. That's been known for decades. What I think is possibly new here is that the musical waves are genuinely getting "in sync" (temporally). Neuron firing is too slow for this to happen due to the normal conventional interpretation of how the brain works, which is that info travels from synapse to synapse. It essentially disproves the "calculational" (synapse based) model of consciousness, and it proves that even qualia itself is based on waves.

Sure it's possible that something akin to simple harmonic oscillator spontaneous synchronization could be happening (i.e. this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RYeNu159Sgc) but even if this 'dumb' sync is playing a role it still isn't evidence against the wave-based nature of qualia.

This is also direct evidence that qualia/consciousness is made of waves, not computations. The Neural Net "wiring" of the human brain is mostly I/O signal routing for various sensory input data and motor neuron output. The convolutions and special 3D shapes in the brain are actually working more like "resonator" circuits (literally like radios), and I'm convinced even memory is not stored "locally" but spread out across all past brains via entanglement and quantum waves (see. "Block Universe" and/or "Eternalism").

This viewpoint means when you remember something from the past that's actually a quantum wave effect where your current brain automatically "finds" and gets energy from the closest matching prior state. This would be like a opera singer singing a pitch to find a hidden wine glass that will resonate at that frequency. This lookup/retrieval mechanism requires no wires or direct contact, but only waves. However I think qualia is built of 'probability waves' and that's how they manage to travel faster than light to go out and find "matching memories", because probability waves are not "real" (no mass) and therefore not subject to the speed of light limitations.

A large amount of pharmaceutical ingredients come out of China, and are safely used in American drugs approved, inspected, and tested [hopefully] by FDA. For those supply chains that are supposedly well regulated there's less risk than just purchasing from some unknown/untrusted entity that also happens to be in China, who might have put in all kinds of impurities or even poisons either by accident or on purpose.

Consciousness is essentially made of brain waves, and it's the 3D positions of the EM fields which is at the core of it. So it makes sense that jiggling around brain matter to where it is in frequencies that resonate with the same frequencies building consciousness then we can alter conscious state.

It was recently discovered that when listening to music your brain waves sync up to the same frequencies, which I had predicted for a long time. This means the "computational model" (i.e. synapses and neural nets) theory of consciousness is mostly wrong.

You mean why would it be risky to ingest substances into your body from an untrusted source? I think that question answers itself.

On a related note: I've been predicting that if things ever get bad between USA and China, models like DeepSeek are going to be able to somehow detect that fact and then weaponize tool calling in all kinds of creative ways we can't predict in advance.

No one can reverse-engineer model weights, so there's no way to know if DeepSeek has been hypnotized in this way or not. China puts Trojan horses in everything they can, so it would be insane to assume they haven't thought of horsing around with DeepSeek.

I think for every platform you could name there will be a certain sub-culture of people boycotting it for one reason or another. Sometimes it's about politics, sometimes about censorship, etc.

I do it myself too. I boycotted StackOverflow for the past 13 years, never sharing another solution with anyone because the admins on that site were hounding me about posting CORRECT answers without first checking to see if a similar answer already existed. I vowed never to help anyone on there ever again, after that. I told them, even back then, that the more correct info they collect for free, the better, because some day AI would sifting thru it, and that they were being stupid. As of 2025, I was finally proven right.

Thanks for the links! Yeah, I'm on X as my primary news source for tech, but I mainly only follow AI-related people and orgs. I should search for WebRTC.

Where's the best place that people are talking about WebRTC then? Hacker News doesn't have rooms by topic does it?

Public Service Announcement: There's a reddit topic for WebRTC, that doesn't get enough action imo! Get in there ya'll...

https://www.reddit.com/r/WebRTC

Right, there's kinetic energy in a system, and potential energy. For example the total energy that can be released from a moon in orbit is it's 1) kinetic energy of motion plus 2) potential energy, available thru the gravitational fields. If something with rotational energy shrinks it's rotational speed necessarily speeds up (energy conservation), and that can cause friction, resulting in heat. Any energy that isn't radiated away gets converted to heat ultimately yes. (this all omits nuclear reactions too!)

Objectives can come into conflict. For example, if you have two employees who simply cannot work together, and you have no other team to move one of them to, you fire the guy who's less productive, because your primary objective is getting the job done. But if the lead guy is more of a troublemaker you fire him instead, but only if net benefit to "productivity" is positive. This is why managers cannot be "friends" with co-workers, because sometimes you have to let somebody go, and you'd never do that to a friend.

Yep, I forgot to consider the tidal forces, but that generates heat for sure.

I just mean there's probably plenty of companies where there's a lot of unhappiness and with a boss who doesn't even care as long as they produce. Infamously this is how Steve Jobs supposedly managed. He was a very hard person to work for lots of the time but he produced results.

Ultimately everyone in management _should_ have their _loyalty_ to their boss, rather than to their subordinates, and different management styles can work. Of course it depends on the employees too. I've never tolerated even one slight bit of disrespect from a boss personally, even as a junior dev. If someone ever treated me badly I resigned immediately without even having the next job lined up, on pure principle. I would've lasted probably about one day working for Jobs, before quitting I bet! lol.