sandgiant

Apple TV?

After Evernote went Electron and stripped the context-feature, DevonThink won me over. I use it for its flexibility in indexing, file-like-organization, OCR, encryption and flexible synchronization. Also the devs are very respondant and I like not having to pay for a subscription.

NIST actually recommends allowing users to paste exactly for this reason:

> Verifiers SHOULD permit claimants to use “paste” functionality when entering a memorized secret. This facilitates the use of password managers, which are widely used and in many cases increase the likelihood that users will choose stronger memorized secrets.

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html

I use the "Don't Fuck With Paste" add on for Chrome/Firefox, which mostly works well.

I'm not sure I understand. Something can be causally connected through something other than light. Say gravitational waves. So using "light" in this case would be wrong.

Causality refers to the underlying constraints from the theory (nothing travels faster than the speed of light), this is more general than talking about any particular type of particle/field.

The observable universe is the set of points from which information can reach you. That is not the same as spacetime?

Can you explain briefly what the issues are around brew? I've been a Mac user for the past decade and I still remember the days of macports, so brew still feels like magic to me.

It sounds like you've had a very different PhD experience than I did. Perhaps a difference in fields? My PhD in physics was probably the most humbling experience I've had in my professional life. I went from thinking I knew everything to learning that I knew nothing. To me that's one of the most important parts of a research education, to become aware of what you don't know and be provided tools to try figuring it out.

The most disconcerting part for me was coming back to society, realizing that no one actually knows what's going on most of the time, even when they think they do. I wish more people had the same humbling experience I did (not saying, by the way, that we need more PhD students, just the similar experience).

It's curious why you'd think that the only reason for doing a PhD is to contribute faster. Contribute faster to what? The author says he's having a lot of fun with his PhD because he gets to work on topics that are not immediately tied in with Googles business model.

This is exactly why we need PhD students doing fundamental research, because no one can see the immediate benefit. Because on the surface it has no value at all - so who else would look at it if not curious PhD students with little to no financial incentives.

Constraining possible research breakthroughs to what someone thinks is valuable a-priori, seems very naive and counter productive to me.

This is just a regular journal page. Not surprised they're tracking their users. A better place to link would probably have been the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.02479v1.

ProtonMail has been rock solid for me for several years now. I might have just gotten "lucky", but Gmail has been down more often for me than PM.

While I do look forward to their calendar solution, it's by no means a deal breaker. I've seen too many products driven into the sand by feature bloat. I use PM for email, that's all it needs to do, and it does that very well IMO.

ProtonMail does client side encryption/decryption so there is no way to offer vanilla IMAP endpoints without some sort of client side decryption. This is what ProtonMail Bridge does. Although I'd admit it's not always the most stable experience, depending on your mail client.

The set of natural numbers is also infinite. That doesn't mean you can't learn something by counting from 0 to 10. :)

Good question! As most results in extra galactic astrophysics this one also depends on the cosmological model used. The actual paper linked in the article describes it well:

"The cosmic optical background (COB) is the average flux of visible light photons averaged over the volume of the observable Universe. It reflects, at least in part, an integral over the cosmological history of star formation occurring in recognizable galaxies, proto-galaxies, and star clusters (Conselice et al. 2016), as well as mass accretion by black holes (BHs) associated with the systems." - https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03052v2

A common problem in astronomy is the lack of ways to measure things (we can't travel to the stars, yet). The special thing about this result is that it is a very direct and independent measurement of the background optical light in the Universe. This means it can be used to put independent constraints on the star formation history, as well as black hole accretion, and perhaps things we haven't even thought about yet.

Edit: And all those results are model dependent as everything else.

I wholeheartedly agree.

I think journal editors have a responsibility here too in promoting references to software libraries used in the articles they publish. I almost never see these in my field (astrophysics), even though they are readily available and very easy to include.

Good luck doing business without society.

It may be true, but I wouldn't say it's evidence for most people behaving rationally. That assumes that everyone does a thorough risk assessment before buying any "smart" device for their home. I highly doubt that's the case.

I put the statement "my phone's already compromised" in the same category as "I don't have anything to hide". Those may very well be common natural behaviors, but I wouldn't call them rational exactly.

Very interesting work! Great to see people are still putting effort into alternative theories of gravity.

This is a fantastic article, thanks for sharing! This part really resonated:

Psychiatric research doesn’t support the notion of simple cause and effect in mental health, instead uncovering a far more complex and indeterminate picture of vulnerabilities. There is no evidence to justify the continued promotion of one-dimensional theories such as ‘chemical imbalance’. Nor does the beneficial use of psychiatric medicines require it. In fact, their precise mechanism of action and relation to troublesome experience remains a mystery. It would be more truthful for mental health professionals and public health campaigns to acknowledge this.

I think you're on to something really important here.

Some people (normal people if you will) just don't think too much about things. Even when they sometimes go on to make terrible choices for themselves, and others, they might regret it, they might have negative thoughts about it, but they don't become depressed. They are not inclined to ruminating hours on end about their mistakes, so the negative thoughts dissipate over time, they effectively move on.

But if your personality, or brain, or whatever, is made in such a way that you like to think a lot about what could have been, or could be, or how to behave, or what others think of you, any kind of negative thought you might have will stay around, eventually leading to (symptoms of) depression.

So I think you're right when you say that depression is not what's wrong with you. You might just be one of those people that are good at thinking. Perhaps sometimes a little too good at thinking, a little too sensitive. Being sensitive and good at thinking is not be a bad thing at all, but spending too much time having negative thoughts may be what leads to depression.

If this is the case, realizing that you have a choice, in what to think about, is an important step on improving the quality of life, perhaps even learning to life with, or overcome some of the symptoms of anxiety and depression. Accept the negative thoughts, they are just natural thoughts after all, but choose not to dwell on them, let them pass and move on to the next thought, it might be a positive one.

You may also find some inspiration in metacognitive therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognitive_therapy).

Nice.

You may be able to imagine a body physically identical to yourself not having a consciousness, but you cannot deduce from that, that this is something that can actually happen in our Universe. It may just as well be true that any exact physical copy of a body containing a consciousness is also conscious. In fact, the latter seems like a simpler assumption than the former.

My own take is that we, as biased humans, put too much value on consciousness. I have not seen any evidence that consciousness is nothing more than a convenient way to organize a complex pattern of elementary particles for self preservation. In that sense the discussion of consciousness is an interesting exercise in analogies, and while it may very well put us on a track to better understand everything from quantum mechanics to the mind, it still, to me, has a very anthropic vibe to it.

Nothing much.

I'd have to find a replacement for Google Maps and YouTube, but I guess I could just create a new account for that.

I use ProtonMail and iCloud for email and calendar respectively. DockDuckGo for search, Firefox for rendering web content.

I backup everything to multiple locations/services, so I'm not too worried about loosing access to things in general.

Guess the most annoying thing to loose access to would be Facebook as I have a few contacts on there that I wouldn't immediately know how else to contact, but I'm sure I'd find a way if I really had to.

Yes, mergers were more common at earlier times.

But in fact, even with mergers, it's exceedingly difficult to get supermassive black holes to merge in the first place. Because they are tiny compared to the sizes of the galaxies they inhabit, they have to somehow be pushed close enough that they start orbiting each other and radiate away orbital energy in the form of gravitational waves. Only then can they hope to merge into a single black hole.

It's actually so difficult that one popular explanation for the existence of supermassive black holes is that they are the peaks of the primordial density perturbations that collapsed into supermassive black holes in the very early universe.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_black_hole

This looks like false conclusions from oversimplifying the death ratio above health care saturation.

You can't just change the axis labels because the death ratio depends non-linearly on infection ratio above the threshold.

Are we willing to take the risk when we don't know the consequences?

We've been running FROM python:3.7 in production for months. Works just fine. ;)

Indeed, this is the observation most usually cited in support of the matter / particle interpretation of dark matter. It's very non trivial to come up with a decent theoretical extension to GR that explains it. Which is why, I think, that a lot of people feel more confident proposing a new dark matter particle, which does in fact explain it quite nicely.

Perhaps we're wrong in assuming that all of these observations on very different scales (galaxy rotation curves over galaxy cluster collisions to large scale structure) are tied to the same unknown (dark matter), but if you want to explain them all in a simple way, a particle still seems like the way to go.

Remember that elementary particles have been predicted and found many times over the past years, whereas modified theories of gravity haven't seen the same kind of success. Of course this is only anecdotal, and may not mean anything, but I think it's part of the reason for most people's preference for a particle explanation.

Evernote is still the only accessible note taking solution to offer OCR + related notes search. I've tried moving away from Evernote many times, but I always come back because of this.

Example 1:

1. Snap photo of document on table

2. Seconds later: Open in Evernote and see related documents

Example 2:

1. Take notes on laptop at lecture/meeting

2. Evernote presents photos of slides and handwritten notes about same topic

If it wasn't for Evernote I would never revisit my handwritten notes, ever. And I would have lost countless important receipts, bills, etc. I have tried various open source home made setups but nothing has come close to the portability and ease of use of Evernote. This is why I keep using Evernote to this date.

I just wish they would fix basic issues such as slow, or completely broken, search on mobile, etc. I think if they can strengthen their core product they still have something unique that I think many people would use, and possibly pay for, if they knew about it.

I have PhD in physics. Now working in IT startup team of five coders from various academic backgrounds. Been doing everything from app development to web, admin/ops, some elixir, lots of python. Currently working on a few machine learning projects, collecting data, making features, scaling infrastructure and so on.

Salary is decent, everything is moving a lot faster than at uni. Wouldn't say I miss academia as such, but I definitely miss working on actual fundamental physics problems.

I might go back some day to apply my new knowledge of operational data science. There's definitely a need for updated methods, especially in data heavy fields such as astrophysics.

Edit: To answer your question about what's better outside academia - I'd say for me it's the tighter collaboration with colleagues, better project management, clearer goals, more diverse team (in terms of educational background / role in company), and last but not least job security - I can live where I want, not where the next postdoc happens to be.

Remember "dark matter" is just a placeholder name for a number of observational anomalies. All of which can be accurately explained by introducing a single extra particle that interacts weakly with photons. So what you call "invisible stuff" is not necessarily that outrageous. A lot of new particles have already been proposed for other reasons, and some of them fit the requirements quite well (SUSY, sterile neutrinos etc.).

That said, I believe the main reason that many physicists prefer some kind of dark matter "particle" is that it's extremely difficult to modify general relativity (GR) without breaking the theory. GR provides such accurate predictions that modifying it just the slightest is almost guaranteed to break something somewhere else (e.g. at some other scale), which forces you to introduce nasty (if you ask me) scale dependent effects.

This does not mean that we shouldn't modify GR, it just means that it's very difficult to make it work. And physicists tend to like simple theories that work (for reasons such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor).