woopsn

Probably impossible to separate Le Pen's disqualification from the situation in the U.S. It's the song of the day. I seem to recall some account arguing in 2020, nominally on their expertise as a lawyer, that the election result could not be determined except in the courtroom. If you asked in 2020, should lawyers be disgraced if not disbarred for attempting to nullify the election - answer from GOP would be no. When asked today, suddenly answer is yes.

I don't believe you, in the sense that I am certain you are lying and do not support both rifle and straw bans etc as well as arbitrary rendition of people to a third world prison. John Yoo had a theory in any case, skewed and kept secret as it was -- what's weird about MAGA's "law" is it's pure shitposting all the way into the courtroom. They don't even care when they're disbarred.

Is the fact of it being legally cumbersome to acquire a machine gun the best support you can give to this idea of sending perps to El Salvador, "for what they are doing [property damage] to Elon Musk and Tesla"?

You don't know what you're talking about. People are fired when they can't add enough value to justify being employed. Sweeping industry-wide layoffs are different. Eg the "damage was done" to the aviation industry in 2001 due to plummeting demand, due (obviously) to new fears and hassle inhibiting travel; the damage currently being done to companies in the economy is from interest rates, inflation, trade uncertainty, stock manipulation, ...

I went to a University of California school which had 3 calculus tracks - one for life/social sciences students (eg biology, econ), one for physical sciences (chemistry, physics, math, ...), and an honors track.

High school went up through what we call Algebra II. Calculus is an Advanced Placement (AP) course that most students don't take.

I took physical sciences calc + multivariate calc (1 year including summer), an intro to proofs and set theory course, and then finally a rigorous construction of reals was taught in our upper division real analysis course. So somewhere in my second year as a math major. Though I had already researched the constructions myself out of curiosity.

Apart from the material being extraneous for anyone outside the major, I think they were in a sense trying to be more rigorous by first requiring set theory which included constructions of the integer and rational number systems.

That's fair. Hardy himself was a zealot and in fact despised applications, writing that he hoped his work would never be put to extrinsic use, for then its value would become contingent on a particular stage of technological development.

I don't want to come across as harsh because the idea is neat and I'm sure creating this helped the author through their own study/understanding of the subject. But if you want to learn it would be better to study a textbook written by a mathematician.

The preamble already contains multiple errors (conflation of general and special relativity, assertion that category theory formalizes the common diagram, assertion that mathematical reasoning underwrites thought itself, assertion physical models are unnecessary/curve fitting is all you need ...)

The intro reminds me that V.I. Arnold once accused his algebraist colleagues (quite unfairly), especially in France, were primarily driven by their inferiority complex with respect to the hard sciences. The book would be much better if it didn't begin in this manner. It's valid to study mathematics (or anything of beauty, anything indispensable) for its own sake, of course.

What they claim to want to create is a for-profit organization that replaces "most economically valuable work".

Putting aside the enormous capital, technical and energetic hurdles - where would the profits come from?

Sam's idea seems to be that governments will have to give people basic income, but he is not really an ally to the UBI movement, because in his vision mainly what needs to be bought is access to OpenAI's computer systems.

To be honest it is the onus of the venture capital class to prove they are not grifters. Talk is extremely cheap compared to the resources at their disposal. And to be fair most of them do not even claim to be altruists.

The notion of mathematics as "the art and science of effective reasoning" is grandiose and blatantly wrong, both in the sense eg no mathematics is performed when an animal correctly flees from a fire, and also that this definition would exclude computer science from mathematics when his whole point is to incorporate it (for almost all formal systems are unreasonable).

Math and computer science at their core are more it less the same. Both are concerned with manipulating "digital" equipment that is assumed to respond predictably. Equipment is a prerequisite even for pure mathematics - it is interesting in this case because it is the mathematician themself, who agrees to act that way and respond predictably.

Physics is implicated in this in that it forms the basis of that agreement. Certainly it did historically. In the 20th century serious attempts were made to justify it on the basis of notions like consistency and completeness; the failure of that project is not yet fully absorbed. To be fair, the results are devastating because they can only really be understood by students after they have invested greatly in mathematics with the idea that all but a few "facts" derive from reason - when in fact almost none of them do.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (best of the grandiose classics imo)

Deep Impact (the only good asteroid movie?)

Jurassic Park + Independence Day (peak Goldblum)

Total Recall + A Scanner Darkly (best Philip K Dick adaptation)

Gravity (great visuals / perseverance story)

Realistically the alternative is that they remain a kind of sham non-profit. I don't like the company, their mission and leadership creep me out - but all things considered it would be a good thing for them to lose the 503c designation, no?

Their CEO and board are... extremely unreliable narrators, to put it lightly.

They just raised over $6b at a $157b valuation. The total amount of capital invested to date is astonishing. The fact is that their corporate structure is not really a hindrance - 18 billion should be enough to start "an enduring company", in the sense that it won't disappear next year.

The idea that they need to be a corporation to succeed seems like just another story to sell. It's unlikely they'll get out of this hole.

How does this not break the foundations of quantum theory? For example the Heisenberg uncertainty principle itself implies that the conjugate of a discrete variable must have a continuous spectrum. Thus if there are no continuous variables, there can be no discrete ones either. Either this or we need to throw out one of the variables and call it non-physical/observable -- and yet it very much seems like both position and momentum are things.

Ilya Prigogine wrote a lot about this, see eg Order Out of Chaos. He won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on nonequilibrium thermodynamics.

Boltzmann had originally tried to prove that the second law is a mechanical (statistical) fact and several others tried as well. But Poincaré showed that those systems which, regardless of their initial state, inevitably increase entropy later on inevitably reduce it (his recurrence theorem). There are also in fact reversible processes in nature, so it can't be that mechanics alone implies the procession of time. Something more involved is going on.

Carlo Rovelli has also written a lot about the "thermal time" concept in his books.

My takeaway from them is that you can't really get time out of mechanics by itself (statistical or otherwise). In the same way that you can't get baryon asymmetry. It is intrinsically a selection principle on initial conditions.

A system in which information is communicated instantly will quickly reach equilibrium, after which there is nothing left for any part to communicate to another. Eg diffusion of heat eventually results in a temperature distribution in which there is no longer a flow of heat.

But we go to sleep, into deep anaesthesia, and to lesser degrees can lose or have degraded our various senses and cognitive capabilities - doesn't this show that the "thresholds" exist, evidently? Drink a bottle of vodka and you will slowly, and then completely, "lose consciousness". The issue folks have with the idea rocks are cognizant is that we can't see any reason to suppose that they are.

Optimistic reality means spreading cellular life, not the great ape in particular. People by and large are uninterested in this, they feel it is pointless if not somehow immoral. Our "weakness" is not in the flesh but our attachment to it, specifically, these would-be galaxy childs' personal flesh. The 20-50 year mission duration is not a cure for the nihilism but another expression of it.

Contrast to "only with mathematics can the scientist say precisely as little as they mean to say." (Bertrand Russell)

With FPGAs I can sample a hundred high precision ADCs in parallel and feed them through DSP, process 10Gb ethernet at line rate, etc with deterministic outcomes (necessary given safety and regulatory considerations). They integrate well with CPUs and other coprocessors - heterogeny isn't wrong. Plus training a NN model also takes days! To be fair not always, but for the above applications my build time was hours to many-hours anyway.

I grant the hardware is absurdly expensive at the high end, but I really don't think application wise the comparison is apples to apples.

Hotzs saying literally everything with an io pin or actuator will be driven solely by NN (driven by tinygrad) seems to me maybe 1/3 self promotion, 1/3 mania, some much smaller amount incisive at best.

What can we see? Vapor trails, patterns burned into a plate, etc. The evidence of some "thing" slowing down, perhaps, but really the environment that slowed it down necessarily changing irreversibly. Irreversible effects cannot be arbitrarily small (apparently). We never see a particle, only effects such as these -- if we did see anything else, well, we couldn't possibly remember. Particles are an attempt to explain/theorize evidence that is fundamentally observational.

It's not new, cf "media culture"

"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which they communicate than by the content of the communication."

"Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of "time" and "space" and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men."

"In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained-ignored. Too many people know too much about each other."

"We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. . . Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. The world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition."

The phase change has already been in full swing for 50+ years. From The Medium Is The Massage, 1967.

The referenced "researcher/guru" Sidney Dekker wrote a whole book titled Drift Into Failure. "Accidents come from relationships, not broken parts."

"Safety may not at all be the result of decisions that were or were not made, but rather an underlying stochastic variation that hinges on a host of other factors, many not easily within the control of those who engage in fine-tuning processes. Empirical success, in other words, is no proof of safety. Past success does not guarantee future safety. Murphy's law is wrong: everything that can go wrong usually goes right, and then we draw the wrong conclusion."

"Why, in hindsight, do all all these other parts (in the regulations, the manufacturer, the airline, the maintenance facility, the technician, the pilots) appear suddenly "broken" now? How is it that a maintenance program which, in concert with other programs like it never revealed any fatigue failures or fatigue damage after 95 million flight hours, suddenly became "deficient"? Why did none of these deficiencies strike anybody as deficiencies at the time?"

The central idea is not to (stop at) discovering what mistakes were made, but to understand why they didn't seem like mistakes to the individuals making them, and what suppressed the influence of anyone who might have warned otherwise.

Hey thanks for your thoughtful response.

In terms of what we may/not be missing out on, I say that because it seems few of the possibilities remaining after a century of investigation (many worlds, relational/information based approaches, etc) contain any new physics or scientific insight.

Eg if we could somehow tell that MW or pilot wave theory is "correct", we would still have nothing to do but shut up and calculate the same things, no?

If unitary evolution continues in some sense, we would still need to throw factors away in order for the theory to remain predictive to us.

Particles are only observed to be in a single place at a single time. My understanding is that it may be that we lose the perspective necessary to see them elsewhere, since we are embedded in the same eigenstate (or something close to it). But the task of science is confined to observables. I question, what are the scientific questions that collapse postulate holds back from being solved?

If I recall there was nothing ontological about the actual Copenhagen group's interpretation. They aimed to develop a predictive theory and nothing more. One of their key insights was that ontology simply doesn't play a role anymore. This led quickly to the discovery of QM, while ~100 years of fussing over the "reality" of the wave function has led to nothing.

The "Copenhagen interpretation" as we understand it, in which some thing "collapses" when measured, trades under the same name but was invented later. As a result the original interpretations of Bohr/Heisenberg and their philosophy of science have somewhat exited the discussion, even though they had the only defensible epistemology -- the rest as you say is just ontology.

What is deficient about the original explanation that the wave function is not real but rather a scientific theory? The issue has been unresolved for about a century now, it's relatively unsatisfying but hasn't held the science back in any way.

What more is there to say than philosophy, the social sciences, life sciences, computer science and mathematics, education and journalism schools have said about this already. Modern media culture has been well characterized since the 60s - "we are back in the acoustic space of tribal pre-literate society".

Was V.I. Arnold wrong when he said everything a student needs to know about determinants is derived from geometric considerations? It seems true to me that, outside of advanced study linear or abstract algebra, this is the one perspective which can at least dispel the magic.

Google seemed to think the many billions of dollars spent annually to insert Google into other products was necessary in order to maintain dominance in the search market. This wasn't disputed right? I doubt they are relieved now that Bing, OpenAI and others have charismatic products that appear to threaten their core competency right as the business is declared a monopoly.

They spent billions of dollars putting their product into other products by default, and meanwhile conglomerate interests make it a worse product every year, while they do in fact maintain a monopoly.

You're right, I misinterpreted. I don't know what they get out of calling the space non-Riemannian if not to say the inner product fails. Good idea, ignoring that term.

That's an interesting related thought that is not quite the same as the paper. They claim that what we perceive as "color similarity" is not a metric at all. That would be required in order to define arclength and geodesy.

I agree with others that it is not surprising and is a technicality. If you put that aside then the situation is much closer to your intuition.