the realpolitik is in Corrections

IME:

I’m beginning to suspect Stamets isn’t even a real doctor.

Concerning that researchers are giving their subjects full-strength memes like this and telling them they’re placebos. Hard to believe an IRB cleared this post.

If each over-universe is capable of simulating multiple under-universes, I would think that being toward the fringe is way more likely than being toward the root. Maybe we’re in one of the younger universes where life hasn’t evolved to the point where it’s simulating universes complex enough to generate intelligent life for a hobby. Or maybe others in this universe have and Earth is just a backwater.

I don’t think it’s as simple as the teapot. We can already simulate tiny “universes” with computers that have internally consistent rules, and there’s no reason to think those simulations couldn’t get more sophisticated as we harness more computing power, which I think puts an interesting lens on the “why are we here?” question. I don’t think there’s evidence to believe that we are in a simulation, but I think there are reasons why it’s an interesting question to wrestle with that “What about a giant floating teapot?” doesn’t share.

That’s exactly the sentence that made me pause. I could hook up an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life to a Geiger counter near a radioisotope that randomly flipped squares based on detection events, and I think I’d have a non-algorithmic simulated universe. And I doubt any observer in that universe would be able to construct a coherent theory about why some squares seemingly randomly flip using only their own observations; you’d need to understand the underlying mechanics of the universe’s implementation, how radioactive decay works for one, and those just wouldn’t be available in-universe, the concept itself is inaccessible.

Makes me question the editors if the abstract can get away with that kind of claim. I’ve never heard of the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, maybe they’re just eager for splashy papers.

Ah, so the differing spin (and mass) of the merging black holes they just detected indicate that at least one of them was already a second generation black hole, and is evidence for multi-generation hierarchical mergers. That makes sense.

I’m so puzzled by this insistence that all who analyze religious history must be religious nutcases. Even if you write off all the scholars who are religious, religion still exists as a concept in the world, and in the same way you don’t have to be a virus to study virology, you don’t have to be religious to study religion. There are plenty of atheists who are deeply interested in religion, if for no other reason than the massive impact it has on all our lives.

I went to catholic school, most of the students’ families had at least tuition money. I was one of the “need-based scholarship” kids so my tuition was less, and I had a job so I had some income, which I used mostly for gas to get to and from my job and most of the rest went to tuition. Fines were added to the tuition bill, and if you hadn’t settled up by the beginning of the next year / graduation, you couldn’t re-enroll / graduate.

I guess. In high school I had a job, so I was very careful not to get fined because it would be coming out of my pocket. Still got busted for uniform violations a couple of times but I learned quick how not to get caught. If I didn’t have money I would have had to ask my parents, which in its own way was more costly than just paying it myself.

A poor architect blames their tools. Serverless is an option among many, and it’s good for occasional atomic workloads. And, like many hot new things, it’s built with huge customers in mind and sold to everyone else who wants to be the next huge customer. It’s the architect’s job to determine whether functions are fit for their purposes. Also,

Here’s the fundamental problem with serverless: it forces you into a request-response model that most real applications outgrew years ago.

IDK what they consider a “real” application but plenty of software still operates this way and it works just fine. If you need a lot of background work, or low latency responses, or scheduled tasks or whatever then use something else that suits your needs, it doesn’t all have to be functions all the time.

And if you have a higher-up that got stars in their eyes and mandated a switch to serverless, you have my pity. But if you run a dairy and you switch from cows to horses, don’t blame the horses when you can’t get milk.

I have big plans for those repos and I am definitely going to get around to it 🥹

Aldi Brand. ~$1 a can and I haven’t had a regular Red Bull in long enough that I’m no longer sure if they taste different. They’re pretty similar though.

No, I think that’s pretty messed up as well. The schools I went to had a lot of problems.

A school fining students for swearing is the most believable part of this story to me. I don’t think I ever saw fines for swearing but we had fines for chewing gum, dress code violations etc. I 100% believe a school would implement this exact policy. And I agree it’s pretty fucked up and classist to fine children.

Pretty easy to tell if they use a selfie for their pfp though 🧠

Very cool paper and I don’t want to be the Internet Armchair Astrophysicist, but doesn’t the fact that we’ve already observed a merger show that second-generation black holes are a thing? Or is this evidence that BH mergers (and therefore second-gen BHs) might be more common than we previously thought?

I remember “Covid was a Chinese bioweapon” being popular, alongside “Covid is fake and just an excuse for the government to inject us with 5G microchips”

The first trillion is the hardest I guess.

Sure have. LLMs aren’t intrinsically bad, they’re just overhyped and used to scam people who don’t understand the technology. Not unlike blockchains. But they are quite useful for doing natural language querying of large bodies of text. I’ve been playing around with RAG trying to get a model tuned to a specific corpus (e.g. the complete works of William Shakespeare, or the US Code of Laws) to see if it can answer conceptual questions like “where are all the instances where a character dies offstage?” or “can you list all the times where someone is implicitly or explicitly called a cuckold?” And sure they get stuff wrong but it’s pretty cool that they work as well as they do.