Barak A. Pearlmutter

@JoeKreeg @YeahThatsKosher @WholeFoods not the wine

@YeahThatsKosher @WholeFoods Well, all that kosher stuff IS hallal.

When you have no Jews or Muslims on staff at @WholeFoods

@Michaeach3 @TrinityMustache Hey look on the bright side. At least we don't have to hear public figures pompously declare "there's no room for antisemitism in New York City" anymore.

This is absolutely insane! Rama Duwaji was already exposed for celebrating October 7th, denying atrocities against women, and providing artwork for an author who called the massacre "spectacular." Now we find out she praised Palestinian terrorists social media. She also used the N-word. How is this acceptable for the family of the Mayor of New York City? Never again.

@gra_dEirinn There has been strong private security at synagogues in Ireland for decades, although no doubt it's gotten even tighter lately.

It's jarring to drive past a synagogue with visible Gardaí patrols and private security. A sad reflection that our tiny Jewish community, with deep Irish roots, now requires this level of vigilance just to gather for prayer.

@mrcmetveelcfrs @Rainmaker1973

@Rainmaker1973 I can see where this is going. Soon we will al be living in those pods. They will be interconnectable and we'll all be issued one starter pod, a kitchen/bathroom pod which you have to give back when you start to live together and when you get children you get issued a new pod.

Germany tried to tackle homelessness with compassion and technology combined. Engineers created solar-powered sleeping pods — known as Ulmer Nests — to offer warmth, safety, and dignity to those living on the streets during cold winters. Each capsule is weatherproof, wind-resistant, and insulated. Solar panels charge internal batteries that power heating systems, ventilation, and sensors to ensure proper airflow. The pods automatically alert volunteers when someone enters, ensuring people inside receive social or medical help if needed. Made from wood and steel, these capsules are compact enough to be placed in public areas, under bridges, or near parks — giving vulnerable individuals a chance to survive freezing nights without fear of violence or exposure.

@mac_ferguson2 @4wavePepe @pfau @CameronCorduroy

@BAPearlmutter @4wavePepe @pfau @CameronCorduroy Honestly it feels like we’re nestled right he in the part of the 1984/Idiocracy intersection where Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” lives

this is what actual national suicide looks like btw

@robertgraham @IanAdAstra Your argument is pretty much "they said we were running out of nice places to live but we figured out how to sleep in fetid puddles in the gutter and we can't even get mail the streets are sewers the whole city stinks, ha ha they were so wrong!"

Back in the 1990s, early Internet nerds were convinced we were running out of IPv4 addresses and that we needed to create a new standard, IPv6, to prevent this. They used the same arguments as Paul Ehrlich, exponential growth meeting a fixed supply, leading to devastating collapse. They did this even after Ehrlich was proven completely wrong in 1990. This argument is a higher level Truth that can never be disproven, no matter how many times its predictions fail to come about. Over 30 billion devices are connected to the IPv4 Internet and we sill haven't run out of IPv4 addresses. Of those are 8.5 billion mobile phones on the IPv4 Internet. Yet, when people explain IPv6 to you, the first thing they'll tell you is that it's needed to prevent the Internet from running out of addresses.

@4wavePepe @pfau @CameronCorduroy Seems we're falling on the Idiocracy circle of the 1984 / Idiocracy / Andromeda Strain Venn diagram.

@CameronCorduroy I had a $600,000 over 5 years NSF Physics grant terminated last year because our grant mentioned "polarization" which was included in the banned terms list. We were discussing the polarization of light. We never got the grant reinstated.

@BWConnector @iowahawkblog ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-b…

@BAPearlmutter @iowahawkblog Your link is interesting in this context because "built up land" is barely visible on the chart. And about half of land use is in grazing which will be replaced with cultivated meat if grazing land use ever becomes a problem.

By "premature" we of course mean "embarrassingly retarded"

@BWConnector @iowahawkblog World population is a mix of groups, some shrinking, others growing. There can be temporary burps, but in the long run the fast will dominate the mix, and global growth converges to their growth rate. “Demographics is destiny.”

@BAPearlmutter @iowahawkblog And it turns out that unrelated societal factors (urbanization and credentialism) are going to cause the world to start losing population this century. We are going to be struggling with managing population decline, the exact opposite of Ehrlich's prediction/concern.

@BWConnector @iowahawkblog People have this naïve conception that human settlements are little islands in a sea of wildness. That was true a few centuries ago, today it is quite the reverse. Yes, tech will continue to help us get more food from the same area. But there are limits, we just don't know 'em.

@Stan_Gualtieri @iowahawkblog He got most everything wrong, he was too stupid to consider technological progress in agriculture, feedback loops in known reserves vs exploration, etc. But that doesn't mean there aren't limits, or that we shouldn't try to figure 'em out. Historically, crashes are often abrupt.

@BAPearlmutter @iowahawkblog “Has was wrong about the details”. The word “details” is doing a lot of work here - dishonestly - when every prediction he ever made was dead wrong.

@mathladyhazel I think that shows a stronger result: that π is transcendental.

A concise single-page proof that π is irrational.

@Michaeach3 @anaraintuitive Hey, look on the bright side. At least we don't have to listen to people pompously proclaim "there's no room for antisemitism in New York City" anymore.

It is actually insane what is being normalized right now! Rama Duwaji was already exposed for celebrating the October 7th massacre and denying the atrocities committed against women. Now we find out she provided artwork for an essay by an author who called the slaughter of 1,200 people "spectacular" and went on unhinged rants about "Jewish supremacist vampires." How is this acceptable for the family of the Mayor of New York City? Never again.

@MadelaineLucyH The modern printer industry has really picked up the 💚 green mantle ♻️. They've managed to save lakes of ink and forests of paper by the simple expedient of never managing to actually print anything.

Ever tried to print a 219 A4-page novel? Because I am this close to declaring war on printers

@LeMangy @knowpium @ReReadingWolfe The one with Spock's emo sister and giant tardigrade mushroom propulsion I think.

@knowpium @BAPearlmutter @ReReadingWolfe One of the star treks. The one with yoda

TIL A spaceship traveling at 99% the speed of light that hits a single grain of sand is equivalent setting off 131 sticks of dynamite at the nose cone.

@pawel_lasek @DonaldPMitchell @Jonathan_Blow @valigo When they were flying high Symbolics repeatedly screwed over software companies that committed to their platform by announcing their own forthcoming competing product, and clamping down on hardware bundling agreements.

@BAPearlmutter @DonaldPMitchell @Jonathan_Blow @valigo Dealing with that was doable so long as your software didn't depend too much on certain hardware details, because even if it was never actually complete OpenGenera was released and provided usable development environment - used in production at least to early 2000s at AMEX.

I just had a revelation that LISP, in its superiority, does not need operator precedence. You always write everything in functional form, and there is no ambiguity what applies to what! Obvious in hindsight, but I got a real "whoa" moment after thinking through it explicitly!

@Kyhanis1 @etherealbloooom @IsraMum Just watch, this is all a big shaggy dog story and the name is going to be something like Shmendrika or Hindl.

@etherealbloooom @IsraMum you have me in intrigue now, reveal the beautiful name 😳🙏🏻

This is just me venting… I’m not Jewish. But when I was born, my parents (for whatever beautiful, personal reason) chose to give me a name in Hebrew. (I mean my real name, which It wasn’t easy at all — they had to fight hard and go through so much trouble just to get this name registered on my birth certificate under the Islamic republic regime’s rules ) All my life in school, university, casual conversations, everywhere,… people would light up when they heard it. “What a gorgeous name!” “What does it mean?” “Which language is it from? It sounds so special.” And I’d answer honestly, smiling… only to watch that exact same warmth drain from their faces the second they assumed it might mean I’m Jewish The smile freezes. The tone shifts. The kindness evaporates. Just like that. It broke my heart every single time. Truly, deeply… How can the world be so cold and cruel toward people who are so kind, so giving, so human? How is it possible that carrying even the echo of a Jewish name can turn affection into suspicion in a heartbeat? I wish one day the world wakes up and sees what it’s doing. I just wish… people would be kinder. That’s all.

@DonaldPMitchell Any evidence? Because my take is that the sleep/memory consolidation hypothesis went from wild-ass speculation to accepted scientific dogma without any intermediate step of experimental validation.

As in LLMs, long-term memory is represented by weights of synapses. Adjusted during REM sleep in about 1000 cycles of synchronized theta rhythm activity. Experiences and ideas replayed and memory consolidated.

Modern LLMs consist of hundreds of neural network layers in the transformer arrangement. Self-attention heads learn relationships across the context window of text, and multi-layer perceptrons do further processing and learning abstractions from the input.