Markus J. Q. Roberts

If I listened to the red team, I'd hate and fear immigrants and worry about the future. If I listened to the blue team, I'd hate and fear billionaires and worry about the future. But when I listen to the immigrants and the billionaires, I mostly hear them working to make their own lives better, and in the process improving things for all of us.

I don't have the energy to try and have this conversation in public because the primary outcome is always going to be people yelling at you for hating waffles. The median person simply can't read. This is just a fact, it is what it is. Their eyes scan across a sequence of words and then an idea appears in their head that may or may not bear some or no relation to what entered their eyes. This happens because thinking is hard and your brain is obsessed with saving energy. Parsing every word in a sentence and then parsing every word within that sentence and then parsing the sentence and then parsing that sentence as part of a paragraph is many orders of magnitude more work than just grabbing keywords and filling in what it means with some ideas from the junk drawer. If you're lucky your reader will assume you meant something similar to the last idea they manipulated that has similar keywords. The reason people do this is because it's almost always fine to do this. Probably 99 times out of 100. You don't need to READ a stop sign. In fact, the reason stop signs are the way they are is specifically so you don't have to really read them. Color, shape, size, placement, outline, material. All carefully chosen to be maximally perceivable even when your brain is on it's lowest power settings. That brings us to this: >LLMs can provide all the answers we have, but it cannot provide the answers we don’t have. This sentence is a landmine. It's going to lock up the brains of 99% of the people who read it. There's nothing you can do to stop this from happening. They're going to parse this as something like "LLMs can't produce output that contains patterns of information that have not existed before", and then they're going to call you a pancake-lover. In order to fix this you have to get them to tell you what they think they read, which they can't do because they don't know that they didn't read what you wrote. Oh, and even if they could, they wouldn't, because you've already revealed yourself as a dirty wafflophobe and who wants to spend precious brain energy playing wordgames with a bigot? Oh, and even if they would, YOU can't, because you're going to have to argue about the definition of every word in the original sentence, and then argue about most of the words in the definitions, and then argue about some of the words in the definitions of the definitions, and meanwhile 50 other people are yelling at you about breakfast and the comment section is covered in syrup.

@ChiefScientist wtf_ftloG_do_not_merge

What is your daily developmentn branch called?

@RexDouglass Not just science. Many fields have this property.

There's this weird tension in science where you have to have strong literacy, you have to read and absorb as much of everything that you can, but then also reject almost all of it. It's incredibly hard to do both at the same time. You either fall for things or refuse to engage it

The result of several decades rapid growth where people were drawn to programming for the salary. And sold the dream of learning all the skills in 8-12 weeks, then $$$.

The socialist regards society much as a child regards supper: he notices with great precision who received the largest slice, while remaining curiously uninterested in who rose at dawn to bake the thing. Socialists always imagine themselves at the table, never in the kitchen.

Parents who raise their kids on realistic content are performing a kind of soul circumcision without anesthesia, and they do it proudly. they buy the little books about sharing and recycling and how divorce is okay, sensible books, vetted books, books approved by some committee of childless phds who decided that dragons are psychologically destabilizing. and then this denuded little creature grows up and wanders out into a world that is absolutely crawling with dragons, real ones, humans who feed on humiliation, women who collect men like scalps, landlords, banks, algorithms, addictions, each one an ancient monster. and the kid has nothing, no stored narrative of the small weak thing prevailing, no memory of stones becoming bread or dead girls waking up. his parents gave him nutritious facts and he stands there starving in front of his first real giant with a stomach full of information. meanwhile some other kid whose grandmother filled him with absolute garbage, nonsense talking wolves, magic beans, boys made of wood, walks up to the same giant and something old activates in him. he knows somewhere deep in the meat of him that giants are a problem with a known solution, that has been handled before, by smaller people than him, with worse weapons

@miketermaat_ Damn! I only noticed your name after I responded. Present company excepted, sir. I try to make a fool of myself on the internet at least once a week, and apparently decided to get it out of the way early this week.

@miketermaat_ The seldom are. VPs are generally chosen from the early and gracefully eliminated opponents (with the fewest bridges burned) to check more base-boxes.

The vice president shouldn’t be chosen because they make a good running mate. They should be chosen because you’d trust them to be president tomorrow. Those are not always the same person.

A lot of the debates over object-oriented programming come from the fact that it combines something everyone wants (data types with functions attached) with something no one wants (programmers spending their entire careers arguing about if a Square is a Rectangle).

You can tell you have made a category error when you find yourself talking about things that are constructed to be impossible to measure, even in principle.

@ryan_landay Sadly, you often don't want to know the answer to that.

I saw a funny debate on the internet where an American living in Thailand or somewhere was saying how much wealthier and more developed the US is. Someone replied something like, “bro if your country is so great, why are you here instead.”

@quasiSnarkX @r0ck3t23 You have a problem with that ? ( To be clear , I do . )

@r0ck3t23 First it was two spaces after a period. Then everybody said, "That's no longer necessary; one space is enough!". Then somehow everybody started doing two carriage returns after every period, which is to say one sentence every other line.

Elon Musk just proved every sighted person on Earth is blind. Your eye captures 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum. You are not seeing the universe. You are seeing the sliver your biology decided was enough to keep you alive. That was never vision. That was a survival filter bolted onto your perception four hundred million years ago. No one has ever removed it. Musk: “Blindsight will enable those who have total loss of vision to be able to see again. Including if they have lost their eyes, or the optic nerve.” No eyes. No nerve. The entire optical system physically absent from the skull. Neuralink does not rebuild what broke. It routes around biology entirely. It streams synthetic signal straight into the visual cortex. Your eye never saw anything. Your brain did. Your brain sits in total darkness inside a vault of bone. It has never seen the sun. It has never seen anything. It builds reality out of whatever electrical signal the eye allows through. The eye is the bottleneck between your mind and the universe. Neuralink removes the bottleneck. Musk: “Maybe have never seen, were even blind from birth.” A human who has never perceived a single photon of light. Given sight for the first time. Not through medicine. Through engineering. Musk: “You can see in radar, you can see in infrared, ultraviolet.” Infrared is pouring off every surface in the room around you. Radio waves are passing through your body right now. Ultraviolet is painting patterns across everything you have ever looked at. You cannot see any of it. Your biology locked you out before you were born. Musk: “Superhuman capabilities.” The person born blind would not be restored to human sight. They would see more of the universe than any sighted person who has ever lived. The blind would out-see the sighted. You will not pity them. You will envy them. Musk: “Cybernetic enhancement.” Every human sense is a sensor converting the world into electrical signal. Replace the sensor and the brain does not care where the signal came from. It just processes. Your senses were never built to show you reality. They were built to show you just enough of it to survive. Evolution built a keyhole. We called it sight. Elon Musk is not fixing blindness. He is fixing sight.

Most arguments about the simulation hypothesis are epistemological bunk (on both sides). 1) If we are in a simulation, we have absolutely no idea of what the outer physics laws are. There is no reason to believe they resemble ours. 2) The absolute unpredictability of some values in QM is a just hypothesis in one interpretation (MW and SD (which, iirc, Hossenfelder favors) don't need it). There is (and can be) no evidence for it.

I show this video in class every year. It doesn't say exactly what Elon says. But I also don't get Sabine's objections. 1) Ok but that's pedantic bc you can easily conceive of a simulation that's random enough. 2) Elon surely knows this. 3) No one is against a proper definition?

@WKCosmo I have to admit, in a sick way it would be fun to watch.

@MarkusQ Yeah, good luck clawing back that indirect from the university.

Joke's on them, they can't claw it back if I've already spent it. nature.com/articles/d4158…

Physics tells you how to compute optimally. If you want to maximize raw compute/watt, you want to move particles as slowly as possible. Kinetic energy scales with the square of speed, so 1/10th the velocity means 1/100th the energy. Maybe you only get 1/10th of the work done, but the efficiency boost is far bigger. Now if you're using something light and fast like an electron, you're going to have a bad time because just about anything can knock that electron onto a different path. Fighting noise gets hard, so if you're minimizing speed, more mass helps. Computers move electrons around at GHz speeds. The brain moves ions around at <1 kHz, and is thousands of times more efficient.

@OldSchoolGamerP I had the same problem with the paper I used to use until I started dating my notebooks.

I don't know how old I was when I made certain things or wrote specific programs because the C64, A500 and A1200 didn't have a battery backed Real-Time Clock. It's a little sad.

New word: "Hypo", a typo that exhibits viral spread through the hype-sphere because it supports the desired narrative even though it is manifestly incorrect (e.g. confusing μg and mg).

@CidCampeador777 @mzjacobson So why lie and say 12,000? I agree 1,200 Wh/kg is still interesting, and it would be cool if someone could actually do it (at the pack level, not just the anode ration). But since that's already been discussed we're getting spammed with the 12,000 hypo.

@MarkusQ @mzjacobson 1200Wh/kg would unlock electric general aviation, possible personal helicopters too. They are barely flying with current tech, but you can see the miserable rate of climb on the testing videos.

If successful, lithium-air batteries will kick jet fuel out of the sky and bunker fuel out of the ocean. "Mainstream lithium-ion batteries have an energy density of ~250-270 Wh/kg, while future solid-state alternatives are expected to achieve ~500 Wh/kg. Lithium-air configurations present a theoretical energy density limit of 12,000 Wh/kg, a ceiling that matches the energy capacity of conventional gasoline." CATL eyes 12,000 Wh/kg theoretical limit lithium-air EV battery to end range anxiety interestingengineering.com/energy/catl-12… Air Energy Closes Seed Round to Scale DOE-Validated Solid-State Lithium-Air Battery natlawreview.com/press-releases…

@space_stations @StephenFleming The problem is that they consistently favor LLM written resumes. And LLM written resumes consistently misrepresent applicants. So just choosing people at random out of the pool would likely be better.

@MarkusQ @StephenFleming AI at least could read all of the resumes and prioritize them. Right now, most resume never get a full or even partial read because they are thrown out based on any possible objection just to make it more simple for the boss. Could still happen, but used properly........

The two most common stories about American employment right now are (1) I own a company and I can’t find anyone to hire, and (2) I’m laid off or recently graduated, and I can’t find a job. Make it make sense.