Håkon Fløystad

MMT is cover for socialism. They start out promoting a free lunch while inflation is low. They know very well that their policies will eventually lead to inflation. For which their solution is higher taxes. It's quite clever. Instead of introducing the taxes and the goodies at the same time, they space them out with the goodies first, and taxes after, like paying with a credit card.

Modern Monetary Theory: because even Keynesian fairy tales weren't delusional enough.

@Wastertorp @j32pmxr @SawyerMerritt That's the only way in space. But blackbody radiation goes as T^4, so a heat pump helps a lot.

@j32pmxr @SawyerMerritt The heat dissipation mechanism is still radiation though, no?

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in new interview on orbital datacenters: "The challenge of course is that cooling, you can't take advantage of conduction and convection, so you can only use radiation, and radiation requires very large surfaces, but that's not an impossible things to solve. There's a lot of space in space. We're going to go explore it. We're already radiation hardened. We have Cuda in satellites around the world. In the meantime, we're going to explore what is the architecture of datacenters look like in space. It'll take years, but that's ok. I got time." via @theallinpod

@j32pmxr @SawyerMerritt You could probably just use concentrated sunlight to power a heat pump, without going through electricity at all.

@SawyerMerritt Cooling isn't an issue via radiation. You use Stirling engines to power a heat pump loop to boost the hot side to 200-300C and suddenly you can radiate tons of heat and keep the chips cool. People act like this is physically impossible.

@revpaulwhite That's the real difference between Iran and North Korea, btw. N. Korea wants to be left in peace, while Iran appears to WANT Armageddon to start, based on their official doctrine.

@revpaulwhite That's why you remove the irrational players from the game before they get nukes.

The deterrence effect of Mutually Assured Destruction only works if all the main players are acting rationally. You can see the issue.

@kimmonismus Dont ask an AI to cure cancer. If it can't fight a regular cure, it will remove all cancer by killing us all.

Hey ChatGPT, cure cancer, make no mistake. The story of the machine learning researcher who used AlphaFold to treat his dog’s cancer has captured hearts around the world. Faith in humanity restored.

This reads a bit like Particle Physics Envy, a subcategory of Physics Envy. The fact that he felt the need to write it is basically proof to me. Since about 1970, and maybe a bit earlier, solid state Physics has been a lot more important than Particle Physics in practice. But the MOST fundamental breakthroughs of Physics (and maybe all of science) in the 20th century were the discovery of Relativity and the development of the Standard Model (+ nonrelativistic QM). THOSE where the discoveries that made Physics almost mythical, the King of Sciences. And since ever since Physics stopped making similar discoveries, it gradually started to become "just another science". Which is ok. But some of those who had gotten used to rate of discoveries up to about 1970 were a bit disappointed that it stopped there.

@hakflo tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1…

Condensed matter physics is apparently "more applied than the Higgs Mechanism" someone ought to have told that to Anderson who came up with the Higgs mechanism before Higgs, in the context of superconductivity

Sure. You don't need a God though. Chinese Confucianism can be just good a source of Conservativism as a belief in the Christian God. And there are many Jews that are very conservative, even practicing relgious, but who do not believe om God in a literal sense. Instead, they may value practices and rituals of the religion, and even think that it forms a basis for harmony and success in their community.

@hakflo The substantive argument for Chesterton’s fence is cultural evolution, which I included in my list of higher intelligences.

Leftists dislike effective altruists because EAs are smart and honest enough to publicly disbelieve a lot of leftist dogmas, and more fundamentally to disavow the leftist mode of thought. Rightists dislike EAs because they are hubristic central planners. One way to define rightism is the belief in an intelligence greater than humans. This can be God, or markets, or evolution (taken seriously as a discovery process), or the Landian fusion of all three. But fundamentally there is a rejection of closure, an embrace of the Outside, an a priori skepticism of grand plans. So when they hear “you just need to give Our People global power to stop the apocalypse” they see the echoes of every other failed totalitarian/closure project and write you off.

Of course. It's about studying the fields that generate these particles, as directly as possible. In a bit over 50 years, we went from the Photoelectric Effect to the Standard Model. Part of the attraction is how so little (a single equation that fits on a single page) can explain so much.

@hakflo Firstly, the analogy doesn't work because it's the same mechanism, unlike Lorentz and Einstein. Secondly, you seem to believe elementary particles are not quasiparticles. We're in a post-renormalization world, buddy. There's no such thing as a "bare" electron.

@postdocforever There is a reason why Higgs is better known than Anderson and Einstein more than Lorentz.

@postdocforever If he didn't use it to explain inertia for elementary particles, it's not the Higgs Mechanism. It's just the same math. He becomes to Higgs what Lorentz was to Einstein.

@postdocforever Now, if you can build a theory that shows that causes solid state physics and our understanding of the vacuum to merge into a single field, then at least it elevates it to the level of almost-fundamental the way Statistical Physics is.

The math of symmetry breaking is math. Math CAN be argued to be more fundamental than all of Physics, depending on point of view. That some specific type of math is developed within an applied field before it's used in some fundamental theory, doesn't change the fact that the applied field is applied and the fundamental field is fundamental. Similar arguments can be made for Relativity. Einstein was not the first to come up with the Lorentz transformations. But he WAS the first to show that relativity was a fundamental aspect of spacetime, not just an attribute of some aether, for instance.

How you can distinguish between the crank critics of string theory and the sensible ones (me) is that the cranks don't actually care about experiments. A good second-order sign is if they say physics has "stagnated" - they're trying to sell you AI or their favourite crank theory.

@postdocforever It's less applied than Engineering, though. But it's one or two steps in that direction, if you start from QM.

@postdocforever It's about as applied as theoretical chemestry, and more applied than the Higgs Mechanism or Quantum Electrodynamics.

Maintaining a society, especially a successful one, is like maintaining a piece of important software, like the Linux kernel. If people were allowed to make rapid and arbitrary changes to the Linux kernel without proper analysis and testing, most of the infrastructure of the modern Internet would soon fall apart. Soon after, a different OS would become hegemonic in the data centers. The same goes for societies. When people stop understanding what the load bearing structures of a successful society are and start removing more and more of them, collapse becomes imminent. It doesn't matter if it's done in the name of God or in the name of Anti-Fascism.

@ArtemisConsort God is simply part of the fence. A person can be very religious and still be a progressive leftist. But even an atheistic conservative can be reluctant to tear down the religious pillars that society was built on.

@SashaGusevPosts Those are not three independent predictions. The main mistake was to underestimate the need for compute.

2) Therefore this innovation can be achieved by a small DIY team with limited resources ("brain in a box in a basement"); 3) Once achieved, the team will turn AI on itself and accelerate so far ahead of the competition that it cannot be caught up ("FOOM").

Stumbled upon an interesting debate on AI super-intelligence from 2011. Yudkowsky makes three core claims/predictions, all of which are (to date) wrong: 1) That human intelligence is relatively simple and ASI can be achieved with a few small innovations; ...

@TheVixhal @heileivo We know that we don't know all of Physics, especially as it was at the start of the Universe (or potentially even "before", if it's embedded in an outer universe).

@heileivo That’s true in general, but this isn’t just misunderstanding. The matter–antimatter asymmetry is a real, measured feature of the universe. The gap is in explaining it, not in observing it.

We exist because the universe made an arithmetic mistake. By every equation we have, the Big Bang should have produced a universe of pure light with not a single atom left over. Matter and antimatter should have formed in perfectly equal amounts and annihilated each other completely. But that is not what happened. There was a tiny asymmetry. For roughly every billion pairs of matter and antimatter, there was one extra particle of matter that did not get cancelled. Everything you see, every galaxy, every planet, every person, is the leftover rounding error from an almost perfect cancellation.