Ray Lee

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social Hello Dr. Lawler. Long time reader, first time replier. (...maybe second?) Thanks for teaching me about why I should care about this. Thanks for giving me talking points to help me convince others to care about these things -- be it via changes to our atmospheric chemistry, or stock market fraud, or just not allowing a few people to destroy our heritage of dark skies, which helps connect us with our Universe. Here's hoping your message snowballs into larger impacts, from all of us sharing this in conversation with others. Also, thanks for the farm animal updates 🙂

@Cdespinosa At minimum, consequences for everyone in Congress who enabled this. Consequences for a lot of people who think they’re above consequences.

@freddy @filippo Scott Aaronson writes: "I’m going to close this post with a warning. When Frisch and Peierls wrote their now-famous memo in March 1940, estimating the mass of Uranium-235 that would be needed for a fission bomb, they didn’t publish it in a journal, but communicated the result through military channels only. As recently as February 1939, Frisch and Meitner had published in Nature their theoretical explanation of recent experiments, showing that the uranium nucleus could fission when bombarded by neutrons. But by 1940, Frisch and Peierls realized that the time for open publication of these matters had passed. "Similarly, at some point, the people doing detailed estimates of how many physical qubits and gates it’ll take to break actually deployed cryptosystems using Shor’s algorithm are going to stop publishing those estimates, if for no other reason than the risk of giving too much information to adversaries. Indeed, for all we know, that point may have been passed already. This is the clearest warning that I can offer in public right now about the urgency of migrating to post-quantum cryptosystems, a process that I’m grateful is already underway." https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9425

@rk@mastodon.well.com It occurred to me later I could have given you a bit of an explanation, on the off-chance this wasn't only a shitpost. If it was you can stop reading now. Also, you may have already understood this. Anyway... As you know, in software we make a distinction between concrete implementations (struct with methods), and an interface / traits. We promote things to an interface if it ends up being broadly useful, or swap it out with other implementations. The same idea happens in physics, though they started doing that back in the 18th century (thank Lagrange, though there may be earlier examples). A ball spinning is a concrete implementation, a la Newton. In different formulations of physics (different refactorings), these things we think of as concrete values can instead be derived quantities, coming from functions or higher order functions (operators). Swapping out the implementations of the interface, quantum for classical, gives something that still honors the narrow interface called 'spin' but behaves in other ways, too, where classical mechanics was less accurate. A reasonable question, then, is whether defining a narrow trait like angular momentum, without any radius or object spinning attached in a structure, leads to allowing invalid models to be constructed inside physics. After all, maybe there's a corner case in the math that allows spin to wander off on its own, separated from the point particle we ascribed it to. People test for that, though the interpretation of the results is still an ongoing conversation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Cheshire_cat

@rk@mastodon.well.com Well, I agree with the first part anyway :-)

@icastico@c.im I suspect part of the story arc revolves around how the events transform the characters. If you compare Carol between the first and last episodes, she’s grown a lot. @Sheril@mastodon.social

@Annalee It’s not me. But is it this? It seems to match. https://github.com/obra/Youtube2Webpage

@rk@mastodon.well.com Types in physics are a smidge messy.

@rk@mastodon.well.com Duck fat fried potatoes is proof god exists and hates ducks.

@dan Mentats make more and more sense

@franco_vazza@mastodon.social I’m dealing with the same thing at work right now. We’re hiring an engineer and a bunch of candidates are clearly typing the questions into chatgpt and reading the responses out word for word. It’s astonishing.

@gwenbeads@mathstodon.xyz Heh. I can't claim it as a place of Great Esteem, but it does give me the delight of looking at it daily ;-)

@AkaSci@fosstodon.org Wow.

@dougmerritt I, on the other hand, come from a family with exactly 1.94 children, therefore am completely average. @axoaxonic

@loopspace@mathstodon.xyz My first thought was it depends on what you want plus to do.

@mirabilos I didn’t say it was a bad thing. I actually prefer cats to dogs. Their occasional wacky behavior only makes me love them more. @lorddimwit

@lorddimwit a biology professor friend of mine pointed out that humans have been domesticating dogs about twice as long as cats. I’ve decided that means cats are half-baked.

@gwenbeads@mathstodon.xyz Congrats! This artwork is the sticker I put on my laptop. It makes me smile.