Because I've tried using LLMs to generate code and I've seen the results. They are not usable. They *resemble* valid code, but they typically throw exceptions and raise errors, they can't pass unit tests, and they don't correctly handle edge cases. AI-generated code is a mess that *superficially looks right* but isn't fit to purpose.

There is a meme going around about the fact that you can tackle a normal coding task by spending 3 hours to write code and 1 hour to debug and test it, or you can use CoPilot to spend 15 minutes to write the code and 8 hours to debug and test it. That matches my experience.

You're not wrong. Still, wouldn't only the crooked candidates be the ones taking the fall?

Some physicists these days like Sean Carroll think that the arrow of time and causality arise thermodynamically. All fundamental physical laws are time-reversible, so the only way for there to be a difference between "forward" and "backward" in time is because one direction was closer to the Big Bang than the other. Increases of entropy are the engine of time asymmetry and causation; there's no other way for us to sensibly say the past causes the future (and not vice versa) since at a fundamental level the physical laws all work as well forward and backward (caveats about the weak nuclear force notwithstanding; it's not the weak force that prevents you from un-scrambling an egg by swishing in the reverse direction).

The current best picture implies a temporally upside-down world "before" the Big Bang by our coordinate system, which is precisely as problematic as an American saying that by their coordinate system, in Australia they build their roofs "under" their houses. Both branches of the timeline have arrows of time pointing away from the shared Big Bang just like both continents have "up" pointing in opposite directions from a shared center of the Earth.

If the idea of the Big Bang being an entropy minimum holds, then saying black holes from a previous universe "cause" dark matter now is a problem. That's because it defies the idea that the Big Bang was a causal root of everything that happens in our local space. To make the idea in TFA work there would have to be another route to an arrow of time. While that's not impossible, it's an extremely tall order, and it would require a lot of rethinking of fundamental concepts that underpin our ideas about how the world works.

Some topical videos:
Up and Atom video on the arrow of time (great intro; 15 minutes: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...)
Sean Carroll's latest thoughts (more depth, cutting edge, > 1 hr: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...)

Agreed!

Einstein taught us that gravity fields are indistinguishable from acceleration. Suppose you have an ideal acceleration sensor. If Earth's local gravity field is unknown at the 0.1% level, you'll have an error in your acceleration signal of about 1 cm /s /s. Let that accumulate for an hour and you are 1/2 (a) (t^2) = 65 km away from where you thought you were.

Much of that will be in the vertical direction, but not all of it!

If you're a public company you'd have to declare a big expense like paying a ransom.

A person's net worth can legally decrease in a puff of paperwork. It's a simple matter to write a promissory note that (for one of a variety of practical reasons) probably will never be acted upon. Art pieces can have a value that's hard to determine too. Wealth per se is very slippery, subject to debate, and is thus not usually a good candidate for something to be taxed directly.

I think we should target passive income tax increases instead. Passive income should include any income generated because you own something. Governments already tax dividends and capital gains from stock purchases. Usually, passive income is taxed at a lower rate than wages; in Canada capital gains are taxed at 50% of the rate of wages.

I'm in favour of the capitalist system where there's an incentive for companies to form to provide services the consumer wants. It's an efficient way to run the economy. However, I join with the French economist Thomas Piketty who says it's a bad idea if passive income is so lucrative that wealth inequality is expected to grow exponentially. If wealth inequality does grow exponentially, then the $10 my great grandfather stole from your great-grandfather may have a significant impact on the relative well-being of my grandkids versus yours. I would much rather a world where historical injustices are expected to slowly melt away, rather than exponentially increase their present-day implications.

It's possible to have our capitalist cake and eat it too with a frosting of equality; we just need to increase the taxes on passive income and decrease the taxes on wages. Thomas Piketty suggests we increase capital gain and dividend taxes until the expected return on investments after taxes is slightly less than the expected increase in GDP. If we put a lot of these extra capital gain and dividend taxes towards decreasing taxes on wages, then folks will have more to spend and it's likely the economy will grow faster.

I'm worried that the rich have set up a system that permanently enshrines them with exponentially increasing shares of the global wealth, while the poor are not savvy in what they're requesting. It's clearly feasible to tax passive income; wealth is a harder target. If you (like me) want a little more global equality delivered by a workable plan, please consider shifting the target of your chants from "Tax the Rich" to "Increase Taxes on Capital Gains and Dividends;" much less pithy, but also much scarier to the wealthy because it's so much more plausible to implement.

PS.I think these changes should be implemented gradually, as in phased in over the course of 10 or 20 years. That leaves lots of time for estate planning, for imperfect international coordination, and for plugging any loopholes that come up.

PPS I also think real estate tax advantages (capital gains exemptions or tax-deductible mortgage interest) should be slowly phased out. It's not possible for a primary residence to be both a fantastically good investment and also something that's eminently affordable - the former requires that a house is a fantastic investment, the latter requires that a house not appreciate too much.

... is a terrible idea. But at some point in the future, it will be slightly less bad than not solar geoengineering. And when that time comes, we'd better have researched the best (least harmful) way to avert disaster. (Critics will say "postpone" rather than "avert," but that depends on whether we can keep it up while we're addressing the root causes.)

Well, I guess they didn't ask *should* dark matter's main rival theory be dead. The answer to that is most definitely yes, in my opinion.

Here's the thing. It's not like it's just galactic rotation curves that give evidence for dark matter. Watch this video (fast forward to 2:36 if you don't want the intro) to see a list of observational evidence explainable by dark matter: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F....

We know almost for sure that dark matter exists because it does so many things other than just explain the galactic rotation curves. We can see gravitational lensing from dark matter clumps. Check out the bullet cluster, where the non-dark matter seems to have collided but the dark matter sailed on through. The power spectrum of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background fits the dark matter hypothesis. The list goes on: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F.... Mond could not explain even half of these items; dark matter existing would explain each of them.

Is it possible that there's dark matter and also Mond? Maybe, if Mond is so weak it makes indetectible perturbations. However, it hard even to write down a theory of Mond that respects special relativity. (Mond typically says to strengthen gravity for any acceleration below some cutoff value, but making that cutoff value observer-independent isn't all that easy to do.). Mond was a really cool idea and I wanted it to be true when I heard about it in 2003. Unfortunately the evidence just isn't there, and dark matter is more or less undeniable at this point.

The big question is what dark matter is made of, and the most boring (read "probably correct") hypothesis out there is that dark matter is made of axions (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAxion). The strong force seems to obey CP symmetry precisely - every experiment you can do that involves just the strong force looks identical whether you use regular matter or a mirror-image setup made of antimatter. The symmetry is so precise, it's kind of like walking into a room and seeing a pencil balanced on its tip on the table. Frank Wilczek and Steven Weinberg asked: suppose there's an invisible string on the eraser end of the pencil holding it up. What properties must that string have? It turns out that not only would the candidate particle (they called the axion) solve the strong CP symmetry problem, it would also be a weakly interacting particle that would have been made in just the right abundance in our early universe to account for the mass of dark matter we observe today. We haven't found axions directly yet, but it does feel like the puzzle pieces of dark matter and CP symmetry could fit together.

What I'd like to see is the governments investing in things like high-voltage DC that ultimately make it more profitable to burn less CO2. Imagine if solar from the Sahara could reach the cloudy UK with only 30% energy loss, hydro dams could store more water when it's windy or sunny anywhere in their hemisphere and generate more when other renewables are not available, and energy users who are able to time-shift their demand (e.g. electric car charging at home) can do so in a free market that naturally helps blunt the peak hour demands.

I think a planet-scale free-market grid is not quite feasible with off-the-shelf technology quite yet. However it seems to me that if we had one, in most cases you'd have to subsidize fossil fuels to keep them competitive with renewables. My hope is that rich countries can try to pave the way to a planet-scale electricity grid, the consequence of which will be that fossil fuels die a natural death with no subsidy needed.

If this sounds like science fiction, check this video out: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F.... Some early long-distance transmission projects have paid back their initial investment 100% in just one year. I would love to see governments at least getting out of the way of, or even better investing in, seriously high-power long distance electrical transmission.

Lucky you! My guess is that the widespread vaccination against the lung-targeting spike protein destroyed most of the food for the lung-targeting original strain, and that's why subsequent strains are less of a problem to the lungs. Even if you didn't get vaccinated, you may have benefited from folks who did.

The Covid vaccines create mostly IgG antibodies that mainly appear in the bloodstream, not IgA antibodies that appear in our mucous. That's the norm for injection (as opposed to live) vaccines, and you are right that we should not expect injected vaccines to do a perfect job of protecting against respiratory infections. That's the norm for all vaccines against respiratory infections - you expect vaccines to improve the second-layer defenses quite a bit, but not necessarily to eliminate infections.

Pre-vaccine, the original virus in circulation targeted the lungs with its spike protein. The case fatality rate was 1% - 2%. About 1 out of 600 people in my county died of Covid. My boss's younger brother in his 30s died of Covid; he didn't get the vaccine and got an early strain.

The vaccine targeted the spike protein that enabled serious lung infections. Post-vaccine, we're not seeing a ton of serious lung infections. The strains of Covid that can circulate in the population are not the ones that are using the lung-targeting spike proteins that the vaccination protected against.

Overall, I think the vaccines did a great job of preventing higher death rates, as well as chronic lung damage and associated complications. Expectations of the vaccine were too high; people hoped Covid would be like Smallpox, when in fact it's more like the Spanish Flu: not a mortal threat for many people anymore, but its descendants are still out there.

To summarize, the vaccines were awesome, life-saving tools that may have reduced mortality by better than 90% and have enabled us to get back to a much more normal lifestyle a lot sooner. Their PR has been bad, especially lately, but please, PLEASE consider the evidence before you try to persuade anybody else that they were basically worthless.

From Wikipedia (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FLunar_resources%23Helium-3):

Materials on the Moon's surface contain helium-3 at concentrations estimated between 1.4 and 15 parts per billion (ppb) in sunlit areas, and may contain concentrations as much as 50 ppb in permanently shadowed regions. For comparison, helium-3 in the Earth's atmosphere occurs at 7.2 parts per trillion (ppt).

OK, so He-3 is perhaps a factor of 1000 more abundant on the moon than on the Earth. It's still way less than one part per million. Is the juice really worth the squeeze, or is this venture more accurately described as a way of mining naive investors?

Yes, the Sun is incredibly important as a vast source of free energy. The consensus is that photosynthesis evolved a little bit after life arose (see https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fp... for example). There are some geochemical processes like alkaline vents and hot springs that provide a steady enough source of free energy to get life going, but as soon as photosynthesis evolved the Sun became our main meal ticket.

I completely agree!

I would say a star doesn't require an external energy gradient to keep being a star. It needed free energy to become a star, but it isn't reliant on continued external flows of free energy to keep on being a star.

Channeling free energy from an external source is a key property of living matter.