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Comment Re:Think smaller (Score 3, Insightful) 44

you apparently desire to use systems beyond their design points

Everyone wants to use systems beyond their design points. Or rather, more accurately, the design point is *always* the cheapest way to accomplish a goal, and that's a moving target.

If you are a company that provides an embedded system with a known functionality that requires a specific amount of RAM, and you realize you can ship that system with less RAM because you of CRAM or ZRAM, you just decreased your costs and increased your margin. There is literally no embedded provider that wouldn't be looking at that.

Comment Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead (Score 1) 49

I can't tell if you aren't smart enough to understand Sabine and Weinstein, simply don't understand the information available, or have been watching idiots like Sean Carrol

I can, however, tell you that you don't understand what science is, or how it functions.

String Theory is what has been debunked

It has not. In fact, the criticism against string theory is *precisely that it is pretty much impossible to debunk* because you've got so may parameters to mess with that you can make just about anything work with string theory. It's a bit like overfitting: if you want to find an equation that perfectly fits your 10,000 data points, you can certainly give a polynomial of order 9,999. Is that going to accurately model the mechanism that caused the data points you gathered, or be a good predictor for additional sampling? Not necessarily. You've overfitted the crap out of your model, it behaves weirdly between the points, it treats random noise or outliers as deterministic and valid, etc.

Is this what's going on with string theory? Maybe. It could also be that it's right. It's *really hard* to come up with an experiment that could falsify it with the technology we currently have. Does that by itself mean it's wrong and we should give up on it? No. Does that mean we should also be looking at other avenues? Yes. And we are, there are plenty of physicists who work with alternative theories and are vocal critics of string theory.

and it is a well known fact that scientists have not been doing very much real science for decades

There is no person that holds that belief that isn't a moron. You included, thank you for outing yourself. I won't respond to any more of your responses, because I do know that debating idiots like you is like playing chess with a pigeon: You knock the pieces down, shit on the board, and strut around like you've won. I'll continue answering your post for anyone else who cares to read so they can understand WHY you're an idiot, but I don't really care about your opinion.

  1. 1. Anything that is rigorous is real science. It's not defined as useful to you right now. Anything we discover, whether the path we're going down ends up being correct or not, is valuable.
  2. 2. I'll let Angela Collier, who, btw, *also* does not like String Theory and happens to agree with you that it was a waste of time, tell you about many of the exciting discoveries made in physics over the past 70 years. I'm not even going to address the point you said "scientists" in general, as in, making the claim that ALL science has apparently been a standstill for decades, where the world I live in today is barely fucking recognizable compared to the world I lived in 20 years ago. I don't mean just in technology, I mean in terms of what we know. My god, we have NEVER been in a time that is more prolific than the time we live in right now, whatever you're learning in school will be outdated by the time you leave college, will be outdated by the time you get a graduate degree. If you're not learning while you work, you're a dinosaur and your job is at risk. The world of science today moves FAST.

String theory is just maths masturbation

Maths masturbation is *great* and we need more of it. This is one of the problems with Sabine: she likes to go, "it's just math." Buddy, If it's not rigorous math, it's not worth anything, if it is rigorous math, and it doesn't match reality, the paper it was written on is still worth its weight in gold. Do you like the world you live in with online baking and secure encryption? Thank all the mathematicians of old doing number theory for the sake of it, finding properties of prime numbers and elliptical curves. Einstein didn't like Minkowski's use of a four-dimensional spacetime to frame his special theory of relativity and then he learned it turned out to be super useful, and embraced geometry when developing his general theory of relativity, and embraced something else that essentially had no use outside of pure mathematics at that time: tensors.

If (and I do mean if, because like I said, it hasn't been 'debunked' as you claim) String Theory turns out to be COMPLETELY wrong, all the work done in it will be useful to advance what we discover is right.

You and Weinstein need to engage in a little bit more of "Maths Masturbation". Especially considering his "geometric unity" theory doesn't have enough math in it to be a rigors theory. He should get on that.

If you don't believe me ask Roger Penrose

Roger Penrose is a brilliant man whom I highly respect, who happens to disagree with String Theory and actually most of the direction that any quantum theory of gravity tends to go towards. Most physicists want to quantize gravity, he thinks they should instead be trying to explain quantum physics in relativistic terms. Now, he's in the minority with that claim, but he could be right, and I appreciate that someone is making strides toward that. Although he often uses strong language to disagree with, I *seriously* doubt he would say the people working with it have "wasted their time" or aren't doing "real science."

I also want to point out Sabine is pretty critical of CCC, Penrose's theory he hopes will replace the inflationary model. Because Sabine, isn't trying to propose alternatives. She pretty much goes, "I think string theory has go nowhere, oh well. Let's just not study it or any alternatives anymore, lest we do any math masturbation." That's not science. Creating hypothesis, making the theory rigorous, and testing predictions is the job.

Comment Congrats. They killed it (Score 0) 50

I understand the myopic that makes this happen. Amazon gets a marquee event, and supposedly boosts its stature and hopefully drives viewership. Everything a corporate vice president wants. The Emmy organization gets the most money, that they use for⦠whatever. Win-win right?

Well, no. Viewership will drop because now people have to get an Amazon prime subscription as opposed to simply having basic cable, or (gasp!) an antenna. They wonâ(TM)t even know when it happens because they wonâ(TM)t see the ads for it on a competing network. And so what used to be yearly appointment viewing cultural touchstone dies.

See also: Apple and the Charlie Brown specials.

Comment Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead (Score 5, Insightful) 49

As Sabine Hossenfelder accurately observed in her latest video

Quoting Sabine Hossenfelder as anything just outs you as anti-science. She has pivoted years ago to making videos that stir the pot of controversy, aiming at those who don't like "academics". If you want any proof of that claim, you can check out her video saying that Physicists are afraid of Eric Weinstein. Eric Weinstein has a bulshit "geometric unity" theories thoroughly debunked, where it's not even that he can't get published: he doesn't *want* to get published, claims in his copyright notice for that paper that it's for "entertainment only" and requires his express permission to write any papers that build upon what he has written: so you technically can't publish a paper debunking without violating his copyright, if anyone actually *cared* to, because physicists that have looked at it like Sean Carroll pointed out his paper isn't rigorous enough to say anything testable.

She allies herself with quacks to get views, and you're falling for her bs.

Comment Re:Threating to "shoot up" a police station (Score 1) 90

Rather than a threat I'd say it moreso would fall under "conspiracy to commit murder".

Discussing plans to commit a crime is a crime (eg, conspiracy).

Now, I'd wager she didn't really intend to go through with this, and in the end there's a good chance the charges get dropped, but seriously - don't be talking about shit like that. I can't even see where someone would joke, vent, or otherwise say - even in private - that they plan on committing a mass murder.

"That police department is a bunch of assholes!" - sure I get that. I might say that. I might say they're crooked, lazy, incompetent, or any other set of negative adjectives, but talking about killing people is not a good way to be venting.

Comment Re:Adversarial patterns FTW! (Score 1) 100

Honestly, AI technology has gotten good enough that those types of things won't fool it anymore. Captchas take longer for a human than it does for an AI model with vision, and the human is more likely to make a mistake.

The point is, sure, their system may suck right now, but if adversarial patterns became common, they're a model update away from fixing it. Might need better hardware on the device, so at most you'll cost them some money, but it won't get us our privacy back.

Comment Re: Not an expert (Score 1) 88

Which I've always hated because it makes no sense. If space itself inflated, what did it inflate into?

There is no such thing as "space", apart from "spacetime.". You can go, "there's a lot of space between our sun and Alpha Centauri" but if you were moving in that direction at close to the speed of light, instead you'd go, "hey, these two stars are super close to each other." Arbitrarily so: you can make them as close as you like, you can put as much energy into changing your frame your reference to make them centimeters or millimeters apart if you want to. Where did all that space go?

You can't really talk about space expansion in the instinctual model we have in our brains as 'space.' That's not "reality" it's a useful model of reality that our brains create to help us accomplish things, but using that to counteract general relativity results *which are testable and have been verified in a variety of ways* is like saying a description of what's going on in CPUs and GPUs don't make sense because it doesn't match up with the video game you're seeing displayed on the monitor. That's an interpretation of states in the computer, in the same way everything you see and experience is an interpretation of reality.

Comment Re: good bye (Score 1) 50

They're paying a monthly fee for a service they essentially aren't using.

That's why I hate most subscription services. Gyms, AAA - hell even insurance to some degree. They're all built around the idea that the customers should be paying but they're the enemy.

With a straight up transactional or metered service, the more the customer uses something, the more they get paid. They're incentivized to make the service or product good. With a subscription, the more the customer uses a service, the LESS money they get paid. They want to balance the scales between making the service good enough to keep the customer from unsubscribing but not so good that they use it.

Comment Re:Barn Door (Score 5, Insightful) 165

Do we honestly think we really *know* about all the frontier models?

I think we have a pretty good idea what the capabilities of the most advanced models are. And they're not that great.

This is a really stupid bill, but the one thing about it that I kind of like is that it's going to put a stop to the AI companies trying to inflate their value by talking about how scary their frontier models are, and how they're "going rogue." None of these AIs are "super intelligent" or "going rogue." What you have is a (admittedly really cool) technology that can solve a lot of problems but also is non-deterministic, so makes a lot of mistakes. And you're giving it the keys to do stuff. And then it misinterprets the instructions and fucks up and does something with those keys that it wasn't supposed to. Then instead of admitting, "oh, we engaged in really bad computer hygiene here," they figure, "we can market this, and say it 'broke free of the sandbox and went rogue" to imply that their models are so advanced it had purpose and the will to act.

So now the old politicians who don't understand technology are going, "oh, that IS scary. We're going to ban it," backfiring on their scary tactics marketing campaign. So it will result in them stopping this stupid scary tactics marketing campaign.

Here's the actual situation: you know every story you hear about how a model deleted the entire codebase at a company? If you have any level of computer literacy at all, the reaction you have is not, "oh, using AI as a coding agent is dangerous." It's, "why the HELL was the agent running with permissions to do that?" And if you hear about the OpenAI's agent broke free of its sandbox using an exploit that it found on the database you set it loose on, the question is, "why the hell could it even run executables outside a whitelist of stuff for it to build". it's amateur hour over here, giving a thing that is non deterministic and capable of fucking up the ability to do do anything at all outside a very narrow scope. The models aren't going rogue, they're fucking up, like when you ask it to give you the emoji for a seahorse and it goes into an infinite loop of bad emojis.

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