Sloppenheimer

For an exposition of Bayesian probability by people who actually know math, there’s Ten Great Ideas About Chance by Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms (Princeton University Press, 2018). And for an interesting slice of the history of the subject, there’s Cheryl Misak’s Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (Oxford University Press, 2020).

For quantum physics, one recent offering is Barton Zwiebach’s Mastering Quantum Mechanics: Essentials, Theory, and Applications (MIT Press, 2022). I like the writing style and the structure of it, particularly how it revisits the same topics at escalating levels of sophistication. (I’d skip the Elitzur-Vaidman “bomb tester” thought experiment for reasons.)

The description of “The questions ChatGPT shouldn’t answer” doesn’t seem to go with the text. Did you mean to link something else?

A Bluesky post by Jamelle Bouie prompted me to reflect on how I resent that my knowledge of toxic nerd deep lore is now socially relevant.

A lesswrong declares,

social scientists are typically just stupider than physical scientists (economists excepted).

As a physicist, I would prefer not receiving praise of this sort.

The post to which that is a comment also says a lot of silly things, but the comment is particularly great.

Are we actually going with vibe coding as the name for this behavior? Surely we could introduce an alternative that is more disparaging and more dramatic, like bong-rip coding or shart coding.

The phrase “trying to gatekeep what was once their moat” makes me feel like a character in A Scanner Darkly who has reached the “aphids, aphids everywhere” stage of Substance D abuse

Josh Marshall discovers:

So a wannabe DOGEr at Brown Univ from the conservative student paper took the univ org chart and ran it through an AI aglo to determine which jobs were “BS” in his estimation and then emailed those employees/admins asking them what tasks they do and to justify their jobs.

I write science for my job and fiction for fun. The mental processes are not that different between a murder mystery and a theoretical physics paper. In both cases, you’ve got a tangle of pieces floating in abstract space, be they preconditions for a theorem or clues to whodunit, and you have to instantiate them somehow, picking a linear order of text to lock down the loose assemblage. You’re trying to cast a shadow of this damn strange thing made of parts that stick together or split apart depending on how you turn the whole.

Dan Dumont recently did what any responsible engineering director would do: He asked his favorite artificial-intelligence assistant whether his children, ages 2 and 1, should follow in his footsteps.

Christ, what an asshole.

She works in Washington state as an applied AI lead at a large tech company and has become an unofficial counselor to the many parents in her social circle who want inside advice.

“Jobs that require just logical thinking are on the chopping block, to put it bluntly,” she says.

Spicy autocomplete is not logical thinking, you sniveling turdweasel!

“No kink-shaming!”

“But I’m talking about Rationalists.”

“… OK, one kink-shaming.”

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entropy, cliche, and meaninglessness poured all over everything like shit over ice cream

“… the HPMORstocrats!”

If someone asked me to write a metafictional short story, I would simply not.

I consider this a valuable lesson from my college education.

I thought of a phrase whilst riding the subway and couldn’t remember if I had read it somewhere. Anybody recall it?

Rationalists will never use one word when fourteen will do.

“Democracy of ghosts” is from Nabokov’s Pnin.

He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.

Hashemi and Hall (2020) published research demonstrating that convolutional neural networks could distinguish between “criminal” and “non-criminal” facial images with a reported accuracy of 97% on their test set. While this paper was later retracted for ethical concerns rather than methodological flaws,

That’s not really a sentence that should begin with “While”, now, is it?

it highlighted the potential for facial analysis to extend beyond physical attributes into behavior prediction.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

(At the brainstorming session for terrible software names)

“PedoAI!”

Rubber dick debugging