Theoretical physicist by training (quantum open systems/quantum information), Currently paying the bills as an engineer working in free-space optical communication. I also enjoy the outdoors and learning about any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well.
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2026-08-30T00:23:15Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick I just installed #GrapheneOS on a new (to me) phone, and man was that shockingly easy. I remembered it being easier than i was expecting the first time I did it, but either they made it even better or I forgot how quick and simple it was. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…0xjm I would welcome correction by those more knowledgeable, but for the benefit of people like me who were wondering, it looks like this just covers MPEG-4 part 2, i.e. the video codec that is roughly equivalent to H.263 and was used by things like DivX, not the more prevalent H.264 (which I believe is MPEG-4 part 10). npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…yjg9 They're also easy to talk to, because they find everything scintillating. 😉 npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…0hde I'm not at all sure it suits your needs, but I wonder if https://magicgrants.org/ might be an option. It's used by PrivacyGuides for their subscriptions. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…t6k2 @nprofile…4hp5 It looks like you can also choose to make posts (by default) quotable by followers only, which might be a happy medium. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…atf6 @nprofile…00p2 One of the experiences this made me think of was learning Lebesgue integration. After I had finished the class, the topic came up somehow with someone else who basically expressed it as "integrals where you sum the areas with horizontal rectangles rather than vertical," and I thought "why didn't anyone express it in that simple way before this?" While you can perhaps quibble with the correctness of the description, as a "motivation" it works pretty well. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…00p2 A thing I've found challenging is a significant subset of math books that dive right into a bunch of definitions and theorems without giving the "motivation" often seen in physics books, describing what sorts of questions they're trying to answer and how we might intuitively guess that a certain approach might be productive. Ultimately I'm happy to have the rigorous exposition, but it's still useful to have a sort of overall plan for what you're building so that you know how to arrange the various building blocks in your mind. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick I think I have similar frustrations to yours @nprofile…5gem. I remember many years ago when I heard some traditional Chinese music for the first time, and hearing that in comparison to the European-derived music I was used to made plain to me how much of what we think of as "the way music works" is historically or culturally contingent. It seems to me that music theory arises from three things, math/physics, intrinsic human psychoacoustic perceptual characteristics, and cultural conventions. But most of the discussion of music theory doesn't seem to distinguish which is which, and I find that rather confusing. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick An acquaintance is thinking about jailbreaking their iPhone. Not being an Apple user, I haven't followed the topic closely, but I thought this was generally believed to be a bad idea from a security perspective (at least for a primary device). npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…00p2 I'd definitely be curious to hear which uses cases you find it particularly useful for. My general sense is that it should be good for tasks that are vary roughly analogous to an NP problem, i.e. not necessarily easy to produce the output but relatively easy to check if the output is good. So, as an example, it makes sense to me how it could be useful for coding, where you have a compiler or interpreter and, hopefully, a test suite to tell give you some indication of whether the output is good (in addition to looking over the output).. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…00p2 I'm curious to hear your thoughts, if you continue your "fiddling". Most discourse on LLMs that I see seems to slant so far to one side or the other (either LLMs have nearly human capabilities or they're completely useless) that I don't find it very credible. And I haven't personally had much occasions to use them (I haven't been that motivated to use them on a personal basis, and they're difficult to make use of on my professional work due to data restrictions). I probably fall more on the skeptical end of the spectrum currently, but I can easily imagine that LLMs are significantly useful for some purposes (e.g. as a coding aid). npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…9s72 This just makes me think about that Sagan quotation, "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…stct @nprofile…w8t5 In fairness, the Brits sent us Andrew Wakefield first. 😜 npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…stct The other option that the article I posted doesn't address (much if at all) is going with an appliance that just keeps water continuously warm (often sold by Asian companies). Since my kettle is just for home, where we rarely make more than 6 cups of tea in a day, that didn't seem like a good solution for my use case. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…stct But generally kettles seem to be another example of an infuriating trend in appliances, where you can't actually buy quality at any price: paying more gets you approximately the same quality of workmanship with a more attractive exterior and a specific brand name on it. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…stct It's a reasonable guess. I think there were several that looked similar. I specifically tried to identify one where the opening mechanism was metal (which it is on the Cuisinart) rather than plastic, since we'd had that fail on an even earlier kettle. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…stct I have the Cuisineart model from that review. I don't notice off flavors, but perhaps I'm not as sensitive. It does had a transparent window, so there is some plastic and sealant involved. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…stct You may be interested in the Wirecutter review. Specifically, I found this tidbit enlightening: npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…pklh This just makes me think of when I was teaching physics, and I had pre-med students taking the course who were trying to prepare flashcards as a study aid. But, yes, prizing memorization seems even more absurd in that context. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…00p2 If you're vague about white holes, today is your lucky day, because I ran across this shortly after reading your post 😁 npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…9s72 While I am a sometimes listener to Mindscape, I didn't listen to that specific AMA. I guess I would think that the early phase of the big bang is not all that analogous to a white hole in terms of its specific properties (for reasons @nprofile…00p2 mentioned, and questions like "in that case where is the event horizon?"). I would think that the white hole might instead be an instructive example in the following sense: The time reversibility of GR together with the solution for a black hole tells us that a white hole must also be a solution; likewise, if we grant that a Universe uniformly filled with matter (that is initially contracting) can collapse to a singularity under gravity, then time reversal symmetry says that the initial expansion of the big bang must be possible. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…00p2 I believe that archive.ph is one of a set of sites that are designed to mirror web content, sort of like the Internet Archive but with fewer rules, I think. Others include archive.is and archive.today. It's not clear to me if they're all the same site or maybe just run the same code. People often use them to circumvent paywalls. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick Someone I know said that while attempting to use archive.ph they were presented with what appeared to be a #Cloudflare captcha that asked them to copy text from one box on the webpage and paste it into another. They felt this seemed too much like some sort of phishing and did not do it, but now the question is this: is this actually some sort of captcha that is used by Cloudflare or a similar service? npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…5k3r Have you encountered Frankel's "The Geometry of Physics"? It's purpose is develop those sorts of geometrical ideas and show their applicability to physics. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick A friend found a tab open in Safari on their iPhone that they had not (knowingly) opened and whose history indicated it had visited a succession of locations, including multiple web searches and several different websites (some related to the web searches, some not). What are the likely ways that this could have occurred? Could this indicate a larger problem? npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…el6z @nprofile…qz4x They're also quite light to carry and preternaturally quiet. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick For those who haven't heard, astrodon.social is shutting down. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick I often see people using "AI" (often non-specific as to what tool exactly) to summarize a longer text source (or spoken sources with speech to text). My immediate reaction was that you could give a generative model (with sufficient memory) a text and a prompt and ask it to produce a summary, and it would likely produce something that looks like a summary but fundamentally isn't; rather it would be some text it made up that looks statistically similar to a summary and contains text statistically correlated to the input text. That would often look similar to an actual summary, but would differ from what we'd normally think of as a summary because it could contain things that were nowhere in the input text (just correlated to language in the original text) and might actually contradict the input text if it happened to be unusual compared to what was in the training set. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…fa4k Maybe @nprofile…uyg4 will want to get in on this discussion. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…fa4k Yes, that's true. I once had someone ask me to help refute Electric Universe/Plasma Cosmology nonsense (because they knew someone who believed it), but when I tried to look into the claims they were just incoherent. You could point to various statements that were baseless or implausible, but it wasn't really even clear enough to say what precisely was the claim to be refuted. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…fa4k I know that they're inherently bad at math (because they're just spitting out sequences of tokens that are probable based on their training set), but I thought some had implemented a kludge where when the LLM recognizes a math problem it writes code to solve it (something it *can* do, to a degree) and runs the code to get the answer to the problem. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…fa4k I know a common crackpot trope used to be "I have this revolutionary theory. I just need someone to do the math for me." I wonder if the LLMs have now gotten good enough at math to solve that problem for them. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…gt6n @nprofile…qz4x Look on the bright side, I guess, you can just attach the remaining edge together and you'll have a cool Klein bottle hat. 😉 npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…u4rg Yeah that was the bit that also raised my eyebrows. Using power series and then truncating them is your big insight!? npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick Reviews for many types of appliances have become less and less useful for me, because increasingly they focus on how good the appliance's app is and whether it integrates with the Apple, Google, or Amazon ecosystems. But to me these are generally anti-features that mean that the appliance will surveil me, be a security vulnerability on my home network, and potentially lose many or all of its features when some back-end server in a data center somewhere is eventually shut down or access suddenly becomes contingent on a new subscription service at an unreasonable price.. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…m2ru What do you mean? It's trivial to isolate a system. For a system of size R, just add an additional amount of mass M = Rc^2/2G, and it will become quite difficult to exfiltrate information. 😜 npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…m2ru I agree that highly secure systems have been shielded against RF for very long time, I guess TEMPEST security was a concern as far back as WWII. So arguably "air-gapped" was always a poor descriptor, but it seems more absurd to me now that RF is not just a potential side channel that could leak a little information but rather one of the main ways computers interface. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick It strikes me as kind of funny that people still talk about systems being "air-gapped" to mean that they are isolated from machine to machine interaction, despite the fact that wireless networking has been widely used for decades. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…5k3r I haven't read it but now I'm quite curious! npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…59k6 While I generally agree that social media isn't great for that, I've actually been able to find stuff that I knew I posted on Mastodon using the search function with the 'from:' keyword. I do desperately wish that you could also view all the posts from an account (your own or others) without the boosts in addition to the search option. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…fa4k Yes, I agree that if you're teaching a class or having a more in-depth discussion and have equipment at hand, you can go the empirical route (as @nprofile…pd3k also suggested). I guess I was thinking more about the context where you're speaking in brief (without props) and just trying to convey the most basic idea of what polarization is in a few sentences. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick I'm curious if anyone has found a good, succinct way to explain light polarization to someone who has no formal knowledge about electricity and magnetism. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…zwgs At the risk of asking a serious question, what's the deal with all these alternative ATProto apps? Are there any that have significant independent infrastructure? npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick I'm curious, does anyone know of a good way to find archived copies of videos from the video streaming app/service Periscope? I'm trying to find helpful suggestions for an acquaintance. npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick @nprofile…5lc3 @nprofile…ksf8 Do these actually work on up-to-date iPhones? I know I've seen a lot of claims about tools to gain access to mobile devices that then turn out to only actually work on older OS versions (presumably old enough to have known exploits). npub1254wcjqdese7zgtsnxcf3j2g2a2erlk5rm6l5rtl00spfhj9qcmsqceqaf Nick I still use an alarm clock rather than a phone to wake up. The fact that I'm still using it is a testament to its durability and how well it does its job. But the one thing that will always baffle me is that it has a dedicated button for toggling daylight saving time on and off; a button that one would use, at most, twice per year. It does not synchronize it's time over the air or anything like that, so I cannot imagine why someone thought that made sense.
