It’s conceivable that there was some amazing math lurking in one or more of the non-string-theory ideas, and nobody was lucky enough to find it.

Occasional sneerclub character Nate Silver is bluechecking again.

The New York Times Pitchbot enters our territory:

We wanted to understand the future of AI. So we talked to three Hawk Tuah cryptocurrency investors at a White Castle in Toms River.

All attempts to make a theory of quantum gravity are unfalsifiable, because the relevant experiments are far beyond our means, much further so than building a practical quantum computer. String theory benefited from multiple rounds of unexpectedly interesting mathematical discoveries, which fired up people’s hopes and kept the fires burning. None of the other assorted proposals (loop quantum gravity, asymptotic safety, …) got lucky like that. Moreover, there’s a case to be made that if you’re an orthodox quantum field theory researcher, any attempt you make to quantize gravity will end up a string theory. Roughly speaking, there’s no regime in which gravity is the only force that you need to consider, so to make any predictive statements about some quantum gravity effect, you need to understand all the physics that happens at energy levels in between “warm summer day” and “immediate aftermath of the Big Bang”. String theory was the only possibility that suggested there could be a way out.

You could say that this just goes to show that orthodox QFT specialists lack imagination. The pioneers of quantum theory devised it in order to explain hot gases in glass tubes. Why should their same notions about what it means to “quantize” also apply to space and time themselves? And maybe they don’t! But proposing an alternative to quantum mechanics, or a modification of quantum mechanics that works in all the circumstances where we have already confirmed quantum mechanics, is no easy task.

“Fundamental” physics had a period of great advances, from the 1890s with the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity through the early 1970s with the establishment of the Standard Model. From then, we’ve been in “the stall”, as barbecue folks say. The big accelerators have filled in the edges of the picture and confirmed some predictions from that era, like finding the top quark and the Higgs. But they have yet to deliver a sign of beyond-Standard-Model physics that holds up under scrutiny.

“The AI is attuned to every molecular vibration and can reconstruct you by extrapolation from a piece of fairy cake” is a necessary premise of the Basilisk that they’ve spent all that time saying they don’t believe in.

He retweeted somebody saying this:

The cheat code to reading Yudkowsky- at least if you’re not doing death-of-the-author stuff- is that he believes the AI doom stuff with completely literal sincerity. To borrow Orwell’s formulation, he believes in it the way he believes in China.

Kelsey Piper continues to bluecheck:

What would some good unifying demands be for a hostile takeover of the Democratic party by centrists/moderates?

As opposed to the spineless collaborators who run it now?

We should make acquiring ID documents free and incredibly easy and straightforward and then impose voter ID laws, paper ballots and ballot security improvements along with an expansion of polling places so everyone participates but we lay the ‘was it a fair election’ qs to rest.

Presuming that Republicans ever asked “was it a fair election?!” in good faith, like a true jabroni.

Comparing quantum computing to time machines or faster-than-light travel is unfair. In order for the latter to exist, our understanding of physics would have to be wrong in a major way. Quantum computing presumes that our understanding of physics is correct. Making it work is “only” an engineering problem, in the sense that Newton’s laws say that a rocket can reach the Moon, so the Apollo program was “only” a engineering project. But breaking any ciphers with it is a long way off.

The man is a hollow shell, and the woman is tripping over her own tongue in the least regal fashion imaginable. There’s no emotional maturity because there’s no interiority. There’s no communication, just Yud doing Ready Player One with Nerd Culture™ references. Remember the Evil Overlord list? You do, don’t you? Wasn’t the Evil Overlord list funny? Now imagine if an Evil Overlord had, wait for it, read the Evil Overlord list. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

(Yes, he did the same damn thing in HPMOR, too.)

Writing prompt: Day one at the dildo factory

“Yarrgh. Another crew of bushy tails, more wet behind the ears than 'tween the legs. You’ve no idea what’s in store for you, but these eyes, these old eyes have seen things. Like the great injector malfunction of aught-six…”

SHE is gowned in a black dress sewn with tiny emeralds, rubies, sapphires too small to detract from the darkness of her gown, instead giving it the illusion of a rainbow sheen.

Following “gowned” so closely with “dress” is awkward, because the latter is redundant. Consider, e.g., “She is gowned in black, the fabric sewn with…” Using both “gowned” and “gown” in the same sentence compounds the problem. Consider introducing further information about the fabric: e.g., “the darkness of the velvet” or “the darkness of the silk”.

Whoof. Made it through the first sentence.

They have leveled up from the socialism of fools to the communism of dipshits.

The phrase “the bong rips of science” comes to mind.

Please learn to parse a joke on your way to the egress.

Being an Internet Old, I do worry about rulings that could narrow the scope of fair use, since good things do rely upon it, and there’s always the risk of a sowing/reaping thing, but I won’t pretend to have actual legal expertise.

Like, if this guy gets a second scene, it’s the one where they demonstrate that SPECTRE does not tolerate failure.

IIRC, they were promising some new kind of processor with stochastic stuff in it that was advertised as “quantum computing” but isn’t really.

But he sure likes saying physics words.

It’s “Bond villain aesthetics” if the “villain” you mean is the big guy guarding the next location who acts intimidating for five seconds before Bond suplexes him and walks inside anyway, quipping.

Also, Grimes is not even offering table stakes for being a Bond girl here. Like, she’s an extra in the club through which Bond quickly passes in order to find the actual Bond girl. She’s not a vaguely trans-coded Famke Janssen bringing herself to orgasm by machine-gunning an entire room of technicians while Gottfried John looks on with a “what the fuck, tovarisch” eyebrow lift.

Ketan Joshi:

Microsoft’s own research confirms something that was already pretty obvious: relying on a text generating machine to come up with answers erodes critical thinking, and is a method favoured by those who never liked doing critical thinking in the first place

The whole paper is an absolute nightmare funfair ride through the behaviours that have become almost instantaneously widespread through the professional world - something Microsoft have invested billions into accelerating and worsening no matter the consequences.

a phrase to make your skin crawl right off:

Lighthaven cuddle puddle

And after that shot, a chaser:

Is the Dark Enlightenment actually fascist? Not at all. It’s probably the least fascistic strain of political thought today, though this requires understanding what fascism really is, which the word itself now obscures. Is it racist? Perhaps. The term is so malleable that it’s hard to say with clarity.