Remember Aaron♥️

Fuck #Meta 

Which Large Language Model do you prefer? The one that thinks trans people don’t exist or the one that doesn’t want to talk about Tian'anmen Square in 1989?

Edit: GitHub Copilot‘s refusal to work on code that mentions gender was fixed (maybe in the last few hours?). I‘m still worried about possible future developments.

I’m not sure people quite grasp how much of the crypto world is reacting to the Trump memecoin launches.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #USpolitics #USpol #DonaldTrump

🎉 Wikipedia is 24 years old today!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Day

#Wikipedia

If you love Richard Feynman you've got to watch this video...

... where Angela Collier will ruthlessly dissect the mythology he built around himself. You probably won't agree with everything she says, and you may hate some of it, but it will still be thought-provoking.

I didn't know about what she calls "Feynman bros": lazy male students who read Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman! and try to adopt the flashy womanizing persona he depicts there, instead of working hard on physics. I can easily believe they exist. So if you know a youngster who likes physics, don't give them that book. Instead do what my uncle did: give them The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

I didn't know these books and indeed every book 'by Feynman' was actually written by his Caltech colleague Robert Leighton or his son Ralph Leighton based on audiotapes of lectures or conversations. I still don't know how much of a role Feynman had in crafting these concoctions.

I *did* know that he once flew into a rage and tried to choke his second wife.

I did not know he was good with children, eagerly answering letters from them, etc. It's nice that Collier points out this good side.

I *did* notice, from his anecdotes, that he put a huge amount of work into trying to seem like a manly man rather than a nerd.

I didn't fully notice that almost none of his anecdotes feature the famous physicists he worked with at the Manhattan Project. Collier points out that this leaves him free to make things up.

I think she overlooks how he eagerly *points out* that he used tricks to seem smart. He explains the tricks to show they're not so hard.

I could go on....

(1/2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc

If fundamental physics were making big progress, I'd be all over it - that's what I wanted to do ever since I was a kid. But it's stagnant: the action is elsewhere, like using category theory to design radical new kinds of software. So these days I get some of my physics fix by studying the *history* of physics.

After studying the hell out of particle physics and general relativity, I went back and dug into the history of electromagnetism, which is really just as fascinating. Now I'm going back to medieval physics - because the idea that everyone was an idiot until Galileo is just plain wrong.

"Natural philosophers" in the 1200s and 1300s developed key concepts, utterly necessary for modern physics, but almost invisible now because we're so used to them - except for students, who find physics really hard because we don't bother to CLEARLY EXPLAIN those concepts: we act like children are born knowing them.

I'm talking about concepts like "the speed of an object at a moment of time". What the hell does that even mean? How can you figure out how fast something is going in one instant of time, when doesn't have time to go anywhere?

Well, that was clarified by calculus, and we credit it to Newton and Leibniz. But they had to have the idea already, in order to clarify it! And the idea of "instantaneous velocity" was developed around 1340 by the Oxford Calculators, a school of thinkers like Heytesbury and Swineshead - geniuses we never hear about.

Now I'm going back further. Did you know that back in 420 AD Martianus Capella had a theory where Mercury and Venus revolved around the Sun? And this was known to thinkers in Charlemagne's day... and also Copernicus! Wow!