Raro

If this were on Mad Men:

"You don't need a hamburger... you need McDonald's".

Maybe it was exterminated?

Ha, my previous comment was before your new edit mentioning Sora. There is a good reason why the accompanying research report to the Sora demo isn't titled "Awesome Generative Video," but references world models. The interesting feature is how many apparently (approximations to) physical properties emerge (object permanence, linear motion, partially elastic collisions, as well as many of the elements of grammar of film), and which do not (notably material properties of solid and fluids, creation of objects from nothing, etc.)

Yeah, I've been thinking about similar concepts in a different context. Fascinating.

Regarding the role of time, the idea of a purely conserved quantity is that it is conserved under the conditions of the system (that's why the article frequently references Newton's First Law), so they're generally held "for all time that these symmetries exist in the system".

Specifically on time: the invariant for systems that exhibit continuous time symmetries (i.e. you move a little bit forward or backward in time and the system looks exactly the same) is energy.

Could it be something like "failure is the mother of success"?

(失败乃成功之母)

I am no expert, I was curious myself and went down an internet-sleuthing rabbit-hole. Apparently this is a common phrase, but I am not fluent in Mandarin, so cum grano salis.

Yes, Mercury was very prominent a couple of weeks ago. Of course it's always close to the Sun, so perhaps your horizon viewing conditions have obscured it (I have to walk so that the trees and street lights are out of the way).

I've been trying to track the Pleiades for Matariki (Maori New Year), which are currently just above Venus.

"AI is 'Machine Learning' for journalists"

Unfortunately I can't recall where I first heard this great quip.

Ohhh, that's where this came from!

I directed a short film in the late 90s and we used this as an 'event' at a party (minus the floating part). We removed the glass from a light bulb to act as a remote fuse. Acetylene was perfect, as it gives this wonderful 'crack,' much better than the LPG we first tried. It was Tim's idea.

Please do not try this!

Codex has the capacity to write decent Python code. A large part of getting great results from it is writing clear, well separated, prompts. Also taking it off streaming mode, to get best N results, and penalizing repetition, improves the output dramatically. Even better if you can give further hints (e.g. import pandas) before submitting.

Of course, it's merely trained on code it's seen on GitHub, so it certainly has a particular smell to it (disclaimer: I focus on Data Science related code, which is not always of the highest quality and has its share of cargo-culting).

Most of the demos you will likely have seen are in streaming mode, have vague prompts with a high temperature setting.

What a great video. I appreciate the care and effort that went into this.

If you are interested in growing some oyster mushrooms, you can pick up a self-contained growing kit for ~US$20. It's not difficult, and it really is a lot of fun to mist your babies and watch them grow over your sink. They really are delicious simply sautéed in some butter and garlic.

Python's NumPy library deliberately emulates much of the functionality of Matlab's core (similarly, fundamental plotting with matplotlib follow similar design cues). As a lapsed long-time Matlab user, I think they're just as fun to use.

There is also Octave, an open-source Matlab alternative, but when I last used it (admittedly quite a while ago) it had limited support for toolboxes (e.g. signal processing). I imagine it has only improved since.

Thanks for that! This is right up my alley. The signal separation makes sense, as the three pick-ups each provide a different sound, but none emulate the live experience quite so well.

The under-the-saddle piezo acts as an accelerometer right at the termination point of the string. So it gets every partial without any real damping, so they tend to sound far too bright. You're directly picking up vibrations that tend to be damped by the time they go through the impedance matching system that is a live guitar (i.e. acoustic radiation from a few feet or more in front of the soundboard). Fishman often roll their piezos off a lot to de-emphasize the upper partials, because it sounds so bright.

The humbucker is effectively a velocirometer, and is around a quarter of the scale length along, so it sounds a lot more mellow than the piezo, but picks up on different things. It also doesn't get the damping that the string-wood-air interface tends to bring, and also doesn't pick up on the neat interactions the instrument has with the internal and external air elements (for example, the Helmholtz and pipe modes of the air in the internal cavity).

The internal mic does sample the interaction the guitar has with the air. But it misses out on the higher radiation modes, which tend to be radiated out the front of the guitar. So it sounds very 'boomy'. It's convenient, for a mic, but doesn't sound great by itself.

In combination, these sound pretty good! But still doesn't emulate the 'real thing'. Hence Jon also mentions the use of external mics too. That, in addition to the separate channel for the octave pedal!

Thank you for this.

I am currently bread-boarding two guitar pedals for myself, and there is great discussion on modulargrid.net on filtering.

You can occasionally see guitarists' signal flows and stopbox arrays in interviews etc

It's amazing how much influence these interviews have. They have, in the past, directly led to surges in demand for, e.g. the Klon Centaur and variacs.

On the contrary, I personally think the suggestion is a useful thought exercise.

There are a lot of interviews in Guitar magazine on the total rig used by particular guitarists. For example: https://guitar.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/rig-diagram-Ma...

Of course, this includes the whole signal chain, including the pick!

I like the suggestion of the analogy in general. But a metaphor I'd use is a feedback system with a very long delay and very low decay constant. So definitely cyclic from that perspective! The signal chain is often split by guitarists with a dedicated A/B box too. So a fuller analogy would be a more complex pipeline.

Thank you for pointing this out; this accords with my recollection, but you clearly stated a fundamental issue with the approach in its current state.

I thought of the idea as more a sketch of how things might be looked at with a perspective change, rather than a full-blown theory (at least in the form I saw it in 2014). I guess I was holding out for the (highly unlikely) possibility of an asymptotic limit or something similar. It just seemed to be rooted more in reality than most of string theory/LQG. Of course, that could be my bias towards novelty!

Oh cool!

Thank you. I am always looking for decent sci-fi recommendations.

The 'Amplituhedron': https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.2007.pdf

The idea is to focus on the amplitude of scattering interactions from the momentum-space twistor perspective, rather than perturbations about a point in space-time.

For background: Nima made a name for himself by greatly simplifying complex particle interactions, from tens of pages of Feynman diagrams to around a page. I think of the above as an extension of that project. However, I don't recall all the details, as it's been six years since I went to his talk on this.

I would go even further: Natalie Wolchover only interviewed string theorists and quantum field theorists. They all assume that gravity in some way or another will just be yet another quantum field theory.

I didn't want to push that point too much. I am personally uncomfortable with the lack of emphasis on empirical evidence. However, that's not to say there can be fruitful results.

In terms of re-thinking geometric approaches, I quite liked (what I understood of) Nima Arkani-Hamed's suggestion for avoiding issues with localization. Similarly for Penrose's twistor theory.

Very much! We periodically update our understanding.

For example, we only knew basic details about the strong nuclear force from the 1910s, and the empirical ingredients for the weak force weren't around until the 1930s.

We still have very little idea of what mediates dark energy, as well as dark matter interactions (potentially, depending on your favorite model for DM). We know they interact gravitationally, at least.

Edit: I meant to say it's something of a cosmic accident that we don't interact more or a lot less with the nuclear forces. We are 'lucky' we get to interact with electromagnetic forces so easily.

For some context: the article only interviews quantum gravity researchers, so it has that particular slant. They are concerned with coming up with different strategies to mitigate the issues general relativity has with singularities, and these strategies range from "sensible deviations from general relativity" to "fun, but highly unlikely".

In terms of how the theory of gravitation is not like the other fundamental forces, I think the most salient point was made by Sera Cremonini: gravitation is not a renormalizable theory. At least in the sense of how we have approached renormalization with the other forces. It is intrinsically non-linear, because the source is the field (and vice-versa).

To get anywhere close to a grand unified theory that incorporates gravitation requires a rethink of the normalization procedure (and likely requires an entirely new geometric framework—this was a pre-requisite for both general relativity and Newton's Universal Law).

The general style guide is to "write it how you say it":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Indefinite_a...

https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/A...

Of course there will be variants where you'd just have to make a decision (e.g. how do you pronounce SQL?)

One note: technically, 'HN' is an initialism; acronyms are special cases of initialisms that are pronounceable.

I too have a great fondness for Noether's First Theorem! However, just a slight technical correction: the theorem only goes one way. A conservation law alone doesn't necessarily imply a (continuous) symmetry of the system. For example, there's no symmetry prescription for baryon or lepton number conservation. Of course, that doesn't bar them from arising from symmetries of some awesome future theory...