pessimist

There are multiple independent observations pointing toward dark matter:

1. Galaxy rotation curves. 2. Galaxy cluster mass measurements from gravitational lenses and infrared. 3. Cosmic Microwave Background models (mass measurements from inhomogeneities that correspond to acoustic waves, for eg).

MOND only explains 1.

Dark matter accounts for all 3. Only catch is that it hasnt been directly observed.

From Terry Tao's comments in the thread:

"Very nice! ... actually the thing that impresses me more than the proof method is the avoidance of errors, such as making mistakes with interchanges of limits or quantifiers (which is the main pitfall to avoid here). Previous generations of LLMs would almost certainly have fumbled these delicate issues.

...

I am going ahead and placing this result on the wiki as a Section 1 result (perhaps the most unambiguous instance of such, to date)"

The pace of change in math is going to be something to watch closely. Many minor theorems will fall. Next major milestone: Can LLMs generate useful abstractions?

Underrated even among physicists. Among the immediate post war generation his contributions are up there with Feynman and Schwinger.

To quote Freeman Dyson: "Professor Yang is, after Einstein and Dirac, the preeminent stylist of the 20th century physics. From his early days as a student in China to his later years as the sage of Stony Brook, he has always been guided in his thinking by a love of exact analysis and formal mathematical beauty. This love led him to his most profound and original contribution to physics, the discovery with Robert Mills of non-Abelian gauge fields. With the passage of time, his discovery of non-Abelian gauge fields is gradually emerging as a greater and more important event than the spectacular discovery of parity non-conservation which earned him the Nobel Prize."

Plausible. General Relativity was concieved by an extraordinary genius, but the perihelion of mercury was measured by dozens of painstaking but otherwise unexceptional people. Without that fantastically accurate measurement, GR would never have been accepted as a valid theory.

There should be legal recourse against these companies and investors. It is pure crime to release such obviously broken software.

The standard model is 100% quantum mechanics. It's just QM as applied to fields. While undergrads start with single or few particle quantum mechanics.

There is a lot of hard math and fundamental physical ideas that pop out when we apply quantum mechanics to fields, but it's still QM.

The work of Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dirac, Pauli from 1925-28 or so is absolutely not our date.

Killian civilians in war has been completely normalized. Even in highly visible conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. People just shrug and move on.

Political discourse has lost all sense of decency. Senators, the VP and POTUS all routinely mock and demean their opponents and laugh even at murder. Arrests are made by unknown masked men with assault rifles.

AI is simply irrelevant to this - humans are selfish, tribal and ugly.

The Democratic Governor of California denounced them publicly and stopped the effort.

Despite Musk raising millions and campaigning viciously against the Democrats the administration kept all of SpaceX contracts and Tesla ev subsidies. In fact the IRA benefited Tesla disproportionately.

Both sides are NOT the same. One is fascist and the other is not

Yes, both parties do it. In California for example left-wing politics is openly racist and I have sympathy for even the crazy republicans here.

However to defend Obama - he explictly ran on unity and went out of his away to not openly benefit his own race.

Fine, I don't disagree with anything you point out. However where we differ is that I believe identity politics is the trigger factor here, all the other changes you mention (loss of balance of power etc) are downstream of this.

Low-level corruption at the local/state level is related but its effects are different though. In fact even today low level corruption in the US is extremely low by global standards - you can't bribe your way to a drivers license openly, for example. I'm sure it happens but it's not common or openly boasted about (parts of CA or DC could be an exception).

Here the corruption is openly displayed as a kind of peacock-tail to the beneficiaries.

It turns out that when elections are fought on the basis of identity (race, religion) etc corruption is actually considered a benefit! This is because the loyalists interpret this as "we" are winning and "they" are losing.

I witnessed this up close in India where parties openly exist to benefit certain constituencies based on caste, language, religion and so on.

It is horrifying to see this attitude take root in my adopted land.

Apart from Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Bohr and Fermi are clearly ahead in depth and breadth of contribution. Post-war it's less clear, but IMO Steven Weinberg and Murray Gell Mann are probably greater.

This analysis in the end doesn't show what it claims to show and actually proves the reverse - US Health care spending is much larger than other countries, it eats up significant fraction of productivity gains in other sectors (rises faster than income as shown by the 1.8 slope in the very first graph), and does not lead to better health outcomes. It actually proves we would be better off if we spent less and focused on lifestyle.

My brother is dying of a grade 4 brain tumor, and I've spend countless hours poring through papers. Horrifying to realize they may be falsified. I am always sceptical of pre-clinical studies since so many have tended to fail in the real world, but now I wonder how many were just fake? These aren't scientists but thieves robbing public money with no skin the game.

So if Sam Altman is back by tomorrow (Sunday) after being crucified on Friday, I think that means the end of the world is near.

Support is bad because outsourced everything, and the outsourcing companies are under huge pressure to cut costs and especially human costs. Everything is measured, and extra time responding to complaints is a huge red flag, so its made as hard as possible to interact with humans. Time for empathy is out of the question, and its probably a security risk.

In less than 5 years, all of this will be replaced by LLMs, and we will have the luxury of talking to a warm but completely fake human who will provide us even less help than before.

Hard to say its the most appalling. Two more appalling omissions are Lisa Meitner for nuclear fission, and Chien-Shiung Wu for parity violation, since effectively others were given the prize for the work and their contributions overlooked.

In chess we had a tiny window of a few years when humans could use the help of computers to play the world's best chess. By 2000, computers were far better than humans and the gap has increased. Chess players are now entertainers, like all us humans are destined to spend our time doing.

A beta that we are all helping test . Simply unbelievable that the NHTSA allows this to happen.

The Tesla safety report which the company boastfully released wouldn't have counted this incident since the Tesla itself wasn't harmed.

ChatGPT understands what it reads. In the sense that it is actually creating a model of what it just read, and it's own output. It happens to understand English, dozens of programming languages and perhaps others. There is no other explanation.

It often makes mistakes, and that's the only reason why it's currently inferior to the human brain.

Surely it be writing full fledged correct programs in under 2 years.

The writer is far more knowledgeable than me, and it seems he believes there was no major decline related to the fall of Rome, the traditional "Dark Age" story is false, etc. I should take him more seriously since he knows a lot more, but it seems clear that there was a catastrophic fall in science, technology and living standards with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The effect was felt as far as my ancestral land of South India where there was a massive de-urbanization and fall in trade in the 5th century. I do not understand why it is in fashion to deny this decline, and nothing in this blog makes a compelling case otherwise.

10x death-undercount nationwide is probably not accurate. Major states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala are reporting close to accurate numbers. 2-5x nationwide is likely, with places like UP, West Bengal and Gujarat undercounting by 5-10x.

Agree with almost everything. Health care is collapsing around us.

10x death-undercount nationwide is probably not accurate. Major states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala are reporting close to accurate numbers. 2-5x nationwide is likely, with places like UP, West Bengal and Gujarat undercounting by 5-10x.

Yes. But clinical trials are expensive ($100m plus) and time consuming.

This vaccine is an inactive host virus whose payload has been replaced by the coronavirus "spike". It has always been a worry that the body will generate immunity to the host virus and thus make the vaccine less effective. That is a likely explanation for the first-full-dose regimen being less effective.

Poor Virginijus Šikšnys, left out because the journal he sent it to rejected without review his paper which was sent before Doudna and Charpentier's.

https://www.statnews.com/2018/05/31/crispr-scientists-kavli-...

"But bad luck with a journal made Šikšnys the forgotten man of CRISPR: Cell rejected his paper in April 2012 without sending it out for peer review. In contrast, when Doudna, Charpentier, and their colleagues showed that Cas9 could be programmed to cut DNA, their paper sped through the review process at Science and was published online in late June 2012. Šikšnys and his co-authors, meanwhile, had scrambled to find a more receptive journal and landed at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which published their paper three months after the Berkeley team’s."

The Privacy Policy is extremely dangerous and has been changed silently already. Although it claims to restrict the purpose and time of data collection, it coolly has 2 additional clauses which give blanket power.

https://www.medianama.com/wp-content/uploads/Aarogya-Setu-Pr...

"“The personal information collected will not be used for any purpose other than those mentioned in this Clause 2 save as required in order to comply with a legal requirement.”

"All personal information collected from you under Clause 1(a) provided at the time of registration will be retained for as long as your account remains in existence and for such period thereafter as required for the purposes for which the information may lawfully be used or is otherwise required under any other law for the time being in force"

You know that the app can be removed at any instant, once the lockdown is over?

But the data is with the government already, and as per their terms of service can be stored forever, and for any purpose they wish (as long as its a "legal requirement").

"“The personal information collected will not be used for any purpose other than those mentioned in this Clause 2 save as required in order to comply with a legal requirement.”

"All personal information collected from you under Clause 1(a) provided at the time of registration will be retained for as long as your account remains in existence and for such period thereafter as required for the purposes for which the information may lawfully be used or is otherwise required under any other law for the time being in force"

https://www.medianama.com/wp-content/uploads/Aarogya-Setu-Pr...

The government has already changed the privacy policy without notification, and for sure they can change it again and nobody - especially not a compliant judiciary - will stop them.

Eugene Wigner knew both and has this to say:

"I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me.

... But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original."