Lost me at "making past from scratch".

In some sense, don't we all make the past from scratch? [stares into middle distance]

Yeah, I, too, practice my bball skills watching Curry's highlights ;)

Jokes aside, it's a fun channel. Makes me feel like I know what's going on in those games.

And for our next trick ... ... pattering to drive transistor switching rather than just transistor etching!

Single-atom transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-atom_transistor

(relative) size (still) matters!

Very approximately, (1) developing AGI is dangerous, (2) we might be very close to it (think several years rather than several decades).

TBH It surprises me how controversial (1) is. The crux really is (2) ...

There seems to be soooo much background feeling that the official large companies of AI are in control of things. Or should be. Or can be.

Can they? When plenty of groups are more interesting in exploiting the advances? When plenty of hackers will first try to work around the constraints - before even using the system as-is? When it's difficult even to define what AGI might test like or look like? When it might depend on a small detail or helper?

Several years is a quite small position. Decades is still extremely concerning.

I did a little spelunking some time ago reacting to the same urge. Tropical geometry appears to be where the math talk is at.

Just dropping the reference here, I don't grok the literature.

This, and more ..

... all the way out to the digital frontier of professional wacom tablets and 4 feet wide plotters. A fun hobby for some.

> We got a refund from the seller pretty quickly and they told us to keep them.

So they made some? Spent time/energy for science of course ...

Top comment.

My adjacent refrain is "Science is not the same as people trying to do science".

The work of philosophers and sociologists of science, Kuhn and Feyerabend in particular, support this perspective.

Scientists trying to do science is a component of broad science, is it not?

Only if they succeed at doing science. If they just engage in pseudo-science then it's not.

IMHO this conflates model with reality. GR is a model.

Specifically, GR is a model that breaks down at singularities. That time "begins" at the Big Bang is a prediction of GR, but until we have a model of quantum gravity there's no telling whether that's actually true or whether the conditions at the big bang are something GR can't fully describe.

Similar to the singularities in black holes - everything up to a stone's throw of the event horizon is pretty well explained by GR, but as far as the horizon itself or the region beyond are concerned, there might be dragons as far as we know.

> That time "begins" at the Big Bang is a prediction of GR

I don’t think that’s right. If we interpret Big Bang theory as claiming that there is a singularity at a finite distance into the past history of every present event, then GR can’t predict what happened at or prior to that singularity. Whether time “began” then or whether there was “more time on the other side” is a question GR alone cannot answer, not a prediction of GR

Black hole singularities do not start right after their event horizon. The event horizon only demarcates where the black hole singularity becomes an inevitable (inescapable) point in all possible futures.

That's not what I was trying to imply, sorry. It's the singularity at the center where GR entirely breaks down, but there's also weird stuff going on below the event horizon (space becoming time-like and vice versa), that aren't present in, e.g. String Theory's Fuzzballs [1] (which, of course, bring their own set of thorough weirdness). So what I was trying to say was that while GR predicts some behavior below the event horizon, a full model of quantum gravity could predict something entirely different, and not only for the area just around the singularity itself but (maybe) up to the event horizon.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzball_(string_theory)