613style

> You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.

That's not true. It's certainly legal to own lab equipment, but when you start combining equipment with the intent to make cocaine, you're committing a crime long before any drug is produced.

Any country who's a party to the 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs has such laws, including the US, UK, and most of Europe.

They're saying you can't find a ruler accurate enough to be sure the number you measure is sqrt(2) and not sqrt(2) for the first 1000 digits then something else. And eventually, as you build better and better rulers, it will turn out that physical reality doesn't encode enough information to be sure. Anything you can measure is rational.

Non-physicst here. Hopefully someone can correct me or elaborate. My understanding is that what's being described is smaller scale decoherence inside the proton. Normally, the universe only asks protons the question: "are you a proton?" and it's like "Yep I'm a proton." (What's your baryon number? What's your charge? etc)

When we blast it with higher and higher energies, we're asking new questions: "What are the momenta of your quarks? What's your color field arrangement?" There are many possible answers to those questions and we're now starting to see the landscape of them.

So having different answers based on how you look is really answering different questions, just like asking an electron: What's your momentum? What's your location?

He's not making it up and there's no reason for that tone. Strings are more straightforward to isolate compared to vocals/horns/etc because they produce a near-perfect harmonic series in parallel lines in a spectrogram. The time/frequency tradeoff exists, but it's less of a problem for strings because of their slow attack.

You can look up HPSS and python libraries like Essentia and Librosa.

Agreed. My experience is GPT5 is significantly better at large-scale planning & architecture (at least for the kind of stuff I care about which is strongly typed functional systems), and then Sonnet is much better at executing the plan. GPT5 is also better at code reviews and finding subtle mistakes if you prompt it well enough, but not totally reliable. Claude Code fills its context window and re-compacts often enough that I have to plan around it, so I'm surprised it's larger than GPT's.

Why are you monitoring your colleagues’ water intake?

These models still have guardrails. Even locally they won't tell you how to make bombs or write pornographic short stories.

Bell's Theorem (1964) describes an inequality that should hold if quantum mechanics' randomness can be explained by certain types of hidden variables. In the time since, we've repeatedly observed that inequality violated in labs, leading most to presume that the normal types of hidden variables you would intuit don't exist. There are some esoteric loopholes that remain possibilities, but for now the position that matches our data the best is that there are not hidden variables and quantum mechanics is fundamentally probabilistic.

I believe that those who justify cruelty with rhetoric and spread hate will one day look into the mirror and be horrified at what they see.

The sharpest cries of, "that's not thinking!" always seem to have an air of desperation about them. It's as if I'm special, and I think, and maybe thinking is what makes me special, so if LLMs think then I'm less special.

At some point the cry will change to, "It only looks like thinking from the outside!" And some time after that: "It only looks conscious from the outside..."

> Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding

It doesn't matter. There is literally no assignment you can give students that they won't cheat on. In an intro college astronomy class, "Look at these pictures of planets, what do think is interesting about them?" or "Walk around your house and look at the different types of light bulbs, what kinds do you have?" Both of these will include 20% ChatGPT responses.

megaparsec (1 million parsecs)

This is exactly what I got wrong when I started learning jazz piano as an adult. My wife is a lifelong musician and I got to the annoying point where I'd be playing and she'd walk by and go "that third chord sounds wrong." I'd ask why and she'd be unable to elaborate until she sat down and played the better version intuitively. Then she'd retroactively analyze what she did to explain it to me. I understood the theory, she understood the sounds. It was always humbling and helped me understand that intellectualizing comes second.

Yet it remains true that not having magic evil talismans in my house makes it very unlikely that my family or I get cursed by accident.

I didn't say and don't believe those things.