mmmBacon

Agree. I also find this photo to be very profound. Generations of people lived and died and we will never see their faces. After this it’s like a great veil was lifted on the human story.

I wonder in our digital age how long our images will endure. Will the vast quantities of images we have now have disappeared entirely 200 years from now and the photographic period be the only enduring image record? It’s interesting to think about.

While your comment is true today. It doesn’t support the GP’s claim that Japan was near a nuclear weapon at the end of WW2 and only lacked the will to do so.

Remember when software was eating the world? The gravy train ran out on commodity hardware and now we are paying the price for almost 3 decades of underinvestment.

Sounds like PMH, if they exist, are essentially the Universe’s ultimate cannonball.

Wow this is awesome! I’ve been using ChatGPT to create TikZ diagrams because honestly it’s not trivial to create TikZ diagrams and they look really good when done well. However it can be challenging to get ChatGPT to tweak the diagrams. My knowledge of TikZ syntax and behavior isn’t always sophisticated enough to get the outcome I want. So this thing looks like an answer for that. Looking forward to trying this.

Incidentally I am using ChatGPT to create Latex documents for my blog and then they get rendered server side. The workflow works really well.

UofR physic grad that also worked at the LLE here. Agree Rochester schools are underrated (although admittedly a little biased).

At least in the sciences you have access to lots of opportunities you don’t have at bigger name schools.

They set me up in life in a way that I don’t think would have happened elsewhere.

It’s ironic what you wrote because it was Carl Sagan who first developed the theory to explain the Venusian climate.

I met Carl Sagan and he was not a person who dumbed down anything. He had a profound impact on planetary science on top of inspiring many including myself to pursue physics.

I think the fact that we are all still talking about Carl 30 years after his death is strong evidence of his impact.

We are still in a regime where the growth of logical qubits is far below the point of any practical computing utility let alone at a level capable of breaking existing codes. While it’s correct to be proactive at the security end, if you take the current rate of improvement in logical qubits and project it forward you’ll get something beyond 2040. I built a probabilistic model of logical qubit improvement and the median ends up being further out (probably should publish this somewhere). I’d like to point out that I’m not purely negative; I was surprised to calculate we can make enough He-II to make it all go!

Of course such a model cannot predict a fundamental breakthrough nor can it predict whether there is some kind of fundamental limit to the size of such a quantum system before we have coherence collapse. This is an interesting question for quantum mechanics however.

In summary, quantum computing feels analogous to fusion, a technology that’s always 20 years away.

Oh and don’t get me started on AGI. Lol.

Totally. I started baking pies because it was a tradition in my family and my wife can’t cook. To make sure my kids had the family food tradition I learned to bake. Once you get a system down, like anything else, it’s not that hard. Plus pie filling has time to bloom if you make it day before. Pie dough can be made ahead and freezes well. Individually these things aren’t hard or time consuming.

I started making my own simple bread and now I can’t eat store bought bread. Just takes like sawdust to me. It’s not really all that hard. Add a little rosemary and some olive oil and it’s delicious. No need to fuss over sourdough (over rated in my opinion). Over time you learn how ingredients work and what ratios work. So becomes easier and easier. I can throw together amazing corn bread and be eating it a little more than half hour later.

The GP has a point about the state of journalism generally and the pervasive nature in which Yellow journalism is returning.

One need not be anti-intellectual to find the state of reporting to be difficult to deal with and not wanting to read it. In addition to the GP’s complaint; journalists of any ilk also tend to conflate editorializing with reporting. You see this all the way from pop science to NYTimes to Fox News and yes even the Economist.

A question is whether the more fact based reporting of the early-mid 20th Century is the exception to the tendency of Yellow journalism that existed before and seems to exist now.

Midnight PRs sounds really sad. Pager duty; I mean you’re not saving people in the ER. Everything you’ve written comes off as profoundly selfish and self-centered. God forbid your 8 month old needs to be a priority over pager duty.

Raising kids is hard, I have 3 but it’s not sad. Blowing off some steam is something every parent needs. But it sounds like you are in desperate need of some perspective on life.

By what metric is the US lagging? By any objective measure we can see the dominance of US technology. I think it’s most of the rest of the world that’s being left behind; Europe in particular. If what you’re saying is true the US economy would also be flagging but it’s not. If what you’re saying is true, you’d see the list of the world’s most valuable companies dominated by non-US firms.

I think you are confusing the current climate of immigration enforcement and reform with being anti-immigration. The US will continue to draw top talent because the US is where the bulk of the opportunities are and will be for at least the next 5 years.

It’s been widely discussed that the immigration system has been abused, especially by the tech industry. This reform started under Obama. The current outcry is a reaction to the most recent federal election. Reform does not mean the US is anti-immigrant. It may mean lower levels of immigration that’s more selective for talent.

Parental controls are all about illusion of control. In reality the kids all know how to get around them. Try just try to block Gmail. It’s impossible. Gmail is the gateway to kids getting on services they aren’t supposed to be on.

Gmail can circumvent almost any security feature even if you set up a profile on iPhone (which is not documented and good luck with that). This is definitely not an accident.

Don’t mean to pick on Google; Apple is also bad, iPhone parental controls are very leaky. My son found a way to jailbreak his phone to completely unlock screen time and disable all parental controls.

Any of the consoles are also bad, PS4, etc… although it is possible to block stuff that PS4 can do via a firewall.