Nick has moved to Mathstodon @internic@qoto.org
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Theoretical physicist by training (PhD in quantum open systems/quantum information), University lecturer for a bit, and currently paying the bills as an engineer working in optical communication (implementation) and quantum communication (concepts), though still pursuing a little science on the side. I'm interested in physics and math, of course, but I enjoy learning about really any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well. My biggest other interest is hiking and generally being out in nature.
Joined Nov 2022
@hacks4pancakes I guess I should say that I *think* it's a minority view. One always wonders. My experience with being (very) white is that other white people are generally more than happy to share any explicitly-held racist views in one-on-one discussions; they all seem to share the delusion that all white people secretly agree with them (or at least the ones they perceive as being "normal"). I don't know if the same is true of misogyny, but I would suspect it largely is.
While I don't encounter it from almost any of the people deal with regularly, I do notice a lot of casual misogyny from men I deal with in passing, especially salesmen for some reason. That seems like a really risky strategy for sales, but I guess see again "think everyone secretly agrees with them."
@platypus @grimalkina Definitely brought a smile to my face as well.
Nick has moved to Mathstodon
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I have the best update after teaching my mom to play her first video game a month ago 😂
My little brother and I were catching up and he said "Can you please explain to me why I called our mother and she started talking about "superior graphics" in the choice between gaming consoles?!"
@hacks4pancakes I think it's still a minority position, and not held among almost anyone I know personally, but it does seem like it's distressingly common among straight cis men. Obviously some strains of this go back to "traditional" ideas about gender roles from the 19th and early 20th century, but I guess I really think of this crystalizing as an explicit ideology in contemporary times with the rise of incels.
It's been distressing to me that many things that I basically think of "incel terminology", like referring to "chads" and "gammas", have apparently become a part of the common lexicon.
Nick has moved to Mathstodon
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Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born #OTD in 1910. He established an upper limit on the mass of stable white dwarf stars, and made numerous contributions to astrophysics and relativity.
Above the Chandrasekhar Limit – about 1.44 solar masses – electron degeneracy pressure cannot prevent a stellar remnant’s gravitational collapse into a neutron star or black hole.
Photo: Stephen Lewellyn / AIP
Nick has moved to Mathstodon
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Google has officially begun killing uBlock Origin. It's an attack on focus, privacy, and security. In our newest video I dive into what's going on and what your options are:
https://youtu.be/nmO5dvn8jN0
Nick has moved to Mathstodon
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I am once again trying to solve Problems with Email™ using technology. I am destined to fail because email problems are social problems. So adding technology just leaves me with two problems.
Nevertheless. I would like to store archived mail on my own hard drive, in an easily-accessed, portable format — like a maildir. Then I should be able to copy, move, access, archive, sync, whatever, using regular tools which interact with files. Ideally all the mail clients I use could just work with a maildir directly, but as you may be aware… kids these days… get off my lawn &c. &c. So I think that the practical compromise would be to run a little local IMAP server which just serves to read and write to the maildir in my home directory.
My question for the lazy/indie/fedi-hivemind is this: what’s the safest, smallest, simplest tool I can run to speak maildir to my filesystem and IMAP to my mail client? (And, implied: why is all of this the absolutely wrong way to go about this?)
I feel a little guilty asking a question like this at 5pm on a Friday; I worry that I’m going to nerdsnipe someone’s entire evening. Well, someone else’s, at least.
@dmm@mathstodon.xyz Weirdly I'm getting the text of the post itself as the alt text for each image. I'm not sure if that's a problem on my end or perhaps an error when it was posted.
@grimalkina I feel like you're unfairly shutting down like 50% of online discourse if you're saying that "you just don't like it because you don't understand how great it is" is an unacceptable response. 😜
Nick has moved to Mathstodon
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There's a thing they teach you about intervention science and it's that you absolutely cannot under any circumstances get more attached to your intervention than to the reality of the people the intervention is impacting.
Nick has moved to Mathstodon
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23andMe faces an uncertain future — so does your genetic data.
@carlypage looks at what you can do to delete your data ahead of a potential sale or privatization of 23andMe.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/19/23andme-faces-an-uncertain-future-so-does-your-genetic-data/
And to your point, @fencepost, I'm curious if anyone has written an article trying to assess the security (including timeliness of patches) of the various Firefox forks/derivatives. I've seen conflicting claims but have not personally delved into it. @dangoodin
@dangoodin I'm curious if you have or plan to elaborate on the reasons. I can imagine some possibilities, of course, with some of the recent controversies.
@fencepost @dangoodin Along that line, presumably Mullvad Browser would be another FF offshoot to consider (or Tor Browser, but that's probably not what you want to use as a default).
Nick has moved to Mathstodon
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Brave is a hard no for me for a few reasons, most notably: (1) the founder is hostile to gay rights, aka human rights and (2) the browser promotes that whole cryptocurrency ponzi scheme mythology.
Nick has moved to Mathstodon
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Simulated small-scale dynamo turbulence in a volume of ~100kpc^3, with a numerical Reynolds number of about ~1e3 and stationary subsonic forcing, using ENZO-MHD.
Something like this - if plasmas were just a simple fluid on all scales, which they are not - should be happening also in the #space inbetween galaxies, over scales of several hundreds million years.
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“Chromium’s influence on Chromium alternatives - Seirdy”
https://seirdy.one/notes/2024/10/06/chromium-influence-on-chromium-alternatives/
> I don’t think most people realize how Firefox and Safari depend on Google for more than “just” revenue from default search engine deals and prototyping new web platform features.
Even the latest release of WPE/GTK WebKit uses Skia for 2D rendering.
@tokyo_0 To the contrary, it would seem you still don't understand me, because your post implies positions I don't hold (e.g. that Mastodon needs "corrosive algorithmic feeds"), but I don't think continuing this thread further would be productive.
@tokyo_0 @oblomov @_elena @mcc @mhoye You seem to have missed my point, so let me restate it a bit differently: The idea of having an algorithmically weighted feed or not as it's often discussed here is essentially a false dichotomy, in which you either have a very simplistic chronological following feed or you have the sort of highly-optimized, psychologically manipulative, completely opaque algorithm of something like Twitter or Facebook. But, in fact, those are just some extremes of a huge parameter space of feed weighting/ordering algorithms. It's a bit like saying you only want to walk places because you refuse to ride in a self-driving autonomous vehicle, ignoring the fact that there are other types of cars, or bikes, or busses, or trains.
To give a concrete example: Someone has constructed a feed on Bluesky that shows you posts of people you follow but surfaces posts more prominently from people who post less frequently, so your quiet but interesting friends are not drowned out by your more prolific ones. Another feed just shows you the most recent post from each person you follow and that's it, so you see everyone equally and are not tempted by the infinite scroll. No opaque weighting schemes there, just some slightly-less-simplistic alternatives to a Mastodon-style feed (which also exists on Bluesky as the default "Following" feed) that help people find the posts they want to see.
To be clear, I don't necessarily think that Bluesky's approach of letting anyone make any sort of feed (within some, fairly loose, restrictions) will be good, because the feeds can impact the culture even for the users who don't use them. But I do think that refusing to have anything but the dead simplest feed types makes it hard for people to find the posts and people they're interested in, and that is a bad idea. But by indulging in this false dichotomy about having "an algorithm", I think people here are talking themselves into the placating notion that this shortcoming is, in fact, a virtue.
Nick has moved to Mathstodon
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@BartoszMilewski - I find cosmology to be in much better shape than particle physics, mainly because we're awash in new and ever more precise data. There are definitely lots of interesting conceptual problems about how we do cosmology, and it's true most scientific papers don't discuss them much - and some astrophysicists run wild in ways that need to be pushed back against. But there are people who write about these issues seriously, so I don't think 'drive-by shootings' are helpful, where you try to poke holes in assumptions but then run off before the conversation can get serious.
Cosmology is in such better shape than when I was a youth, in the 1960s, that it's hard for me to despair. Back then the (old) textbooks I read treated the argument between the Big Bang and steady state model as largely a matter of taste - e.g. some people just *didn't like* the idea of a universe that began at some moment in time. Now we're getting ever more accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, etc., and in the 2030s LISA may see the cosmic gravitational background radiation, which could go back to the time of electroweak symmetry breaking, around 10⁻¹² seconds after the Big Bang. So it's getting harder and harder to make up fairly simple theories that fit the data.
(Yes, there are always infinitely many theories that fit the data, but if we let that paralyze us science would never have happened.)
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- he/him/his
Moved to Mathstodon.xyz
Theoretical physicist by training (PhD in quantum open systems/quantum information), University lecturer for a bit, and currently paying the bills as an engineer working in optical communication (implementation) and quantum communication (concepts), though still pursuing a little science on the side. I'm interested in physics and math, of course, but I enjoy learning about really any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well. My biggest other interest is hiking and generally being out in nature.
Joined Nov 2022
