Nick @internic@qoto.org
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- he/him/his
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
@Catvalente Yes, this is much like how my favored politicians' fortunes could coincidentally be improved by doing more of all of the things I personally support and less of all the things I oppose. Funny how that works out so neatly.
Nick
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You know what's wrong with America?
The thing that's most important to me, which, coincidentally, you can only understand through my specific skillset and personal history!
@BartoszMilewski @johncarlosbaez @TobyBartels I wonder if it might be helpful to think about the Rindler horizon that a uniformly accelerated observer experiences (which was mentioned elsewhere in this thread by @gregeganSF).
The thing that's interesting there is that a uniformly accelerated observer has this horizon (because the uniform acceleration means that light from events sufficiently far behind it will never catch up to it, so they are causally disconnected), but as soon as that observer stops accelerating (say, turns off their rocket engine) then the horizon ceases to exist for them. This should be somewhat analogous to the difference between the observer holding a constant position relative to the center of the black hole and one in free fall toward the center. (I'll leave it to others whose GR is stronger than mine to say exactly how close that analogy is.)
@gregeganSF When you said "The horizon isn’t really a “place”: it’s traced out by null rays in spacetime... it’s generated, geometrically, by light rays, so it’s moving at the speed of light," it reminded me of this video, which was making that very point:
Nick
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55 years ago #OTD the #Apollo12 crew experienced a #SolarEclipse by the giant Earth shortly before arriving back on the latter: here is a lesser known image of the atmospheric arc with the Sun at the limb, see https://skyweek.wordpress.com/2019/11/24/eine-fette-sofi-fur-apollo-12-durch-die-erde/ for many more, a video and a full transcript - and https://www.nasa.gov/history/eclipses-near-and-far/ for other eclipses in the solar system.
Nick
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Published #onthisday 165 years ago, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" by Charles Darwin created the foundations of evolutionary biology, which today is one of the organizing principles of modern biology.
[Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Origin_of_Species.jpg]
@johncarlosbaez Weird, it seems like in some places this isn't showing up with the quoted post, so I guess I'll include a link to the post in question.
Nick
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I said for the last three years (thinking about the waves of discourse in tech on this) but really, the story of this paper starts far, far further back, to the beginning of my interest in psychology and in the measurement of human ability, which I confronted when I had to take a standardized test for the first time, as I shared about in a talk at Monktoberfest (link below)
Nick
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Let's make something crystal clear.
If a book about "the psychology of programming" that was published when the first class at Princeton university that included women was still two years away from graduating is still quoted around as a holy bible in tech communities, but I, a PhD in psych who was a fellow in CSE/Cog Sci and went on to found a developer tool startup AND a scientific lab to do open science *for developers*, cannot share a preprint, What. Are. We. Doing.
@j_bertolotti @gregeganSF @BartoszMilewski @johncarlosbaez @TobyBartels I agree @j_bertolotti, so now I'm going to try to take advantage of it for another splinter topic: Sometimes people talk informally of space flowing into a black hole, as a way of understanding some of the phenomena we've been discussing. They also sometimes talk of analogues to "dumb holes", which (in addition to being a potentially cutting insult) are scenarios where a fluid flows at an increasing rate until it exceeds the speed of sound, creating a sort of event horizon for sound waves.
I think you you want to formalize this notion of "space flowing into a black hole", what they really mean is just that a gravitating body tips light cones towards it, so if you fill some spacelike hypersurface with a grid of tests masses and let them fall freely (without interacting with each other or other matter) the geodesics will tend to flow toward the center of gravity (so space itself is not really flowing, of course).
But I admit that this way of talking about it really makes me uneasy, because speaking of space flowing or analogies to sound waves seems to smack of aether theory and, therefore, seems like it will be a trap that results in misconceptions. So I'm curious to what degree folks in this thread believe that ideas along this line are a productive way of thinking to guide intuition.
In the original version of this post that was displayed to me, the text preceding the image just said "Nick is right." I assume it was posted prematurely and then fixed later. But given the cache that @johncarlosbaez has for those of us who started talking physics online back in the usenet and early web days, I really should have had the presence of mind to get a screenshot of that original version. 😄
@internic @BartoszMilewski @j_bertolotti - Nick is right. You can see it clearly from here if you remember that light moves along 45 degree lines.
@DavidBruchmann A hash will always have collisions, because its output (the hash string) is much smaller than its input (binary data of effectively arbitrary size). If a hash function did not have collisions it would be a one-to-one function, and that would mean that the set of outputs would have to have the same size as the set of inputs (so they'd need to be the same number of bytes).
This is only a problem when it becomes computationally feasible to find a pair of inputs that collide (especially if you can take one given input and find a second input that collides). md5 is an example of a hash where weaknesses in the algorithm make it computationally feasible to find collisions (which it would not be if you had to guess at random). It's not my area of expertise, but I believe that no such attack is currently known for sha256 (certainly nothing remotely as effective as for md5).
@cwebber
Nick
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>> "TikTok is getting it's own Mastodon-like competitor."
Well, look at that.
Nick
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One thing we have already discussed so, before I will say anything else, I will repeat: content addressing is really good, and I'd like to see it happen in ActivityPub, and it's *possible to do*, I even wrote a demo of it https://gitlab.com/spritely/golem/blob/master/README.org
Bluesky does the right thing here, AP should too
Nick
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People are trying; most notably alice has done some great work recently: https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q
So now someone *can* run their own Relay (not the AppView yet, but maybe soon), and we're getting a sense of the cost and scale. This is good news; we didn't know before.
Nick
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Our preprint has been viewed 1806 times.
@anthrocypher and I now have the opportunity to do the funniest thing and describe how much our work on developer productivity DISRUPTS developer productivity. Pls take my very serious survey for this purpose
Nick
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Elizabeth Warren calls for crackdown on Internet “monopoly” you’ve never heard of
Senator wants to investigate whether VeriSign is ripping off customers and violating antitrust laws.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/11/elizabeth-warren-calls-for-crackdown-on-internet-monopoly-youve-never-heard-of/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
@MichaelPorter I don't have a good answer, but I'd probably avoid Wix, based on some of the news that was coming out about how they were treating employees recently.
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/10/28/wix-addressing-internal-messages-on-israel-hamas-conflict/
Nick
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For the last three years, I have thought often about why individual-level "explanations" of developers' ability, potential & productivity trouble me, and why I think they ultimately keep us from the things we most deeply want to understand and cultivate: software development problem-solving *cultures*
With @anthrocypher , we came together as a scientist and an expert practitioner to propose a different model: a cumulative culture theory of developer problem-solving
@rdviii They're just a bit Focked up.
- Pronouns
- he/him/his
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
