Nick @internic@qoto.org

You (slowly) come to learn here in Germany that just because there’s a friendly green “hey, this way by bike!” sign, that by no means guarantees that that the corresponding path won’t be a 25 cm wide goat track with loads of nasty gravel & sticky-out stones 😬

As encountered out by Ilvesheim on this evening’s 50km ride. Quite lovely autumn conditions, with a whiff of wood smoke when crossing the fields towards the Rhine 🙇‍♂️

#CyclingLife 🚴‍♂️
#Photography 📷
#ReturnToGermany 🇩🇪

Hot off the press...

Machine Learning in Three Easy Lessons (with jax, from scratch, with examples that are useful for physicists):

https://florianmarquardt.github.io/MachineLearningThreeEasyLessons/intro.html

I am using this as lecture material next week in Trieste. Feedback welcome!

 😀

@allendist56 My hope is that a diverse ecosystem of AI tools emerges to handle a variety of useful research tasks, including the ones you listed. The extremely large, general-purpose proprietary LLMs are the ones attracting the most attention now, but at some point I believe the marginal cost in data and compute to improve these models further (or to fine tune them for specific applications) will become prohibitively expensive, and that more lightweight and open source models (and data sets) developed by the research community for tailored needs will also begin playing an important role, perhaps with the general-purpose models serving as a user-friendly interface to coordinate these narrower tools.

@tao similar conclusions but for theoretical computer science. From initial experiments o1’s able to solve undergrad theory problems and some grad theory course ones that gpt4 couldn’t do.

U.S. citizens are far more likely to commit pretty much every type of crime than either legal or undocumented immigrants

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117

It's normal to sit up and take notice when someone you hardly know and who is in a position of authority baselessly accuses you of doing something dishonest or unethical, because it's hard to shake the notion that the bad thing you're being accused of is something they are already well acquainted with.

Early in my solo career, I spent a lot of time talking to businessmen in Russia, who invariably would at some point accuse me of taking bribes to write unflattering things about them or their businesses. I soon learned that those individuals were accustomed to paying journalists in their country to write unflattering stories about others.

This reminds me of behavior in various state and federal GOP efforts to "secure" the vote, which has led to a flood of state proposals that effectively make it harder for people to vote, register, or have their vote count. "We can't let them steal this election again" is the refrain, even though it was never stolen in the first place. But it might very well be this time.

They say AI will not take jobs but will help artists. Indian filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma (RGV) abandons human musicians for AI-generated music https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/19/indian-filmmaker-ram-gopal-varma-abandons-human-musicians-for-ai-generated-music/ RGV is a big deal in indian cinema. This is start of disaster. Countries like India shouldn't be using AI at all. The unemployment rate is exceptionally high compared to Western nations. Despite the $3.95 trillion GDP size, 99% don't get anything out of this massive economy. The top 1% controls and benefits the most.

Beautiful. https://www.elonowesyou100dollars.com/

Walt Disney plans to transition away from its use of Slack as a companywide workplace collaboration system, after a hacking entity leaked online more than a terabyte of company data, according to a report in the Status media newsletter.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/disney-stop-using-salesforce-owned-slack-after-hack-exposed-company-data-wsj-2024-09-19/

London’s clean air zone was meant to reduce car pollution but also had another effect: more active kids. “Instead of being chauffeured to school by their parents, the students started walking, biking, scootering, or taking public transit.” https://grist.org/cities/london-fining-polluting-cars-more-active-kids/

Okay this is a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier this week. You're building a web browser. One of those most sophisticated pieces of software you can imagine. But meanwhile you bolted this little firebase thing onto it that executes arbitrary code in everybody's tabs. And those folks weren't experienced enough with security practices to understand how potentially dangerous that was.
https://flipboard.com/@theverge/apps-tj3a91j8z/-/a-PE98y0ECTFOOTE0EgUjWSg%3Aa%3A43611565-%2F0
https://flipboard.com/@theverge/apps-tj3a91j8z/-/a-PE98y0ECTFOOTE0EgUjWSg%3Aa%3A43611565-%2F0

I know it's not always for everyone but I absolutely love scientific writing & its wryness. Like this opener: "In order to maintain physical integrity, people must attend to situational cues that may signal various threats in the environment. For example, the smell of fire can alert people to the possibility of physical threat in the environment, prompting them to scan for signs of this potential danger. " (Murphy, Steele & Gross, 2007)

Physical integrity yes that is a general goal 😂

Laying the groundwork for Stop the Steal 2024.

Georgia election board orders hand count of votes in US presidential contest

"Georgia's Republican-controlled state election board voted on Friday to require a labor-intensive hand count of potentially millions of ballots in November's election, a move voting rights advocates say could cause delays, introduce errors and lay the groundwork for spurious election challenges.

The hand count rule, passed in a 3-2 vote, will make Georgia the only state in the U.S. to implement such a requirement as part of the normal process of tabulating results, according to Gowri Ramachandran, the director of elections and security at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning public policy institute."

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/georgia-election-board-may-order-hand-count-votes-us-presidential-contest-2024-09-20/

For fun and curiosity, I have few random sensors logging data at my home 24/7.

Earlier this month, I saw multiple events where my Geiger counter detected significant (not dangerously so) temporary increase in #radioactivity for some reason.

Today I think I got an explanation! The Finnish radiation authority #stuk posted that that they have measured Cesium-137 levels over 20 times higher than usual in the air early this month, likely coming in from the fires raging in #Chernobyl

So cool!

A *lot* of wee near-Earth asteroids have even more wee moons orbiting them. Why?

The main culprit could be… sunlight.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-so-many-tiny-asteroids-have-moons/

Not a #PhysicsFactlet, but a full beginner-friendly tutorial on how to use speckle correlations for imaging through a scattering medium, complete with a step-by-step guide on how to set up your first experiment and analyse the data (including a full code in Mathematica and one in Matlab to analyse the data, and all the raw data used to generate the plots to make your tests):
#Physics #Optics #Photonics #ITeachPhysics
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7647/ad7cb1