Saad M @saad@qoto.org

Piracy websites should adopt Midjourney's arguments on copyright:

"Look bro, it's just too hard to figure out what license governs each and every file and who its author is."

i found out theres a chocolate doom fork that lets you kill processes by killing associated demons and its really funny to me for some reason

I’m clearly a master of SEO.

When I google for “cold dark place filled with sadness and despair” right now (with the quotes), google gives me exactly one result - my Linux kernel github repository.

I will call my new hobby “Reverse Emo Googlewhacking”.

You’re welcome.

Peter Woit exposed the problems with string theory. Then Sabine Hossenfelder brought the news to a bigger audience. Now, in this hilarious video, Angela Collier is bringing it to the Gen Z gamer crowd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E

Yes, she shreds the repeated grandiose claims of string theorists while gaming!

I agree with her main points. Some pedants (like me) will notice mistakes. I think they arose because she has a PhD in astrophysics, not particle physics. Also, she said she didn't want to talk about the physics, just the sociology. None of these mistakes affect her actual point, but just to keep up my nerd cred:

1. The pion was not one of the particles whose existence was predicted by the Standard Model. Yukawa predicted it way back in 1935, and it was found in 1947.

2. The cost of the never-finished Superconducting Supercollider would have been $11 billion, not $200 billion. I think she was just being flip here. By the way, the US spent $2 billion building it before giving up.

3. There are 5 superstring theories, not 10.

4. Bosonic superstring works best in 26 dimensions, not the numbers she haphazardly guessed.

A bit more importantly, I think she said the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled much later than it actually was: October 1993. So this gums up her chronology a bit.

Still, I enjoyed this a lot!

This example of a digital relict of a largely obsolete technology (seeing a floppy disk and thinking "save icon") made me remember seeing a talk from Amelia Acker a number of years ago about work on youth data literacy. Something that stuck out at me was the finding that young people who grow up using phones and tablets rather than computers might have no understanding of how a file system works. Some of those findings discussed here: https://www.yalsa.ala.org/jrlya/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Bowler-Acker-Chi_PerspectivesOnYouthDataLiteracy_FINAL.pdf

This is the only math book I know that has warning of this sort.

More of them should.

New video + transcript! You may have heard that a Cochrane Review has found no benefit to wearing a mask to stop COVID-19, which flies against many other studies that show clear benefit. What happened? https://skepchick.org/2023/02/revisiting-the-science-do-masks-stop-covid-19/

@MartinEscardo - This interview is also interesting:

EZRA KLEIN: "And what unnerved me a bit about ChatGPT was the sense that we are going to drive the cost of bullshit to zero when we have not driven the cost of truthful or accurate or knowledge advancing information lower at all."

That's where we are now, and we'll soon see what this does. *Later* we may see positive uses of this technology.

(3/n)

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-gary-marcus.html