blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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I'm imagining a Dorothy Parker review of Honor Levy. "It took gumption to call this My First Book, in the face of the inevitable riposte, 'And it should be your last.'"

Monday. Cold pizza and a vape around 2 pm. The Adderall at the Urbit meetup last night was too revolting, but what can you do? You can't stay up til 5 posting nrx thirst traps on just nothing. They had those divine dubstep remixers in the green coats, and Mike Crumplar was perfectly scathing, angling for a hate-fuck, and it couldn't have been funnier. Absolute VOG unit!

— from "Diary of a Dimes Square Lady (during Days of Panic, Frenzy and World Change)"

Nah. A man who sucks his own dick? That takes effort and deserves respect.

What pushes Levy’s stories beyond being merely on the level of smart magazine essays is the empathy you can sense below the starkness of her sentences. A typical observation: “When I’m at a party and I look across the room I can see everyone holding their red Solo cups and hurting.”

"When I am at a party, I feel like nobody understands me," said the voice of a generation.

One character is nearly canceled when, on a college radio station, she says, “Trigger warnings trigger me.”

2014 sent a Vine; they want their joke back.

Generations no longer understand one another because we haven’t been injected with the same memes.

"Marvy. Fab. Far out," deadpanned Calvin's father.

weird flex but OK

... maybe not OK, at that

The ceilings are so high, pre-war or something like that, and in the lobby there’s a mirror that makes me feel like we’re at Versailles.

"His voice is warm and husky, like dark melted chocolate fudge caramel ... or something."

I kind of wish that she and I could meet. I'd stare deep into her eyes, take her hand in mine, drop my voice into the register that Grandpa Stacey used in his decades of hosting radio, and intone, "Your brain is where insight goes to die."

Levy is rarely boring.

[citation needed]

His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other.

Illustrations by the dck pck AI

As a physicist whose current specialization is quantum information theory, reading those quotations hurt.

Shit, does that mean I have to date Grimes now

I wandered over somehow from RationalWiki, which I had known of since the science-blogging days of yore, and found it more congenial to my tastes than other subreddits. E.g., it was friendlier to excursions into the wonky and erudite than r/badphilosophy, and generally had a justifiably low tolerance for superficial politeness while maintaining a level of empathy for serious matters.

Why did 3.6 million people watch this hour long video dunking on flat earthers? Because the topic of people believing crazy things is fun and interesting.

Dan Olson's In Search of a Flat Earth is most definitely not just an hour of dunking on flat-Earthers.

It pivots to discussing QAnon at 37:30.

From the comments:

This just went from 0 to 100 real quick.

Lord, the cry of pure anguish I gave out in response to that line...

Props to the Qanon guy's kid for standing up to him and saying "nobody's gonna help you" when he kidnapped them, that must have been terrifying

Occasionally rewatch this while dealing with the loss of my own parents to conspiracy lunacy. Even tried using this video to pull them back from the edge. Ended up precipitating cutting contact with them, something that has done wonders for my mental health. I have since realised they were deeper in than I thought, and were never going to listen to their child, and unlikely to listen to people they actually might have respected the opinions of.

The person I used to consider my father now believes that viruses aren't real and is getting deep into transphobia and Putin worship. He is likely to already be a holocaust denier. There is no bottom to the conspiracy theory abyss and few ever seem to find their way back from the depths.

Thank you for crushing that last bit of remaining hope I didn't even know I had.

It's honestly kind of chilling to see him effectively spending half an hour predicting the Jan 6th riot.

"Fun and interesting"?

Today seems to be another day on which archive dot fuh just refuses to load. Anyone able to see it?

A related issue that I doubt they've ever thought through: In statistical mechanics, the probability densities are defined on phase space, meaning that they're functions not just of position, but also momentum. They wouldn't be the first to get confused about this, helped along by oversimplified illustrations of "high entropy" and "low entropy" states that ignore the momentum part. But when you're reinventing a subject, it helps to avoid students' misconceptions about it.

Another problem: They claim to derive the idea of pressure by having proved that the number density (particles per volume) is the same on both sides of the partition. But this is only the right condition for equilibrium if the temperatures are equal on both sides. This is what happens when you don't check your revolutionary new method against the ideal gas law....

The fact that the naive continuous version of the Shannon entropy (just replacing the sum with an integral) can go negative is one reason why statistical physicists will tell you not to do that. Or, more precisely: That's a trick which only works when patched up by an idea imported from quantum mechanics.

Hourglasses work by inverse Weeping Angels rules, doncha know?

I should also have mentioned the part where they say that the entropy of the "uniform distribution over (0,x)" is the base-2 logarithm of x. This is, of course, a negative number for any x they care about (0 < x < 1), and more strongly negative the smaller x becomes.

Argh. These people just don't know any math and never call each other out for not knowing any math, and now I have to read MIT OpenCourseWare to scrub the feeling out of my brain.

A lesswrong attempts to explain physics using Information Theory!. This irritates me.

If we instead have a lot of particles in our first box, we might describe it as a box full of gas. If we connect this to another box and forget where the particles are, we would expect to find half in the first box and half in the second box. This means we can explain why gases expand to fill space without reference to anything except information theory.

No, you can't, because you're still presuming that gases do expand, i.e., that merely connecting two containers is enough to mix their contents. Otherwise, you're saying that if you fill one bottle with orange juice and another with vodka, and then forget which is which, you've made a screwdriver.

Then it gets weird and confused, talking about a box divided in two parts, with green particles on one side and pink ones on the other.

We might expect the partition to move some, but not all, of the way over, when we forget as much as possible.

Forgetting where things are doesn't give you psychoflexitive powers!

And from the comments:

My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech.

No. If you don't incorporate quantum mechanics (or at the very least take some results of quantum mechanics as valid), you will get statistical mechanics very wrong rather quickly. Your results for the thermal properties of gases will get worse the more you calculate. You'll convince yourself that magnets are impossible. Etc.

For all that Yud has been praising the Feynman books ever since HPMOR at least, he doesn't seem to have inspired his fans to actually read the Lectures on Physics.

oh lordy, there's a whole post

Why did evolution give most males so much testosterone instead of making low-T nerds? Obviously testosterone makes you horny and buff.

"Compared to me, 78% of the human male population are low-T betas" &mdash;Hbomberguy

Mad research skills:

Are people in rich countries happier on average than people in poor countries? (According to GPT-4, the academic consensus is that it does, but I'm not sure it's representing it correctly.)