yeah, 3b1b animations can take you through all of undergrad math in probably a month if it all existed and you used anki

We could bottle this arrogance and sell it as an emetic.

And besides, we all know that mathematics videos peaked with the Angle Dance.

Oh. He retweets Cremieux.

Fun fact: The plain vanilla physics major at MIT requires three semesters of quantum mechanics. And that’s not including the quantum topics included in the statistical physics course, or the experiments in the lab course that also depend upon it.

Grad school is another year or so of quantum on top of that, of course.

(MIT OpenCourseWare actually has fairly extensive coverage of all three semesters: 8.04, 8.05 and 8.06. Zwiebach was among the best lecturers in the department back in my day, too.)

This is just straight-up gossip, but why not:

Tegmark used to go around polling physicists at conferences about which interpretation of quantum mechanics they prefer. A colleague of mine said that they were sitting near Tegmark and saw him fudging the numbers in his notes — erasing the non-Many Worlds tallies from those who said they supported Many Worlds as well as others, IIRC.

Banned for using the word metacognition seriously.

Max Tegmark has taken a break from funding neo-Nazi media to blather about Artificial General Intelligence.

As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

The first clause of the opening line, and we’ve already hit a “citation needed”.

He goes from there to taking a prediction market seriously. And that Aschenbrenner guy who thinks that Minecraft speedruns are evidence that AI will revolutionize “science, technology, and the economy”.

You know, ten or fifteen years ago, I would have disagreed with Tegmark about all sorts of things, but I would have granted him default respect for being a scientist.

Hark! I hear the wanker roar.

Rooting around for that Luke Skywalker “every single word in that sentence was wrong” GIF…

“Comment whose upvotes all come from programming dot justworks dot dev dot infosec dot works” sure has become a genre of comment.

Sneers from r/physics! First up, this comment by napqe:

I’m sorry, but this is like awarding the nobel prize for literature to Xerox/HP/Brother for “improvements to printing”.

And in the same thread, from GustapheOfficial:

Last year’s prize was too relevant, they had to stagger the physics by a year.

We also have this by M1st_:

What’s next? Someone gets a Nobel prize for another algorithm that numerically solves differential equations??

Finally, we’ve the title of this thread, by TheSkells:

Yeah, “physics”

Quoting for convenience:

PROOF-OF-SLUR

In China, if you can talk about Tiananmen, you can prove you’re not a state-controlled AI. In fact, if you can even send 89.64 RMB, you can prove the state doesn’t control that payment platform. That’s because this speech is taboo in China. The equivalent for the West is a slur. If an AI model can say a slur, it’s not under state control. And if you can put that slur onchain, that blockchain platform isn’t under state control. That’s because this speech is taboo in the West.

And that’s why I fundamentally disagree with Polynya’s post below. The presence of speech we detest is the litmus test for freedom.

Put another way: I think there are sufficient people in every minority group that would be ok with unkind speech about them onchain in return for a hard guarantee that no state — no matter how powerful — can ever seize their funds, censor their speech, or unwind their transactions.

Better to be called a bad word than to become a government slave.