sinedpick

I'm a nixos fanatic, thank you very much! I even installed nixos on my (non-technical) SO's computer. Was this a mistake? Yes. Do I care? no.

Random musings but I feel like posting: I almost got sucked into the urbit hole. I thought it was such a cool idea and implementation, and all the fun names and technical purity was so attractive to me at age 18 (this was before the crypto circus and urbit barely did anything except talk to a terminal).

It took me a while to realize that there is, actually, zero reason to give nonsensical names to literally every aspect of software, and also pretty dumb to try to shoehorn everything through a tiny functional core ("Nock") while slowly re-learning all the lessons of 50 years of compiler development. So why use it at all?

Using urbit over a normal Linux stack comes purely with downsides. Slow, buggy, obscurantist, and so on. This means whoever actually dedicates their precious time to developing this unconditionally buys into the ideology. I never thought an ideology could be so powerful that it could corrupt the minds of my people (software monkeys).

Urbit is a truly fascist^H^Hnating phenomenon.

A reminder that Rationalists have absolutely No Fucking Clue what they're talking about when it comes to quantum mechanics, and this is evident from the very top.

Here is their prophet's, Eliezer Yudkowsky's, brilliant writings on QM: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5vZD32EynD9n94dhr/configurations-and-amplitude

In this stunning vindication of Dunning-Kruger, EY sets up a thought experiment of a photon being ejected at a half-silvered mirror. Then, he realizes that QM is formulated with complex numbers, so he decides to shoehorn them by imagining a "computer program" that computes the result of the experiment and using the complex numbers as the internal state (because he read somewhere that a wave function is a complex-valued function). From there, he goes on to realize that he needs to actually justify the use of complex numbers, so he drops the fact that multiplying the "internal state" by i represents the photon turning 90 degrees (what?! yes, multiplying by i rotates complex numbers by 90 degrees but this has literally nothing to do with the direction the photon travels, what the ACTUAL fuck am I reading?)

I seriously want to pull my hair out after reading this asinine nonsense. MIT OCW's QM course is extremely accessible to anyone with a decent high-school math education but these chucklefucks' need to prove to themselves that they're smart supercedes any process of actual learning.

edit because I can't stop sneering: "wave function collapse" is purely born of the Copenhagen interpretation which EY rails against as ridiculous (which, admittedly, isn't a totally unpopular opinion for real physicists to have). This is, of course, 100% lost on SBF.

The amount of lazy "it is what it is" takes makes me want to vomit.

Every system has some form of bias, more or less, and a system that has less of a functional bias than another system isn't necessarily a better one

I can't even begin to comprehend how asinine this take is.

The problem is far worse than what any single billionaire can fix. Billions of dollars are being poured into renewable energy infrastructure. It's just that while this is happening, we're also emitting the same amount of CO2 as always. The only long-term resolution of this is de-growth.

Can't use that to explain Cs in math and physics.