Fourier864

I think the default for get-togethers now is a 3rd space, like a bar or a food hall. I'm sure we're all spending more time at home than the 70s and 90s, but it still seems like every couple of weeks I'm going somewhere with friends/acquaintances. Its just not in people's houses.

Apparently around 2004 people started spending more money on food-away-from-home than food-at-home, and it has only increased from there. Dining out seems just much more standard now.

Did any of those links provide evidence that Instagram deliberately withholds likes? If not, it seems like a non-sequitur.

A lot of comments are suggestions and/or complaints, so I just came to say I loved it, no notes.

Ok I realize you're making a point, but 10 launches a day comes out to about $15 trillion a year, that's like half of the US GDP

Almost everything? Most money for fundamental atmospheric research flows through NASA. People always forget that only half of NASA's budget is for rocketry and human space flight, and the other half is science.

Do you have kids? How would school even work? 20 years ago in high school we were expected to use the internet.

And these days internet integration in school is far stronger, my 6 year old's daily homework is entirely online.

My Spanish is infinitely better than it would have been if Duolingo didn't exist, because I don't really have a burning desire to learn Spanish, but I do like playing games on my phone and watching numbers go up.

When I bought my Leaf last year, I actually didn't have range anxiety because I assumed the infrastructure was better than it actually was. But I'm shocked that at most places I drive to don't even have a charging station, and if they do it's like 2 spots that are both full.

And I definitely didn't factor in skiing, my favorite mountain has 4 charging stations in one of the hotel's parking lots.

FWIW, I fed in the same problematic prompt to all the current ChatGPT models and even the legacy/mini models enumerated a bunch of pitfalls and considerations. I wonder why/how it managed to tell the author everything was perfect? A weird one-off occurrence?

But the other 3 results are that the randomness is "irreducible", which I'm assuming means we can never actually get rid of the randomness. And smaller portion believe that randomness is just apparent, which I'm assuming they're referring to Many Words interpretation. Neither of those gets you to determinism from our perspective though.

They actually ask later in the poll which interpretation is their favorite (Q12) and 42% pick Copenhagen. But the only deterministic one on that list is the pilot wave theory, and that got a 0. Some did pick "other", so that might include something deterministic, but based on the results of Q1 I'm assuming not.

Conclusively was probably too strong of a word, as there are technically still two ways to get hidden variables to work:

1) If we allow information to be non-local, i.e. we allow information to travel instananeously. Allowing this would just be such a hit to the foundation of theories like relativity and quantum field theory that most physicists don't really believe this could be an explanation. These theories rely on nothing traveling faster than the speed of light.

2) We could allow for "superdeterminism". One of the assumptions of Bell's theorem is that a researcher is free to choose any measurement they'd like, independent of the particle they're measuring. However, if the universe correlated everything from the Big Bang onward, a.k.a "superdeterminism", then the researcher is actually NOT capable of choosing a measurement independently of the particle. Everything is pre-scripted from the initial conditions of the Big Bang. If I go and measure a photon from the CMB (the earliest light in the universe we can measure), superdeterminism implies that this photon emitted 14 billion years ago somehow "knows" exactly how it'll be measured in 14 billion years, and has hidden variables that ensure it won't contridict my measurements or quantum theory. This seems to open a whole can of worms about the feasabilty of all scientific experiments, and it doesn't actually make any predictions about the randomness anyhow.

Out of curiosity I went digging to see if there were hard numbers for what physicists believe, and I found a 2011 poll from a conference about the nature of quantum mechanics. Surprisingly none of the respondents believed that random quantum events have some sort of underlying determinism. I'm not saying you should always follow the crowd, but it, combined with all the laboratory testing of the Bell inequality, shows that your initial statement "randomness is an incorrect interpretation of quantum mechanics" is not something you'd say to a group of physicists without having very compelling and detailed reasons to back it up, because it's very much a fringe idea. The majority of physicists subscribe to theories of quantum mechanics that don't involve hidden variables, and treat the randomness as inherent to theory.

Link to the poll if you're interested: arxiv.org/abs/1301.1069. I'm talking about question 1.

So the article says "quantum mechanics is incompatible with local hidden-variable theories".

Hidden variable theory is what you were describing initially. It basically says that there must secretly be deterministic rules to quantum mechanics, and that the randomness we observe is just due to our ignorance of some "hidden variables". Einstein was a fan if this theory because he believed "God doesn't play dice".

John Stewart Bell discovered that quantum mechanics would actually behave a little bit differently if there were secretly variables out there, and proposed experiments that would show if there were hidden variables or not.

The 2022 nobel prize was awarded because these experiments were finally completed, and they showed conclusively that there were no hidden variables in quantum mechanics.

An experiment that proved that there are no local variables which secretly determine the outcome of a quantum measurement won the Nobel Prize in 2022:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

It appears to be completely random.

Yeah 8 hours would be quite a bit for a day. I'll tell you our use case. We receive a large dump of data 2 times a week, and we spin up 5 machines to process the data files. We have one machine that uses a GPU, one that needs like 128GB of RAM, and a few smaller ones. They're up for maybe 3 hours each.

The best part about the cloud for me is that it scales down to ZERO. We used to get large on-prem servers that could handle the worst case, only for them to sit idle 90% of the time. Now we just spin up the 5-10 EC2s we need a couple days a week when we receive new data.

Sorry, to clarify, after I received a profound effect from the drug I scheduled an appointment with a psychiatrist who diagnosed me with ADHD and I have been on my own prescription ever since.

I used to think like that, and to some extent I think its good to have some neurodiversity. I do have a relatively successful career after all.

That said, the day I randomly decided to try half of a pill of my wifes Adderall changed my life. I knew nothing about Adderall and just expected to just be smarter or something, instead I just...did things without being distracted. I scheduled an oil change, paid some bills, responded immediately to emails, etc. I learned later people with ADHD have a really hard time initiating uninteresting tasks, and the Adderall just obliterated that barrier.

I still think I'm largely old imperfect me, but now I don't get sent to collections for forgetting to pay a 5 dollar toll bill any more.

When I was 20 and in college, I used to work at a Barnes and Noble. When I was working the registers one day, I apparently forgot to put a $300 gift card in a lady's bag at checkout.

The store manager got a complaint about it like a month later, and she tracked down the gift card number from the receipt. It wound up getting loaded with even more money a few days later, and given to someone else.

Anyway, the whole incident got me fired. And to this day, I always check that I put gift cards into bags (on the rare occasion it comes up in my job as a software engineer for NASA missions).

Both companies I've worked for rely on government contracts, and in general feel pretty calm. It's hard to feel super rushed when the software isn't delivered for a few years. I don't think I make anywhere near industry salary though.

My wife just did this a few days ago, she was bed ridden with the flu and I was out getting her some medicine.

The police came for a wellness check, and my wife had to talk to them through doorbell camera and explain that she can't come to the door because she was sick and extremely dizzy.

Yeah, that went over about as well as you'd think.