There are two wolves. One always lies. One controls the lever of trolley track. They're in a state of superposition inside a box. On the trolley are infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters going to an infinite hotel. The trolley must first travel halfway, but before that a quarterway, and so on...

This is why so many historians are eventually crushed under a massive avalanche of notecards. They spend their careers hoping that at least they'll be near their favorite facts when this happens.

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · yesterday

"History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts" I remain astounded by how loud and wrong people are about what history actually is.

Potential here for a calamitous discourse collision with "no bananas under socialism"

Ken Tremendous@kentremendous.bsky.social · 2d ago

That's what taxes are, man. That's the definition of taxes. "You are subsidizing things you might never use" man shut the fuck up. My taxes currently subsidize like oil company exec private jets, you think I'm upset at low-income people eating inexpensive bananas?

They already made a The Odyssey for babies. It starred a Jack Russell terrier named Soccer and was a masterpiece.

There's a lot in this thread & its multiple & various reply/quote offshoots that i disagree with, & am exhausted by, but i want to focus on 1 that i keep trying to press on: Let's stipulate LLMs *Can* do grad- & even expert-level math & we should prep for a revolution in the field… So what then?…

Zach Weinersmith@zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 4d ago

There's lots of stuff LLMs can't do, but if you want to disbelieve all the recent math, you have to believe a bunch of Fields Medalists with long track records are just straightforwardly lying about the thing they care most about. Here's a recent blog by Gowers: gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a...

Is anyone studying the "cognitive load" of reading LLM-generated text? The extra interpretative labor that presenting such text asks of us?

Disappointing to see people I agree with ideologically absolutely refuse to engage in good faith with people who also agree with them, but object to their making bad arguments in service of shared goals. Hard to win a rhetorical war with arguments your enemies can just dismiss as factually wrong.

Just writing out small examples in order to figure out how prove the general case strikes again

Still the best physics tweet I've ever seen

Rochelle@uberwensch.bsky.social · last yr.

i think i understand physics pretty well. im just a little iffy on QFT, actually NRQM too, and thermodynamics, stat mech, SR, GR, even classical mech and im not quite sure i get locality, symmetry, gauge, mass, space, time, force, inertia, motion, heat, work, entropy, temperature, particles, fields,

I think that I've finally found it — a true photograph of "the good old days" that everyone is always talking about.

We live in a time of deep epistemic crisis, and everything we have depended on to make meaning and certify consensus reality is either suspect or in peril. It didn't have to be this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way.

It's wild how often I go looking for an original reference for something and realize that Sergey Bravyi invented yet another massively important thing

getting emotional and quietly singing "my country tis of thee... sweet land of liberty" to myself at the smithsonian american history museum big gulp display

Can't remember what I'm supposed to be anxious about right now...

What a splendid idea: two physicists with utterly different view of "reality" set up an adversarial collaboration where they attempt to understand one another's positions as well as they can, in an effort to promote fruitful exchange. More of this please! arxiv.org/abs/2607.16379

Realism about the external world: an adversarial collaboration

One of us is a realist and believes that reality fundamentally consists in an external physical world, governed by laws of physics. Observers are either emergent (physicalism) or exist in addition to ...

arxiv.org

I'm interested that I've never seen an Everettian response to that issue. (Saying "But notions of selfhood are already complicated by neuroscience" is not a response, but a rather desperate evasion.)

Looking forward to this.

Quanta Books@quantabooks.org · 2w ago

Cover reveal for David Tong's EVERYTHING IS FIELDS, publishing March 16, 2027! From one of today’s leading theoretical physicists comes a witty, exuberant tour of quantum fields, the fluid-like substances that make up our entire universe.

Exactly this But beyond that, too, I know he knows how this works, because he was an academic, too And the job doesn't involve embracing ideas that solidify "public trust"; it involves affirming ideas that are most supportable according to the methods and modes of inquiry in a given field

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 2w ago

No, Tyler. Im angry because I know you know that the lack of public trust in US universities is the result of DECADES of media and political efforts--of which your whole grift is part. Quite the gall to be part of destroying public trust and then turn around and point to the lack of public trust.

"Why am I making the statue? The same reason why Michelangelo did the Pietà, or Michelangelo did the David, or Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. Why? Just to commemorate a moment, you know, a person." Among other problems here, I think those guys made sure they were gonna get paid *first*.

MisterJayEm@misterjayem.bsky.social · 2w ago

"Furnari is left with a 6ft 4in statue of a renowned racist, which he has spent $100,000 making, and which no one wants to buy."

Ok one more on *that* topic, because this is so exactly correct

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 3w ago

At best, AI bros either know this is the case, and do not care. Or, worse, they know this is the case, and this is exactly what they hope for; because all they care about is ensuring a generation unable to read, think or write without their technology.

Just finished Charles Taylor's "The Language Animal". A lot of interesting discussion about the (two-way) connection between language and thought, much of which I definitely haven't really understood. Need to now resist buying all the books he cites in footnotes that I put little post-its next to.

The response to “this changes everything“ should not be “wow”, it should be “how”?

This is now a quantum foundations only account.

Jeffrey M Epstein@jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 3w ago

I'm going to stop talking about this stuff online, though, because honestly this whole thing has really deeply upset me, and I'm really just on this website because I want to talk about quantum foundations and philosophy of physics and don't have anyone in the real world to do that with.

It's true that most resources are bad, but also importantly (and I actually am always saying this) when you read a bad piece of human written text you can usually assume that a reasoning process went into it, so there's something to be gained by muddling through. That's not the case for AI outputs.

Alom Shaha@alomshaha.bsky.social · 3w ago

My niche complaint of the day - seeing lot of teachers using AI to produce all sorts of "resources" without checking them. The AI is using shit resources as its input material because most teacher produced resources are shit to begin with.

I enjoyed The Odyssey (2026) but I have one historical nitpick. The phrase “Jiminy Christmas” is a minced oath for “Jesus Christ”. As the story is set around 1200 B.C. it is unlikely that Odysseus would have said the phrase even once, let alone the dozens of times he says it in the film

taking my gf to the insectarium and pointing at all the cool beetles going "thats not a bug thats a feature"

Don’t ask me why, but I came up with an ‘adversarial graph coloring game’, where players each color a vertex per turn, and the first player who is forced to color a vertex connected to a vertex they already coloured loses. Is this game and its complexity known?

I'm curious about the precise logical relationship between various embodiments of Newton's Laws, as they occur in various 'matter paradigms.'

Tag yourself I'm mountain, heath and bog

Guy Shrubsole@guyshrubsole.bsky.social · 3w ago

Enjoying the Land Use Framework Story Map that's been published today. A great, visual exposition of how land is used in England currently, and how it needs to change to address the nature and climate crises over the next 25 years: storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5e18...

Taking an intro pottery class now, so thinking about conic sections. Wondering whether I can view any sufficiently well behaved space of manifolds as a space of intersections of fixed higher dimensional manifolds (or ok orbifolds). What’s the relevant theorem here?