Steuard

9 ms·

31.
by Steuard 3y ago
> The accuracy of opinions/predictions is almost always inversely proportional to the confidence of the claimant. I recognize the sort of phenomenon you're pushing back against here, and there's legitimate value in conscio
32.
by Steuard 3y ago
I don't mean this unkindly, but I am always so baffled when I see how common this take is. I mean, sure, say this about string theory (the field I was trained in): fine. I don't agree, but I see the point. But dark matter? You thi
33.
by Steuard 3y ago
A friend of mine worked for a while as part of the team building http://unglue.it , which IIRC is a pretty close match to what you're envisioning.
34.
by Steuard 3y ago
Oh, yikes: when did the + stop working for Apple support? That's going to bite me at some point. (And in general, yeah: I've had multiple cases over the years where the "+" only caused problems after signup. One of sev
35.
by Steuard 3y ago
Ha! Cool! I wasn't the only one! But honestly, I eventually concluded that with the resolution available on my CGA monitor, the (slightly) higher-resolution black and white version was probably a better choice (and it gave the game a b
36.
by Steuard 3y ago
Sometimes it is exactly what they're doing. 15 years ago, shortly after surgery to remove a tumor from my femur, I ran into a physical therapy assistant whom I'd been working with when my doctors thought my leg pain was a soft tis
37.
by Steuard 3y ago
Are we revealing our age through exploits now? How about "using gopher on a university library terminal to access a site that launched a telnet session so you can check your out-of-state college email over the summer"?
38.
by Steuard 3y ago
Oh, man, the Lurker's Guide was just such a fantastically good site. Organized, comprehensive, solidly good look: great stuff! I feel like it's often harder to find high-quality focuses resources like this at this point. I'm
39.
by Steuard 3y ago
This feels very dark to me: I think it would make it enormously harder to actually process the grief. (The thought "You could make one to mimic your ex" passed through my head just long enough for me to recoil in absolute horror.)
40.
by Steuard 4y ago
This is a very nicely designed site, but I have to grumble a little: bivectors aren't a concept unique to geometric algebra! They've been used elsewhere in physics for ages: well before geometric algebra in its current form was de
41.
by Steuard 4y ago
That sounds like a cool use case, but... how can you bring yourself to trust anything at all that it tells you? This feels like it's just begging to contaminate your understanding with sparse, unpredictable errors, and personally I f
42.
by Steuard 4y ago
Wow. Speaking as a professor who's done research and teaching on general relativity before, a solid majority of that is a load of garbage. (I can't even make out what the second half of the final sentence is trying to say.) But pa
43.
by Steuard 4y ago
Reading this is really weird for me. Worthwhile and eye-opening, but also baffling: I am literally the chair of the faculty committee at my small college that voted a couple of years ago to go test-optional (provisionally but with an eye to
44.
by Steuard 4y ago
This isn't meant to trivialize what you're saying here, or to deny that a lot of parts of life can be pretty miserable for people who are poor. But what you're describing here sounds only partly like "I'm poor and l
45.
by Steuard 4y ago
The "ants" got fixed sometime in the past few months, I believe, and thank goodness: it really did make GIMP almost impossible to use for anything complicated enough to need GIMP. (But they've been working on my M1 Mac for a
46.
by Steuard 4y ago
We lost the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 because Lockheed Martin supplied a part that output results in pound-seconds and then that number was fed in to a NASA part that interpreted it as Newton-seconds.[1] Having US engineers speak a diffe
47.
by Steuard 4y ago
I can't find the solution post that you seem to be referring to here. The closest I've found is a link to Reddit where someone said "Turn off Sync Library and all that data will come back". But the original user responde
48.
by Steuard 4y ago
Okay, but you're now moving away from "How could people not know to make backups???" to "This problem could in principle be avoided by people who use specific types of backup software and maintain complete snapshots goin
49.
by Steuard 4y ago
In case it matters to you, the "GPT-2 Output Detector" rates this text as "99.68% Fake". ( https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/ ) For comparison, the top three comments as of this writing got score
50.
by Steuard 4y ago
I'm not an expert (I'm a physics prof who once took a seminar on nuclear arms control back in college), but what they're trying to do here is much, much harder than making an atomic bomb. If you want nuclear weapons, this wor
51.
by Steuard 4y ago
To be clear, the article title isn't inappropriate in a scientific context, but it does feel like clickbait to post it here: I can't see anything about this paper that would make it exciting to non-specialists.
52.
by Steuard 4y ago
I'll admit in advance that this physics failure came up in a particularly silly prompt. Here's an excerpt from the response: [...] Carrie: Okay, so what's the equation? Samantha: It's pretty simple. It's just F = q
53.
by Steuard 4y ago
Your poem discussion example also illustrates why ChatGPT isn't a good source of answers and information, though! Chocolate in Harry Potter is used to help people recover from the effects of Dementors. But I'm almost entirely
54.
by Steuard 4y ago
It's an article about theoretical physics published in the 21st century, so it would be very surprising if it had not been posted on the arXiv before being published in a journal. And sure enough: https://arxiv.org/abs&
55.
by Steuard 4y ago
Warning: lots of jargon ahead. I really wish I understood this better, but the sense I've gotten is that intrinsic spin needs to couple to gravitation through torsion rather than through the usual curvature we study in GR. Most GR co
56.
by Steuard 4y ago
It's interesting that in both of the examples people have shared here, the image produced was quite good but entirely missed the "flowing out of the building" part of the prompt (which I think is a fairly significant aspect o
57.
by Steuard 4y ago
The big difference that makes causality work is that there is only one timelike dimension (but three spacelike ones). A purely spacelike curve can wrap back around and close on itself like a circle. But a purely timelike curve just can&#x2
58.
by Steuard 4y ago
Speaking as a physics professor, you can listen to me talk about awesome physics all you want, and maybe feel like you're getting something out of it. But if you actually want to learn math or physics at any level beyond "I'v
59.
by Steuard 5y ago
It's genuinely good to hear that it's been appreciated (let alone so much). I owe the milkmaid example to my Calc 3 professor, many years ago, though I later realized that I'd probably altered it a little from his version.
60.
by Steuard 5y ago
I appreciate the kind words! And yeah, that could have even been MS Paint: it's been a long time, and I was still using Windows a lot back then. (I made the first version of this page for my wife when the topic came up in one of her

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