rotorblade's comments

I have been wondering something similar. Just a simple voice-command thing. Not a general purpose, any voice, assistant, but just to be able to say a word 10 times to train (form some average) and then assign a command to that word. Something like CellWriter does for handwriting but for voice. Does this exists?

Democracy Now! also covered the protests at the end of 2017 [1].

[1] https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/special_report_from_...

Note, that I still do like using Julia. I'm a physicist and need to do a lot of computations in a hassle-free way, then jupyter+Julia (+ SymPy) is(/are) the best available tool(s).

The above may only be an issue of BigFloat, to be fair, since Float64 compiled in an instant (never measured, and the time never bothered me).

So Julia has solved a lot of problems for me, and I see great potential for it in the future.

I agree. I meta-programmed (enormous) expressions from analytical expressions exported from Mathematica to Julia, because I found Julia to be ~3000 times faster than Mathematica when it comes to calculating eigenvalues. Using BigFloat for higher precision, my matrix function in Julia took ~20 minutes to compile on the first run and ~20 GB of RAM. Smooth once compiled, but I was the only one of my collaborators that had the capacity to run it.

I heard that voiced as a worry, and the logic goes something like this: A small organisation that does not have the capability (money or otherwise) to implement their own content filter, have to look elsewhere for it. Where to go? Probably Google, etc, once they start selling those services. So the net effect will not be negative for the big companies (if those now are the actual target for the copyright directive), since they will now instead have a new market to exploit; small organisations burdened by the content filter requirements demanded by the copyright directive.

I also find this a useful resource when preparing a talk (slides-based): David Tong's "How to make sure your talk doesn't suck"

www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/talks/talk.pdf

I'm confused over the size of these extra dimensions... They say that they do not rule out small compact extra dimensions, but only large ones, the number they give is ~100 km. But this must surely be ruled out by ordinary gravitational experiments that establish the 1/r^2 law for gravity, since I would assume that that law would be seriously broken for extra dimensions of those sizes for even everyday physics.

The number that is quoted in some textbooks on String theory (but I do not have the refs.) is that gravity is 1/r^2 down to sizes of ~1 cm for extra dimensions.

I tried to use pandoc a while ago to convert the latex-sources of arxiv.org documents to epub, since those are often much more comfortable to read on small devices than pdfs.

The problem I had was that latex was turned into images, but changing the font-size of the reader did not change the size of the images, making the text readable, but the maths barely readable.

This is something I would love to see happen though.

Their journals are not even doing their job properly and have published a plagiarised version of a paper already in Nature:

https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/8w98c8/shameless_...

As I said elsewhere in this discussion thread:

I tried it this morning (lineageOS). Got the arm binary from github, `chmod +x`-ed it on my computer and scp:ed it over to my phone. Ran the binary and got a quick flash of the screen and a `exit status 1` [in termux].

Have not looked into it more than that. Since `browsh` depends on headless firefox, which is not in the termux default repository (it seems), I guess it won't work because termux does not have access to the firefox system app, if that even shits with the headless-functionality. (but here I'm just guessing, a work around may be available)

Would be cool to see working though.

I tried it this morning (lineageOS). Got the arm binary from github, `chmod +x`-ed it on my computer and scp:ed it over to my phone. Ran the binary and got a quick flash of the screen and a `exit status 1`.

Have not looked into it more than that. Since `browsh` depends on headless firefox, which is not in the termux default repository (it seems), I guess it won't work because termux does not have access to the firefox system app, if that even shits with the headless-functionality. (but here I'm just guessing, a work around may be available)

Would be cool to see working though.

Just have to add a comment on some things.

It is unfortunate that they refer to the 26 dimensions...

> [...] particles as tiny vibrating loops of string that exist in somewhere between 10 and 26 dimensions.

... of what is known as "Bosonic string theory". It is called bosonic because it only has bosons (e.g. photons) and no fermions (e.g. electrons). This is obviously not a realistic theory because of that reason, and it also suffers other serious problems. But, this was the first formulation of string theory, not meant as a fundamental theory of gravity even, and if you do open some of the famous text books in string theory, you do find that it starts with the bosonic string theory. This is because it is a more gentle introduction.

The "between 10 and 26" comment is also a bit unfortunate. String theory is ten dimensional (space-time, meaning I include time in there). A lot of physics is formulated in terms of perturbation theory, meaning you have that the full result is expressed as an infinite sum of smaller and smaller terms, and you can truncated this infinite series and get a approximate result. This holds if the parameter you are expanding indeed is ever-smaller, which it isn't necessarily. One of those parameters (string theory has two of them built in) is the string coupling "g_s". If you start taking this parameter large than one, so the perturbation breaks down, string theory (type IIA in particular) grows an extra dimension into a theory known as M-theory. Note that this theory has no strings, it only has other fundamental objects. Similarly, there is an F-theory that is in some sense 12D, which also describes non-perturbative physics.

So, if physics in our universe is described by this non-perturbative physics, then sure, it's 11D or so, but we do not know which parameter regime of string theory our universe is in ( yet ;) ). But it is not a choice willy-nilly.

Then regarding effective theories against fundamental ones. Effective theories, or models rather, are things like: the inflationary model, cosmological constant to explain dark energy, standard model, minimally-supersymmetric standard model, F(R) gravity, DBI gravity, and so on. The problem is that there are too many of them. Claudia de Rham had a talk a month or so back in which she said something along the lines of (this is how I remember it) "We are quite good at excluding effective gravitational models, but we are however better at constructing new ones.". We need some deeper understanding of what is allowed when it comes to model building, and even theory building. But the point is, for gravity for example, that there are several models out there that are consistent with observations, but we do not know which ones can be consistently included in a fundamental theory.

And theory gives us ideas of what to look for. In this thread "seeing extra dimensions" are discussed, but it is misrepresented a bit. There are potentially several ways that we could start seeing evidence for extra dimensions, at least in principle. For example, "compactification" which means that we make the extra dimensions small, hidden for us, comes with the so-called "Kaluza-Klein tower" of particles, in which particles are essentially separated in mass inversely to the size of the size of the extra dimensions (small extra dimensions -> high mass). So this is one indirect way of how one could in principle see them (then they may be very massive, and virtually undiscoverable, but space-time warping brings down these masses... so we don't know).

Some of the particle physics experiments are looking for, in a sense, "anything that deviates" from the standard model. Note that for such experiments, any fundamental theory would have the same "problem" as string theory: it must show new physics at higher energies than already explored. LHC results are often seen as a "string theory is wrong"-result, which is not true, but what it rather shows is how boring the universe is at those energies, independently of the theory. Hopefully theory can give predictions in other places as well (in addition to the predictions of susy, extra dimensions, etc), like of what gravitational waves can say something fundamental about black holes.

Yeah, I guess that is fair. It might just be that it is more or less the furthest way from how I like to work as I can imagine.

> Sin[θ] //TraditionalForm //TeXForm

Did not know of this. Thanks!

>> The tie-breaker is social, not technical.

> The tie-breaker is financial. Jupyter is winning because it's free [...]

It is a bit more nuanced than that. Personally I do not pay from Mathematica usage, so why do I like Jupyter more?

The Mathematica notebook interface is horrible. You may go "oh, neat" the first few times you try it then, at least I, get more and more frustrated on all the idiotic issues

* Indentation/text-wrapping. Write a long line that starts wrapping, it gives it a little indentation to signify this, an your next line that you have indented is slightly more indented, but it is really hard to see, so you have no idea of where your line-breaks are.

* Brackets. "[" are used for function calls and for part-specification. The number of square brackets in your expression makes it necessary hard to read when it is big enough.

* Jumping text. The notebook interface does not have the "auto-complete brackets" (maybe v11 does), so you add your first, all the text in the Cell gets reformatted and you have to find the fucking place you wanted end the bracket. This is akin to working with images in MS Word.

* Exporting. The notation is just ugly, fine, that is personal, but "Sin[]" as "sin()"... ok. Ah, good, it has a "Copy as Latex", nice... "Sin[]" -> "\text{Sin}[]". Really? Who in the world uses "\text{Sin}" for the sine-function and square brackets for function-calls when typesetting maths in Latex?

It is just a complete nightmare to try and incorporate these things into your workflow, at least for me.

Jupyter just behaves as you'd expect. Just that it is so much smoother to work with wins. For me, I do symbolic calculations, SymPy can do some things much easier than Mathematica, but a lot of things it can't or you have to work some more to get going. That Jupyter allows you not to have an aneurysm every day at work, which makes you actually wanna spend the extra time working it out.

I use the browser extension 'dark background light text' [1] for that reason. Works OK, far from perfect, but helps quite a bit.

[1] https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light-text-...

I have it a bit mixed up in my head, but yeah, Sony announced they would do one abandoned it, and then HBO bought it and announced it and abandoned it. So this would be the third step (but I seem to have a memory of that this has been going on a lot longer).

https://hbowatch.com/hbo-acquires-asimovs-foundation-series-...

Since black-holes interact gravitationally with other particles, there must be a mediation of a graviton between them (assuming quantum properties of gravity). However, force mediation is different from a physical particle escaping one object than interacting with another (e.g. physical graviton escaping a BH, interacting with an other particle). That is why we have the concept of virtual particles [0]:

"[...] the electromagnetic repulsion or attraction between two charges—can be thought of as due to the exchange of many virtual photons between the charges."

so when the electromagnetic force mediation takes place, it exchanges virtual photons, and this is different from an object exchanging physical photons with another (which we would more think of as one object shining (if the photon is in the visible spectrum) on another).

How a virtual graviton would interact between BHs and other particles are up to any suggested theory for quantum gravity to explain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle

> graviton particle and the Higgs tells space which way to curve

The Higgs does not play that kind of role. It is a common misconception, since Higgs it often referred to as "giving mass to the other particles", which is true, and called the Higgs-mechanism, it does not influence the curvature of space-time that way. That is all due to the graviton (assuming, which it is also commonly believed, that gravity is quantised).

Mass is one thing, interactions between masses another.

Is it a good choice though? Isn't there a bunch of possible issues with FAT patents, in case someone wants to ship a product that boots, that could have been avoided by using something else?

(I don't know, I just have some vague memory of some Tomtom/Microsoft conflict due to FAT)

edit: user 'xxs' managed to type up the same issue before me (while I was typing mine).

It is very bad indeed.

1. The judge in the pirate bay case was a member of an organisation "Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt"/"The Swedish Organisation for Copyright" (my own translation), and it was decided not to be partial to the pirate bay case. See for example [0].

2. Even if there were diplomatic pressures on Sweden from the US (which there were [1], their actual impact is what is in question), it should be impossible for a minister to influence the police directly [2]. Which makes for the pirate bay take down to be a ridiculous coincidence.

3. Sweden allows lawyers with their own, so called, "intellectual property" interests to defend suspects of file-sharing. See for example [3] which do give credit for this lawyer doing a good job, but just in principle this seems absurd (imo). I hope he is not allowed to be the defence lawyer if it is his own material at least.

[0] (Swedish, summary in English) https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/3800...

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-us-pushed-sweden-to-take-do...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerstyre

[3] (Swedish) https://overklass.wordpress.com/tag/fildelning/