breadAndWater · HackerTrans

breadAndWater

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8년 전discuss

The point being that computation is so cheap now, that it's more difficult to promote confusion and obscure facts.

It used to be expensive to compile massive data sets and reduce them to reliable statistical evidence, so it was easy to push concepts that had little supporting evidence. For example: "the particle passes through both slits", "the cat is alive and dead", "there are no hidden variables", "the source of an emission never ascribes state to its particles, and that state does not exist until inspected"

Now, such wild claims are in disagreement with rivers of data that are much more easily produced and reviewed computationally. Observations that were not previously possible now shed light on facts that were previously obscured. Without backing data ideas prone to confusion could take root. Particularly so, with voices of academic authority shouting down concepts that threaten the ivory tower.

But now, technology to conduct measurements is cheaper, and data shouts louder. So, something presented as fact in A Brief History of Time (the particle passes through both slits) can no longer be supported by fame alone, simply because the author is revered. It's easier produce and publish data (make high-fidelity video recordings of the behavior of silicone oil beads demonstrating pilot wave phenomena, and post on youtube).

On this example, pulling together raw data from sensor streams, and dumping into a high performance computing pipeline, reveals that diffraction itself is a state producing phenomenon, and that reliable variables are produced by the diffractor, but would be later hidden by subsequent polarizers that drive downstream state. If the hidden variables weren't reliable, there would be no possibility of composing an image from the statistical analysis of the diffraction. The diffraction would produce no reliable signal to reconstruct, because it would not exist, since local hidden variables are forbidden, behind no-go boundaries.

8년 전discuss

Instead of counterfeiting, and operating beyond the boundaries of well understood legalities, while deceiving users, and engaging in sketchy malicious software practices, what if they were more well behaved?

What if they didn't create an obvious attempt to create a direct knock-off of the latest iPhone? What if they created a comparable device to stand on its own? What if they clearly labeled everything that the phone was really doing? What if they weren't scraping every interaction he user has with the device?

What if they took all of that deceptive effort, and poured it into producing a device that could be trusted, and took all of those efforts to deceive, and instead poured that creativity into improving the fundamental device they wished to create?

What if they made something they could put their names on, without inviting all the consequences that their dubious behavior would surely result in, if we knew who was behind this sort of thing?

What if they could admit to what they were doing, because it sought to benefit their patrons, instead of posing obvious risks to anybody spending $100 on their stuff?

8년 전discuss

None of the things you've mentioned are anything close to what I'm bringing up.

The point I'm making is that popular discussion of quantum effects are so wildly off-base, and have muddied the waters of even trying to understand what happens between photons and electrons, by casually reading about it.

But you see something like this emerge, and it's really obvious that solutions to these problems were on the right track even as far back as the early 1900's, only to be derailed by academics emerging in the 1940's.

Principles such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_princi... had it right very early.

So, was there an ulterior motive to all the complex obfuscation of math, and inaccurate scientific reporting throughout the later 20th century? Or has it all been one big, innocent misunderstanding, among aloof egg heads distracted by their gigantic precious particle colliders?

One wonders.

8년 전discuss

I think that would mean only a dyson hemisphere, since Earth is illumnated by the entire hemisphere of the sun that faces us, due to the sun's sheer size.

To see the kinds of effects this would have on the gas giants would be fascinating. It would probably drastically alter the coriolis banding and spots on Jupiter and Saturn.

Venus would probably be the only other planet affected, and perhaps comet behavior might change. In fact, I wonder if planets would become so cold, that they might produce visible comas as they warm up, when they enter the sun's (now hemispherical) light cone. That's probably the most prominent effect I can see happening.

8년 전discuss

Wake up sheeple!

8년 전discuss

I mean, sure. Except for the part where we blot out the only star in our solar system.

Can't we siphon the total energy output of some other star? #NIMBY

8년 전discuss

  The basic principle of the technique was 
  proposed almost 50 years ago by the physicist 
  Walter Hoppe, who reasoned that there should 
  be enough information in the diffraction data 
  to work backwards to produce an image of the 
  diffracting object.

This kind of statement just absolutely cracks me up, because it's a clear reveal that between this sort of awareness of diffraction principles, and concepts like pilot wave theory, that double slit experiments and entanglement haven't been mysterious for decades.

It's all just media manipulation. There are very firmly understood concepts backing all the mechanics of quantum effects, and the journalists that push the ambiguities are simply trolling would-be amateurs for to fan the flames of confusion as a sort of outsider performance art.

8년 전discuss

You as an English speaker. What about the remainder of the world?

Must everything be left-to-right? What if the nouns and verbs were not English words? What if the natural order of possessives or adjectives is reversed in a romance language? What if the words are not even cognates, and the characters to express terms are not even letters, but opaque pictographs?

The paths chosen are an abstraction, and REST is designed such that it should be easy to bind any one resource to perhaps multiple URLs. But honestly, to the vast majority of the world, these URLs never see the light of day, and every consumer of a REST URL is probably going to do so programmatically, perhaps once, while reading the docs and setting up tests, and then they'll call it a day, and never look back, because honestly, consuming data from API endpoints isn't actually anyone's idea of "fun" despite wild claims to the contrary.

For the sake of getting shit done, I usually avoid this conversation in practice, but honestly, also because arguing is worthless. People have their opinions as a matter of convenience to their own efforts, and not as considerations to others.

These are the tastes of a given developer creeping in as a leaky abstraction of human readability.

8년 전discuss

  I've also found focusing on the resource/noun 
  aspect ( ... ) to be a bit of a "nerd trap";

Oh, absolutely. Ten years ago, during one of my first projects involving a REST implementation, I was working with a person who I deemed fairly rational, and reasonable to work with.

Coding up the REST paths was a breeze, and I had implemented like 99% of perhaps a month's worth of work in under a week. I laid out some quick docs for how to interact with the URL patterns and, proud of how quickly the whole thing snapped into place, I showed it to the guy.

He immediately jumped all over me, complaining loudly that the URLs "were not RESTful!!!" Which, of course, shocked me. Was he joking? Certainly not. This was a very serious error.

Well, okay! Big deal!

So I spent 15 or 20 minutes performing search and replace, changing words from things like:

  /blue/104
  /read/9008
  /fetch/18

To things like:

  /car/104
  /book/9008
  /page/18

And wowee, crisis averted. I was still weeks ahead of schedule, and the commit was all of 10 minutes ruminating over preferable synonyms to please the sensibilities of humans, rather than struggle with computational correctness.

During this time, I briefly mulled over the idea of trolling him with a many-to-many look-up table, and introducing variable synonyms that include opaque MD5 hashes of my original path names, and produce the same effective resource, such as:

  /48d6215903dff56238e52e8891380c8f/104
  /ecae13117d6f0584c25a9da6c8f8415e/9008
  /5374034a40c8d6800cb4f449c2ea00a0/18

...but I otherwise enjoyed working with him, and didn't want to make enemies.

The pedantry and neurosis some people raise over obsessive semantics is painful to behold.

8년 전discuss

Driving doesn't fit into such a world view. Driving through a long tunnel never lasts up to 30 minutes, and tunnel lengths are never such that if your car got stranded, walking out on foot to reach the surface would challenge people with small children.

Subways are categorically a different animal. Of lesser endurance than light rail networks, the excess of amount of time spent within them is due to unintended delays and speed limits that draw out travel times. Spending more than 45 minutes on a subway trip is often viewed as unhappily inconvenient and/or an error.

8년 전discuss

Fascinating, what gets flagged on HN these days... [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17563345

8년 전discuss

The ship sank in 1905, in case people who can't bypass the paywall might have been wondering.

8년 전discuss

Also, the "crying with laughter" face, in practical use, comes across as absurdly over-eager to express inauthentic laughter. Most people just knee-jerk flood you to hell with those things, at the slightest hint of a joke.

I'm tired of seeing that stupid, stupid cartoon face. I wince when I see it. It pains me. It's like getting stabbed in the gut for offering chewing gum to someone. I don't like to tell jokes anymore.

I want to reply:

  Please stop laughing so hard.
  The joke I made was not that funny.

I notice Facebook users have the worst sense of habitual knee-jerk emoji obligation. I think it's because they are restricted to expressing only five emotions.

  1. Thumbs Up (like, but often mere acknowledgement)
  2. Heart     (love, but often off-topic)
  3. Wow       (horrified, shocked or amazed, but which?)
  4. Cry       (sad, but why?)
  5. Mad       (angry, but at who?)

In most cases, this leaves them resorting to an ambiguous "Wow" for most non-thumbs-up reactions, leaving the reader to question if it's a good wow, or a bad wow.

Because they've accepted ambiguity as fact when communicating with individual icons, they also lack a sense of volume. They've been trained to understand that CAPS LOCK is bad, but it will be years before emoji fatigue sets in. For this reason, I've mostly withdrawn from interacting with many people.

8년 전discuss

That is definitely a sad, crying face.

How is there no [ ZZZ ] talk balloon floating above, to indicate the obvious snoring?

8년 전discuss

The experiment certainly demonstrates "something" in terms of how not to "measure" relativistic effects with macroscopic tools...

And yet, with relativistic particles, the wild claims are made that splitting photons through a substrate, and then passing them through the wall of a polarizing lens, means we can declare ourselves capable of rewriting and erasing history. Eh, not quite.

But hey, where there's smoke, there's fire, so something must be true, right? Let's just make up whatever.

8년 전discuss

Uh, wow, at no point have I made the claim that an electrical circuit is not a quantum system. Nor have I claimed that they are incapable of simulating quantum phenomena. Quite the very opposite.

What I did clearly state, and insist as quite relevant, is that entanglement and double slit experiments are hocus pocus and irrelevant distractions. In fact, I stated that this experiment says basically nothing because it merely simulates quantum phenomena within a circuit.

Hello? Yes. Electrons are quantum entities, and assuredly interact with photons which are also quantum entities. This is demonstrated by the photo-electric effect, which we can all notice by placing tin foil in a microwave. Therefore a circuit is indeed a quantum system, since it assuredly deals in electrons.

Wow! Didn't even need to publish a paper about qubits to draw that conclusion! Amazing!

The implication here is that Bell is waste of time, and so is his theorum: such that emission doesn't determine state, especially when you don't look at it.

Great, thanks Bell. I'll be sure to not look at anything until I want to know what it is. True genius at work.

8년 전discuss

Quote from the "Phase_qubit" Wikipedia article:

"The zero voltage state describes one of the two distinct dynamic behaviors displayed by the phase particle, and corresponds to when the particle is trapped in one of the local minima in the washboard potential. [...] With the phase particle trapped in a minimum, it has zero average velocity and therefore zero average voltage. [...] The voltage state is the other dynamic behavior displayed by a Josephson junction, and corresponds to the phase particle free-running down the slope of the potential, with a non-zero average velocity and therefore non-zero voltage."

So, we're not even talking about actual fundamental subatomic particles anymore. We're talking about phase oscillations, and renaming that as if it were a "particle" because, hey, particle/wave duality, so why not?

Hand-wavey math permits us to equivocate that a current induced on a wire, by way of the transfer of many actual electrons across substrates, can serve to prove the premise of a "teleportation device" also.

See? If we play our game of three-card monte, change phase oscillations, wiggle our noses, and tilt our heads a little, it's all very obvious that faster-than-light information transfer can be generalized to fit in the same picture, because this tuning fork makes that tuning fork ring in harmony, but only when we choose to notice.

8년 전discuss

A Josephson junction doesn't even trap any single actual physical particle. It's just a standing wave of electrical current trapped in a bounded array of geometrically crafted slabs of superconductors and insulators. It's a phenomenon that arises from the construction of the device.

Unlike fundamental particles such as photons and electrons, there is nothing substantial about the state represented by the standing wave qubit trapped in a circuit operated by a Josephson junction device. Destroy the device (or nevermind that, just never place it in a dewar flask chilled to 4 degrees kelvin, to activate it) and the phenomenon doesn't even exist. So much for whether or not matter or energy can never be created nor destroyed.

To sit there and state that, on paper, this is the same thing as an individual electron emitted as beta decay is, well... fundamentally flawed.

8년 전discuss

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconsistent_comparison

Josephson phase qubits aren't even utilizing the same fundamental concepts to examine the qualities of the mediums that quantum uncertainty affects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_qubit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_voltage_standard

8년 전discuss

Except you can't tell me what the spin is without polarizers. This is like telling me I have to measure the orientation of a fidget spinner with a fitness club's treadmill set to the brisk pace of an uphill jog.

None of the experiments don't use polarizing lenses to make a determination of results on both sides. This is where the experiments are fundamentally flawed and propose weak evidence.

To simply read about the fundamentals of light polarization is to understand that quantum wave function collapse is much ado about nothing, and it becomes obvious that all this contention is total bullshit, and none of it is magic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarizer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarizing_filter_(photography...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_polarization