nowayhaze's recent activity

  1. Comment on Quizzle – Can you guess the word in fewer than twenty questions? in ~games

    nowayhaze
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    On #17, I asked if it's larger than a bread box and it said no. I asked it later if it's smaller than a bread box and it said no! Spoilers: it did not think it was the same size as a bread box.

    On #17, I asked if it's larger than a bread box and it said no. I asked it later if it's smaller than a bread box and it said no!

    Spoilers: it did not think it was the same size as a bread box.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on ALPHA experiment at CERN observes the influence of gravity on antimatter in ~science

    nowayhaze
    Link Parent
    No worries, I wanted to clarify my parenthetical for everyone else anyway. Especially for very structural things about physics like CPT, it's very hard to engage with lay people without sounding...

    No worries, I wanted to clarify my parenthetical for everyone else anyway. Especially for very structural things about physics like CPT, it's very hard to engage with lay people without sounding overly authoritative or dogmatic, so I went with a more agnostic viewpoint about the positron mass.

    However, any serious local CPT violation proposal would need to be accompanied with an extraordinary overhaul of QFT and modern high energy physics in general. Quite intriguing and interesting if it were true, but any naive modification would break way, way more things than a lay person would realize.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on ALPHA experiment at CERN observes the influence of gravity on antimatter in ~science

    nowayhaze
    Link Parent
    Yeah, it would be nice, but I think Deimos wants a mostly Javascript-free Tildes, and fast load times. So things like MathJax would be counter to that design philosophy. I think there was some...

    Yeah, it would be nice, but I think Deimos wants a mostly Javascript-free Tildes, and fast load times. So things like MathJax would be counter to that design philosophy.

    I think there was some Slack extension render LaTeX client-side and be completely transparent to people without the extension. Perhaps that is a solution we can make if there's enough interest in the Tildes community.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on ALPHA experiment at CERN observes the influence of gravity on antimatter in ~science

    nowayhaze
    Link Parent
    Of course, I wasn't implying that this experiment or any experiment in our lifetime would measure CPT violation. But the point of experiments like this one is to be agnostic about CPT violation.

    Of course, I wasn't implying that this experiment or any experiment in our lifetime would measure CPT violation. But the point of experiments like this one is to be agnostic about CPT violation.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on ALPHA experiment at CERN observes the influence of gravity on antimatter in ~science

    nowayhaze
    Link Parent
    As far as gravity is concerned, a positron has the same mass (or nearly the same mass) as an electron. For the precision of this experiment, you can definitely treat their masses as equal and...

    As far as gravity is concerned, a positron has the same mass (or nearly the same mass) as an electron. For the precision of this experiment, you can definitely treat their masses as equal and positive. Newtonian gravity still is valid here and you would get the classic -G m_1 m_2/r^2 attractive force between the earth and the positron, which both have positive masses.

    The one electron universe is an old idea that may have sparked the more accurate understanding of how particles actually work in quantum field theory. In the current understanding, electrons and positrons are indeed excitations of the very same field across the universe. This doesn't mean that we can only see one electron/positron at a particular time slice.

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Huawei accused of building secret microchip factories to beat US sanctions in ~tech

    nowayhaze
    Link Parent
    Your assessment is not quite fair to the US I would say. Most of much of Huawei's tech, especially in the early days were stolen IP from US and Western companies. There were numerous explicit...

    Your assessment is not quite fair to the US I would say. Most of much of Huawei's tech, especially in the early days were stolen IP from US and Western companies. There were numerous explicit examples of very egregious Huawei making knockoff telecom devices that used the same hardware design and exact source code stolen from other companies. It's not exactly a fair free market when one side doesn't play by any rules.

    I think it would be a caricature to think the US ever pushed a no-holds-barred anarchist laissez-faire system. On the contrary, the US government has always been pretty protectionist for most of its history except for the period after WWII until recently.

    If Chinese companies like Huawei succeed in legitimizing themselves globally and reaching parity or surpassing Western companies with their practices, it sort of demonstrates how asymmetric breaking rules is for getting ahead. A parallel to the fact that democracies are not a complete free-for-all comes to mind: there's a point you can break democratic institutions with more nefarious tactics.

    10 votes

  7. Comment on Plexamp is now available for free in ~tech

    nowayhaze
    Link Parent
    Definitely not as feature-rich as plexamp, but have you looked into Gelli for your needs yet?

    Definitely not as feature-rich as plexamp, but have you looked into Gelli for your needs yet?

    1 vote

  8. Comment on Does the "inflation due to wage growth" narrative hold water? in ~finance

    nowayhaze
    Link Parent
    Great points in your many comments here. How much of what you are analyzing as demand-pull when there is a market shock is assuming the market stays efficient? When there is a deadly pandemic or a...

    Great points in your many comments here. How much of what you are analyzing as demand-pull when there is a market shock is assuming the market stays efficient? When there is a deadly pandemic or a stimulus all of a sudden in the context of your examples you would expect a demand shock but your reasoning relies on the fact that the market dynamically stays at equilibrium as it transitions. If you have transience during this shock, you can expect some amount of "price gouging" in the form of price exploration which could have time scales much, much longer than, say, high-frequency trades. This also assumes the supply side also transitions efficiently but that might be a next order affect.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on Place to learn Japanese in ~humanities.languages

    nowayhaze
    Link Parent
    Yes, to better understand how Japanese works I'm proposing a new kana system that is romaji and designed with Japanese speakers in mind. I think pinyin does that for Chinese speakers (Wade-Giles...

    Yes, to better understand how Japanese works I'm proposing a new kana system that is romaji and designed with Japanese speakers in mind. I think pinyin does that for Chinese speakers (Wade-Giles and definitely Yale for example are better designed and gets closer to the actual sounds for the unintiated English speaker), where the letters really don't correspond to English or IPA at all, but is good enough for a native Chinese kid to fully learn and express virtually all sounds uniquely. So would a "romaji for Japanese speakers" be enough or do the existing kana system really do something that roman letters can't do? Is it just betraying to an unintiated English-speaking beginner who just wants to read the letters like they are reading Spanish? Could someone with the correct orientation and mindset fully use letters instead of hiragana and katakana?

    When I mentioned alphasyllabary I would mean fixing the forms of the letter combinations for Japanese morae/syllables instead of having free letters like in a proper English alphabet. For example "ka" would be bound together as a unit, "k" and "a" would not exist on their own. Perhaps "ka" = か = カ for example. What would be wrong with this? Kana with dakuten can be implement via other letter combinations like "ga" for example.

    1 vote

  10. Comment on Place to learn Japanese in ~humanities.languages

    nowayhaze
    Link Parent
    Thanks for the detailed reply. Your analogy with Chinese pinyin is interesting because even Chinese lacks a 1-to-1 mapping between characters and syllables but it is a complicated relation...

    Thanks for the detailed reply. Your analogy with Chinese pinyin is interesting because even Chinese lacks a 1-to-1 mapping between characters and syllables but it is a complicated relation sometimes (This aspect is probably a far worse issue for Japanese romaji). I guess my question was if you had to start Japanese orthography over again, say using romaji + kanji only for writing, with all a different set of ideosyncracies and ambiguities that come with romaji rather than kana, then would Japanese functionally retain the same complexity? In this thought experiment, you can even use alphasyllabaries so you have set two- to three-letter combinations for each kana, with alternate pronunications for the letters and letter-combinations like we have in English, and proper vowel length markers.

    I totally get your main point about how just relying on romaji can be a crutch that doesn't let you engage deeper with Japanese language and culture. I was just wondering if the exceptions and misleading nature of a fully fleshed out romaji system would have necessarily present an orthographic limitation on the Japanese language. Again, I'm not advocating for this (nor for pinyin-only Chinese).

    2 votes

  11. Comment on Place to learn Japanese in ~humanities.languages

    nowayhaze
    Link Parent
    Hello, I'm not someone interested in learning Japanese per se, but more of a linguistics fan. I'm curious why you two say that romaji will betray you? From @Nadya's joke I can gather that it is...

    Hello, I'm not someone interested in learning Japanese per se, but more of a linguistics fan. I'm curious why you two say that romaji will betray you? From @Nadya's joke I can gather that it is not consistent, but from an information standpoint why is it so much worse than katakana and hiragana?
    I know Chinese, so I can imagine kanji can be worse for "betraying" Japanese learners in some senses.

    2 votes