psi's recent activity
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Comment on The rise of 'conspiracy physics' in ~science
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Comment on Conservative activist Charlie Kirk shot and killed at Utah college event in ~society
psi (edited )LinkI can't help but see the parallels to the October 7 attacks. On that day, Hamas carried out a monstrous act of violence against civilians. It was terrorism in its most brutal, unforgivable form....- Exemplary
I can't help but see the parallels to the October 7 attacks. On that day, Hamas carried out a monstrous act of violence against civilians. It was terrorism in its most brutal, unforgivable form. Yet it was also the inevitable consequence of Israel's inability to address the Palestinian people in any meaningful way.
Kirk's murder is a smaller scale version of the same underlying dynamics. Murder is wrong. It is unjustifiable except in the most extreme circumstances, and being a right-wing provocateur certainly does not meet that threshold, as much as I thought Kirk a net drain on society. Certainly his children, reportedly also in attendance, do not deserve the lifetime of trauma.
Yet we cannot understand this moment without understanding how we arrived here, an era in which the legitimacy of our political opponents is routinely questioned (in both directions). With each election, our polarization has only become worst. Now at the helm we have our commander-in-chief who regularly dumps jet fuel on the flames. To temper his worse impulses, we have the Supreme Court, which has succumbed to the temptation of an unassailable conservative offensive, allowing for an unprecedented expansion of executive power that would have been unimaginable under any Democratic administration. Meanwhile, Congress shrugs. It's difficult to understand these moves as anything other than a pure political power grab. So if the opposition has no legitimate way to express their grievances, how else can they respond but violently? It is not right. It is not justifiable. Yet it is the inevitable consequence of refusing to acknowledge your political opposition.
In principle we know what we need to do, or at least we know in which direction we need the rhetorical landscape to shift. We need to defuse and de-escalate. We need to be willing to compromise, or at the very least we need to make an earnest attempt to listen to our political rivals. This is, admittedly, much easier said than done.
Unfortunately, this administration's response so far has been to double-down, promising to investigate all liberal "organizations that fund [...] and support [violence]." In blaming democrats for Kirk's murder, Trump cited the attempt on his life as well as the attempted assassination of Republican Representative Steve Scalise in 2017. Yet he didn't mention Melissa Hortman, the former Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives murdered in June, nor Nancy Pelosi, whose husband was hospitalized by an act of political violence in 2022. That is, this administration does not see political violence as a bipartisan issue. They see it as a cudgel to further disempower the left.
In the universe of all possible responses to this tragedy, Trump's response is among the worst, as it will do nothing but exacerbate tensions. And until our government is willing to face the reality that political violence is a bipartisan issue, tragedies like this will only become more common.
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Comment on Pentagon authorizes up to 600 US military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges in ~society
psi (edited )Link ParentImmigration judges belong to the executive branch, being employees of the Department of Justice and appointed by the Attorney General. That's not to excuse this action but to emphasize that...Immigration judges belong to the executive branch, being employees of the Department of Justice and appointed by the Attorney General. That's not to excuse this action but to emphasize that regular immigration judges are already subject to similarly perverse incentives.
If you haven't read it yet, I strongly encourage you to read this article on the dual state model, which is (unfortunately) perpetually relevant when discussing immigration courts:
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Comment on Why do so many people think US President Donald Trump is good? in ~society
psi (edited )LinkBrooks seems to be conflating moral relativism with a loss of shared culture. We haven't lost sight of some "objective" moral standard because such a thing has never existed; if it had, we would...- Exemplary
Brooks seems to be conflating moral relativism with a loss of shared culture. We haven't lost sight of some "objective" moral standard because such a thing has never existed; if it had, we would still be practicing slavery and stoning gay people. Even his own examples don't past muster with a little more scrutiny: Did serfs really tend to the fields from a sense of moral duty, or did they do it because they were literally the property of their feudal lords?
Focusing on moral frameworks misses the larger picture. Yes, people have different opinions on diversity and trans rights, but virtually everyone agrees that corruption, theft, and murder are wrong. Trump's enablers do not argue that Trump's conflicts of interest are moral; they argue that he's too rich to have conflicts. More to the point, liberals and conservatives have not lost a shared sense of morality so much as we've lost a shared sense of reality. We read different newspapers and occupy different spaces on the internet. It's not just that we don't agree on the same facts; we don't even know what the other side considers important. How many people on the left would have recognized the name Ashli Babbitt if Trump hadn't repeated it so many times?
So I don't know how Brooks managed to write this essay without addressing the elephant in the room. Every issue Brooks describes has been exacerbated by platforms such as Facebook, X, and Truth Social. We were filtered into different content bubbles, we went along willingly, and to be frank, I don't even think we were wrong for wanting it. (Why should I regret limiting my exposure to bigotry?) Unfortunately for us, the new fourth estate has become social media. We no longer rely on journalists to do our fact finding, thereby establishing a foundation for which ideas can compete; instead we start with the theory we like and follow the blogger or influencer who spouts it.
Our failure is not moral but epistemological. In today's media landscape, there are no facts. There is no debate. There are only unchallenged, unsubstantiated theories.
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Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: Voting topic in ~games
psi Link ParentI am amused by the idea of a "wildcard" month, so I thought maybe I should clarify exactly what I'm proposing. Essentially, for the wildcard month, one would choose a game per a categorical...I am amused by the idea of a "wildcard" month, so I thought maybe I should clarify exactly what I'm proposing.
Essentially, for the wildcard month, one would choose a game per a categorical distribution, with the probability of drawing a particular title
Tgiven byp_T = N_T / Nwhere
N_Tis the number of votes for titleTandN = sum_T N_Tis the total number of votes cast.However, the simplest implementation might give too much weight to unpopular choices, so one could additionally introduce a reweighting function
fto minimize/eliminate the chance of selecting especially unpopular games. For example, one could consider the reweighting functionf(p, N) = {0 if p*N < 15, p^2 else}which eliminates titles that received less than 15 total votes and gives a quadratic preference to more popular choices. In principle, the only restrictions on the reweighting function are that it be (1) non-negative for all inputs and (2) non-zero for at least one input.
To choose a game using a reweighting function, one would again draw per a categorical distribution but with new probabilities
p_T_reweighted = f(p_T, N) / Awhere the normalization constant is
A = sum_T f(p_T, N).Here's a python script that reads "tally.csv" and simulates a random draw per the reweighting function above. (Note that it uses numpy, so you would need to add `numpy` to requirements.txt.)
import csv import numpy as np def choose_wildcard(): # get titles, scores from csv file with open("tally.csv") as f: cf = csv.reader(f, delimiter=',') next(cf) # skip header titles = [] scores = [] for row in cf: titles.append(row[0]) scores.append(int(row[1])) # calculate probabilities for each title N = np.sum(scores) p = np.array(scores) / N # apply reweighting function def reweighting_func(p, N): return np.array([0 if pi*N < 15 else pi**2 for pi in p]) p_reweighted = reweighting_func(p, N) # check pathological cases if (p_reweighted < 0).any(): raise ValueError("Probabilities must be positive!") elif (p_reweighted == 0).all(): raise ValueError("Must have one non-zero value!") # normalize p_reweighted = p_reweighted / np.sum(p_reweighted) return np.random.choice(titles, p=p_reweighted) def main(): print("Wildcard!", '\n ->', choose_wildcard()) if __name__ == "__main__": main() -
Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: Voting topic in ~games
psi Link ParentWind Waker, The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls, and Lufia II were all chosen because I haven't played them. However, I would like to specifically single-out Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger was a...Wind Waker, The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls, and Lufia II were all chosen because I haven't played them. However, I would like to specifically single-out Chrono Trigger.
Chrono Trigger was a generational JRPG that helped popularize the genre in the West. Its influence remains so great that games today are still referenced against it, so much so that for a certain style of game -- JRPGs with pixel graphics -- it is almost impossible to escape the comparison. But amazingly, even after 30 years of progress in game design, Chrono Trigger hardly feels dated, with many of its spiritual successors (e.g. Sea of Stars) feeling hollow against it.
Being one of the greatest games of all time, I'm sure many people here have already played it. But for our inaugural CGA thread, what could be a better fit than one of the all time greats?
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Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: Voting topic in ~games
psi LinkChrono Trigger (5) The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (5) Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls) (5) Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (5)Chrono Trigger (5)
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (5)
Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls) (5)
Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (5) -
Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: Voting topic in ~games
psi Link ParentAlternatively, rather than pick the most popular title, one could pick a title at random with weights assigned according to the number of votes. For example, given three titles A, B, C with...Alternatively, rather than pick the most popular title, one could pick a title at random with weights assigned according to the number of votes.
For example, given three titles A, B, C with corresponding votes 10, 5, 15, one would generate a random number r between 1 and 35 (inclusive), then choose a title based on the value of r,
01 - 10: A 11 - 15: B 16 - 35: CTo prevent truly unpopular titles from spoiling the selection, you could either use a nonlinear weighting function (e.g., square the counts then normalize) or require that a title have at least 6 votes to qualify for the selection procedure (meaning that at least two people have voted for it).
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Comment on Google will require developer verification for Android apps outside the Play Store in ~tech
psi (edited )Link ParentThe UK isn't in the EU, and for all the complaints about chat control, it (thankfully) hasn't passed. Mind you, the EU is also responsible for the GDPR, a regulation specifically crafted from the...The UK isn't in the EU, and for all the complaints about chat control, it (thankfully) hasn't passed. Mind you, the EU is also responsible for the GDPR, a regulation specifically crafted from the ideal of privacy as a human right. And one of those EU member states is Germany, which is among the most privacy-conscious countries in the world. So I don't think the EU's anti-anonymity streak is as clear-cut as you're depicting it.
But to @Bullmaestro's point, a one-time $25 fee is categorically different from Apple's core technology fee, so it might withstand regulatory scrutiny.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
psi (edited )Link ParentNeat! The developments aren't really relevant to my research, but given that there are now workshops dedicated specifically to applying machine learning to lattice QCD, I would definitely consider...Neat!
The developments aren't really relevant to my research, but given that there are now workshops dedicated specifically to applying machine learning to lattice QCD, I would definitely consider it a thriving subfield. And there are some seemingly useful applications, e.g. training neural nets to reproduce costly correlation functions [1].
Regarding ensemble generation in particular, I think it's still an open question as to whether such a program is actually feasible. Unlike image generation, which has a nearly limitless number of images available for training, we are in much shorter supply of independent ensembles: there are only about O(100) - O(1000) ensembles that have ever been created. And even assuming one could generate an ensemble, we would need to be absolutely sure that we had the bias under control, i.e. that we were actually simulating QCD and not some partial facsimile.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
psi (edited )Link ParentPeople are conducting research into the applicability of generative AI in various scientific fields; those applications just aren't widely known because they're extremely niche. For example, in my...People are conducting research into the applicability of generative AI in various scientific fields; those applications just aren't widely known because they're extremely niche.
For example, in my field (lattice QCD) we use massive amounts of computational resources to generate "ensembles", which are essentially simulations of hadrons in a discretized, finite boxes at non-physical values of the quark masses. And when I say massive, I mean truly mind-boggling numbers -- we're talking computation time of the order O(1) - O(100) million core-hours and with disk usage measured in the petabytes.
So you can imagine the amount of money that is spent on these projects. Now comes along diffusion methods. Some people realized that image generation doesn't look that different from ensemble generation, and that if you could simply generate an ensemble via diffusion you could drastically reduce your computational requirements compared to conventional techniques.
An ongoing research problem in my field is determining to what extent these diffusion techniques are viable.
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Comment on Meta allegedly pirated terabytes of porn to trick the BitTorrent protocol into letting them pirate books faster in ~tech
psi Link ParentIn this case, the plaintiff's demands should be interpreted as a threat, not as a likely (or even desired) outcome. I'd guess the parties will almost certainly settle long before the case goes to...In this case, the plaintiff's demands should be interpreted as a threat, not as a likely (or even desired) outcome. I'd guess the parties will almost certainly settle long before the case goes to trial (assuming there isn't a summary judgement against the plaintiffs). If Facebook is capable of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to attract talent, they can also afford to pay some ungodly amount of money to make a lawsuit disappear.
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Comment on Recommendations for a obscure newer games in ~games
psi LinkSome recommendations, organized from least obscure to most obscure: Lil Gator Game: cute-as-heck platformer. You're a gator playing make-believe Zelda. Sometimes there are "enemies", but since...Some recommendations, organized from least obscure to most obscure:
- Lil Gator Game: cute-as-heck platformer. You're a gator playing make-believe Zelda. Sometimes there are "enemies", but since they're just make-believe, the enemies are only cardboard-cutouts who can't hurt you. Currently available in this month's humble bundle.
- Chained Echoes: a throwback to JRPGs of old, this game is probably /r/JRPG's indie darling. It's not a perfect game -- in particular, the writing feels a little ham-fisted at times -- but the gameplay is great, with the developer understanding which tropes are fun and which are tedious (I especially appreciated how all battles begin at full health and with your "super" charged).
- Hylics 2: this game takes inspiration from classic JRPGs (and gameplay-wise is quite similar to @Beardyhat's recommendation of Felvidek) but leans heavily into its alien setting, making the game feel properly otherwordly instead of just another JRPG with an alien skin. I wrote much more about it here.
- Withering Rooms: this game's genre lies somewhere between Metroidvania and a 2D Resident Evil. I would especially recommend it for fans of Victorian horror. Again, I shared more of my thoughts in a previous comment.
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Comment on Xbox Series X and S: Microsoft has reportedly sold less than 30 million consoles this generation in ~games
psi (edited )Link ParentOh, if only it were so simple -- those were two different devices! The Nintendo 2DS had a single, non-folding body, whereas the New Nintendo 2DS XL had the upgraded compute, larger screen, and...2DS (? this was the one with the solid screen and New 3DS capabilities, right?)
Oh, if only it were so simple -- those were two different devices! The Nintendo 2DS had a single, non-folding body, whereas the New Nintendo 2DS XL had the upgraded compute, larger screen, and more conventional DS form factor.
DS
There was also the DS Lite, the DSi, and the DS XL.
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Comment on Xbox Series X and S: Microsoft has reportedly sold less than 30 million consoles this generation in ~games
psi (edited )Link ParentOff-topic, but during lockdown I managed to snatch a non-scalped PS5 through a combination of email notifications and diligently refreshing product pages. (At some point I had even installed a...Off-topic, but during lockdown I managed to snatch a non-scalped PS5 through a combination of email notifications and diligently refreshing product pages. (At some point I had even installed a program on my home server to automate the process, though this ultimately proved unnecessary.) Alas, after I had paid for the order, the vendor informed me that they had overestimated the stock of PS5 Digitals they had on hand. But rather than cancel my order, they instead shipped me a PS5 Disk!
And so, while others were still haggling with scalpers, I managed to secure a PS5 for $100 off MSRP -- which, even nearly five years into the PS5's lifetime, still remains its largest discount to date.
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Comment on Is AI actually useful for anyone here? in ~tech
psi Link ParentOn the other hand, sometimes those skeptics were right. Consider the industrial revolution. Despite popular depictions of the Luddites as being anti-progress, it is worth remembering that factory...On the other hand, sometimes those skeptics were right. Consider the industrial revolution. Despite popular depictions of the Luddites as being anti-progress, it is worth remembering that factory conditions in the late 18th/early 19th century were absolutely grueling, with seven day work weeks, the employment of child labor, little concern for safe working conditions, and payment via vouchers only redeemable at company stores. It was only after some hundred years of resistance that the labor movement managed to limit these practices. Now we reap the benefits of the industrial revolution, but those gains came at the cost of generations of human suffering.
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Comment on The America Party in ~society
psi LinkThis party is only centrist insofar that Elon considers himself the center of the universe. More seriously: Setting the stated ideals of the "America Party" aside, I don't see how it will...This party is only centrist insofar that Elon considers himself the center of the universe.
More seriously: Setting the stated ideals of the "America Party" aside, I don't see how it will distinguish itself from the Republican party. Other than their disagreement over the budget, Musk has been a vocal supporter of nearly all of Trump's policies; indeed, Musk himself was personally responsible for perhaps this administration's least popular initiative so far, the so-called "Department" of Government Efficiency. So what's the appeal here? It's a copycat populist party but without the strongman.
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Comment on Tildes Game Giveaway: June/July 2025 in ~games
psi Link ParentI'll take Busy Beaver 🦫. He wants to be a mathematician, and in fact he had a good lead on solving Goldbach's conjecture! But that would require him to be able to count to 27, and right now he...I'll take Busy Beaver 🦫. He wants to be a mathematician, and in fact he had a good lead on solving Goldbach's conjecture! But that would require him to be able to count to 27, and right now he only knows how to count to 5.
Thanks as always for running the giveaway!
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Comment on Brazilian comedian sentenced to eight years over discriminatory jokes in ~society
psi Link ParentI agree that everything should not be in service of democracy, but I would disagree that democracy exists to optimize freedom of action and speech. Such a political philosophy describes literal...I agree that everything should not be in service of democracy, but I would disagree that democracy exists to optimize freedom of action and speech. Such a political philosophy describes literal anarchy.
Rather, democracy exists to balance individual freedoms without intruding on the freedoms of others (as the saying goes, "your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins"). Speech is not inherently valuable because it is speech; otherwise spam filters would be an assault on principled discourse. Indeed, many types of speech are considered inherently harmful (slander, piracy, CSAM, etc), so I don't find it useful to throw all types of speech into the same bucket. Clearly one can and should distinguish between, e.g., academic inquiry and hateful misinformation.
I would recommend visiting Peter Woit's blog Not Even Wrong for another discussion of this article. Not because I agree with Peter -- I think Peter missed the point of the essay -- but because (1) none other than the writer of the piece (Dan Kagan-Kans) shows ups to defend himself and (2) there is a rather ironic twist as the thread develops, which speaks to an even larger epistemic failure.
A hint
Note that Daniel Kagan Kans is not Dan Kagan-Kans.