DiogenesKynikos

First, we know for certain that pretty much everything other than gravity is described by quantum theories. It's almost an impossibility to merge quantum theories with non-quantum theories in a logically coherent manner, so either there exists a quantum theory of gravity (which we just haven't discovered yet), or the rest of physics is not really quantum mechanical. But there's a strong theorem (Bell's inequality) that rules out non-quantum explanations of experiments we can conduct in the lab, unless you invoke truly exotic explanations that are much weirder and implausible than quantum mechanics.

So we really are stuck with quantum mechanics, and there must be a quantum theory of gravity. In fact, there are actually quantum theories of gravity (including String Theory), but we don't know whether they're the correct theory that describes our universe.

Quantum mechanics and General Relativity[0] are not fundamentally incompatible. It's just that the most straightforward approach to incorporating gravity into the Standard Model fails. In fact, we know that it is possible to construct quantum theories of gravity that reduce to General Relativity in the classical limit. String Theory is one such theory. We just don't know if it's the correct theory.

0. Special Relativity is already baked into the Standard Model, which is a quantum theory. It's General Relativity that causes problems.

This is really a misunderstanding of what quantum mechanics is. It's not a particular theory. It's a category of theories that fit into a certain framework.

Quantum electrodynamics is a quantum theory. Quantum chromodynamics is a quantum theory. String theory is a quantum theory. I'm sure there is a correct quantum theory of gravity - we just don't know what it is yet.

Indeed. The classical view is wrong, and the quantum view is correct.

But it just turns out that there's a limit in which the quantum world looks approximately classical.

There are only a few things that I think are exactly correct in physics, and quantum mechanics is one of them, alongside Relativity.

Quantum mechanics is a framework for how theories are built, not a specific theory, and it's really all or nothing. There's not much between the quantum and classical ways of viewing the world.

If you read through Dario Amodei's manifesto on pacing the frontier, the only concrete action item is implementing even harsher restrictions on technology exports to China.

The LHC is a massive experiment. Just to cite Wikipedia:

> The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, and hundreds of universities and laboratories across more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.

They give credit to everyone who built the instrument, wrote the software pipelines to analyze the data, etc. That's thousands of people. That's how large experimental projects work.

They're referring to the Huns, not the Hungarians. They're two completely different groups. The Huns invaded in the 5th Century AD, and the Hungarians invaded in the 9th Century AD.

Both groups came from Asia. The reason why the Hungarians seem "local" now is that they've intermarried with local people for so long. But the language they speak is not Indo-European. It's actually related to language spoken in Siberia.

With projects like the LHC, there really are thousands of people involved in "getting the work done."

All you have to do is to plug in at work or home once every few days. Even at <5kW, you can easily make up for a few days of commuting in a few hours.

Even the cheapest cars have ranges of around 400 km. That's several days of commuting. You can forget to charge for three days and you'll still be fine.

And if you really do forget to charge three days in a row, just drive to a nearby fast charger, wait for 10 minutes, and then you're set to go.

That's when you drive to the nearest fast-charging station, where you can charge from nearly empty to full in <10 minutes.

> Whether or not Palestine Action should be proscribed is a different matter

No, that's actually the heart of the matter.

Palestine Action is not a terrorist organization. Full stop. This isn't even arguable.

Labeling them a terrorist organization and then arresting anyone who expresses support for them is a massive abuse of terrorism laws and an attack on the very heart of freedom of speech.

Both of which are unthinkable in a normal democracy.

They called PA a terrorist organization, which is an insult to everyone's intelligence.

Then they carried out mass arrests of people protesting that decision.

Democracies don't do that.

I don't know, but the UK has criminalized expressions of support for Palestine Action.

They're dragging grannies off to prison just for holding up signs, and literally accusing them of supporting terrorism.

Israel has continually justified killing and capturing civilians based on extremely loose affiliation with anything related to Hamas or the government of Gaza.

For example, the Israelis have held a prominent Palestinian doctor / hospital director, Hussam Abu Safiya, under the flimsiest of pretexts. Like doctors in the civil service in many countries, he formally holds a government rank and has a ceremonial uniform that he wears once in a blue moon on formal occasions. Think "surgeon general" in the US. Israel has used this as an excuse to hold him for years now, to subject him to torture, and to brand him a militant. He's a neonatal doctor who ran a hospital, so the idea that he was involved in fighting in any way is absurd on its face.

The idea that Israel only targets the military wing of Hamas is simply not plausible to anyone who has followed the conflict at all. It's insulting to our intelligence.

If you look at how American cities are laid out, the cost on society of car infrastructure is massive. Roads and parking space use up a very significant percentage of the real estate in an American city. Public transit is far more efficient with space, so it saves society as a whole a lot of money.

Israel has heavily used AI targeting in Gaza as well.[0]

The pattern across both Israel's strikes in Gaza and the US strike on the Iranian girls' school is the same: complete disregard for civilian lives.

In the case of Gaza, Israel used an AI system to automatically identify tens of thousands of Palestinians who might be somehow related to Hamas. Then, it identified where they lived, and bombed their homes at night, when they (along with their families, and everyone else who lives in the building) were most likely to be at home.

Keep in mind that Israel considers anyone involved with any part of Hamas in any way to be fair game: police officers, civil servants who work in any part of government in Gaza, people who work for charities run by Hamas, etc. So the targeting is incredibly wide, which is why the casualty figures in Gaza are so high (over 70,000 documented deaths, nearly 20,000 children documented as killed by the IDF).

0. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Many people in this discussion have read it.

The only concrete action item in the blog post is a call to increase restrictions exports of GPUs and chip-making equipment to China.

If Amodei were serious, he'd be calling for a ban on investment in AI research. It reminds me of all the "land acknowledgements" by people who have zero intention of giving the land back.

Increased charging rate also means that fewer charging stations can serve more cars. One Megawatt charger can serve 4x as many cars as a 250 kW charger in the same span of time.

Sub-10-minute charging is going to be standard in new Chinese EVs very soon. There are already many new models on the market this year with charging times between 5 and 10 minutes. There will soon be cars with Megawatt charging speeds that sell for $15k.

As I understand it, Chinese manufacturers have optimized for a different set of parameters than European manufacturers. The Europeans emphasize range, but the Chinese are more willing to trade range for cost while optimizing charging rate.

This is a completely absurd comment.

I'm calling the AfD Nazis because that's exactly what they are.

Of course when people vote for a Nazi party, that's extremely alarming, and I have every right to say that they're wrong to do so.

If the AfD comes to power in Germany, it will be a disaster for the country, and not only for the country. Germany tried fascism once before in its history, and we all know how that turned out.

Deep Blue beat Kasparov fair and square. Kasparov was a bit of a bad sport at the end of the match, though the reasons are understandable. He was at the top of the human chess world. He wasn't used to losing, and he took it badly.

The fall of East Germany, which led to mass unemployment in the East (including Saxony-Anhalt).

The Thatcher-Reagan-style reforms that the Social Democrats and Greens pushed through in the early 2000s, which reduced the social safety net and created new types of less-secure temporary work. In particular, these reforms ended the Social Democrats as a mass party in Germany.

The 2008 financial crisis, which weighed heavily on Europe for years.

The rise in inflation, caused by Covid and wars in Ukraine and Iran.

As in the 1930s, right-wing parties blame everything on immigrants, foreigners and minorities, even though they're not responsible for any of the above.

20% of people in Germany were born abroad. A good share of them have naturalized and are now German citizens. The top countries of origin are Poland, Turkey and Ukraine.

Very few of them go to Saxony-Anhalt. Less than 10% of the population of the state is foreign-born. As GP said, anti-immigrant sentiment is strongest where there are the fewest immigrants.

> But I guess its easier to think that 44% of the inhabitants of Saxony-Anhalt are secretly Nazies

People have a hard time imagining that any person ever voted for the Nazis. 37% of Germans did. It's entirely possible for large parts of the population to vote for fascist parties. It has happened in history before.

If you're a foreigner who's rooting for the fascists, you're an idiot. They want to deport you.

> being told they're all nazis (I'm sure some of them are, but nowhere near all)

Many of their senior leaders are Nazis. The head of the party in the state of Thuringia used to write pro-Hitler articles under a pseudonym.

> ignoring and belittling a large group and ignoring their concerns entirely

The AfD doesn't address their problems either. It tells them that all of their problems are because of foreigners and immigrants.

What's the AfD's solution for affordable housing? Deport immigrants to free up apartments. What's their solution for creating jobs? Deport immigrants.

This is a party that wants to deport all German citizens who don't have a sufficient quantum of German blood. There's no need to pretend the party is anything other than what it is: a fascist party.

The Nazi party got 37% of votes nationwide (not just in one state).

Getting a lot of votes does not mean a party is not far-right. Germans of all people know that.

A lot of people don't realize that chess players peak around the same age as athletes do. Carlsen was at peak dominance in his mid-20s. Kasparov peaked later, at 36 years old, but still, it wasn't at age 50 or 60.

Chess requires you to be really sharp. Experience increases with age, but there's some cross-over point at which the decline in calculating speed is more important than increasing experience. Heck, I'm measurably better at chess tactics in the morning after a good night's sleep than in the evening after work.

Chess has developed significantly over the last 50 years. The best players now can be reasonably expected to be much more skilled than the best players of 50 years ago, even if you discount opening theory knowledge.

I agree that the drift in chess Elo ratings is slow enough that we can say Bobby Fischer at his peak would still be a strong grandmaster today (if he were given some time to study developments in opening theory). But I don't think we can say whether he would land at 2700 or 2800 in today's Elo scale.