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ethn

455 karma · joined March 28, 2016

https://aethn.com

Interested in: - epistemology - social/financial structures. - startups

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ethn··on A mystery of the ketogenic diet: benevolent pseudo-diabetes in mice (2019)
Yes fiber doesn’t take you off of ketosis however it does increase carbohydrate absorption.
ethn··on Physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers
Many people on HN have a PhD in similar fields but that isn't relevant, though it's the smart people here that give us these thoughtful conversations on HN.

No one has disagreed with it, I explicitly agreed with you on the existence of Fermi velocity. I don't have the ability to downvote, but you were downvoted because you mentioned the fermi velocity in contradiction to electron flow even though it is the drift velocity that is pertinent in the original context of electricity (which requires a non-net zero velocity).

ethn··on Physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers
Drift velocity has everything to do with the discussion, which is why you brought it up.

I’m familiar with Pauli exclusion principle I’ve worked on real semiconductors.

Your last point is wrong, everything else you said is correct but it remains irrelevant since it does not contradict what was said. Both links are correct.

As you know the net fermi velocity of a fermion is 0. The directional velocity resulting from an electric field on an electron, the fermi velocity which becomes directional due to net flow, is the drift velocity. Which is what we care about.

You can do a simple experiment with NMR to measure the speed of electrons. Indeed they’ve done it and it corresponds to the “wrong calculations”.[1]

Edit: Good resource [2] to help you understand the difference between those two velocities:

> However, the drift velocity of electrons in metals - the speed at which electrons move in applied electric field - is quite slow, on the order of 0.0001 m/s, or .01 cm/s. You can easily outrun an electron drifting in a metal, even if you have been drinking all night and have been personally reduced to a very slow crawl.

> To summarize, electrons are traveling in metals at the Fermi velocity vF, which is very, very fast (106 m/s), but the flux of electrons is the same in all directions. That is, they are going nowhere fast. In an electric field, a very small but directional drift velocity is superimposed on this fast random motion of valence electrons.

[1] https://physics.aps.org/story/v17/st4

[2] https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Inorganic_Chemistry/...

ethn··on Physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers
??? Indeed everything I have written is accurate, not sure your point since we are talking about electron directional velocity in a wire not the speed of energy propagation...

> In fact, electrons in conductive media do not travel at c, they travel at incredibly slow velocities, on the order of a fraction of a millimeter per second. The rate can vary, and the amount of current in the conductor is a function of the average speed of the electrons in it. [1]

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?SpeedOfElectrons

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

[3] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/497916/how-fast-...

ethn··on Physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers
Electricity travels faster than the speed of electrons (which only travel at ~3 cm/s!), it travels proportional to the speed of light, it’s speed is instead described by the Poynting vector, an energy wave.
ethn··on Ask HN: How worried are you about the upcoming recession?
Shouldn’t occur in a positively inflationary recession. That is behavior that we would expect in a deflationary recession like the prelude to the 2008 period, 2007. If it goes to around 4%, I will start worrying.
ethn··on Ask HN: Why XMPP failed and SMTP didn't?
I thought it was pretty easy to use using Pidgin.
ethn··on Ask HN: How worried are you about the upcoming recession?
All of retail is not the cheapest goods. From Disney to Roblox revenue is up.

Savings rate is decreasing not increasing.

ethn··on Ask HN: How worried are you about the upcoming recession?
I don’t believe there will be a recession due to the savings rate continuing to recover to normal levels [1]. Indeed, we see real revenues of all retailers increasing, e.g. Walmart, Target, Amazon, Costco, etc.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

ethn··on Reddit Founder Says 90% of Games Will Pay You to Play Them in 5 Years
Very clever. This makes sense.
ethn··on Milton Friedman’s Interest Rate Fallacy
The author should consider A Monetary History of the United States by Friedman.

The EFFR is exactly incrementally increased in a way to not immediately perturb markets, to slowly approach its target. It is also well known that there is delay expected between prices of all assets (including credit) to react to monetary conditions.

ethn··on The Universe Is a Machine That Keeps Learning, Scientists Say
So any sane person will immediately recognize this sounds crazy.

However, epistemologically it might be sound, I've been thinking about this for a while now. Mainly because of the simple potential well problem and considering Hegelian epistemology.

The particle form isn't determined until it is measured, this is okay in regular epistemology and transcendental idealism. Not an issue, all appearances are human activities anyways created by our limited senses and tools.

But the amazing thing is that the particle still complies with our concept of causality despite not yet existing (its probabilities are completely dependent on potential energy)!

There are several theories to try to reconcile this. Real many-worlds theory, holographic universe, superdeterminism, single-electron etc. But all of these have either epistemological issues or cannot account for all phenomena.

This has led me to what I think is the most satisfying interpretation so far, which I call retroactive superdeterminism (RS).

In RS in order to resolve the problem of maintaining causality for an object which does not exist, on information of the appearance of the particle which may otherwise contradict causality, the mind changes the entire history of the world so to be that the particle existed the entire time with defined position and momentum, thereby producing causality. Thereby saving the mental framework we have on all things (phenomenology).

In this way the universe 'learns' but of course it is merely the ensemble of the appearances of the world and their properties that are changing as a result of that mental activity, which from one perspective can be argued that the universe is learning.

ethn··on Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?
Use a Minhash-LSH ensemble with pre-processing on the words to fix typos via Levenshtein. Tune parameters to get the best distance
ethn··on Why can't we just give steroids to people with muscular dystrophy?
On the other hand an MPC inhibitor like RCGD423 should reactivate the muscle stem cells [1].

For a similar reason an oral TZD (which are selective MPCi) should also help.

[1] https://hscnews.usc.edu/small-molecule-could-make-a-big-diff...

ethn··on ST Sees AR Glasses Replacing Smartphones
XR includes AR and VR
ethn··on Mailable Live Animals
This whole time I thought I did something wrong.
ethn··on ST Sees AR Glasses Replacing Smartphones
It occurs when you have glasses with 3D objects produced by either stereoscopic, multi-planar or other means overlaid onto the real world.
ethn··on ST Sees AR Glasses Replacing Smartphones
Snapchat already has it, spectacles.com. Better approaches are on the way, kura.tech and the Magic Leap 2.0--and of course the technology in the article.

The real challenge with XR is the vergence-accomodation conflict, it's solved in AR but not VR [0].

AR input software is a commodity, open-source versions exist. They use gesture detection.

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/9/15/3147

ethn··on I built a business that lets me live on the beach full time
Market Efficiency is a convenient argument of faith which has a more nuanced rational basis, but absolutely in the general case is untrue.

In the long-term, markets are certainly efficient. However, the period of inefficiency is determined by the absolute quantity of profit dollars available in the market which in itself determines the competition. That is, the quantity of ticks (time) required for a dynamic optimization w.r.t. profit extraction is the measure of competition in some market, and thereby the degree of efficiency.

It is then true, that in the most competitive markets, the ones with the most capital, have a very small window of inefficiency, but they do exist. It requires a lot of capital to dynamically extract profit from those inefficiencies. An example of this would be the near hegemony of Citadel Securities in making markets. It is impossible for anyone today to compete in the market-making (an advanced arbitrage) industry without tons of capital.

However, we are time-bounded beings so there is always present an inefficient market. The challenge of the proprietor is then to determine that market which can provide a return to his constrained capital.

For instance, a restaurant can give a 15% annual ROI, which outperforms the S&P. The Citadel is not going to be interested in this inefficiency because that ROI is unavailable to the amount of capital they're trying to invest. So what we see is that the most competitive markets beget the most capital, because they have the most profit available to extract absolutely; then the most amount of resources, where capital is the analogue, are invested into those markets--so any inefficiency is quickly eroded.

This means that just like the restaurant, there are markets that remain untouched for long periods of time due to their inability to return large amounts of capital in absolute terms. These markets then have a great ROI in terms of percent. It is these markets that are available to the proprietor with low capital.

This is why the startup advice of finding a niche first is so salient, they are always necessarily underserved non-competitive markets. There's the other cycle from crossing-the-chasm which removes enterprises from this market who have the same idea as they scale, that's a separate explication, but this cycle allows the period of inefficiency to be maintained in those markets through that self-regulation.

ethn··on I, Token: The untold story of the hole in Bitcoin's heart
Graeber’s model is refuted by the existence of pre-fiat currencies, the Wampum, the Chinese copper cowrie, and Bitcoin. Where Bitcoin is a currency but just deflationary like gold. Optimal currencies of course are inflationary or stable [1].

[1] This is a simplification, the real optimal rate of inflation is really -0.8% as shown in the seminal paper The Optimum Quantity of Money.

ethn··on I, Token: The untold story of the hole in Bitcoin's heart
I’m not a fan of Graeber’s debt model for currency (i.e. the IOU). I prefer Aristotle’s nomisma and Szabo’s work on top of it [1].

[1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/

ethn··on Is Aging Inevitable?
Entropy is a condition where a system becomes more chaotic over time when energy isn't added to a system. Otherwise life itself wouldn't occur due to entropy, life is precisely possible because energy is added to a system to prevent entropy.
ethn··on Electromagnetism is a property of spacetime itself, study finds
I thought we knew this already since Faraday.
ethn··on Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches
You’re not wrong, despite Wittgenstein’s Brown Papers, his criticism of Golden Bough—-people continue to refuse to acknowledge the limits of knowledge.

Here’s an author theorizing on why people go to festivals TODAY, instead of the obvious answer that they’re a fun social game he creates this entire abstract theory about worship and religion.

https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/girard-series-part-1-th...

ethn··on How Bell’s Theorem proved ‘spooky action at a distance’ is real
Look up how entanglement is done experimentally. It will always involve a technology which can be used to classically transmit information at a distance.

What happens in entanglement is that the two entangled objects receive say an entangled photon, it is at this point where the two objects are entangled.

Entanglement is a dance of the statistical limits and position of a particle/object given a specific space/energy configuration (initial condition). From this we know the probability of where it can be, what states it can assume, and the limits of both—given the energy it takes to traverse space and assume those states at once.

They are entangled because once information of the states of one of the entangled objects is measured (mainly by analyzing the exiting photon), we can apodictically discern the state of the other.

ethn··on The Death of the Festival
Or consider Wittgenstein. Maybe people attend festivals just because it’s fun.
ethn··on Fake Tesla, Apple stocks have started trading on blockchains
I think this is illegal. This is effectively a CFD, which are absolutely illegal in the US regulated or not.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_for_difference

ethn··on Fake Tesla, Apple stocks have started trading on blockchains
It’s the redemption of the real underlying that allows ETFs to work.
ethn··on What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
In social choice theory, May's theorem states that simple majority voting is the only anonymous, neutral, and positively responsive social choice function between two alternatives.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May%27s_theorem

ethn··on 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again
Free market requires strong property rights, as private property is a legal fiction which otherwise does not exist enough to sustain a market.

This is instead a dysfunctional government approaching anarcho-individualism.

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