prof-dr-ir

It is interesting to compare this against a letter in the Guardian [1] by one of the chief critics of the project. They are both so keen to insist on rationality!

A quote from the original post: "They [his critics] could engage rationally, even if forcefully."

A quote from [1]: "That debate [on empire] should be equitable, rational and based on all the available evidence."

So I think the debate might be a bit more nuanced than can be gleaned from blog posts and columns? I guess I would be wary of taking a side here without significantly more background reading.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/03/histor...

Your first link talks about a specific derogation approved by the EU parliament. It provides an exemption to the ePrivacy directive, which allows for (existing) searches for child sexual abuse material by major content providers to remain legal. Without this exemption these searches would apparently be in violation of the ePrivacy directive.

You can read the derogation here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... . There is a somewhat helpful first page that provides context.

Personally I think it is quite a reasonable derogation; the pirate party clearly disagrees.

Well, thank you for your efforts but I do not think I see anything alarming at this stage. (Perhaps this means that your efforts paid off...)

The proposal itself does not explicitly forbid end-to-end encryption; it might one day try to, but the regulatory scrutiny board insists that the legislation should "respect the prohibition of general monitoring obligations."

In fact, having seen all this I think I can kind of see why journalists are not actively "pursuing" this as the article keeps asking.

The making of EU legislation can take years and is surprisingly transparent; in particular, the public is asked for input at several stages. So I am surprised that the article does not provide any link to an actual proposal - without it, how am I going to believe its claims?

> 4. "Hacking is cool": literally, this is "get off my lawn".

I do not quite agree with this verdict. Back in the early two thousands there were lots of people who thought it rather cool to just hack around (or more precisely crack around), for example by exploiting SQL injection bugs in whatever web form they encountered.

Of course I might not have a representative impression of the community, but I think this kind of stuff is now much more widely seen as unethical and uncool. So I think the article's prediction that this will "be a dead idea in the next 10 years" was actually quite accurate.

To be honest I think your explanation misses the point in two important ways.

First, the Fourier transform does not just measure the 'energy' or amplitude of a single wave; it must also take into account its phase.

Second, complex exponentials are in no way an essential ingredient for defining the Fourier transform. We just work with them for computational simplicity, essentially because exp(ix) exp(iy) = exp(i(x+y)).

I also have trouble assigning meaning to your last paragraph. After all, complex exponentials can cancel just as much as sine waves (proof: sine waves are a combination of complex exponentials).

Does "blog post learning" ever really work?

I have taught these kind of undergraduate subjects and, in the context of a course, the Fourier transform never struck me as something very complicated. First, it feels completely natural to write down a Fourier decomposition for periodic functions; the inverse transform to determine the coefficient is just (real or complex) calculus; and all that is left is to convince the audience of completeness which is best done through a few examples as well as the time-honoured method of "proof by intimidation". (Note that the blog post does not do a better job here.)

By contrast, these posts seem to fulfil a demand where people look for an isolated explanation of concept X, like Fourier transforms, matrix determinants, monoids, etc. But they are necessarily too isolated to really convey the subject. For example, one does not normally teach (complex) Fourier transforms without first dedicating significant time to topics like complex exponentials and integrals of trig functions, and likewise one normally teaches monoids only after introducing functors and applicatives.

In other words, without having the necessary background at your fingertips it is hard to really grasp the core concepts. That is why, IMHO, reading these blog posts may feel good but will rarely make things really stick.

What would be a politician's ideal outcome of a stint in politics?

I think that Trump and Berlusconi and Cheney and Netanyahu all aim for maximal wealth (and minimal imprisonment) for them and their buddies - and they do very well on this front! So are you sure they are unable to make "good decisions" from that perspective?

On the other hand, I think that people like Macron and Merkel, but also May, Truss and probably even Johnson, are more motivated by their legacy and truly would like to improve the status quo of their country - and they believe that that is their path to greatness.

So I think this sets apart the UK politicians from the "real" grifters. But at the same time I think they are also easily distinguished from people like Macron and Merkel and even Von der Leyen, because the British leaders are just so spectacularly bad at it. Starting at least with Cameron's referendum decision we have witnessed a remarkable sequence of massive unforced errors by UK politicians, the likes of which I have not seen in other "Western" countries or the EU (despite your insistence to the contrary).

Maybe "terrible governing by people who nevertheless care" captures it well.

So I guess where you see "evil" I see "haplessness" as a defining factor among UK leaders. A competence gap was my way to explain its origins.

I would like to stress that the gap I speak of is not about stupidity or competence in itself; instead it is about being oblivious to one's own incompetence.

For example, I think that people like Trump, Berlusconi, Cheney, etc. are not in the same class. They are certainly bad leaders, but largely because they are selfish grifters who care little about their country. On the other hand people like Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Johnson and Truss seem to really believe that they are destined to lead the country (to greatness) and that, for them at least, it "cannot be that hard".

So I sense a real difference here, and introducing the "competence gap" was my way to try to make it precise. But maybe there is a better way to formulate it. Arrogance perhaps? (And of course such personalities are not unique to the UK, but I did find them more widespread there.)

As a former inhabitant of England, I always thought that those in charge suffered from a uniquely wide 'competence gap' which I would like to define as the difference between someone's self-perceived competence and someone's actual competence. (The term is probably useful more broadly...)

Maybe it is the historically class-based society alluded to in the article, but it always stunned me how those at the top, and in particular politicians, were pushing through policies without even a modicum of consultation. See for example the 'kamikwasi' budget of last month: in which other European country would this have been done so thoughtlessly?

I am pretty sure the newspapers all picked up on the press releases rather than on the quanta article. For example, the article in the NY Times [0] appeared on the same day (and is also much better IMO).

And, for what it's worth, I do not share your pessimistic outlook. I think a lot of excellent science and science reporting is taking place every day.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-...

Two things can be true at the same time: one, quanta magazine is the best publication out there when it comes to popularizing recent advances in fundamental physics and mathematics; and two, this article was bad.

If we are allowed to base our opinion of a publication on one article, should I declare that Mateus Araújo's blog is dead to me?

Here is an (excellent, IMO) article instead of a press release:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-...

Here is a rather critical reddit comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/z9n8ns/comment/iyib9...

See also quanta magazine for even more background:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-...

How about just adding a disclaimer at the top of the readme that the code was written 15 years ago by a much less experienced version of you?

You can add that the statute of limitations for this code has (in your humble opinion) expired, so those wishing to judge you might want to look instead at your more recent projects.

Meh :) in classical mechanics one cares little about maximization versus minimization; it's really just (stationarity of L) <---> (equations of motion) that matters. Practically speaking it's just a cute gimmick to quickly find the equations of motion, especially for constrained systems.

In quantum mechanics everything is different, but for that you should study path integrals. To re-establish the connection with classical mechanics you have to learn about the saddle point approximation; it might also help to read Feynman's book called QED.

Surely that probability should be i x delta(0) x (-i) x delta(0) so, you know, your everyday squared Dirac delta function.

Agreed. Also, there are not "two ways to teach quantum mechanics".

For example, take the hugely popular book of Griffiths: if I remember correctly, equation 1.1 is just the time-dependent Schrodinger equation.

From what I have seen, most teachers do not spend too long on the history of quantum mechanics but they do focus more on the physics of quantum mechanics that this introduction does. The difference is important, and completely ignored in the first paragraph of the linked article.

I did, but LinkedIn asked me to login and I do not have an account.

I did not mean the edit to be snarky. And I also did find the archive link, but none of those pages seem to load for me. Maybe the error is on my side - can you get a snapshot from the past year or so to load?

Ehm I am very sorry and not the greatest fan of Google by a long shot, but... who are you? Why should we trust you?

Again I am really sorry but I'm just missing street cred; I only see two new HN accounts and a Twitter account with 79 followers.

Edit: in response to all the comments and downvotes: really, I would not be that hard to convince. How about a LinkedIn page? Glassdoor? An archived version of the site? A personal webpage? A cached Bing search result? Anything, really.

Thank you - I asked because their price did not drop in the EU.

So I guess the most important question is whether the iPhone 13 models will see a price drop soon?

I once used a special character in my login password (on Ubuntu I think) but the keyboard settings at the passwd prompt happened to be set differently from the ones at the (graphical) login manager at boot. So in the one case, something like 'e was interpreted as é and in the other case it wasn't.

I think it took me about five reboots in single-user mode and password resets before something clicked. I wish Ubuntu would not have allowed special characters. :)

I don't think it's that black and white.

As you surely understood from my previous comments, in the eyes of many both Trump and Cuomo are simply disqualified men. This is so fundamental that one must stop supporting them and find the next best option within your party, taking any compromises on policy or electoral disadvantages for granted.

For Cuomo this was done swiftly; for Trump there would have been plenty of time since the 2016 election, but it just hasn't happened.

For many this is unforgivable, and I am afraid it is nearly impossible to change such a viewpoint.

You are trying to make the point I was anticipating.

One might have been a supporter of someone like Trump or Cuomo for all kinds of reasons, but for many it's simply over once a certain line is crossed.

As I said, it is a difficult point to argue against because their transgressions concern what many consider really basic values.

I think it should be viewed like this: in the eyes of many, Trump is a man who boasted about sexual harassment. Continuing to support such a man is borderline incompatible with holding basic values that one might hope every employee has.

This viewpoint is really difficult to argue with. You can say that such transgressions are perhaps outweighed by any advantages of his presidency that you perceived, but that will not convince many on the left. Indeed, just look at the Cuomos and Franken to see that harassers are simply no longer tolerated on the left - these days such men are simply disqualified without pardon.

I think this fundamental incompatibility of basic values is an important reason why it is difficult to be a Trump supporter at many companies and universities nowadays.

(I conflated being "conservative / Republican" with being a Trump supporter. Feel free to ignore my comment if that is not what you intended.)

This certainly makes a lot of sense, and although I am happy to believe you I am having a hard time convincing my grandma that you are right.

Do you maybe have a source for your claims that would convince her? A simple news article from a reputable source would probably suffice.

To answer such questions I always imagine transplanting a random citizen of country 1 to country 2 and vice versa. In other words, I guess you should ask the expats.

Having lived in both the UK and the US, I would say that anyone not rich is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare, better infrastructure, cheaper education, etc.

However, in my experience the UK living standards (again, for a non-rich person) are significantly worse than the rest of Northwestern Europe. And the UK's trajectory is not looking good.