“So, professor sir, are you OK with psychologically torturing Black people, or do you just not care?”

Superficially, it looks like he’s making a testable prediction. But that “prediction” is a number from a bullshit calculation (or maybe two or three different, mutually inconsistent bullshit calculations — it’s hard to be sure). So if someone wasted their time and did the experiment, he’d handwave away the null result by fiddling the input bullshit.

I will try to have some more comments about the physics when I have time and energy. In the meanwhile:

Entropy in thermodynamics is not actually a hard concept. It’s the ratio of the size of a heat flow to the temperature at which that flow is happening. (So, joules per kelvin, if you’re using SI units.) See episodes 46 and 47 of The Mechanical Universe for the old-school PBS treatment of the story. The last time I taught thermodynamics for undergraduates, we used Finn’s Thermal Physics, for the sophisticated reason that the previous professor used Finn’s Thermal Physics.

Entropy in information theory is also not actually that hard of a concept. It’s a numerical measure of how spread-out a probability distribution is.

It’s relating the two meanings that is tricky and subtle. The big picture is something like this: A microstate is a complete specification of the positions and momenta of all the pieces of a system. We can consider a probability distribution over all the possible microstates, and then do information theory to that. This bridges the two definitions, if we are very careful about it. One thing that trips people up (particularly if they got poisoned by pop-science oversimplifications about “disorder” first) is forgetting the momentum part. We have to consider probabilities, not just for where the pieces are, but also for how they are moving. I suspect that this is among Vopson’s many problems. Either he doesn’t get it, or he’s not capable of writing clearly enough to explain it.

So these two were published in American Institute of Physics Advances, which looks like a serious journal about physics. Does anyone know about it? It occupies a space where I can’t easily find any obvious issues, but I also can’t find anyone saying “ye this is legit”. It claims to be peer-reviewed, and at least isn’t just a place where you dump a PDF and get a DOI in return.

I have never heard of anything important being published there. I think it’s the kind of journal where one submits a paper after it has been rejected by one’s first and second (and possibly third) choices.

However, after skimming, I can at least say that it doesn’t seem outlandish?

Oh, it’s worse than “outlandish”. It’s nonsensical. He’s basically operating at a level of “there’s an E in this formula and an E in this other formula, so I will set them equal and declare it revolutionary new physics”.

Here’s a passage from the second paragraph of the 2023 paper:

The physical entropy of a given system is a measure of all its possible physical microstates compatible with the macrostate, S_Phys. This is a characteristic of the non-information bearing microstates within the system. Assuming the same system, and assuming that one is able to create N information states within the same physical system (for example, by writing digital bits in it), the effect of creating a number of N information states is to form N additional information microstates superimposed onto the existing physical microstates. These additional microstates are information bearing states, and the additional entropy associated with them is called the entropy of information, S_Info. We can now define the total entropy of the system as the sum of the initial physical entropy and the newly created entropy of information, S_tot = S_Phys + S_Info, showing that the information creation increases the entropy of a given system.

wat

Storing a message in a system doesn’t make new microstates. How could it? You’re just rearranging the pieces to spell out a message — selecting those microstates that are consistent with that message. Choosing from a list of available options doesn’t magically add new options to the list.

The “simulation hypothesis” is an ego flex for men who want God to look like them.

I sneered that in a blog post last year, as it happens.

From the Wired story:

As a comparison, Cui cited another analysis that GPTZero ran on Wikipedia earlier this year, which estimated that around one in 20 articles on the site are likely AI-generated—about half the frequency of the posts GPTZero looked at on Substack.

That should be one in 20 new articles, per the story they cite, which is ultimately based on arXiv:2410.08044.

David Skilling, a sports agency CEO who runs the popular soccer newsletter Original Football (over 630,000 subscribers), told WIRED he sees AI as a substitute editor. “I proudly use modern tools for productivity in my businesses,” says Skilling.

Babe wake up, a new insufferable prick just dropped.

Edit to add: There’s an interesting example here of a dubious claim being laundered into truthiness. That arXiv preprint says this in the conclusion section.

Shao et al. (2024) have even designed a retrieval-based LLM workflow for writing Wikipedia-like articles and gathered perspectives from experienced Wikipedia editors on using it—the editors unanimously agreed that it would be helpful in their pre-writing stage.

But if we dig up arXiv:2402.14207, we find that the “unanimous” agreement depends upon lumping together “somewhat” and “strongly agree” on their Likert scale. Moreover, this grand claim rests upon a survey of a grand total of ten people. Ten people, we hasten to add, who agreed to the study in the first place, practically guaranteeing a response bias against those Wikipedians who find “AI” morally repugnant.

shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.gif

Breaking news: “AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably”!

Or, you know, not.

If you find yourself saying

There isn’t a single good term in English for people who are post-pubertal but below the legal age of consent or majority

you may already be morally diseased.

My own final project was a parody of the IMDb that was “what if the IMDb was about books instead of movies”, except that the user reviews told stories about people who turned out to have all gone to high school together before scattering around the world, and reading them in the right sequence unlocked a finale in which they reunited for a New Year’s party and their world dissolved so that their author could repurpose them for other stories.

Senior year of college, I took an elective seminar on interactive fiction. For the final project, one of my classmates wrote a program that scraped a LiveJournal and converted it into a text adventure game.

“I was somewhere in the middle of your mother last night, Trebek!”

Serious data might not be available for months. For comparison, the Pew Research Center didn’t come out with their numbers for the 2020 election until June 2021. Who knows? The country might burn down before next summer.

here’s a matt yglesias article on the ordeal that i think is pretty even-handed

eat a dick

Good change, I think, but maybe “alleviate” is too weak a word when combined with “promises”. I feel like the claptrap that influencers are selling would be better captured by a more emphatic line, like “magic away writer’s block” or “make writer’s block go poof”.

Not enough for the presidential race, sadly; perhaps enough to scrape by with a few Senate victories.

Those are the actors who played Duncan Idaho in the David Lynch adaptation and in the two Syfy miniseries. So, yeah, it’s not wrong, just incomplete — though I have no idea why it only serves up those three. There’s certainly no limitation to three images, as can be verified by searching for “Sherlock Holmes actor” or the like.

Even the AI summary is quite good

insta-block

The level of fucked we are is too big for words

I wanted to say something darkly comedic about the AI bubble popping under the new regime, but my heart is too sick to make a joke

My sense growing up in Huntsville was that the airport ads for defense contractors were kind of like, e.g., Exxon sponsoring a pavilion at EPCOT. The intent wasn’t to push any specific consumer towards buying any specific product, but to pump out a positive image for the company generally.

And a lot of those contractors’ people fly through Huntsville on business. (For those not in the know: The airport is just down the highway from Redstone Arsenal, which is where we brought all them Nazis we recruited to help us beat the Commies to the Moon. The only reason Huntsville exists as more than a sleepy/dying cotton mill town is the space program and missile warfare.) There may well be deals along the lines of “advertise here and your people get the cushy lounge”.