V0ldek

as if it makes any difference whether the universe runs on (...) Microsoft Excel

Okay but it is very spiritually important for me to not be that, please.

Storing a message in a system doesn’t make new microstates. How could it?

Lol I got so tripped up by him later saying "this is no longer clearly 0 or 1 so it doesn't exist" and decreasing N that I missed he does the reverse thing when encoding the message.

This is like the ontological argument. He creates a virtual entity from words alone and then treats it as a physical thing storing energy. And then once it no longer fits the words of the definition, poof, gone it is, oh look, total entropy decreased.

We have to consider probabilities, not just for where the pieces are, but also for how they are moving.

I completely omit that because, well, it's hard, but also I don't think it's necessary here. This approach doesn't work even if you consider only positions and assume uniformly random momentum. It doesn't work even if the microstate is "is this pixel more red or more blue" in the paper's experiment!

But thank you for the comment, I'm glad I didn't completely butcher entropy with my weird nonrigorous internal model I developed based PBS Space Time videos lol

but you aren’t quite right about some of the details.

I'd be happy to be corrected.

This isn’t too outlandish, and modern studies of quantum mechanics suggest that information is a conserved quantity,

I hope I didn't pass it as if it was completely out there, that information has to have some physical properties and energy as a carrier is a very reasonable hypothesis. The Landauer principle is not that controversial, I'm sad I'm too stupid to actually understand the discussion around it on any reasonable level lol

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”.

I meant the experiment itself. Like it looks like something you could try and do and measure and get an actual answer?

https://awful.systems/post/2876657

This is probably the least surprising thing ever.

CocaCola is like the symbol of capitalism. Everything they produce is corporate slop. GenAI is a perfect fit -- soulless, artless, hastily slapped together bright pictures that ultimately don't matter and carry no value. The world is not better with CocaCola ads, and it would be no worse without them. They're just there, to be lost in time, forgotten. Like tears in the rain.

You know, you can just click on the link in the article to watch the ad it talks about

Radical thought, maybe read the article?

If you're hearing this, then there is still hope. Hope that you can avoid making the same mistakes we made.

So, how does Abdaal watch anime and TV productively you might ask? Well, the fact that his listens to audio books on 3.5x speed should give you an idea.

[…] normally what I do is, I'll just speed-speed-speed-speed-speed-speed-speed up until it gets to an interesting point, and I'll speed it as fast as I can so I can still keep up with it.

And because he obviously can't hear what's being said when watching at 3.5x speed anymore, he's speed-reading subtitles.

Lol, great, at that point you can just as well read the plot synopsis on a wiki or something. Or ask ChatGPT to tell you what it was about... aaand I just rediscovered the main thesis of this essay, nice

I see calling like Raegan's margin in 1984 "decisive"