IF ONLY MY PHONE WERE THINNER, I SCREAM INTO THE VOID.
Ok, to not be totally glib, I think my reaction to this is coming from a place where, if I made a big list of every single thing I want in a phone, "thinner" would be at the bottom.
I want more freedom to do what I want with my phone, primarily to stop it from spying on my activity to give information to advertisers. I would get a phone twice as thick as my current phone if I could just use it to tell advertisers and information brokers and monopolies to f-OFF with it. I do not care about this and I hate that thousands of man hours and millions of dollars are going into this shit.
If the system is such that you have to be an exceptional parent not to fuck up your kids, the system is the problem. Like I applaud your friend with kids, but I think its worth considering that their might be an issue if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood.
> if you need to be working very hard to give your kids a stimulating, healthy, childhood.
They don't work hard, they enjoy themselves.
They also have hobbies and my friend is always working on some hobby/home project. His wife is very social and is always planning something and he has no issues following along as he likes going out and doing things. They take the kids because they enjoy being with them and the kids also enjoy going out too.
The big issue today is the fact that parents are distracted by phones so their kids follow that example. It used to be everyone sat around, watching TV or talking to a friend on the phone. Those were limited activities as eventually you got tired of talking or nothing good on the few channels of TV so you found other things to do. Now its phones constantly pumping out attention stealing content 24/7. It's a prison.
>She is speaking about physics in a very narrow sense.
In what respect? Did you bother to actually watch the video or read a transcript or did you just watch the first minute and a half and assume that was the point? It wasn't. the ensuing thirty-two minutes serve to debunk the idea that there hasn't been progress in physics over the past seventy years.
Which GP claimed was the case. GP is wrong.
And she covers a wide array of physics areas -- she even mentions that she could have gone year by year starting in 1953 and cover at least one advancement per year, but she limited it to just her top ten which was pretty wide ranging.
Yes, but this is cartoon shit. String theory was a major research program in theoretical physics for a few decades but theoretical physics involves quite a lot more than string theory and physics involves quite a lot more than theoretical physics and if you stacked up all the budgets you'd find that string theory is a minor footnote. And also, its been a few decades since people took it very seriously as a strong candidate for a TOE.
I really don't get it. As a total amount of any budget from any perspective, string theory has always been a blip whose cultural impact is much wider than its actual budgetary one. Like this critique about string theory is just a thing that people who are physics "enthusiasts" say and even to the extent that it is true, its really been more than a decade since it was a problem.
The problem is string theory was pushed by people who were really good at getting attention and so they appeared to be outsized. Eventually everyone realized they were never making good on their promises and it was time to quit given them money - but most people who are not physics insiders don't really understand the other parts and so the total budget was cut to punish string theory - but by more than just the string theory part.
There is a warning above about something, but I'm not sure exactly what.
I actually think that for the most part string theory and its detractors and its rise and fall have had little effect on total physics budgets in the last 30 years.
I will say that theoretical physics is in a hard spot, but the problem isn't string theory. It is that we are short experimental data because the domain of validity of our theories is currently somewhat larger (in most obvious ways, anyway) than the domains we can reach with experiment.
I don't think any amount of clever budget allocation is going to make progress in theoretical physics go faster, nor do I think we'd be in a different position if we had allocated the resources differently. Notably, LQG and similar approaches (of which there is hardly any shortage) have not made noticeable progress either.
My perspective is this: string theorists are cheap. We may as well have a few for some long shot research, and while we fund them they teach kids math and physics. Seems like a good trade.
Big same, friend. But the kinds of people who think taxing externalities of AI would be a big victory are going to be extremely mad about $8/gal motor fuels.
That's the failure of the people. Those politicians are supposed to represent their constituents - not their highest bidder. Democracy is not a system where people choose a politician and hand them the power and authority over themselves for the next half a decade. Instead, people have to constantly and consistently boss them and hold them accountable. This is the duty of every citizen towards a democratic constitution, without which the latter is not even viable.
I know what response to expect for the above. It will be contemptuously dismissed with the remark that it's just a fantasy. But I hope you're seeing the congress people running out of town halls via the backdoors in disgrace after their constituents heckled them and challenged their demagoguery. Sadly, it's a tad bit late. This should have been the response to much less provocation. Still, many of those politicians are now afraid to blindly endorse the ideas of their overlords. This concept isn't new either. This was widely experimented with during the French revolution. They had provisions to recall and replace the reps in such instances. What people need are political education and a strong allegiance to the constitution.
I guess ask a Chinese person? Like I'm sure many Chinese people aren't happy about the way their state functions, but the vast majority of them live their lives pretty much like we do. I don't know if I would take that as a total invalidation of whatever it is they have over there. Would I prefer a western style system? Definitely, but I'm not sure its so easy to point at China and say "this is an abject failure."
In fact, quite the opposite: most of the poverty reduction in the last 50 years has been in China, for example. Most of the cheap stuff we buy is manufactured there. Being the "factory of the world" doesn't seem like a definitive invalidation of that system.
This is a pretty glib way of putting it. The chinese system isn't really capitalism, at least not of the "free market" type. Like I'm not saying that communism is responsible for the improvements in poverty, but I am saying that a significantly non-capitalist system has resulted in big changes. My point is that we often talk like anything that is not a pure capitalism is bound to grind to a halt and be catastrophically bad, but that isn't true.
I was deeply enthusiastic about epaper devices for awhile and I tried all kinds of things. Eventually, I decided paper is better. I used to like the idea of my notes being capture automatically but you can just take pictures of them if you use a notebook.
I also got enthusiastic about them, but I ended up embracing the Kindle Scribe. I just completed my 12th monthly notebook, so I’ve been at it for over a year now.
I was using regular notebooks but I was collecting too many and I was worried about storage and loss.
I wrote about the experience a few months into it.
I embraced an iPad w/ paper-like surface during my grad degree, simply because I needed the organisation (annotating papers, multiple subjects, project notes, etc.). It worked really well for that.
Funnily though, professional life is a lot simpler. I just need a single paper notebook with my running todo list. Everything else is stored in google docs or obsidian. Having an eink or tablet for taking notes would feel like friction without much benefit.
I've come to the same conclusion. It's just easier, especially for things that involve diagrams. $10 worth of notebooks and pens is a much better value than something that is more fragile, has to be charged, etc and orders of magnitude more expensive.
Also, I tend to only write things down as a note-taking and memorization exercise, or to think out a certain idea. I usually don't have to read the notes again. So the archiving functionality of having digital paper-like notes is not nessisarially more useful, and it is often more difficult to search through than physical notebooks. Anything I really need to read later, I can write succinctly in a text file or something.
I also don't like getting locked into a certain ecosystem. Xournal++ is the only open-source cross-platform app I can find, and it's not that good.
Even for reading physical books, you can find a lot of used paperbacks for less than $10, which is very little when you consider the value of the time you spend reading them, the ease of flipping through pages and being able to dog-ear them, and the collectible aspect of the book covers covers. An eink tablet be nice for reading textbooks and papers that are more expensive and require pirating, however. But for now I just use a regular screen in portrait.
For several kinds of notes, the value from writing is in doing the writing to assist thinking. Once I write it down, it doesn't need to hang around in my head.
I’m in the same boat. My Boox Go 10.3 is collecting dust. I used it for a while, but I just find it easier to flip back through paper notes as opposed to tapping or swiping through files. I don’t want to connect to work WiFi either on it. So now I’ve found pens I enjoy writing with and decent notebooks with paper I like and it’s great. I actually spend time journaling on paper. But I do have both a Boox Palma for reading and also a Kobo Clara.
Ok, to not be totally glib, I think my reaction to this is coming from a place where, if I made a big list of every single thing I want in a phone, "thinner" would be at the bottom.
I want more freedom to do what I want with my phone, primarily to stop it from spying on my activity to give information to advertisers. I would get a phone twice as thick as my current phone if I could just use it to tell advertisers and information brokers and monopolies to f-OFF with it. I do not care about this and I hate that thousands of man hours and millions of dollars are going into this shit.
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