Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
How sneerable is the entire āinfodynamicsā field? Because it seems like it should be pretty sneerable. The first referenced paper on the āsecond law of infodynamicsā seems to indicate that information has some kind of concrete energy which brings to mind that experiment where they tried to weigh someone as they died to identify the mass of the human soul. Also it feels like a gross misunderstanding to describe a physical system as gaining or losing information in the Shannon framework since unless the total size of the possibility space is changing thereās not a change in total information. Like, all strings of 100 characters have the same level of information even though only a very few actually mean anything in a given language. Iām not sure it makes sense to talk about the amount of information in a system increasing or decreasing naturally outside of data loss in transmission? IDK Iām way out of my depth here but it smells like BS and the limited pool of citations doesnāt build confidence.
I read one of the papers. About the specific question you have: given a string of bits s, theyāre making the choice to associate the empirical distribution to s, as if s was generated by an iid Bernoulli process. So if s has 10 zero bits and 30 one bits, its associated empirical distribution is Ber(3/4). This is the distribution which theyāre calculating the entropy of. I have no idea on what basis they are making this choice.
The rest of the paper didnāt make sense to me - they are somehow assigning a number N of āinformation statesā which can change over time as the memory cells fail. I honestly have no idea what itās supposed to mean and kinda suspect the whole thing is rubbish.
Edit: after reading the authorās quotes from the associated hype article Iām 100% sure itās rubbish. Itās also really funny that they didnāt manage to catch the COVID-19 research hype train so theyāve pivoted to the simulation hypothesis.
Oh the author here is absolutely a piece of work.
Hereās an interview where heās talking about the biblical support for all of this and the ancient Greek origins of blah blah blah.
I canāt definitely predict this guyās career trajectory, but one of those cults where they have to wear togas is not out of the question.
Not only is the universe a simulation, the Catholics just had it right, isnt that neat.