knightly the Sneptaur @ knightly @pawb.social

Posts

28

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1,614

Joined

2 yr. ago

It can work if they want it to, I've been in a poly relationship with both of my highschool sweethearts for 20 years now.

Good for them.

What's the issue?

He's too busy encouraging concerned parents in Texas to give their kids liver damage.

Only half? I'd imagine the entire left would be excited to have some left-wing representation. The centrist and right-wing Democrats only need us to make their party relevant.

It died when she tried tried appealing to "moderate republicans" instead of democrats.

Or having a button to refresh RSS feeds.

None of these are fountain pens, the obviously superior choice over ball-points.

Pretending that the old rules still apply is how Empires fall.

I'd presume the check mark means the language pack is available locally and the warning sign probably means it's missing some localization strings.

I think it comes from the right place, though. Anything that's smart enough to do actual work deserves the same rights to it as anyone else does.

It's best that we get the legal system out ahead of the inevitable development of sentient software before Big Tech starts simulating scanned human brains for a truly captive workforce. I, for one, do not cherish the thought of any digital afterlife where virtual people do not own themselves.

I already left it all behind once, I can only hope I ran far enough..

There are literally dozens of us. XD

It was you all along! /jk

Mood

Why would they let us do that when those same do-nothing centrists get to decide who's allowed to run in the primary?

Mood.

I can't blame Americans though, the last mass protest movement fizzled out just like Occupy because billionaire-owned mass media gets to decide which protests are valid.

All we can say is "that seems weird" but that's not a scientific argument against it.

You say it diverges from reality but... how do you know that? No experiment has ever demonstrated this.

On the contrary, this breaks semi-classical gravity's usage of quantum mechanics. The predictions the approximation makes are not compatible with our observations of how quantum mechanics works, and scientists are working on an experiment that can disprove the hypothesis. ( https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.180201 )

Science is not falsifiability. Science is about continually updating our models to resolve contradictions between the theory and experimental practice. If there is no contradiction between the theory and experimental practice then there is no justification to update the model.

I'm afraid you've got that precisely backwards. Falsifiability is the core of science, as it is the method by which factually-deficient hypotheses are discarded. If there is no contradiction between the theory and experimental practice then either all false theories have been discarded or we have overlooked an experiment that could prove otherwise.

I have seen a mentality growing more popular these days which is that "fundamental physics hasn't made progress in nearly a century."

That's distinctly false. The Higgs Boson was only proposed in 1964 and wasn't measured 'til just 13 years ago.

But my response to this is why should it make progress?

Because we still have falsifiable hypotheses to test.

Why have not encountered a contradiction between experimental practice and theory, so all this "research" into things like String Theory is just guesswork, there is no reason to expect it to actually go anywhere.

We have, actually. The list of unsolved problems in physics on Wikipedia is like 15 pages long and we're developing new experiments to address those questions constantly.

There is no reason to assume the universe acts the way we'd like it to. Maybe the laws of physics really are just convoluted and break down at black holes.

Likewise, there's no reason to assume that the universe is not acting the way we'd like it to except where contradicted by observable evidence. If the laws of physics can "break down" then they aren't "laws", merely approximations that are only accurate under a limited range of conditions. The fact that the universe continues to exist despite the flaws in our theories proves that there must be a set of rules which are applicable in all cases.

And if the rules can change, then our theories will have to be updated to describe those changes and the conditions where they occur.

Why would you deliberately crowdfund national propaganda?

To oversimplify with another example from the theory, assume that planet earth was in superposition between two states with a non-zero separation. Semi-classical gravity says the distribution of the gravity field would be split evenly between the two points, but observing such a state is impossible as it must decohere into 100% of the mass being either in one point or the other. It simply doesn't make sense when we try to apply quantum maths to gravitationally-significant objects because gravity/spacetime isn't a quantum field.

So yes, the predictions made by semi-classical gravity diverge from reality when faced with extreme masses, but that theory was only ever intended to be an approximation. It is useful and consistent with reality under certain ranges of conditions, but we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that physics breaks from all known fundamentals in the presence of large masses when the simpler answer is that this is a case where the approximation is wrong. A more complete theory will be able to accurately explain physics across a wider range of conditions without requiring the untestable assumption that there are places where the rules don't apply. We've got a good reason to believe that the rules of physics don't change in the fact that no matter where we look the rules seem to always have been the same and all prior divergences from the model could be explained by better models.

The problem in physics is that we have two models that describe reality with absurd mathematical precision at different scales but which seem to be fundamentally irreconcilable. But we know they must be, because reality has to be assumed to be consistent with itself.

It's fundamentally a product of one of our most basic assumptions, that the laws of physics don't change.

When the laws of physics don't change, symmetries arise in the math used to describe them, and each of these invariant symmetries corresponds to a law of conservation we can observe experimentally and an aspect of the universe it renders un-measurable.

Conservation of Momentum is a space-translation symmetry which makes it so that absolute position is unmeasurable, we can only tell where we are in relation to other things. Conservation of angular momentum is a rotation symmetry that does the same thing for direction. There's no "center" to the universe and no "up" or "down" without something to stand on for context, and no experiment we could possibly design can prove otherwise.

Conservation of energy (and therefore mass) arises out of time-translation symmetries. There's no way we can distinguish a particular moment in time from any other without setting a relative "time zero" for comparison, and no possible clock we can build that could be 100% accurate. We have to account for the different rate of time in the atomic clocks in our GPS satellites due to their relative velocity to us on the ground, but the lack of absolute time precision means it can only ever provide an estimate with some range of error.

Exactly how the relativity of spacetime implies a universe with conservation of information would require a lot of math, and a new description of spacetime that breaks these conservation laws would have to explain why it "seems to" adhere to them in all the ways we've tested our reality so far.