A long post about excellence, learning, standards, rules, and being exceptional but also good.
Get Weird And Disappear ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/get-we…
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Small anecdote about this from my own family. In the 1940s, my paternal grandmother was ordered to host a young man who had been a warden in one of the German Concentration Camps. That man had nightmares every night and when my grandmother mentioned this to a neighbor along the lines of "If Hitler weren't such a stuck up about the Jews, we wouldn't be in this pickle" she got rounded up by the Gestapo and questioned for a day, and only let go because my grandfather was at the Eastern Front and known to be a good citizen (i.e., fervent Nazi).
This is _the only story_ about the Nazi time I know about my grandparents. Everything else was stoic silence.
Everyone knew.
infosec.exchange/users/masek/s…
I didn't knowWhen I learned about the holocaust as teenager in Germany, many people from the Nazi era were still alive and lived all around me. Being the curious person I always was, I asked them about what happened and their role in it.
"I didn't know" was the boilerplate answer. And as they were relatives and friends, I believed them at first.
Then in 1981 we got a new teacher for history and he exposed the lie. Or more precise: he got us exposing those lies.
1/5
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What does it mean to live in a quantum universe?
Most of us don't think of quantum physics as playing a role in our macroscopic, everyday world.
But look closer, and you'll see that so much absolutely relies on it.
bigthink.com/starts-with-a-ban…
Ask Ethan: What does it mean to live in a quantum universe?
Over a century after we first unlocked the secrets of the quantum universe, people find it more puzzling than ever. Can we make sense of it?Ethan Siegel (Big Think)
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OK, this thing is amazing and props to @siracusa for another really neat tool. I look forward to giving it a run on my mom's machine -- it's got multiple users on it (and the tool doesn't do cross-user file linking alas, though I understand why) and they're regularly short of disk space.
mastodon.social/@siracusa/1140…
Announcing the third entry in my collection of weird little Mac apps: Hyperspacehypercritical.co/2025/02/25/hy…
Hyperspace can reclaim disk space *without removing any files.* Read the linked post to learn how it works.
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AI has a lot of problems, but maybe counter intuitive, energy consumption is not a big issue!
Very interesting read by Andy Masley on the energy consumption of ChatGPT compared to services like streaming and other cloud services.
andymasley.substack.com/p/indi…
He does not mention the Jevons paradox though which could have negative outcomes for some services I guess.
#ai #energy #chatgpt #water #climatechange
Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
And a plea to think seriously about climate change without getting distractedAndy Masley (The Weird Turn Pro)
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Dan Sugalski
in reply to StartsWithABang • • •One thing I have wondered about all this. In the equation E=hf, does f have to be an integer quantity? Or can it be any (more or less) real number?
It feels like it ought to be an integer quantity (otherwise things wouldn't be very quantized) but I don't know if I've ever seen it detailed anywhere that it is, or isn't, constrained in some way.
StartsWithABang
in reply to Dan Sugalski • • •Dan Sugalski
in reply to StartsWithABang • • •G1itchbit
in reply to Dan Sugalski • •Dan Sugalski
in reply to G1itchbit • • •