In that sense, no underlying physical state could be said to hold “more” information than any other, right?

In an information-theoretical sense, you can have a message that has a lower or higher information content. This is where entropy gets derived from. But it only makes sense for a fixed distribution – a more likely outcome has a lower information content. So I think you could have a physical state holding more information, if it’s a less likely state for some fixed definition of likeliness.

This would probably be closer to an actual link between informational entropy and physical – a given microstate has lower physical entropy when it is a less-likely state (e.g. half-squished cup of coffee), and that state would have higher information content if we considered the state as the message. This intuitively makes sense, because physical entropy is in some sense the ability of a system to undergo change, so indeed a low-entropy system is “more useful”, just like a message with higher information content is “more useful”.

The thing already is a markdown renderer and every single markdown renderer I encountered supports maths within $ delimiters.

Also can we make awful.systems render Latex in posts, I had to screenshot my formulas to put them here and I feel unclean

This is the only way you could make me care about the Simulation Hypothesis, if it runs on a spreadsheet then I will make it my life’s mission to break out just to yell at them for being terrible at engineering and replace them with a small shell script

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?

What is controversial about Kolmogorov.

Maybe if we funded them better they’d be able to tackle larger projects.

The orcas were trying to send us this message for a while now

Which just adds to my point that this ordeal with giant graveyards is entirely unnecessary, just do whatever else.

Maybe go back to funeral pyres on boats? That was at least cool.

Can you ‘abuse’ a toaster

Of frakkin’ course you can’t! They’re not human!

Like look how much space this random municipal cemetery in Warsaw takes:

That’s bigger than some living districts. And for what?

Like do we really need this system where each family has to buy a plot of land and spend a truckload of money on a big stone monument, with the implied social pressure of having the prettiest shiniest one because otherwise what, you don’t love your dead ones enough?

I don’t disrespect the dead (not conscious).

To be completely serious, the only ethical reason for caring about the dead in any way is that there are living, conscious people that care about their memory and it would upset them. Otherwise there’d be zero reason to treat the dead with any more respect than other biological waste.

All the other parts are normal and practical (why waste time or energy bothering animals or insects if you have no business in them? that hurts the ecosystem for no reason; why destroy your own useful property?), but if there was no ethical reason for not “disrespecting” the dead then we should, as a matter of policy, turn it all into fertilizer and put the unusable parts into a trash compactor so that no precious land or resources are wasted on cemeteries and shit.

You can disagree with that, but I don’t see a way to make an actual rational argument against it without invoking consciousness one way or another.

Just to be clear I don’t deride people who treat dead with reverence, you do you, although I think we could have a discussion about how much space is taken by burial grounds and the frankly gauche nature of some of the tombstones.

shall I presume many of you have no objection to being called ‘nazis’ in the standard twitter-left definition

I didn’t know there was a standardised definition, or that it was somehow political-side-specific. If I were to steelman this then this could be about a pedantic distinction between a fascist and a nazi?

Hey, you know what you can do if you feel bad about being called a nazi? STOP BEING A FUCKING NAZI.

Shall I treat all drunk sex as ‘rape’ because kidnapper-rape and frat-sex have the commonality of reduced consent

Yes. Yes you should. Hey, see, you understand this! Also consent either is or isn’t, there’s no “reduced consent”.

Shall I treat your remarks about this-or-that group as ‘hate speech’, or ‘violence’, in the form of speech?

Emm, depends on the remarks? If they’re hate remarks then ye dude, that’s what the word means?

Clearly, we have some sense by which concept creep exists; by which definitions can be stretched dishonestly.

Ye, like how you would define “censorship” I’m sure

MDMA, however, is meth; it’s literally its name: thre-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine

Rust, however, is iron; it’s literally in the name iron oxide

Wait so it’s a decentralised network with a rigid authoritative hierarchy?

lol i basically wrote that article

Oops

To me it looked like someone wrote some babble about the architecture and then a Responsible Adult came in and added the thinly veiled sneers of “all they built is a text board, Yarvin is a certified idiot, none of this works”

I might read the primary source on this tomorrow if I hate myself hard enough, I am fascinated by why you need two languages and two OS things to run a nazi chatroom, sounds like some absolute pinnacle of human lack of thought

EDIT: I guess the actual concept might be so insane that there’s no way to write an article about it that makes sense and doesn’t use expletives