crispyambulance (u/crispyambulance)

crispyambulance commented on The contrarian physics podcast subculture timothynguyen.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/Emerson1

qoez · 3 days ago

The motivation of getting attention about the problems he believes exists in institutions (eg lack of heterodox thinking) doesn't seem like a grift to me (how broad does that definition get to be before it's just "they're doing stuff I don't like"). It seems more like he wants heterodox thinking to be able to flourish within the academics and is fighting for that, nothing grift-y about that.

> obscurantist

Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, I never get the people who make this critique (other than try harder to decipher it, he's just using a lot of extra words/high vocabulary to be very clear about what he's saying in a compact way in order to not be misinterpreted).

crispyambulance · 19 hours ago

> Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading,

My dude, the guy shows up on Joe Rogan and Lex (multiple times) and talks a fire-hose of jargon to a general public audience. Indecipherable even to physicists. And what do you mean "compact"? The Rogan/Lex interviews are like 2-3 hours in length.

THAT ALONE is a clear signal he is some kind of fraud.

Capable scientists who insert themselves into public discourse are able to discuss their work at any level of detail, without jargon, and actually explain what they getting at. EW uses "Gish Gallop" tactics, I guess, to make himself seem smart. Aside from that he goes on bizarre detours where he mixes in his "geometric unity" theory with grievances about higher-ed, side-bars about Jeffery Epstein, his insane brother, and "DISC" (an acronym he coined and uses like it's now common knowledge).

crispyambulance commented on The contrarian physics podcast subculture timothynguyen.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/Emerson1

qoez · 3 days ago

Unfair to call it grifting when Eric Weinstein doesn't have a podcast or any source that makes him money from all this. (In fact I believe he ended his podcast to avoid that accusation.)

crispyambulance · 3 days ago

There are other motivations besides money for cranks.

In the case of Weinstein, I think his motivation has been getting attention and grievances he has with other people and institutions. I think it's OK to recognize grifting for attention as grifting. Having been a longtime employee of Peter Theil in some finance job, I expect he has f-u money by now and can thus attempt whatever he desires.

I don't know what the end-game is, but on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, the thinking has been that he is keen to be appointed to some important government role. That would be, of course, ridiculous for such an obscurantist to get an important public job, but that's ENTIRELY possible with this administration and the support of Theil.

crispyambulance commented on So you want to parse a PDF? eliot-jones.com/2025/8/pd... · Posted by u/UglyToad

gcanyon · 20 days ago

The answer seems obvious to me:

   1. PDFs support arbitrary attached/included metadata in whatever format you like.
   2. So everything that produces PDFs should attach the same information in a machine-friendly format.
   3. Then everyone who wants to "parse" the PDF can refer to the metadata instead.

From a practical standpoint: my first name is Geoff. Half the resume parsers out there interpret my name as "Geo" and "ff" separately. Because that's how the text gets placed into the PDF. This happens out of multiple source applications.

crispyambulance · 20 days ago

  > The answer seems obvious to me: [1, 2, 3]

Yeah, that would be nice, but it is SO RARE, I've not even heard of that being possible, let alone how to get at the metadata with godforsaken readers like Acrobat. I mean, I've used pdf's since literally the beginning. Never knew that was a feature.

I think this is all the consequence of the failure of XML and it's promise of its related formatting and transformation tooling. The 90's vision was beautiful: semantic documents with separate presentation and transformation tools/languages, all machine readable, versioned, importable, extensible. But no. Here we are in the year 2025. And what do we got? pdf, html, markdown, json, yaml, and csv.

There are solid reasons why XML failed, but the reasons were human and organizational, and NOT because of the well-thought-out tech.

crispyambulance commented on Show HN: WTFfmpeg – Natural Language to FFmpeg Translator github.com/scottvr/wtffmp... · Posted by u/ycombiredd

huimang · a month ago

Why is it so hard to read the manual or even a cheatsheet? Many people use ffmpeg, it's not like there's a dearth of information out there...

crispyambulance · a month ago

I am sure there exist people who live and breath media/codecs and they're reasonably fluent at getting ffmpeg to do what they want because of a tremendous amount of practice.

But for the vast majority of folks who only occasionally use ffmpeg to do something, the complexity of it is so outrageous it feels like a parody. Literally (I mean literally) THOUSANDS of options/flags. It's just too much for a human to navigate. Of course we're going to "cheat" or just google up something similar to what we want. If an LLM can handle it, even better.

crispyambulance commented on The Fallacy of Techno-Feudalism (2024) petrapalusova.com/article... · Posted by u/gasull

crispyambulance · 3 months ago

Well, what would be a more “accurate” word, then?

Varoufakis uses the word “techno-feudal” because it reflects the fundamental character of where things are headed. Moreover, even the author pointed out why the case is strong for the analogy.

I don’t think it’s fair to expect 100% consistency with “feudalism” to rightfully use the word “techno-feudalism”. But if one is compelled to point out the inconsistencies anyway, the ones the author pointed out are not particularly convincing.

The first three basically boil down to the idea that citizens are free to “opt-out” or find/create alternatives. Are they? I guess in theory, but in reality that’s a far more complicated problem.

Sure, in medieval days, kings could force their will and crush opposition without concern of law, morality, or anything other than who has more power. Today we have surveillance capitalism, and the comprehensive manipulation of truth and attention. Originally this was employed to merely sell toothpaste, but the same tools more lately can and have been used for far more sinister and greedy motivations.

If you don’t agree with that, fine, but but if you must quibble about “inconsistencies” with the usage of the word “techno-feudal”, then at least provide a better alternative word.

crispyambulance commented on Retailers will soon have only about 7 weeks of full inventories left fortune.com/article/retai... · Posted by u/andrewfromx

toddmorey · 4 months ago

Curious if there is anyone here who genuinely sees this as short-term pain / long-term gain for American economic interests. That is of course the political angle, but I've yet to see an economist concur with that theory.

EDIT: I can find very few voices (not currently working directly for the administration). There's Jeff Ferry who believes "tariffs imposed during the 19th century spurred industrialization and ultimately positioned America as a global superpower". (That historical view is uncommon and wouldn't account for the current realities of global supply chains.)

crispyambulance · 4 months ago

I certainly would like to see more American made products and manufacturing, unfortunately, making that happen is not just a matter of shuffling money around, capricious tariffs, and the president posturing for "deals" like a real-estate shyster.

Our current situation is the result of decades of deliberate greedy systematic outsourcing of everything that can be outsourced. It's our own dumb fault. And it will take decades to reverse it if it's even possible. It's not a "short-term" kind of thing.

crispyambulance commented on LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo librelingo.app... · Posted by u/hyperific

Tor3 · 4 months ago

There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a comment I read somewhere said "Duolingo is for the perpetual beginner".

crispyambulance · 4 months ago

People have vastly different needs when learning a second language. Many folks never need to progress beyond "perpetual beginner" and that's perfectly fine.

If you're traveling for work or pleasure, it's nice to learn some key things about the language and freshen up on vocabulary. Basic words/phrases about time, money, food, etiquette, and travel will go surprisingly far when you put yourself somewhere that another language is spoken. That's what duolingo and, I guess, things like it do well. It doesn't matter if it's focused on translation at that most basic level.

To actually learn a language takes a lot of time. Years of regular sustained effort. I don't know what is meant by "modern methods" but I am skeptical that they're vastly better than classroom instruction, and in any case, the outcomes will depend more on the motivation of the student than the exact method used. The only way to shorten the time it takes to learn is total immersion.

crispyambulance commented on Hegseth had an unsecured internet line set up in his office to connect to Signal apnews.com/article/hegset... · Posted by u/doener

tweakimp · 4 months ago

I can't understand how someone like that got into such a position.

crispyambulance · 4 months ago

    I can't understand how someone like that got into such a position.

It was deliberate. President Stable Genius wants a loyal "yes man" in that critical position. The Fox new host was it. Competence and continuity are not important for what the administration is doing.

If Hegseth gets cut-out, someone equally ridiculous will be chosen to fill that role.

crispyambulance commented on Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI addyo.substack.com/p/avoi... · Posted by u/NotInOurNames

crispyambulance · 4 months ago

I frequently experience "diminished memory" and failure of retention especially when coming up to speed on something that I am unfamiliar with or revisiting stuff I rarely do.

It's often possible if the AI has been trained enough, to inquire about why something is the way it is, to ask about why the thing you had expected is not right. If you can handle your interaction with a dialectical mindset, it seems to help a lot as far as retention goes.

If API, language and systems designers put more effort into making their stuff sane, cogent, less tedious, and more ergonomic, overreliance on AI wouldn't be so much of a problem. On the other hand, maybe better design would do even more to accelerate "vibe coding" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

crispyambulance commented on What the hell is an elliptic curve? onlynv.dev/blog/what-the-... · Posted by u/thecommieaxo

crispyambulance · 4 months ago

   >   The ECDLP involves finding the integer k such that P=k⋅G, where P is a point on the curve, G is a known point (the generator point), and k is the ephemeral key. The difficulty of this problem is what makes ECC secure.

I am trying to match up the statement above with the visualization directly below it where they show the generator point, G, on the curve. The plot shows k, the ephemeral key, as another point-- but it's NOT an integer, k is a point! And then there's a Q, which is the public key, and that's not described in the paragraph above at all. Nor is P shown in the plot.

I don't get it?