gammarator (u/gammarator)

gammarator commented on White House loyalty rating for companies axios.com/2025/08/15/whit... · Posted by u/petethomas

1a527dd5 · 14 days ago

I mean at first glance, this doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy. But ignoring my initial reaction; I don't think this is any different from lobby groups keeping tabs on what congressmen say vs do.

Just this time it's the government tracking which companies are pro-government currently.

It's not nice, but this government is transactional at best.

While I choose not to play games; it's hard not to play when the other side is the government.

This does explain all the random gifts the government is getting.

gammarator · 14 days ago

Lobby groups are private actors rating elected Congressional reps. This is government officials rating private actors (with an implied threat to punish those who don’t comply).

gammarator commented on 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program kcrw.com/news/shows/npr/n... · Posted by u/ProAm

gammarator · a month ago

Comments about SLS miss what’s happening. SLS is inefficient and wasteful, but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1].

Until this year, NASA was the world leader in space science. We’re pushing out the experts who build and operate astrophysics missions like Hubble, Chandra, JWST, Kepler, TESS, Swift, and many more in planetary and heliophysics. This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation.

The private sector is irrelevant here: SpaceX and friends don’t do scientific research.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/trump-administration-m...

gammarator commented on Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth twitter.com/premqnair/sta... · Posted by u/rfurmani

labster · a month ago

You should have bought in when Prop 13 went into effect, you’d only be paying $3k in property taxes today instead of $40k.

gammarator · a month ago

Or inherit the Prop 13 rate from your parents.

gammarator commented on I drank every cocktail aaronson.org/blog/i-drank... · Posted by u/colinprince

gammarator · a month ago

I’m surprised the author didn’t try to make more at home! Personally I’m a fan of the apps at https://mixologytech.com/, especially “Modern Classics.”

gammarator commented on First Hubble telescope images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS bsky.app/profile/astrafox... · Posted by u/jandrewrogers

dylan604 · a month ago

> I refuse to use the incredibly cursed unit "minutes per second"

Man, that is a horrible unit. I've never heard of that, but I can only imagine each semester professors every where have to endure an enterprising student using this to be "clever" in some way

gammarator · a month ago

“Arcminutes per second” would be the standard way to express it in astronomy.

gammarator commented on AI comes up with bizarre physics experiments, but they work quantamagazine.org/ai-com... · Posted by u/pseudolus

LeroyRaz · a month ago

The article is misleading and badly written. None of the mentioned works seem to have used language or knowledge based models.

It looks like all the results were driven by optimization algorithms, and yet the writing describes AI 'using' concepts and "tricks". This type of language is entirely inappropriate and misleading when describing these more classical (if advanced) optimization algorithms.

Looking at the paper in the first example, they used an advanced gradient descent based optimization algorithm, yet the article describes "that the AI was probably using some esoteric theoretical principles that Russian physicists had identified decades ago to reduce quantum mechanical noise."

Ridiculous, and highly misleading. There is no conceptual manipulation or intuition being used by the AI algorithm! It's an optimization algorithm searching a human coded space using a human coded simulator.

gammarator · a month ago

This is the obvious consequence of funding agencies pouring money into “AI.”

gammarator commented on Linda Yaccarino is leaving X nytimes.com/2025/07/09/te... · Posted by u/donohoe

wonderwonder · 2 months ago

BlueSky has not taken off because its the far left version of Twitter. If you stray even to the center you are doxxed and banned. They banned the sitting vice-president within a couple of hours of him joining.

gammarator · 2 months ago

JD Vance is not banned, he’s just widely blocked, which is something BlueSky users are free to do.

gammarator commented on Rules of good writing (2007) dilbertblog.typepad.com/t... · Posted by u/santiviquez

tomhow · 2 months ago

He became well-known via his writing in the early-mid 00s; first his book about Lisp then his essays that became popular on Slashdot. His investing happened as a consequence of his writing.

gammarator · 2 months ago

His investing happened as a consequence of having available capital (and, certainty, forward-looking ideas about how to seed startups).

As to the writing, I think its influence (in terms of ideas) makes people overrate its stylistic quality. An enjoyable critique: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

gammarator commented on Guess I'm a rationalist now scottaaronson.blog/?p=890... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

Certhas · 2 months ago

It really depends on why you are having a philosophical discussion. If you are talking among friends, or just because you want to throw interesting ideas around, sure! Be free, have fun.

I come from a physics background. We used to (and still) have a ton of physicists who decide to dable in a new field, secure in their knowledge that they are smarter than the people doing it, and that anything worthwhile that has already been thought of they can just rederive ad hoc when needed (economists are the only other group that seems to have this tendency...) [1]. It turned out every time that the people who had spent decades working on, studying, discussing and debating the field in question had actually figured important shit out along the way. They might not have come with the mathematical toolbox that physicists had, and outside perspectives that challenge established thinking to prove itself again can be valuable, but when your goal is to actually understand what's happening in the real world, you can't ignore what's been done.

[1] There even is an xkcd about this:

https://xkcd.com/793/

gammarator · 2 months ago

Also http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21 (I am a physicist myself)