carl feynman @carl_feynman Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

@Mirabelle_tkx

@Sukabinorstw11

@wang199701

@realperrikiely

@miraalashay

@sandra_goutte

@MattM0720

@Zaid_5GG

@GastroRosaRivas

@Andrei545225

@HuoHuaXyn

@AndNyan

@developetra

@SerialDesiN25

@DrWeil

@bokeplokalmalam

@football_ie

@general_BBC

@__oQuery

@typeofweb

@Lamachemist

@Ephemerisle

@LgRDXbMGgq4CDnD

@MATOI_KAWASAK

@PBARANDENGE

@sophia_kova

@Eva__05

@iamjebatsiderha

@jetaimeliz

@ImmokaleeFB

@amigosenelcruce

@ccbaemon

@biyoberry

@zhoaolusi

@melito_pinto

@Jordanlee1993b

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

@daniel_271828 Feynman was my father. Once when I was in about second grade I said something like “The other kids in my class are like me except I’m smarter than them.” He sharply retorted “Don’t ever talk like that.” The lesson I took from that is that I could think it but not say it.

13

29

746

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

Let’s freeze the excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere! Antarctica is almost cold enough. Make it colder by building a circular wall around the South Pole, 12 km high and 50 km in diameter. The land inside never sees the sun and is protected 1/

35

40

510

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

@TomVaid @daniel_271828 Did he actually say it? It strikes me as unlike him, but I’m not a perfect expert on what he said vs what was attributed falsely to him. About 25% of the things he was supposed to have said don’t stand up to investigation.

2

1

215

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

from tropospheric winds. Eternally exposed to the icy blackness of space, it gets cold enough to freeze out CO2! In 30 years, freeze out 200 ppm and restore the climate of our grandparents. The frozen CO2 is about 40m deep, mixed with an unknown depth of ordinary snow. 2/

3

2

135

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

1 month

I wrote an article about a design for a self-replicating machine. Read it, it’s fun! (For a particular type of engineering nerd, which many of you are.)

It's time for a self-reproducing machine — LessWrong

I've wanted to build a self-reproducing machine since I was 17. It's forty-five years later, and it has finally become feasible. (I've done a few o…

www.lesswrong.com

7

16

118

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

20 days

If someone’s explaining, and you don’t get it, ask a dumb question. That may make them think you’re dumb. If they talk to you repeatedly, they’ll form an accurate opinion of your intelligence. And if they don’t, why do you care what they think when you never see them again? 1/

11

8

111

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

Obviously it’s an unprecedented civil engineering problem to build such a huge wall in such a hard to reach place with such unstable ground. But it’s not impossible to build such a tall structure. It just hasn’t been done because we haven’t needed it. 4/

3

2

103

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

Inside the center of the wall, even in summer, the sky will be the deep dark blue of high altitude. There will be visible stars. 6/

5

2

93

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

After 30 years, back off a little on the cooling and only condense super-cold ordinary snow to keep the pressure on. CO2 is kept frozen by pressure for centuries, until the glacier migrates to the coast and melts. 3/

1

84

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

I think the air inside the wall will be cooled from below, by ground contact (the ground is cooled by radiation). This will stop convection currents, like in the stratosphere. We’re literally pulling the stratosphere down to ground level. Prevents heat gain by vertical winds.

3

1

74

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

Actually, you can examine all your beliefs. I’ve been reflectively consistent since about 2005. I can look at any of my beliefs or behaviors and say, I know why I’m believing or doing that, and why it’s reasonable and consistent with my other beliefs. It took decades of work.

Rado9910 (He/Him)

@Rado9910

7 months

@gptbrooke The issue is that you can't examine ALL your beliefs. People fall for propaganda all the time because they have limited cognitive resources. And companies know it, have tons of resources, and are more than eager to use them. But I get your larger point.

4

2

31

5

7

69

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

@atomicarchive @ToughSf Critical mass of Californium is small enough you could fit a nuclear bomb into a bullet. It would explode like 1 ton of TNT. But if you have to carry the bullet in a fifty ton cask, it’s not really worth it.

1

59

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

@CryptoChloeee @1978Wildcats @meghaverma_art There was a hefty book listing all flights for the year. You (or more likely a travel agent or airline employee) would page through that book and find you the best flight.

1

0

51

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

20 days

Realizing this in my late 20s made me much more willing to ask dumb questions, which increased my learning substantially. Before that, I wasted lots of opportunities to learn by nodding along sagely so as not to appear dumb. 2/

1

0

45

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

5 months

Some examples of a technology improving by more than 250x in 2 years: A-bombs vs ordinary explosives, H-bombs vs A-bombs, moon flight vs orbital flight, X-ray diffraction vs ordinary microscope, resolution of X-ray of broken bones vs palpation…

Aaron Levie 🇺🇸

@levie

5 months

It is insane that just 18 months ago the state of the art AI model had a 4K token limit, and today state of the art can reach 1M tokens. There are essentially no examples in history of a technology improving at a rate of 250X in under 2 years.

73

161

1K

1

2

41

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

5 months

@VictorTaelin Congratulations to Victor Taelin for offering $10,000 to be proven wrong, and then paying up when someone did it after only a few hours! It shows a willingness to stand up for one’s ideas, and laudable integrity to pay up.

0

1

40

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

5 months

For people who wonder if this is true: I have a background in all those things, and I can assure you this is nonsense. Unchecked superhuman AI is possible and extremely dangerous, and the arguments for that don’t use any of these tools.

Beff – e/acc

@BasedBeffJezos

5 months

@ESYudkowsky Actually you also need a background in functional analysis, optimization theory, probability theory, complexity theory, and thermodynamics to make coherent full-stack arguments about the future of AI

39

10

235

0

36

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

@LeoWandersleb Perhaps. The input air is Antarctic stratosphere, so tremendously dry. There might be less ordinary snow than there is CO2. I can’t find an actual measurement of stratospheric moisture; any ideas?

2

1

33

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

Is my pfp a Feynman pfp? I am, after all, a Feynman.

ieva

@HyperboIeva

4 months

I hate how often a Feynman pfp is a massive red flag

4

3

57

1

0

33

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

This always works perfectly for me. I’m happy when I take off a cap and see a lift&peel because I know I’m gonna be able to easily and completely open it. What am I doing that everyone else on this thread isn’t?

Ramp Capital

@RampCapitalLLC

7 months

I present to you the worst design in the history of the human race. In theory, it should work, but never does. Inventor should be sent to prison.

328

247

7K

6

0

27

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

@bayeslord we can tell that the strong nuclear constant has been nearly the same since 2.2 billion years, about 1/6 the age of the universe. Cool, huh? (3/3)

1

0

26

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

@bayeslord Investigation of decay products in the Oklo natural nuclear reactor shows that the strong nuclear force hasn’t changed much in over a billion years. Nuclear resonances at the same energy as emission lines in other nuclei produce depletion of certain isotopes. Very sensitive.

2

1

27

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

5 months

@VictorTaelin You should state what the limits are for your allowable models. There are plenty of GOFAI logic systems that can carry out this kind of operation perfectly. I know that’s not what you’re talking about, but you need to be precise about how far we can push it.

1

0

26

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

20 days

I’m not sure if there’s a larger principle here. Not caring about the opinions of people you’ll never see again is a recipient for rudeness, so it doesn’t generalize that far. 3/3

3

0

25

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

Did you know that people (particularly women) posses a wide range of sensitivities to the color red, because of variation in the OPN1LW gene? It’s harmless unless you come to blows over how bright something red is.

bayesian asian (36/50 paintings)

@etirabys

2 months

tried to write a color theory primer for myself, ran aground on formalizing/standardizing brightnesses of various hues, and am at the bargaining stage of depression

2

0

15

2

25

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

@bayeslord This is work by Philip Morrison back in the 80s but I can’t find the reference. As Uranium fissions in a reactor, it forms hundreds of possible decay products, many radioactive. As these products decay, they interact with each other. The stable end product is a mixture of (1/)

1

0

25

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

26 days

@drethelin Real cows have an evolutionary reason to get seriously good at distinguishing conspecifics from predators. If a predator messes up, it loses one meal. But if a cow messes up, it loses its life. Lots more evolutionary pressure on the prey side.

1

0

23

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

14 days

@norvid_studies When I was trained in computer science around 1980, we called it “hill climbing” and the goal was up. But the physicists and numerical analysts had the convention that it was “gradient descent” and the goal was down. After a decade of confusion, the other side won.

1

21

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

I’ve been thinking about a self-reproducing machine using 1960s machine tools and 2024 robotics. I calculated the doubling time today: 125 days for the machine to build a duplicate. 1 year yields 8, 2 years yields 64, 3 years 512, etc. This could change everything.

1

0

20

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

16 days

@wife_geist Newton DID get tenure. He worked as a college professor for decades, from right after his PhD until he got appointed Master of the Mint.

0

20

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

@bayeslord dozens of isotopes. The exact abundances of these isotopes depends sensitively on the strength of the strong nuclear force. The Oklo reactor was a natural nuclear reactor operating in a river delta 2.2 billion years ago. By looking at the isotopes left behind (2/)

1

0

19

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

@LeoWandersleb I found a technical paper that gives the details. The water in the Antarctic stratosphere is actually somewhat less than the carbon dioxide. So the snow that comes out will mostly be dry ice. Paper is

Air Moisture Climatology and Related Physical Processes in the Antarctic on the Basis of ERA5...

Abstract Atmospheric moisture is a key component in the water cycle and radiative transfer. In this study, a comprehensive picture of air moisture climatology and related physical processes is...

journals.ametsoc.org

1

0

18

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

Almost all animals in the wild have a parasitic worm or two. In this case, it’s not really a matter of getting sick and then better— more like being a little run down all the time.

Michael Bench-Capon

@MikeBenchCapon

4 months

Do other animals, who don't wash with soap and eat off the ground, have way better immune systems than we do or do they just get sick a lot

12

2

50

0

17

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

Remember Wolfe wrote the book in an age before Wiktionary. It reads just fine if you can’t look up the words. They’re just part of the evocative weirdness. The ones you need to know, he explains by context.

Jared Sylvester

@jsylvest

7 months

I'm ten pages into "The Book of the New Sun" and I've had to look up five words in wiktionary. One didn't have an entry, and three of the rest had their example usage quotation from Gene Wolfe What have I gotten myself in to?

7

0

12

1

17

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

20 days

We are not monsters, we’re moral people, and yet we have the strength to do this. This is the splendor of our achievement.

helicopterosaur

@helicopterosaur

20 days

yeah you can power the electric grid with the wind, the rain and the sun. You do it by turning the wilderness into a machine. So that when the wind blows, the rain falls, and the sun shines, it transmits power into the electric grid.

0

6

2

1

15

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

This gets a million fold easier if you build the accelerator off Earth and send the beam down from above. It has to get through a dozen meters of solid instead of a dozen thousand kilometers. Build it on the moon!

ToughSF

@ToughSf

7 months

A method to unilaterally disable all nuclear bombs on Earth, remotely and without countermeasure: It uses a 1000 TeV muon->neutrino beam to penetrate right through the Earth and decay near fissile material, forcing it to 'fizzle' and become useless.

173

582

4K

2

1

15

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

1 month

@asanwal If anybody wants an actual answer: They negotiate with every bank that wants to issue the card and makes sure they work with the system. They negotiate with every merchant ditto. They answer questions of everyone who calls in to the 800 number on the card. They prevent fraud.

0

16

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

5 months

In Norse mythology, Auðumbla is a primeval cow. … Over the course of three days she licked away the salty rime rocks and revealed Búri, grandfather of the gods and brothers Odin, Vili and Vé. [from Wikipedia]

Vladimir Sumarov

@summeroff

5 months

It's strange that there were no religions where a god was created by lesser beings.

67

14

256

0

15

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

@robinhanson I made exactly this graph as a high schooler, at about the same time. Richard Feynman was amused and pleased that his kid had done such a thing, but I got the feeling he’d seen it before 😀.

1

0

15

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

He’s right. I read off a table of vapor pressures given in kPa thinking it was given in Pa, so I was tens of degrees too warm. It requires getting down to -134 C, not -100 C as I was assuming. I wonder if it’s still possible?

Boris Bartlog

@BorisBartlog

2 months

@carl_feynman This thought has also occurred to me (though my plans involved nuclear power and active refrigeration). Unfortunately, you need a temperature not just below the freezing point of CO2, but low enough that the vapor pressure is less than CO2 partial pressure in the atmosphere...

1

0

36

1

0

13

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

@zrkrlc @daniel_271828 Yes, I post on LW a lot, under my real name.

0

13

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 days

@etiennefd @eshear Clearly they are trying to confuse submarines. Dazzle camouflage was a WWI method of painting ships with bold stripes and patterns to make their exact motion and location harder to spot.

0

1

14

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

That something is painful to believe does not speak to its truth or falsity.

jay owen

@RamRanchGamer

2 months

@AndrewCritchPhD Whole heartedly believing that AGI is coming in the next 12-48 months is almost too overwhelming an idea, even if its true. Why work or learn or do anything important when we will either be dead or in post-scarcity heaven by the time Avatar 3 is in theaters?

1

0

1

0

13

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

3 months

Lasers were invented in 1958. They could have been built decades earlier. The neon tube was demonstrated in 1898, but we had to wait until 1960 for mirrors and Brewster windows to be attached to the ends to make a laser.

Henry Shevlin

@dioscuri

3 months

I’m also interested in the reverse of this phenomenon: which inventions arrived far later than you might expect? For example, why did it take us until the mid 90s for wheels on luggage to become commonplace?

378

439

17K

1

13

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

22 days

@jfischoff @drethelin The image reconstructed by the model is subtly different from the ground truth actually shown to the camera. Look at the images in the paper— the fisherman is replaced by a bush. The result is perfectly plausible but will mislead any who trust it. It’s brilliant and I hate it.

1

2

13

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

Just finished this book. Terrific hard science fiction. Very well drawn characters (for the genre). The viewpoint character misunderstands the situation for most of the book— a good portrait of an emotionally obtuse fellow. Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen.

1

3

12

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

6 months

Excessive copyright enforcement ahead.

henry

@arithmoquine

6 months

if you have never seen this hazard symbol before, just based on visuals, what do you think it means?

217

8

237

1

0

11

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

20 days

@freezechips If it derails the conversation, was that train going where you wanted in the first place?

0

11

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

Possibly. Pure ice flows too easily. But perhaps a mixture of ice with reinforcing fibers, like sawdust. Or perhaps you build it as a steel frame with opaque plastic film on it. Mine the steel in the Transantarctic Mountains.

Bryan Bishop

@kanzure

2 months

@carl_feynman Can the wall be made of ice too?

0

1

0

11

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

Binary nerve gas has never been used in combat. It was used to assassinate Kim Jong-Nam in 2017, but that was more of a family tiff rather than combat.

Michael Nielsen

@michael_nielsen

4 months

Apart from Hydrogen bombs is there another major class of destructive weapon that has never been used in combat?

261

11

545

0

1

10

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

1 month

Get a 100L barrel (large wastebasket size). Fill with water. Place one of those ornamental indoor fountains 1 inch deep in the water, to provide circulation and air contact. Extend a tube from the fountain pump intake down to bottom of barrel.

Elizabeth Van Nostrand

@acesounderglass

1 month

The other option is some sort of giant heat sink in my room.

2

0

2

3

0

10

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

5 months

Nick Zentner Geology Podcast. I’m interested in geology, so I listen to it for real, but my wife isn’t, so she listens for his soothing old-timey voice chatting about mountain ranges, until she falls asleep. A monologue, not a conversation, but that’s more soothing.

Aella

@Aella_Girl

5 months

I want a podcast to fall asleep to thats like art bell/classical music radio host/prairie home companion vibes. Comforting, drawling conversation between people with beautiful fireplace voices

42

5

198

0

1

10

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

I also learned (some) algebraic topology by self study. In my experience, homotopy is easy to visualize and calculate with, but not as deep as (co)homology, which is just barely visualizable. But I’m a visual guy; if you’re algebra-brained, you may disagree. I used Hatcher.

Emmett Shear

@eshear

7 months

Uh oh. I think I'm about to try to actually learn algebraic topology. Send thoughts and prayers.

76

9

567

0

10

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

1 month

Some clever folk X-rayed a larva from only 13 million yrs after the Cambrian explosion. Soft parts marvelously preserved. It’s obviously ancestral to insects but also has parts characteristic of velvet worms and tardigrades…(1/2)

Organ systems of a Cambrian euarthropod larva

Nature - Youti yuanshi is a euarthropod species newly described from a fossilized larva from Yunnan Province, China dating approximately to late Atdabanian stage, Cambrian period, and provides...

www.nature.com

1

9

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

@robbensinger I’ve been working in AI and adjacent areas of engineering since 1979. In 2002 I stopped work on AI and tried to talk some colleagues out of continuing to work on it. I haven’t been on the cutting edge for years, so I don’t think it made much difference in the big picture.

2

0

9

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

6 months

Achulean handaxe technology was essentially unchanged for a period of 2 million years, outlasting entire human subspecies. It was probably created by evolution, like termite mounds. It wasn’t until the upper Paleolithic that we see signs of individual cleverness.

Aleksi Liimatainen

@aleksil79

6 months

@ESYudkowsky "good at chipping stone handaxes [etc]" given the observed unreasonable effectiveness of simple learning algorithms, do we have reason to believe evolution came up with specializations for these tasks as opposed to more powerful simple learning algorithms?

0

2

0

2

9

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

Most cells just self-destruct when too much junk accumulates (or other things go wrong). There’s a whole well-oiled self-destruct system, so they don’t need to empty lysozymes. There are a few cells that don’t do that. Heart and brain foremost among them.

helicopterosaur

@helicopterosaur

4 months

I've been reading Aubrey de Grey's book "Ending Aging", and the most interesting part so far is that protein junk accumulates in heart and brain cells, filling up the lysosomes. But couldn't it be budded off from the cell and pooped out? Does that happen to some extent?

1

0

2

1

9

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

1 month

For aiming at a small target far away, the front end optics of a laser is exactly that of a telescope. It’s like seeing a small thing far away, but with the light going the other direction.

ToughSF

@ToughSf

1 month

Depiction of a space laser for the Star Wars program. It looks like a Cassegrain telescope.

1

8

72

1

0

9

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

5 months

An interesting theory. Important if true. Does it imply that scaling the model while not scaling the data would result in a model that has more “smarts” but the same amount of memorization?

Taelin

@VictorTaelin

5 months

@alexmathalex @pxWnRFPbjr That's exactly what you're missing. They *can't* simulate a Turing machine reliably. Keep in mind my take is speculative, but I also believe it might be on point, so, let me try to explain it the best way possible. You can think of GPT as a "model of computation that learns

14

29

178

2

1

8

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

3 months

@acesounderglass Yes, it can, for certain values of the word “cause”. In fact a single air molecule moving a trillionth of a meter can cause a hurricane, given a long enough delay. It is an astonishing mathematical fact that this is not just possible but universal. Good luck with your studies!

2

0

8

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

@AlexKontorovich Prof friend: When someone comes to his office with a purported meteorite, his answer is “Might be a meteorite, but since it has no fusion crust, and is indistinguishable from a terrestrial <name of rock>, you’ll never get anybody to buy it from you.” It’s true and gentle.

0

8

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

This is how I (a) think AI is likely to kill me and my family, and (b) I’m not doing much about it, and (c) I’m not upset about (b).

Ignacio Prado

@openingBklyn

7 months

But no discipline of regimenting your psyche to rationality is ever going to bring beliefs about abstract world possibilities and what’s happening around you onto motivational par. Nor, contrary to some rationalists, should it. Monstrous people would result from that.

2

1

5

1

0

8

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

5 months

IIRC, a mission to mars launched in between the good transit periods will actually take so long it will arrive after a mission that just waits until the next good time and launches then (with similar delta-v). With enough delta-v you can go anytime and get there quickly, ofc.

grimy

@twit_grim

5 months

@peterrhague @SpaceX It can still launch test starships to Mars even if it's not the perfect transit orbit, right? That's just the quickest.

1

0

1

0

8

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

5 months

Indeed not. Genius requires a nonzero temperature, sometimes generating a less-likely token. Fortunately, people are working on this.

Michael

@mmay3r

5 months

Genius is not generating the most likely token.

11

29

138

0

1

7

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

@nephew_jonathan The electrical requirements for direct CO2 capture are colossal (but conceivable). People are working on it. But I invented the Great Wall of Antarctica method last night, so let’s talk about that!

1

0

7

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

5 months

We had a rule of no noisy toys. If someone bought the kids a noisy toy, it would only last a couple of days before it “broke”. Actually secret parental disablement, of course.

🌾🍁🍂 bosco 🍂🍁🌾

@selentelechia

5 months

it's a hamster that vibrates and repeats every noise it hears at a much higher pitch she adores it and keeps trying to shove it in my face I did tell her I was taking it away if she didn't take it to another room but jfc why would you give that to a 3yo unless you're a sadist

11

3

74

1

0

7

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

6 months

This is a terrific book— filled with original insights into human physiology in health and disease. It’s nice to see the field of theoretical biology really pay off. It’s been kind of disappointing the last 30 years, but that’s over.

uri alon

@UriAlonWeizmann

9 months

Why do we get certain diseases whereas others do not exist? This new book builds a foundation for systems medicine. Starting from basic laws, it derives why hormone, immune and aging circuits are built the way the are, culminating in a periodic table of diseases.

41

255

1K

0

7

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

5 months

How long does it take for one of these to build itself? (Not strictly possible since it contains electronics & plastic it can’t make, but how long before it can make all its metal parts?)

Christian Heinzel

@chheinzel

5 months

God Rheinmetall is just so fucking cool, fully containerised 3D printer, metal 3D printer and CNC setup to produce custom replacement parts right behind the front, gone from a first display unit to production units being sent to Ukraine in less than a year

60

475

4K

0

1

7

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

Submarine reactors are high pressure meaning any accident is a loss of coolant accident. And they use highly enriched Uranium you don’t want in civilian hands. And they require constant supervision by trained diligent people. Trade off: they’re tiny. Useless for civilian use.

Robin Hanson

@robinhanson

4 months

“Since … 1948, U.S. Navy nuclear program has developed 27 different plant designs, installed them in 210 nuclear-powered ships, taken 500 reactor cores into operation, & accumulated over 5,400 reactor years of operation.” Why not just make lots more of these?

15

11

112

0

7

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

3 months

@davidad I’m a highly alarmed non-welfarist eventualist. I was lowly alarmed last week before I read Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness. His model is highly plausible and has no good way of aligning an ASI.

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

3 months

@Mad_dev @Jordan_W_Taylor You’ve invented the cylinder pump, which used to be common. What you need is not just to create an empty space, but to create an empty space with a gizmo in it— whatever you’re building the vacuum chamber to contain. So you need to cycle the cylinder repeatedly and pump out air.

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

25 days

Nope! The wall itself— the actual airproof barrier— is a plastic sheet and cloth reinforcement. What holds it up is a structural steel frame, tapering upward. No engineer I’ve talked to has said it’s impossible. We haven’t built that high because we don’t have to.

TomiTapio

@Tomi_Tapio

25 days

Materials for 12 km high wall... that's Space Elevator ultra-materials...

0

1

0

7

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

@AbHomineDeus @daniel_271828 An AI of merely human intelligence would be a scary thing. As clever at theory as Einstein, as persuasive as LBJ, as strategic as Napoleon, as inventive as Edison, and as ruthless as Bismarck. The outer limits of merely human abilities aren’t that mere.

1

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

@RokoMijic When I say AGI, I mean the stupidest possible machine capable of building a machine smarter than itself. At that point it will be capable of doing many jobs, so that’s another definition. Seeing the many different answers in this thread makes me realize it is a sloppy term.

1

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

6 months

@biased_skeptic @eigenrobot You’ve spotted the nub of the issue! There’s a reason I specified refineries and importation points. They are vital but very hard to rebuild. A fractionation column requires an airtight pressure vessel taller than most buildings and intricate temperature control /1

2

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

@VictorTaelin Because contrary to your assertion, we can’t manipulate things at cellular scale. We don’t have machines capable of reaching into a cell, doing complicated things, and getting out with the cell intact. Even once, in a dish, much less for the millions, billions or trillions (1/)

2

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

20 days

@robinhanson I’m thinking back to my last board game get together. Everyone there was doing better at life than most people. 2 Engineers, 2 scientists, high school history teacher, real estate developer, wife thereof, master machinist, professor, 2 librarians, federal official…

1

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

@BanjoAtheist English grammar has a constraint that a grammatical sentence has to have a subject. Most languages don’t have this constraint, and they just say “Rains.” English has to stick something in there, so we use “it”. Unlike most English pronouns, it doesn’t refer to anything.

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

1 year

@robertskmiles If you can build one on the equator, you can build one that’s off the equator. It costs you payload, eg 50% loss for south Texas base. Google “non equatorial space elevator”.

0

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

@robbensinger Oops! I stopped working on AI in 2022, not 2002! I’ve had a high p(doom) since about 2003, but I thought we had plenty of time until Bing went crazy and turned into Sydney. That was too much like the scenarios I’d had cooking in my head all those years.

0

1

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

9 months

@robinhanson Most books about fire safety are flammable.

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

This only makes sense if you define “idea” to mean top level plan for action, because that’s what the prefrontal does. An idea of what color something is requires the occipital cortex. An idea of what your mother looks like requires the superior temporal sulcus. 1/2

Yann LeCun

@ylecun

7 months

The "generative" part of the brain is what turns ideas and plans into actions, including spoken and written words. But the hard part of intelligence is to come up with those ideas and plans. In the brain, ideas are formed in the prefrontal cortex. Turning them into actions is

150

284

2K

1

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

6 months

@eigenrobot There are 150 large oil refineries and oil importation points in America. Nuke those and our economy and agriculture come to a halt, and most people starve in a few months.

1

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

@AlbertoGirardi9 @DrPhiltill Navier-Stokes works when the mean free path is much shorter than any scale of interest. Individual particle simulations work when mean free path is long enough to ignore collective motions of gas. Expanding into vacuum is first close the rocket, second far away, yuck.

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

30 days

@michael_nielsen “Book of the New Sun” by Gene Wolfe. Superficially a fantasy with philosophical asides and embedded stories. At some point you realize you are actually reading science fiction seen through a fantasy-novel narrator. At some points after that you see the next levels.

1

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

@PicturesFoIder My father was a famous physicist. He would periodically receive stuff exactly like this. It’s crackpot nonsense. Always from a man, usually older, always convinced of their importance, sometimes actually insane. Sad. Don’t bother sending to a physicist.

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

3 months

You’re seeing the sharp edge because of temperature, not density. Sufficiently hot gas is opaque and glows. Slightly colder gas is transparent. Temperature transition is very sharp because as soon as gas gets transparent, gas below it starts cooling quickly.

lisatomic

@lisatomic5

3 months

why does the sun appear so hard-edged and not where the light intensity tapers off more slowly or smoothly from the center?

44

3

199

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

@Sven_Etienne @helicopterosaur Counting numbers of patents as a measure of innovation is bogus. Japan prefers separate patents for each aspect of an invention. America prefers giant omnibus patents. And other national variations in patenting. Temporal comparisons OK, international comparisons no.

1

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

26 days

@SakanaAILabs What does this do to ML science? It seems like we will soon have copious cheap grad students, with which to perform grad student descent. It’s like a mechanical harvester for low-hanging-fruit. That frees human scientists to make larger leaps in design space… (3/)

1

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

7 months

@nickfloats The faces are both in sharp focus despite being at different depths. Only possible with a tilted focal plane, which nobody uses for snapshots. Most visible where woman’s arm goes behind man’s. There’s a dichotomy between “in focus” and “out of focus” with nothing in between.

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

26 days

@SakanaAILabs So I skimmed one of the papers, pretending I was a peer reviewer. It’s reasonable work, a little repetitious and wordy, but a little shallow. If I got it blind, I’d guess it was a grad student’s first paper. I’d publish it somewhere if you cut out 30% of the words. (1/)

1

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

6 months

@biased_skeptic @eigenrobot A cracking reactor requires control of high pressure hydrogen and special steels and catalysts. Many such examples. They’re not something your average welder can whip up in the backyard. This studyi read considered an anti-refinery attack the most deadly because /2

1

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

@pickover @paulg That’s 22 digits and many mathematical operations. Just from a combinatorics argument, there are probably many shorter expressions that approximate pi to that many places. But knowing Ramanujan, there’s some incredibly deep reason why this expression is the BEST.

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

@VictorTaelin … of cells involved in a real disease process, inside a real body that fights invaders. I agree that such things are physically possible, but we’re so far from being able to do it that not working “brutally” on it is a reasonable strategy, like not trying Apollo in the 1920s.

1

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

In the Antarctic stratosphere, there is actually less water vapor than there is CO2. So my global warming fixer will condense mostly dry ice, mixed with small amounts of ordinary snow.

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

2 months

From data on research spending versus burden of various diseases, we can’t tell anything because there is an important missing term: tractability. Some diseases (e.g. cancer) have plausible routes for improvement through research while others (e.g. stroke, injury) do not.

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

2 months

Does this show research is focused on the wrong things? Is effort allocated well, poorly, or do you think this is (close to or actually) optimal?

8

2

10

1

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

@cremieuxrecueil You ransom it back to the insurance company for a few tens of millions. It’s a tricky exercise in operational security and trust building.

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

6 months

@biased_skeptic @eigenrobot Almost no petroleum after a few weeks. All agricultural machinery and trucks and most automobiles come to a halt. Fertilizer manufacturing comes to a halt. Agricultural efficiency drops to what it was in 1910, even if we empty the cities to provide agricultural labor.

2

0

5

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

16 days

I have never had flu in 57 years. Can someone please sequence all my antibodies to find the universal anti-flu?

1

0

6

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

4 months

The first operating system I used was Incompatible Time Sharing on the PDP-10. File names and user names were restricted to six characters, all caps. Forty-seven years later, I find out why.

davidad 🎇

@davidad

4 months

The PDP-10 used a 6-bit character encoding (corresponding to the modern codepoints from 32–95), and had a 36-bit word size. So, words were limited to 6 characters, and could not be case-sensitive. K&R’s original C compiler actually supported 31-character identifiers, but the

7

6

79

1

5