marymessall

Lady physicist. Opinionated nerd.

Profile Pic: Hubble img of HD97950: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_97950

Last Notes

2026-02-08 20:18:14 UTC

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Why does like look strangely 3D to me? As if some of the foreground birds appear to have in front of my phone screen... Amazing.

2026-01-29 20:13:45 UTC

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I can only speculate based on my own experience, and I'm not a mathematician (I'm a physicist, and an experimental/industrial one.)
But I've never been a person who went to the internet with technical questions even though I've always been a person who spends a lot of time on the internet. I prefer to ask colleagues in person. Mostly, I think, because I want to be able to ask follow up questions and get immediate answers, and then ask more follow up questions about those.
But maybe there's something gendered about that? Maybe guys find it more embarrassing to ask questions in person that reveal they don't understand something? (Though revealing that to the whole internet under a real name seems more embarrassing to me.)
Right now I feel a little weird trying to be helpful on public websites, too, because I know my answers are going to be harvested to feed large language models.

2026-01-02 03:55:42 UTC

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I've just installed Fedora on my new laptop and am trying to use it for my normal media editing and organizing tasks, and for documents and spreadsheets and so on.
I have had to install software, and occasionally it comes in the form of a "flat pack" - a term which is new to me as a recent migrant from Microsoft.
It seems to work more or less like a Windows installer? Which is great for me because that's what I'm used to? So I guess I am probably the target audience?
Why would someone NOT like it?

2025-12-13 15:07:31 UTC

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I do pay $3 per month or so towards my Mastodon server's costs. I also pay similar amounts into the Patreons of six different podcasts and two blogs. I subscribe to my local newspaper and support my local NPR station even though I don't follow local news as closely as I should. I buy books (mostly from Kobo now, though I still get my audio books through Audible) and music (MP3s through, sadly, Amazon.) I subscribe to Netflix and Disney+, and get most of my video content that way.
I feel like it's definitely still possible and even culturally expected to pay for media if you can. But I wish I knew how to set up my own media server, my own little "cloud" so I could access my books and music and TV shows without having to stream from Big Tech's servers.

2025-02-27 18:46:07 UTC

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"Starlink is 2/3 of ALL satellites in orbit. They effectively already control access to orbit."
I did not know that. That's very unsettling. Maybe in the way that people found the original Sputnik unsettling all by itself. It's weird that satellites which can potentially affect all of us earthlings can be launched without any say from the vast majority of us.

2025-02-07 04:28:15 UTC

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I know who Sailor Moon is, so this is just a goofy cartoon fighting game, probably at least a little entertaining.
Sailor Moon out of context is a little horrifying, but hey, she's from a different time, and a different place. It's like trying to judge Romeo and Juliet by modern American standards. Or really any media about women from most of history and most of the world? You've got to make allowances.

2025-02-05 20:44:36 UTC

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Dunno. Sounds like federalism to me. We already have thousands of different county and city agencies... The federal government just coordinates & shifts funding between them. And that's good! Because that lets people from areas which haven't recently been hit by disasters share resources with those who have! It lets richer areas share with poorer areas! It prevents wasteful duplicate efforts. It allows people to warn each other about threats & coordinate solutions.

2025-02-05 20:35:06 UTC

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As if ad hoc working groups can't be taken over by assholes.
The government is HOW we do mutual aid, traditionally. But people have to do the work to run it, and when you put malevolent people in charge of running things, they abuse that power. It doesn't matter if you call the thing they're in charge of "government" or "ad hoc working group" or "charity board." The point is to keep bad actors away from the systems we create to help each other.

2025-01-11 15:07:42 UTC

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Here's a little more from the Ted Chiang piece...
https://mendeddrum.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/810/343/594/585/556/original/4a8caf02c10617ca.jpg

2025-01-11 15:05:42 UTC

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"To save space, the copier identifies similar-looking regions in the image & stores a single copy for all of them; when the file is decompressed, it uses that copy repeatedly to reconstruct the image. It turned out that the photocopier had judged the labels specifying the area of the rooms to be similar enough that it needed to store only one of them, & it reused that one for all three rooms when printing the floor plan." -Example from the essay of lossy compression "hallucinations."

2025-01-11 15:00:51 UTC

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But since that article is so long, a more practical reading assignment might be Ted Chiang's "Chat GPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web":
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web
I think even non-math people who don't understand how statistics relate to file compression might have enough experience with JPEG artifacts to get the point on a metaphorical level, but I think it's a good description on a literal level too. The statistics on which LLMs are built really ARE a kind of lossy compression.

2025-01-11 14:46:39 UTC

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I think educators need to put in a little more work to understand what large language models are actually doing. The best resource for this is this LONG article by Stephen Wolfram, of "Mathematica" and "Wolfram alpha" fame. If I could assign it as homework to all educators and policy makers, I would.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/

2025-01-01 20:33:32 UTC

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That's fair, although I gather he has described the idea with equations, some of which make predictions which could in principle be tested? I just quoted the qualitative description in the Wikipedia article because the wording in the toot I was replying to reminded me of that phrase. I think I'd better go and look at some of the original papers myself, and then see if I can find some papers which cite them critically, to better understand...

2025-01-01 05:05:21 UTC

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I'm a physicist, but not THAT kind of physicist--I do experimental optics.
Still, to the extent that I understand the problem, I find Roger Penrose's proposed approach attractive: "gravitization of quantum mechanics" instead of "quantization of gravity." I'd be very interested in an explanation of why this idea isn't more popular with theorists...
Here's a Wikipedia article about it, and a screenshot of a relevant bit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di%C3%B3si%E2%80%93Penrose_model
https://mendeddrum.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/751/340/601/237/386/original/49a1493a7c595f9f.jpg

2024-12-26 17:37:56 UTC

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The melodrama was definitely my issue with Oppenheimer.
These characters seemed so certain of themselves. How could they be? No one had done this before. I'm a physicist. I've worked on DARPA projects. The main feeling was "Geez, this is never gonna work." Where was self doubt?
I have read Feynman's accounts of Los Alamos. Full of absurd little moments - security theater, silly code words, safe cracking. Where was the nonsense?
These guys should be nerds. They didn't even feel human.

2024-11-18 04:21:31 UTC

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I have implemented the advice from this article on all my devices, and am now unpleasantly surprised when I use some other device and am reminded that AI "overviews" in search results are a thing.
https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/

2024-11-05 15:21:21 UTC

I really like the idea of #federation and the goal of a large #fediverse, and so I like the idea of following some #BlueSky and #Threads accounts here.
I hear that's supposed to be possible now, but I don't know how to do it, or who to follow. Is there a "bridge" involved in the case of BlueSky? How does that work?
Anyone got any tips for me?