Nick has moved to Mathstodon

Moved to Mathstodon.xyz

Theoretical physicist by training (PhD in quantum open systems/quantum information), University lecturer for a bit, and currently paying the bills as an engineer working in optical communication (implementation) and quantum communication (concepts), though still pursuing a little science on the side. I'm interested in physics and math, of course, but I enjoy learning about really any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well. My biggest other interest is hiking and generally being out in nature.

Pronouns: he/him/his

Public Key

npub1hnphh99kmukqa3qq2axyw9jweek98rchfzchfnjqua7xr79x4xjs5z26ht

NIP-05 Address

internic_at_qoto.org@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqstesmmjjmd7tqwcsq9wnz8ze8vumzn3ut53vt5eeqwwlrplzn2nfgpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dshegqu0

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1hnphh99kmukqa3qq2axyw9jweek98rchfzchfnjqua7xr79x4xjs5z26ht

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Last Notes

2025-02-16 23:49:01 UTC

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Presumably, in light of recent events it may have become even more controversial, and it's possible that even those servers that were federating with them (like mastodon.social) may have stopped. I'm not that plugged in to wider Fediverse happenings.

2025-02-16 23:43:15 UTC

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Threads supports ActivityPub (to an extent), so it doesn't require a bridge, just that a Fediverse server federate with it (which was controversial). See for example:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon

2025-02-16 21:04:33 UTC

I'm looking at migrating my account to #Mathstodon. One thing I'd like is the ability to follow people from a wide variety of different places, including Bluesky (via brid.gy) and Threads, if possible. I know that the former is possible on Mathstodon, but I'm trying to figure out if the latter is. It seems like maybe not.

2025-02-14 23:56:13 UTC

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Initially I thought this was just a creative description of bagpipes.

2025-02-11 05:33:39 UTC

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It's probably worth adding that apparently two different payment processors seemed to assume payments to @npub1rkw…5q62 were fraudulent, so if your donation payment doesn't seem to be working check to see if the payment was declined.

2025-02-11 01:31:16 UTC

I'm guessing that @npub1rkw…5q62 has probably been getting a lot of new users over the last few months, and that will be costing a lot of money. If you use it (or you just value privacy) you might think about donating.
https://mastodon.world/@signalapp/113635632154547730

2025-02-03 15:56:51 UTC

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Ben Stein was literally the first thing I thought of when people started talking about them recreating Smoot-Hawley.

2025-02-01 23:32:32 UTC

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I'm curious in what say Floccus didn't work for you (since that's another I've run across).

2025-02-01 17:48:56 UTC

I am looking for a good way to have bookmarks available from all my devices.
I was once a del.icio.us user and have tended to use services similar to that since, because they easily allowed me to have my bookmarks on all devices without worrying about compatibility with a specific #browser or OS. But I've been thinking that maybe I should use something with better #privacy guarantees, like end-to-end encryption.
Since I'm primarily a #Firefox user, I considered just using Firefox's built-in bookmarking and FF sync. But one issue I have is that it doesn't seem to autocomplete tags when you're entering bookmarks. To me this is important because a challenge with tags is consistently using the same ones and not creating a bunch of similar variants, so I want something that makes it easy for me to tell if I've used a tag before when I'm entering tags for a new bookmark.
Are there Firefox extensions or other web services for this with E2EE that I should be considering?
#web #webBrowser #webBrowsers

2025-01-29 05:04:18 UTC

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I find that one of my biggest problems on many sites is just getting a straight answer on which ebooks have DRM.

2025-01-27 00:00:52 UTC

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Yeah, I appreciate all the advantages you listed of in-person meetings. I can believe that some of the advantages that currently come from physical meetings could be recreated in purely-online meetings, but I think the problem is that it doesn't happen naturally as an extension of normal human activities; it would probably require research and a lot of conscious work to structure the correct processes to do it. It seems like an open question how far one could get with a purely online approach.
I'm glad to hear that the IETF does so much with the hybrid approach; I often find hybrid meetings to be highly dysfunctional for either the online or in-person side. I would suspect, though, that it still means there will be effectively be a two-tiered system where, all things being equal, the people who attend in person are taken more seriously. This makes some sense, since attending does require commitment of time and money, but it also works against people with less money, health conditions, or certain nationalities.
[@j_bertolotti](https://mathstodon.xyz/@j_bertolotti )

2025-01-26 18:05:12 UTC

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It's puzzling to me that the IETF of all organizations wouldn't focus on a solution that doesn't require everyone to be co-located. Setting aside border control issues, I would think that any solution based on global travel will still have equity and environmental issues.

2025-01-25 20:49:44 UTC

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Thank you for putting this together! It's important context for current events.

2025-01-25 01:41:32 UTC

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I completely support this attitude in principle, but I don't think it really becomes a useful plan until one has a credible alternative approach for long-term sustainability. I know you're actively trying to raise money now, which is good, but I haven't seen anything yet that looks like long-term sustainability one can count on.
Obviously, I'm not trying to single out you or Pixelfed here. I think this is a problem basically all of the Fediverse and all non-ad-funded services are trying to figure out (including Bluesky). My point is more that I don't see that much practical difference between the person who says "we might have to have ads" and the person who says "we'll never have ads" if the latter doesn't have a credible long-term alternative, which I haven't yet seen for the Fediverse.

2025-01-24 19:36:32 UTC

"Seventy per cent of Nature readers who responded to an online poll are using the social-media platform Bluesky"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00177-1

2025-01-24 15:09:35 UTC

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I'm really fascinated by the idea of this mirror universe where (a presumably goatee-wearing) Cory Doctrow has been convincing the world to love DRM and palling around with Metallica.

2025-01-23 14:45:26 UTC

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For what it's worth, that does sound like it's reasonably simple with Bluesky. But note in that case it just contains your data which is then read by the Bluesky relay; it is not a full parallel instance.

2025-01-23 13:55:01 UTC

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It seemed like maybe the server was having some problems last night. It seems to be loading for me today.

2025-01-23 05:00:15 UTC

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I know what you mean about crackpot theories that take too much work to unravel, but I found the one I linked to pretty hilarious just based on the notion of claiming that Charles Misner didn't know how to do basic GR and furthermore claiming that GR actually predicts that the solar system should be static, which apparently no one realized in the many decades earlier working with, e.g., the post-Newtonian approximation. 😆

2025-01-23 04:47:11 UTC

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I feel like this combination of sentiments distills to much of crackpottery: "I think that it’s mathematically provable that ... However, I don’t know the math to prove it. ... Feel free to do the math and prove it correct." People who are certain they are correct even though they don't know the math. Or people who have decided that, because they don't know the math, the "one true theory" must be expressible in very simple math.

2025-01-23 04:27:02 UTC

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This thread may be of interest:
https://misskey.de/notes/a3b41p8prp

2025-01-22 20:49:57 UTC

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There is the occasional more scholarly work of crackpottery. I actually find these more enjoyable, because they are at least coherent enough to allow some sort of criticism of the content. One of my favorites in this genre is https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9506082

2025-01-22 20:20:13 UTC

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Wouldn't an Erdös number at least imply having published something with a coauthor? I feel like that's already putting one in the upper echelon of crackpots. Often it seems like they can't find even one other person who buys into their ideas (probably because they're usually incoherent).

2025-01-21 16:12:43 UTC

I have a question about buying a #book on #amazon that I'm hoping people on Fedi can clarify: I believe I saw an author complaining that if Amazon ran low on the stock of their (new) book they would instead produce a poor-quality print-on-demand version and send that to the customer. Can anyone confirm whether this is the case and under what circumstances it happens?
I don't buy books (or anything else, if I can help it) on Amazon, so I have no personal experience. If I can get accurate information on this, though, I'd like to share it with people who do, since I think this is a deceptive practice.
#bookstodon

2025-01-21 14:32:33 UTC

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Mazel tov! How to they rate on the Crackpot Index? :-)
https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

2025-01-20 02:44:16 UTC

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3. For storage you can again find recommendations on those two sites (under "cloud" or "cloud storage"), but I think there are some subjective questions to answer about what you want out of it. Presumably you are worried about the privacy of your files, but how concerned are you about them becoming unavailable (because the service went down)? What rough amount of stuff do you want to store? Are we talking a few GB or many 1000s of GBs? For example, for privacy one option is not to use any special service but instead to use software (e.g. cryptomator) that encrypts you data prior to uploading it. Then you can just use whatever without worrying about the privacy features of the service, but the cost is a bit of extra hassle.

2025-01-20 02:34:11 UTC

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2. Again, secure turns out to be a little subjective because it depends on what types of threats you want to be secure from (what cybersecurity types like to call your "thread model"). For example, Google offers pretty good features against, say, cybercriminals getting access you your account, but it also analyzes the content of your emails, so in that sense it's not very private. Proton offered a zero-knowledge end-to-end encrypted architecture that meant your emails could be quite private (under certain conditions), but now there are some questions about whether the people running it are trustworthy.
You can again find recommendations for email services on the two sites I mentioned in response to #1. I think Tuta is the option I see mentioned most often as a replacement for Proton (since they also have an end-to-end encrypted architecture).

2025-01-20 02:29:00 UTC

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1. What is a good VPN is a little subjective based on what you want out of it, but you can check recommendations by privacyguides
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
and Techlore
https://www.techlore.tech/resources#vpns
to get some good leads. The latter also has a big table with feature comparison if you feel the desire to dig deeper. Note that I would not expect either to have been updated in light of the Proton mess.

2025-01-20 02:23:31 UTC

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To, I'm not an IT person (though I do work related to software), and I'm definitely not an expert on the things you're asking about, but since you haven't gotten responses yet, I'll tell you want I know in the mean time. I'll do it as a thread to respond on each subject in turn.

2025-01-18 15:47:16 UTC

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As far as I can tell, plenty of people want and use AI-generated search responses. I don't use them, and I think they're a fundamentally very bad use case for LLMs, but I see people talk about using them online and in real life.
I think that there's a bit of group think on this topic on the Fediverse, that because many of us don't like or use these tools, no one does. But from what I can see, that isn't an accurate perception.

2025-01-18 15:20:59 UTC

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It is dumb, but at least you can turn it off in your settings. I saw that once, turned it off, and have never seen it again.

2025-01-17 20:09:39 UTC

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I don't know about BC, but I'm surprised about Seattle. I live in a major metro area in the US and buy most things in cash for the reasons @npub1z3l…qvzu states. While I do encounter some businesses that don't take cash, it's a small minority in my experience.

2025-01-16 12:29:11 UTC

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Let's be honest, the worst is CGS units. ;-P

2025-01-16 04:14:04 UTC

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I think many scientists see Twitter and its successors as an important venue to promote their work, network, etc., so I think they will tend to be pragmatic in gravitating to where they think they can best do that.
Mastodon doesn't make it that easy to connect people to the information they're interested in, so it would be hard for people to rely on for those purposes. The same dynamics will apply for anyone who relies on social media professionally to some degree (unless maybe they're such a big fish that they know people will seek them out).
@npub1tx7…47wc

2025-01-16 04:03:29 UTC

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I'm sure @npub19kd…t56d has some very-well-informed opinions on this. 😉

2025-01-15 20:15:18 UTC

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I find this an ironic contrast to a current fad online to rail against all food dyes irrespective of any evidence of harm.

2025-01-15 15:36:12 UTC

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I will say that for some organizations even Bluesky is too small to bother with (compared to, say, Instragram, Tiktok, and Youtube), but I assume that Nature is really mostly interested in a Twitter successors, since Twitter was where more scientist discourse was happening.

2025-01-15 03:13:47 UTC

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Yeah, it looks like it's using some sort of responsive design to change the layout for mobile and the RSS feed link doesn't seem to appear there (unless you choose to view the desktop version).
I did manage to use the link on the desktop version to add you to my RSS reader. 🙂
https://media.social.qoto.org/media_attachments/files/113/830/172/412/837/122/original/ae2218a9dcb8275b.png

2025-01-14 23:29:14 UTC

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You can feed the site URL into a tool like this to find the feed: https://www.rsslookup.com/

2025-01-14 04:51:15 UTC

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As someone else put it, the world of Star Trek will still be real, but our timeline will be the one where everyone has a goatee.
[@argv_minus_one](https://mastodon.sdf.org/@argv_minus_one )

2025-01-13 22:59:23 UTC

This Decoder interview from March with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber was interesting. It seems that in doing the research to select the technology for Bluesky she was able to recognize something that it took me much longer to see: the Fediverse will never be able to displace closed social media, not for any technical shortcoming but for cultural reasons.
Many people in the Fediverse don't want information to be easy to find. Many people don't want to interoperate with those they disagree with. Both of those arise from understandable sources and aren't necessarily bad (if not taken to extremes), but they are fundamentally opposed to creating a usable open social ecosystem.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview

2025-01-05 23:35:16 UTC

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Now that I think about it, because the pivotal issue in this example is that the differential equation is a non-Lipshitz function of the dynamical variable (position here), in E&M the analogous situation would probably involve a non-linear medium, so now I'm even more curious if @npub1l0c…kzlu may know of some such example.

2025-01-05 16:24:30 UTC

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Hey, for myself if they all turn out to be actual words and it's approximately grammatical, I count it as a win.

2025-01-05 15:57:20 UTC

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12:17 -- "I'm feeling like arguing with you a lot," and there's the other danger of doing a podcast with your spouse, I guess. 😅

2025-01-05 15:54:34 UTC

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11:00 -- I also immediately assumed we were talking about a mouse as in the biological organism, not the computer input device.

2025-01-05 15:51:42 UTC

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09:40 -- "Can I feel safe and secure going on a hike with you on vacation?" Having both knee and back problems these days, boy do I relate to that sentiment. I can say from experience that being on an alpine peak with a thunder storm quickly rolling in is not when you want your knee to suddenly stop working right.

2025-01-05 15:34:50 UTC

02:51 -- Sounds like it as a positive experience, but I'm not sure a New Years party where you workshop New Years resolutions sounds like fun to me. The very concept makes me feel self-conscious.

2024-11-22 14:27:11 UTC

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No, from the perspective of the second observer the first never disappears. You can see this by taking the above conformal diagram and drawing two timelike world lines that cross the event horizon and end at the singularity. If you then draw a set of outward-pointed light rays (moving up and to the right at 45°) from events on the first world line, you will see they continue to intersect the second. However, also note that the image that the second observer receives just before crossing the event horizon is of light the first observer emitted just before crossing the event horizon.
It's also worth noting that technically even for a stationary observer an in-falling object never disappears, it just appears to gets dimmer, slower, and more redshifted as it approaches the event horizon (until it becomes imperceptibly dim as an effectively frozen image at the event horizon).

2024-11-22 03:02:06 UTC

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But presumably @npub1glg…tqzy's statement that "you'd see the horizon as a black surface coming at you" is true at some level, because what you see in the distance is not only a function of local spacetime (unless you're inside an enclosure, which is the usual conceit of equivalence principle thought experiments).

2024-09-21 21:54:48 UTC

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I remember the early, largely ad-free web. It was cool, but much, much smaller, and only of limited practical use. And it was an experiment, while people tried to learn how it could be used and how to make money off of it. It was never a sustainable state. Likewise, the current situation on Mastodon is not a sustainable state. It takes money to keep a site online, and people who work on them or produce the content they host have to eat. A vibrant web cannot exist without some way for people to get paid.
The vast majority of the browser market runs on WebKit and Blink, so if Google and Apple come to some mutually agreeable arrangement, they can force pretty much whatever they want on the rest of us. That's precisely why we need a resurgent #Firefox or other 3rd rendering engine.
I understand you seem to think that no one is willing to put up with ads in any form, but I think you may be over-generalizing your own attitudes. People widely use Google services (including Chrome and Android) and commercial social media sites, which are well known to make all their money off advertising and surveillance. Free apps (which necessarily make money primarily off advertising and surveillance) dominate mobile app stores. I might like to live in a world where most normal people won't put up with advertising (because that's my own attitude), but we simply don't live in that world.
Subscriptions can work for some very popular/large site or niche sites with a very committed audience, but they don't work for sites in general because there are too many. That would only potentially work with a functional micropayments infrastructure that does not exist. It's also debatable whether it's working for news sites, at least in the US, other than the few largest outlets.
It seems like your solution is to let the open web diminish to a shadow of its former self, starved of resources. I agree that's an option, but I'm not sure it's a desirable one. But, in any case, I think it's clear that won't be the position of people making a web browser, so then it is rational for them to seek some form of privacy-preserving advertising as an alternative, and it doesn't make sense for people to vilify them for that (as I've seen here and elsewhere); they're just trying to explore one of the few open avenues for a vibrant open web to continue. It might not work in the end, but it's a reasonable thing to try.

2024-09-21 19:49:43 UTC

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As you can see in my post to which you're replying, I don't like online advertising and I think it's bad for that to the the basis of funding the web, so there's no point arguing about that, because we already agree there. However, what I'm saying is that it *is* the current financial basis of the web, and changing that won't be accomplished tomorrow or even next year.
So long as advertising is the life blood of the web, it won't really matter if we like it. We will either have to accept it in some form or kill the open web (by either driving sites to close or driving them to make most of their content available only via propriety app). Meanwhile Google is flirting with integrating features into the browser that will effectively allow websites to prevent ad blocking.
For the time being, a small minority can use effective ad blocking and privacy tools, so long as it's not enough to really hurt revenues. But if it remains a small minority then web technology can change to make it untenable, and if it becomes a larger proportion of people then sites will basically have to fight back against losing all their revenue, which won't result in any better outcome.
So the only sustainable path is to offer another option, which is what #Mozilla is trying to do. Maybe that option isn't the right one, but I think they're correct to try something in that area.
While I'm not crazy about crypto, one thing I liked about the idea of BAT in Brave is that it would naturally create the option of micropayments to sites in instead of having to get ads, so it could theoretically create more privacy-respecting ads and also a path away from ad-based revenue. Unfortunately websites didn't seem to pick up integration (to get the payments), Brave turned out to maybe not be all that trustworthy, and Brave is based on Google's rendering engine so it still allows Google a lot of de facto power over web standards.

2024-09-20 16:39:04 UTC

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I think the argument is even stronger for Mozilla's foray into privacy preserving advertising. The reality is that the current Internet runs on advertising dollars. I think that's bad, and I would like that to change, but if it's possible to change that it will be difficult and take a fair amount of time. In the interim, you can just block or evade advertising if you have a tiny sliver of the browser market, but if you have any significant share then doing so will essentially put you in a battle with every site your users want to visit. Either sites will work poorly on your browser (because they're trying fight your features), or you'll kill the sites your users are using (by starving them of revenue).
That means you have to find some less-privacy-invasive, near-term solution to the advertising funding problem as a bridge to the future. Brave already tried this with their BAT system, but it hasn't really seemed (to me) to go anywhere. Mozilla is making another run at it. I don't know if their solution will be a good one, but it needs to be tried. We cannot grow a significant alternative browser ecosystem by starving site of revenue; that only works for niche browsers.
And doing this work might also put Mozilla in a good position to offer an alternative to advertising-based revenue, just as Brave was trying to do with BAT.

2024-09-20 16:36:18 UTC

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A lot of people think generative AI will transform every aspect of computing in the near future. I don't really buy that personally, but I do think it will remain significant for certain use cases, so facilitating integration with generative AI models and experimenting with local models for privacy is not unreasonable.

2024-09-20 16:35:53 UTC

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For #Firefox to be sustainable as a meaningful alternative, they need to grow their browser market share (or at least the market share of gecko-based browsers) and diversify their income stream, and so it is probably true that #Mozilla needs to try some somewhat radical things now (while they still have a bunch of Google cash to use). While I won't defend the ways in which they're rolling them out, their efforts to integrate generative AI and privacy-preserving ad tech make a lot of sense in that light.

2024-09-20 15:06:00 UTC

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I only watched a brief snippet, but I think this video illustrates essentially what [@j_bertolotti](https://mathstodon.xyz/@j_bertolotti ) was describing (how the reflection from each point on the mirror combines to give the angle of reflection):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3levs4TzTA

2024-09-17 22:06:48 UTC

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I will say that many of the replies in that thread on the Mozilla instance plans to shutdown are pretty toxic, and that seems to be a pretty frequent phenomenon for their posts, so I can imagine that might have dampened their enthusiasm.
It's not that I expect people to agree with all their actions or give them nothing but positive feedback, but often the replies are not even looking for dialog and start by assuming bad faith; that's not the sort of thing you can productively engage with.

2024-09-17 22:01:03 UTC

I'm sad to see this. I was really hoping that Mozilla would try to make this a part of their long-term strategy.
Generally I think that even for organizations that are sympathetic to Mastodon's aims, running accounts, let alone an instance, is a hard sell in terms of ROI. Even large and well-funded organizations are reasonable to use the funds they allocate for social media outreach where they will be most effective. So I'm generally understanding of organizations focusing their efforts elsewhere, as much as I wish that they had a Mastodon presence.
But it does seem like the Fediverse is more closely aligned with Mozilla's putative strategic goals than is true for most organizations, which was evident in what they said about their reasons for starting an instance. So it does strike me as an odd and troubling change in direction that they are shutting down the instance for which there was so much initial fanfare.
QT: https://mozilla.social/@mozilla/113153943609185249
#note1a94…9dp5

2024-09-06 02:11:17 UTC

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That's true, but as referred to elsewhere in this thread, cooling would be the real killer. Cooling is very difficult without air or water with which to exchange heat, and it's always a significant design factor for spacecraft. An AI data center creates a LOT of heat.

2024-09-05 23:00:13 UTC

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I guess I was assuming that FHE was still far from being practical (having not followed this topic much). Are you talking about something plausibly useful for some practical purpose or more of a proof of concept?
OTOH, I guess the real killer app for crypto would be if it could provide confidentiality and proof of work all at once. 😜

2024-09-03 15:48:16 UTC

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Do I take it correctly that that's mostly focused on privacy (tracking/spyware) and not intrusion or other aspects of #malware ?

2024-08-31 20:48:59 UTC

A #security question for #infosec folks: Is it advisable for the typical user to use a continuously running antivirus/anti-malware software package on MacOS? (I'll put a poll but I'm even more interested if anyone is willing to elaborate or point to informative articles on the topic.)