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

relay.nostr.band

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 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 02:29:00 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.

2025-01-16 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 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 )

2025-01-05 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. 😅

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).

2024-09-20 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

2024-09-06 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.

2024-09-03 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.)