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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • There’s no real complexity. Computers are first and foremost electric space heaters, a negligible amount of energy is used to perform computation.

    If you would be heating a room with resistive electric heating, a computer drawing the same wattage can do the same job while also, in theory, doing some useful work.

    If you are just evaluating heating options, heat pumps use less energy to output the same heat.



  • enough men exhibit predatory behaviour to the extent that a decently large percentage of women fear the average man more than the average bear.

    Women should fear the average man far more than the average bear because they will almost certainly never encounter the average bear, but will encounter thousands of men.

    That said, the entire argument belies a deep misunderstanding of statistics. Many women, perhaps most women, have experienced trauma at the hands of men. Many men, perhaps most men, have not been perpetrators of that trauma. There is not a 1-1 relationship between victimized women and guilty men - there is a minority of men who negatively affect many women.

    The entire thing has become flamebait and it is impossible to have an actual discussion about it. The point is to start a conversation about how women feel unsafe in society - not to talk about bear attacks and incels.







  • The short answer is it depends.

    The long answer is that treaties and international law are pretty window dressing around the utterly anarchic reality of geopolitics. If states saw it as in their best interest to allow Poland to fall to Russia, they would allow it regardless of whatever treaties they previously signed.

    Article 5 provides that the alliance must support a member after an armed attack against them on their territory in Europe or North America. In plain reading, this would apply should Russia attack Polish soil regardless of who started the war. In reality, it really depends.

    No one (in the west) wants a ‘real’ war. War is a distraction from making money. If Poland expanded the war by joining in, I doubt they would receive the full support of the alliance.



  • With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.

    These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.

    An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.

    The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.

    The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.

    To make a crude concrete example:

    Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.

    Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.

    Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?

    One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.

    Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.





  • it’s not spontaneous

    Spontaneity in thermodynamics refers to a process which occurs without external application of energy. In your description, a pile of ash becoming an apple is spontaneous.

    So in a contained universe, it doesn’t matter if it’s an apple releasing energy and becoming a pile of ash, or a pile of ash absorbing energy and becoming a perfectly normal apple.

    The net energy is still conserved. Just going from energy to mass unlike mass to energy.

    There is no mass-energy conversion in an apple burning to become ash, just the release of chemical energy from newly-formed bonds.

    Regardless, conservation of energy is only one part of how the universe operates. The second operating principle is (or at least from hundreds of years of scientific inquiry appears to be) the maximization of entropy. That is the ‘spreading out’ of available energy. This is the reason iron rusts, rather than remaining oxygen and iron - conservation of energy alone cannot explain natural phenomena.

    Spontaneous reconstruction of an ashed apple violates the second law of thermodynamics, and the Second law is no less valid than the First.

    Lastly, I was not writing specifically about Penrose’s views on consciousness. His entire theory that gravity is driving the collapse of a wave function, and that said collapse occurs retroactively, is untested and based on an appeal to elegance. This does not make it wrong, but it most certainly should not be taken as true.




  • Explaining what happens in a neural net is trivial. All they do is approximate (generally) nonlinear functions with a long series of multiplications and some rectification operations.

    That isn’t the hard part, you can track all of the math at each step.

    The hard part is stating a simple explanation for the semantic meaning of each operation.

    When a human solves a problem, we like to think that it occurs in discrete steps with simple goals: “First I will draw a diagram and put in the known information, then I will write the governing equations, then simplify them for the physics of the problem”, and so on.

    Neural nets don’t appear to solve problems that way, each atomic operation does not have that semantic meaning. That is the root of all the reporting about how they are such ‘black boxes’ and researchers ‘don’t understand’ how they work.