Posts

John D. Norton - Claims that information is fundamental are mistaken: The thermodynamic myth at the heart of information theory

See his article published in IAI News on 10th July 2026. "Considerations of information and computing complicate thermodynamic analysis and contribute precisely nothing."  CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, has recently speculated that information might be as fundamental as mass and energy. As AI hype rolls on, many like him are increasingly tempted to apply computing principles to reality as a whole. Those who support this view rely on the idea that information has a thermodynamic cost, as proposed by physicist Leo Szilard.   See  Happy Birthday Raymond Solomonoff  (in particular 22:33  on how to get information from experiments) and  Mike McCulloch on Why Everyone Should Care About Quantized Intertia . I recently heard that the formalisation of the simplified Taylor/Wiles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem had been completed by Anthropic AI agents . I asked Google's AI how much energy this took and the estimate was of the order of one mil...

Mike McCulloch on Why Everyone Should Care About Quantized Intertia

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My comment : I care about QI, really I do. Mostly because if you're right then there's a whole lot of stuff I have completely misunderstood about physics! I don't mean that facetiously though, even though it probably sounds like that. I'll tell you why I don't get it and it's that the whole of physics basically depends upon the duality of symmetry laws and conversation laws, including everything we think we know about the visible universe and it's size and mass and whatnot, basically everything about Cosmology depends on Noether's principle , and Unruh radiation is, as far as I know (which is not very far at all!) a vacuum fluctuation affect which is precisely where our measurement precision fails to be able to pick out the ground state because basically there's nothing there to measure anymore, so all we see is the noise: the signal is gone. And this means that the conservation laws are gone and so the symmetry principles are thrown out as well. An...

Happy Birthday Raymond Solomonoff

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He was born July 25, 1926, a few days after Max Born sent his paper Zur Quantenmechanik der Stoßvorgänge for publication in the journal  Zeitschrift für Physik . 37:53 To my shame I never bothered to look up the proof of why Ackermann-Péter function A(m,n) is not Primitive Recursive. I guessed it would be something complicated arguing about how  A  is implicit in the recursion parameter, i.e. that you need higher-order primitive recursion to represent function exponentiation f^(A(m,n)) meaning the function f applied A(m,n) times, ... but it uses an argument about the size of the partial sums of successive terms, ....  See PlanetMath: Ackermann function is not primitive recursive . See also this ProofWiki proof which is the same. More interesting is Larry Paulson's Ackermann's Function in Iterative Form: A Proof Assistant Experiment  which he wrote whilst I was living in Chiapas, Mexico, begging at the traffic lights for my bus fare to Tijuana. 1:05:06 S...

Ally Berry on Atmospheric Rivers

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Here's her video on forest fires and water: She's really good. She did a summary of the Nepal disaster: Subscribe to AquaDiary Podcast .

Why Are People With Money So Fucking Stupid?

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16:45 On light pollution. Just because you can afford to buy a cheap LED floodlight doesn't mean you have the right to shine light all over the surrounding countryside all night, yes,  even if  you are you so stupid that you think it protects your business! See John Searle on the Logical Structure of Human Civilization . See also Ally Berry on Atmospheric Rivers . Subscribe to Symbiosys TX . Some of this is to make datacenters so assholes can pretend they're biologists: Subscribe to FUTO .

MSP Strathclyde Lecure - Conor McBride on Bi-directional Typing

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I've only seen 15 minutes of this but it looks like it's going to be a really great lecture. Who invented this stuff? (Thierry Coquand, Benjamin Pierce and David Turner, I think). Google suggests it was a bunch of people hacking on compilers in the 90s. It's funny how you can produce really pretty theories doing stuff like that, isn't it? It's as if there's a kind of implicit discipline of mechanism. There is a survey article here: Bidirectional Typing  by Jana Dunfield and Neel Krishnaswami. But note the remark at  1:02:35 . Maybe see 4.1. "Turning CCω Bidirectional" of Meven Lennon-Bertrand's PhD Thesis (2022): Bidirectional Typing for the Calculus of Inductive Constructions . I wonder if you can use this algorithm to derive custom type systems from programs, or is that too weird an idea?  See Girard, Lafont & Taylor's Proofs and Types , Section 3.3 on the significance of the Curry Howard Correspondence: This talk is a lot better than th...

Audrey Henson on What John Searle Would Call "The Epistemology of Human Civilization"

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It's not as bad as it sounds, if you're happy searching through megabytes of CSS definitions to find out who runs the State, ... See  Popper's Non-dualist Theory of Objective Knowledge  and John Searle on the Logical Structure of Human Civilization . The Drey Dossier .

Anton Petrov on The Carbon Cycle

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I don't think this would be a problem for intelligent life. The question is, ...  From May 2022: SwRI-led team finds younger exoplanets better candidates when looking for other Earths  and  Mantle Degassing Lifetimes through Galactic Time and the Maximum Age Stagnant-lid Rocky Exoplanets Can Support Temperate Climates  by Cayman T. Unterborn, Bradford J. Foley, Steven J. Desch, Patrick A. Young, Gregory Vance, Lee Chiffelle, and Stephen R. Kane. Subscribe to  Anton Petrov . 

Elle and Grace Talking About The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin

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Subscribe to  Elle Cordova . See also Toby's video about the maths  Toby Reviewing Books - Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past : Apparently I thought I understood some of this : 11:07 There's no violation of any facts , it's just that their entangled computers messed with our theorems, the first one being the no-communications one, ... that's really clever!😀  Our science would not be so hard to mess with! See Sheaf Theory, Probability and Topology .  Subscribe to Tibees .

Aksioma - Sheung Yiu: It’s a Face-eat-face World

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This was a really great event they held in Ljubljana in March this year. See Nina Davies - Synchronising With Images and Martyna Marciniak : Subscribe to Aksioma .