The thing already is a markdown renderer and every single markdown renderer I encountered supports maths within $ delimiters.

This is the only way you could make me care about the Simulation Hypothesis, if it runs on a spreadsheet then I will make it my life's mission to break out just to yell at them for being terrible at engineering and replace them with a small shell script

That's the closest you'll ever get to an admission from a corporate mouthpiece though.

Storing a message in a system doesn’t make new microstates. How could it?

Lol I got so tripped up by him later saying "this is no longer clearly 0 or 1 so it doesn't exist" and decreasing N that I missed he does the reverse thing when encoding the message.

This is like the ontological argument. He creates a virtual entity from words alone and then treats it as a physical thing storing energy. And then once it no longer fits the words of the definition, poof, gone it is, oh look, total entropy decreased.

We have to consider probabilities, not just for where the pieces are, but also for how they are moving.

I completely omit that because, well, it's hard, but also I don't think it's necessary here. This approach doesn't work even if you consider only positions and assume uniformly random momentum. It doesn't work even if the microstate is "is this pixel more red or more blue" in the paper's experiment!

But thank you for the comment, I'm glad I didn't completely butcher entropy with my weird nonrigorous internal model I developed based PBS Space Time videos lol

but you aren’t quite right about some of the details.

I'd be happy to be corrected.

This isn’t too outlandish, and modern studies of quantum mechanics suggest that information is a conserved quantity,

I hope I didn't pass it as if it was completely out there, that information has to have some physical properties and energy as a carrier is a very reasonable hypothesis. The Landauer principle is not that controversial, I'm sad I'm too stupid to actually understand the discussion around it on any reasonable level lol

Oh, it’s worse than “outlandish”. It’s nonsensical. He’s basically operating at a level of “there’s an E in this formula and an E in this other formula, so I will set them equal and declare it revolutionary new physics”.

I meant the experiment itself. Like it looks like something you could try and do and measure and get an actual answer?

You know, you can just click on the link in the article to watch the ad it talks about

Radical thought, maybe read the article?

This is twenty percent logic, ten percent myope

Fifteen percent concentrated power of cope

Five percent incel, fifty percent lame

And a hundred percent reason to forget his name

The fall from grace of StackOverflow is something both mesmerising and horrifying.

An invaluable repository of programming knowledge ground into dust as the last tokens of good will are cashed in for stinky money. It was a unique place, where self-moderation by the community actually worked to a large extent.

How the fuck did we get here? First the AI debacle, now this. Joel Spolsky always appeared as a reasonable guy, I wonder how much him stepping down is intertwined with SO making some of the worst possible calls in the past few years.

I'm really tickled by the fact that we can't fully automate trains yet. I never thought about it, but put into perspective how asinine self-driving cars are if we can't achieve the same thing with a train, something that is vastly more tractable and less chaotic than road traffic.