solrize

I've lived there and liked it. More open than NY with less BS than the west coast. Food was fine but I'm even less of a foodie now than back then.

Currently known forces splitting at low energies, and hidden 5th force: nobody knows. Physics is an observational science and right now there aren't any observations that suggest such forces, but never say never.

Star wars force: come on, it's fiction.

Gravity incompatible with QM: basically, quantum field theories are developed by starting with classical field theories (say electromagnetism) and doing some mathematical transformations called "canonical quantization" and "second quantization" (these have wikipedia articles). In the 1920s through mid-1940s this worked well for electromagnetism, and made good predictions except it broke down at very small scales, giving "infinity" as the answer to calculations that should have been finite. In the late 1940s a scheme called renormalization was developed, that allowed cancelling out the infinities and getting very precise answers. That was called quantum electrodynamics (QED). Later this was extended to the strong and weak nuclear forces, giving the standard model (SM). That was harder, but same basic idea.

The trouble with gravity is that when you perform quantization and then renormalization, the infinities still don't go away. That's what the incompatibility means. There are a lot of alternate proposals like string theory to quantize gravity, but it's all very speculative for now.

As for detecting gravity waves but not gravitons, it's similar to the situation with visible light. As far back as the 1700s(?) it was possible to combine light beams and see interference patterns, thus confirming the existence of light waves. Light "particles" (photons) are much harder to detect and I think this was first done convincingly by Einstein's explanation of Brownian motion around 1900 (before relativity). Current gravity wave detection works by measuring interference, if I understand correctly.

Disclaimer: I'm no expert and I haven't made any progress in understanding this stuff beyond the handwaving level that you see above.

Added: you might like John Baez's videos about the standard model, https://www.youtube.com/@johncarlosbaez_edinburgh

There are some suggestions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38879188

Here too: https://github.com/zepingyu0512/awesome-llm-understanding-mechanism

As for intelligence, that's complicated. I can't find the URL I want right now but maybe later.

They'll come after California and other US states next. Should be interesting.

Stack exchange?

Magnatune still exists but they want you to buy a one time all you can eat membership.

I cared about audio more as an inexperienced listener than I do now that I can play stuff in my head.

I mean that's a real picture or pretty close, so I'm missing something.

It means they look like this:

"The FCC this week released its latest totals. There were 4,730 licensed noncoms or “educational FMs” at the end of September,"

Yeah college stations usually just want local coverage. I don't think non-commercial AM has ever been much of a thing. Among other things AM likely costs more to operate because of the higher transmit power required. Also, FM is better for music because of better audio. AM is fine for news, traffic.

Not privacy and tbh kind of creepy.