This is speculation, the parent replied with statistics.

Once I realized that I could use gillespie's algorithm to model a basketball game, I felt like I was 'trading on the inside'.

As expected, $1.50 in late fees at the public library provide much greater value than paying for anything I've read on substack.

Well, yeah, but that seems like a vacuous observation to me. In order to find solutions to the SE you have to know the initial conditions. How are you going to obtain those for an isolated system? You haven't solved the problem, you have just pushed it backwards in time.

Thermalization (excluding systems which exhibit many body localization and the like) will occur regardless of initial conditions.

That is manifestly untrue because the SE is time-reversible. That is the whole problem.

Yes, and at the same time, the statistics of the system can still satisfy thermalization.

You are going to let him choose his own hairstyle.

Toddlers don't have that level of agency.

I would say that Toddlers are mostly not given agency.

Toddlers want things and they don't want other things. Their parents don't permit much agency, because.

I'm probably agreeing with you but I wasn't sure of your implication.

Toddlers are 1-3 years old. Huge difference in agency between a 1 year old and a 3 year old. 1 year old can't dress themselves let alone make choices about dress.

I guess what I'm saying is that a 3 year old can sometimes pick out their clothes (sometimes they will hate the consequences). They can't really commit to long term decisions about what hairstyle they will want to live with for months, or manage the upkeep of the style they pick.

Yes. I will ask my 2 year old what hair styles he likes.

You could show them pictures.

The signal to noise at the union of QM and thermodynamics on HN is evidence of regression to the mean.

Why?

The comments on HN are always full of ostensibly deep quips or questions but the work to connect them to scientific or philosophical questions is absent. That's the part that doesn't scale.

So true, tale as old as time. Someone “raises doubts” based on partial knowledge of the subject, they go back and forth with someone, and then finally someone comes in with conversation-killing “what is consciousness anyways” type comment

It's categorically more than a weakness.

Choice is still there, just very expensive and very inconvenient.

Imposing such choices fuels political polarization, with increasingly evident consequences.

You can watch as it happens all around the world, but I am sure it won’t happen in Norway. /sarcasm

Deepseek is unique, but the US has consistently underestimated Chinese R&D, which is not a winning strategy in iterated games.

There seem to be a 100 fold uptick in jingoists in the last 3-4 years which makes my head hurt but I think there is no consistent "underestimation" in academic circles? I think I have read articles about the up and coming Chinese STEM for like 20 years.

Yes, for people in academia the trend is clear, but it seems that WallStreet didn't believe this was possible. They assume that spending more money is all you need to dominate technology. Wrong! Technology is about human potential. If you have less money but bigger investment in people you'll win the technological race.

I think Wall Street is in for surprise as they have been profiting from liquidating the inefficiency of worker trust and loyalty for quite some time now.

It think they think American engineering excellence was due to neoliberal inginuenity visavi the USSR, not the engineers and the transfer of academic legacy from generation to generation.

This is even more apparent when large tech corporations are, supposedly, in a big competition but at the same time firing thousands of developers and scientists. Are they interested in making progress or just reducing costs?

What does DeepSeek or really High Flyer do that is particularly exceptional regarding employees? HFT and other elite law or Hedge funds are known to have pretty zany benefits.

Whatever you think about the Chinese system, they educate hundreds of thousands of engineers and scientists every year. That's a fact.

Precisely. This is the view from the ivory tower.

That doesn't the calculus regarding the actions you would pick externally, in fact it only strengthens the point for increased tech restrictions and more funding.

I think this is just a(nother) canary for many other markets in the US v China game of monopoly. One weird effect in all this is that US Tech may go on to be over valued (i.e., disconnect from fundamentals) for quite some time.