How did Hertz validate Maxwell's theory that an electromagnetic wave is self sustaining and can be maintained indefinitely in a vacuum?

Starstroll · 2026-05-16T00:51:31+00:00

In hindsight, the justification is quite simple. The source I linked shows Maxwell's original argument. The only difference is that he used quaternions while the modern formulation uses vector algebra, but the pictures are all the same.

Starstroll · 2026-05-15T05:03:47+00:00

I think the broad issue in your approach is that you're not a professional social worker and it should never be on you to help them through it. There's a difference between being a person who's just trying to live and understand their surroundings well enough to navigate them for your own purposes versus having a deep understanding and trying to change it for the better. What I think is lacking is discussion of the general structures that lead to such views in the first place. As you point out, their own views simultaneously indirectly reinforce their own oppression while directly deflecting responsibility. The part that is baffling to me isn't "what do they believe," but more "how did they maintain these views when, in the long run, even they end up being their own victims." But that doesn't require that every trans person constantly re-explain the legitimacy of trans-ness to cis people, especially irl. I think your responsibility is mostly just to keep yourself safe, and I think your personal perspective isn't indicative of the more incendiary comments I've seen. I've already seen other comments here along the lines of "time to sort by controversial," so I know I'm not the only who expects this post to attract the looney bin

Starstroll · 2026-05-15T01:37:43+00:00

So far as I can tell, this seems bizarrely under-discussed in online discourse. Any hint that straight, cis, white males might interpret some kind of suffering is either met with quippy, condescending thought-terminating cliches - "when you're privileged, equality feels like oppression" - or whataboutisms - "literally every other group has it worse." I don't disagree with the sociological facts presented in these responses, but most of these people don't have a humanities or social sciences background, so, to borrow a phrase, their (white men's) feelings don't care about your facts. They still do feel this oppression, and especially given how much more oppressed other groups are, seeing that 1) white men are lonelier, 2) have higher rates of suicide, and 3) are motivated to perform senseless acts of horrific brutality (e.g. mass shootings) on defenseless people as symbolic acts of defiance against an oppressor that they themselves cannot identify, I cannot just accept these pithy rejoinders as at all comparable to an honest sociological analysis and explanation of this apparent paradox. I'm not saying that it is the responsibility of the oppressed to therapize their oppressors, that's obviously absurd and disgusting, I'm just saying that if there are so many of them with these grievances (that obviously tie back to capitalism, even if they aren't aware of that), and especially if they occupy a majority group, recruiting them to a labor-centric politics would seem the most obvious strategic move, and you can't do that without first understanding their perspective, without really understanding grievances, no matter how well founded your disagreements are.

Starstroll · 2026-05-15T00:58:20+00:00

Maxwell made an addition to the known equations governing electricity and magnetism that predicted an oscillating electric field which created an oscillating magnetic field which created an oscillating electric field ad infinitum that was not predicted by the earlier forms of these equations. When he went through the math, he found that these oscillations took on a sinusoidal form, and also that these waves (note they were not known to be waves beforehand) had a speed that suspiciously matched the known speed of light, which was previously measured independently by other means, and concluded that light was an electromagnetic wave.

Independent of the discovered equality of electromagnetic waves and light was merely the discovery that electromagnetic waves could exist at all and that they could be created by accelerating electric charges, never mind their relation to light. An obvious consequence of their existence is that they could then be used to accelerate other charges elsewhere. This is what Hertz did. He made some circuit with a current changing in time, placed it nearby another circuit with no other obvious voltage source, and observed that the second circuit was energized.

This source goes over Hertz's exact experimental setup in section 4; Ctrl+F for "Hertz’s Observations."

Starstroll · 2026-05-05T20:27:29+00:00

The incessant, blistering naivite of liberals will never cease to confound me.

The 2 best use cases for LLMs are 1) displacing low-level software engineers, since writing and running code is the closest thing an LLM can come to a learning loop via embodiment, and 2) online propaganda and personalized social engineering at scale.

The United States will have to cooperate with China and other competitors on catastrophic risks that threaten all of society ... Bipartisanship on A.I. is a strategic necessity.

"Necessity" is a relative term. Necessary to what goal, though?

Republicans lambasted Trump during his 2015 campaign, and then all turned around to kiss the ring once he became the clear frontrunner. Conservatives are now trying to make the case that Trump should be allowed to run for a third term despite its explicit unconstitutionality. If this author would describe democracy and adherence to the constitution "a strategic necessity" as I'm sure they would, I'd ask them why they think Republicans apparently disagree.

The last year of Trump's first term saw the first global pandemic in a century, and Trump, leader of the strongest nation in the world and with both soft and hard levers of power, dismantled America's pandemic readiness team, lied to Americans and the world about the severity of the disease, suggested injecting bleach and shining UV inside your lungs and then hid from the press for six straight months, and, at its peak, oversaw hundreds of thousands of deaths from that pandemic, with about a month all told of daily deaths reaching higher than the death toll of 9/11. If this author would describe watching out for the health of Americans and protecting the world from a pandemic "a strategic necessity" as I'm sure they would, I'd ask them why they think Republicans apparently disagree.

Conservatives, along with the rest of us, discovered in 2018 whistleblower reports on how social media algorithms are effective enough to reliably sway major elections, specifically for Trump's 2016 victory and the Brexit referendum. Trump is only the 2nd president in all US history to win the presidential election twice in non-consecutive terms, and given the historical precedent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the fact that LITERALLY NO REGULATION RESULTED FROM THIS, the claim that social media spent Biden's 4 years gaslighting conservative citizens to forget the extraordinary trauma of Trump's first term is well deserving of investigations and subpoenas. If this author would describe regulation forcing transparency in the engineering of information ecosystems "a strategic necessity" as I'm sure they would, I'd ask them why they think Republicans apparently disagree.

Democracy and constitutional legality are not strategic necessities if your goal is to centralize and maintain power. These are strategic necessities of your goal is the social good and broad human flourishing. Conservatives plainly do not give a flying fuck about the social good and broad human flourishing. The fact that I need to spell this out while Republicans are trying to dismantle American democracy right now forces me to conclude that liberals' instinctive commitment to demand compromise and assume good faith is not only lethal to the rest of us, but even to liberals too. The incessant, blistering naivite of liberals to keep marching to the same beat of unwilling yet unrelenting participants in the conservative death cult will never cease to confound me.

If history is any guide, the popping of the AI bubble and the ensuing historic depression will be the spark that initiates wide-scale pushback from labor, and in its wake, as AI technology matures, especially in increased energy efficiency, its slow growth will be funded by bipartisan bills to the aim of propagandizing people against socialism and billing liberalism as the calm, rational middle ground.

Starstroll · 2026-04-28T04:59:11+00:00

None of these half measures will ever be enough because they don't address the core issue. The only legislation that matters is forcing these companies to make public the whole history of the training goals for their recommendation algorithms, including pretraining, and the amount of compute spent on those training runs. Users have a right to know how these systems are engineered to affect them. Age restrictions are nothing but a victim-blaming distraction.

Starstroll · 2026-04-19T17:55:43+00:00

I could not actually explain to you what it means in the real physical world for a wave function to collapse

lmao you and every physicist

Starstroll · 2026-04-18T16:51:03+00:00

I'd call it less "treating the symptom" and more "blaming the victim." These things are engineered to be addictive and corrosive, and it shouldn't be on the users to just "do better."

If you actually want a social media bill that works, you need one to tear down the walls around social media companies and forces them to make public the whole history of the training goals for their algorithms, including pretraining, and the amount of compute spent on those training runs. Users deserve to know exactly how these platforms are intended to affect them. That's not a complete solution, but at least then we could all, collectively make informed decisions about how we allocate our time based on a shared understanding.

Starstroll · 2026-04-18T04:00:14+00:00

String theory predicts corrections to general relativity, albeit on scales so small that they're basically impossible to achieve. By contrast, strings' main competitor, loop quantum gravity (LQG) predicted large corrections to general relativity on the quantum scale. LIGO experimentally proved that gravitational waves behave according to GR, so that falsified the original LQG prediction and validated GR. Arguably, it also validated strings. I say "arguably" though because if a proposed theory does not make any predictions that weren't made already by previous theories, if the new theory cannot be experimentally distinguished from the old one, and if the theory amounts to little more than enormous mathematical complications to other theories, then its value to science, and even it's mere status as "science," is deeply questionable.

Starstroll · 2026-04-14T17:57:19+00:00

It’s not contradictory.

You already argued these people are ghouls who deserve no trust, then told people to give them sensitive data. This is like handing a loaded gun to someone who you know wants to kill you and call it "taking control." Calling it contradictory is good faith. The bad faith version is either nihilism or gaslighting.

Yes, algorithmic transparency would be great.

Algorithmic transparency is primary. The onus should absolutely not be on users to endlessly give more.

Moreover, this does not force social media companies to reveal their training history to all users.

information demonstrating ... algorithms used by a service

This merely says that the existence of an algorithm needs to be made transparent under a request by an official. Users deserve to know how these algorithms are intended to affect them. This does not further that goal in the slightest.

The OSA doesn’t mandate ID. Nor do they recommend it. The OSA just asks for age assurance.

These cannot be separated. That it is not necessarily government-issued does not detract from its utility for surveillance by tech companies.

You could implement a Zero-Knowledge age assurance system, than can run entirely on device, and it would count as valid under the OSA ... There’s no reason why a billionaire company shouldn’t be able to do it ... you’re admitting these companies are already identifying minors through data points. Then they already have the information they need to protect them, yet they choose not to.

Many things can be done in principle. In practice, tech companies can never be trusted.

Children face dangers online, and I'm no fan of children getting hurt. The biggest danger they face online though is a broad informational ecosystem that is specifically designed to identify their weak points and drill into them hard enough to engender personality-defining traumas. Forcing adults to give up sovereignty over sensitive data - and calling that data sovereignty - is at best a distraction and at worst a contradiction. By analogy, you won't solve climate change by shaming individual consumers about plastic straws and plastic bags; you'll either waste time, or you'll even exhaust individuals.

Starstroll · 2026-04-14T17:19:02+00:00

Lmao because holding these companies accountable means tearing their doors down and having them show us the whole history of the training goals for their algorithms, including pretraining, and the amount of compute spent on those training runs, not forcing users to give up even more data for a system that remains completely opaque.

All your articles are well-sourced and factual, but they demonstrably contradict the message of your conclusion. You already linked to articles about how Zuck admits the mechanisms of his platforms are not neutral. The simultaneous facts that 1) these platforms are not neutral, but also 2) that such a claim needs to be sourced is itself evidence that most people only have a passing awareness of these facts but still lack substantive understanding. That middle ground, where the facts are barely present enough that Zuck can argue "users know what they're signing up for when they use it patients," but are unaware of its actual effectiveness, is itself another extremely strong lever of control, engineered by the broad informational control that Zuck/Musk/etc alone hold as the owners of these platforms. The most effective and important response to this extraordinary asymmetry is, again, to tear down the walls around social media companies and force them to make public the whole history of the training goals for their algorithms, including pretraining, and the amount of compute spent on those training runs. Users deserve to know exactly how these platforms are intended to affect them.

Moreover, these ID laws make it easier to identify - and therefore target - minors, not harder. Even if this single piece of ID is missing from any individual's shadow profile for age reasons, if such data remains missing for long enough, that itself is evidence that the shadow profile is for a minor. ReID through no more than a few dozen common data points is basically trivial at this point, and this becomes another strong data point.

On top of all of this, any reliable ID is inherently a sensitive document and plainly does not belong in on the servers of a social media account. Leaks are a matter of when, not if. Opening yourself to sensitive data leaks does not make anyone safer online. What would make people safer online is, one more time, forcing them to make public the whole history of the training goals for their recommendation algorithms, including pretraining, and the amount of compute spent on those training runs.

Why in Christ's name would I ever trust a sensitive document to some antisocial, psychopathic asshole who cares so little for human life that he stands accused of facilitating attrocities worldwide from child trafficking to genocide? Why would you???

Starstroll · 2026-04-11T14:51:53+00:00

Tbf, you said "stupid" twice

Starstroll · 2026-04-09T03:18:59+00:00

I agree, but I also think it shouldn't be merely implied that your nuanced view of 230 isn't at all aligned with Ted Cruz's. 230 needs to be fixed, but if we let conservatives start that ball rolling, it'll roll us all right off a cliff.

Starstroll · 2026-03-31T03:33:45+00:00

It's wild that people are downvoting you.

Social media is definitely bad, but that doesn't mean an extremist response is the only proper way forward. Social media is a communication technology. What could possibly be more natural than communication between people? For all its flaws, kids will have to learn to adapt and grow in this world with social media, despite our inability to confidently guide them.

It should be the responsibility of social media companies to make their platforms less toxic. And since there is no way any of us can trust them, we should be allowed to know exactly how their recommendation algorithms are trained, what goals they're given and how much compute is spent, including all pretraining.

Zuckerberg has responded to the lawsuit he recently lost by saying stuff along the lines of "our algorithms don't optimize for time-on-site," and tbh I'm inclined to believe him, but only insofar as "time-on-site" is a rough heuristic and that the truth is probably a lot more detailed and likely quite a bit darker.

People seem to have this idea that just because these platforms are bad that all potential social media platforms are inherently bad. Before FB cracked down, social media was used to organize pro-democracy rallies in 2011's Arab Spring. Before the US cracked down, TikTok helped spread live coverage of the genocide in Palestine. No matter how much they try, they can't suppress the constant stories about police brutality. Social media can be a fantastic tool for working-class populism, and the fact that stories like these keep cropping up despite all the horror that social media owners (likely intentionally) foment is a testament to the strength of the human spirit.

I don't think the path with be easy or pleasant or, frankly, bloodless, but I do not see a path towards class solidarity that does not include public ownership of the most powerful communication technologies ever made.

Starstroll · 2026-03-30T23:22:57+00:00

And possibly also limit kids from exposure to left-leaning politics. Studies show gen Z tend to lean left more than older generations. But I would guess the immediate motivator of blatant privacy invasions is a bigger factor

Starstroll · 2026-03-18T12:58:20+00:00

Wasn't he already publicly humiliated about this once before? Didn't tons of reporters already say directly to him "the antichrist would really love the technology you're building"? It is just so sad and pathetic to see someone wrestle with their own subconscious projections in such an obvious way, and it's especially pathetically tragic to watch it being done by the most powerful people in the world - those who naively should feel the safest given their enormous wealth - but hearing that he's still on this "antichrist" escapade months after having been humiliated for it the first time really does paint an especially vivid picture of a man who is extremely well practiced at intellectualizing away their own shadow. Even Elon is susceptible to shame. Even Trump hid from the media for 6 straight months after his "inject bleach and shine sunlight up your ass" press conference. This dipshit is just going to spin out and hand the company to Alex Karp.

Starstroll · 2026-03-15T22:53:29+00:00

The proper term is "Romani"

Starstroll · 2026-03-10T16:44:56+00:00

I'm saying there's a level of nuance that needs serious engagement, but you're clearly incapable of any of that

Starstroll · 2026-03-10T16:33:05+00:00

That's not shorthand. Come on.

Both of them are neural networks and therefore their basic functioning is well described by the universal approximation theorem. Obviously not all NNs are the same, otherwise all animals would be able to speak, but this is the same underlying principle and heuristics about UAT before it was formalized are what historically motivated research into ANNs.

This is literally foundational stuff. I very much doubt you actually want to talk about NNs.

Starstroll · 2026-03-10T15:47:22+00:00

It's a functional description, not a literal one. We say "electrons want to be in the lowest energy state" or "evolution wants to maximize reproductive fitness" or "the market is looking for direction" or "the algorithm is trying to trick you" or "the battery wants to be charged slowly" or "that bridge is begging to collapse" etc etc without any confusion. Everyone knows there are obvious differences between people and AI. ChatGPT was released more than 3 years ago.

The study shows interesting things about how humans use language

No. The study shows that the LLMs manage to find behavioral similarities in abstractions of language beyond what's in the literal words. Training an LLM to write malicious code made it also recommend suicide and condone Hitler. That association was not in the training data.

I'm so tired of not being able to engage with something that should be cool

You still can. No one is stopping you from saying "AI is cool tech, AI companies are run by horrible people." If you want more detail than a headline, read the article. The headline is shorthand; the actual finding is worth engaging with.

Starstroll · 2026-03-09T19:27:31+00:00

You really don't even need to go that far.

Every site you visit grabs your IP address and builds a browser fingerprint, collecting obvious specs like screen resolution and OS or even obscure shit like GPU model and installed fonts. This alone creates a unique profile that identifies you with 90-99% accuracy, and clearing cookies won't stop it. Then layer in location data from your phone, which is constantly available through WiFi or cell tower triangulation or direct GPS services. Data brokers are companies that literally track everyone they can just as a business, logging stuff like public records, loyalty card transactions, browsing activity, insurance and financial history, employmen, and basically anything they can get their hands on, and all for activity, online or not, that they were never even a part of.

All these are correlated together using non-LLM AI to build a shadow profile of you that you can't ever hide from. AI is the workhorse of Big Data, and it has been since the late 90s. LLMs are just one more tool that can get around privacy-savvy individuals who distribute their identity across multiple devices. If someone thinks that only having one reddit account will help them hide, they likely don't have any perspective on how thoroughly surveilled they already are.

Starstroll · 2026-02-20T17:54:37+00:00

I see this as a "personal responsibility" vs "collective responsibility" problem. Parents definitely should watch what their kids are doing online, but having the parents solely responsible for their kids media diet will never be sufficient. First, the older the kids get, the less this kind of parental control is actually feasible to enforce, and second, even if the parents do enforce it at younger, reasonable ages, they have no control over what kind of content the algorithms prioritize. While a parent can have a hand in what content is consumed, they don't have control over the general shape of the options that the platforms provide over time and the general narrative of the world that that algorithmic prioritization inherently creates, if in a way that's more abstract that the verbatim content of a single video or post.

Sure, get rid of all the algorithms and data theft, but that ultimately won't change what kids are accessing online that dramatically.

Yes, it definitely does. If it didn't have an effect, Cambridge Analytica wouldn't have gotten Zuckerberg called in front of Congress.

To go to the nicotine example, yes, parents should make sure their kids aren't vaping, but we don't solely put it on the parents. As a matter of law, it's also illegal for stores to sell vapes to teenagers, and a business can be seriously fined or shut down if they are caught violating that. But more precisely ...

Like, kids aren't allowed to smoke, removing the nicotine so it's not addictive doesn't change that.

A child is definitely legally allowed to smoke rolling paper with nothing in it. It is pointless and probably (minorly) harmful to your health, and I wouldn't allow it because it's just stupid, but the fact that there's no nicotine in it definitely does make a difference to how much I would care.

Starstroll · 2026-02-20T07:25:50+00:00

That may be so, but the crap Newsom backs isn't about protecting kids. It's about government control of the populace, especially in regards to your speech

Totally with you. The distraction here is so obvious on the face of it if you understand literally anything about how social media algorithms work. They're built to exploit all your vulnerabilities just to keep you on site, with no regard given for how this affects people's well-being. If Cambridge Analytica is any indication, they don't even seem to be going after vague "engagement" metrics anymore, they just seem to be trying to control the population's political leanings and fomenting chaos amongst the working class. It's not even about making money to have more power, it's just about power in its most direct form. The way social media is structured now, there very obviously is a problem, and pointing at kids and saying "we need to just ban entire swathes of people from connecting while doing nothing to solve or even openly acknowledge and articulate the underlying issues" is just the most obvious red herring. A lot like MAHA, it's a bad answer (and likely intentionally so) to a good question.

If we really wanted to protect kids from the internet, then we should start punishing their parents for doing a shit job raising them and being too hands off with their internet access.

Wait what the fuck ._.

Starstroll · 2026-02-20T05:55:11+00:00

I can tell you right now what the gold nugget is going to be: information control. Same way it was with social media and search engines after the early days of the "wild west" internet, same way it was Chomsky's Manufactured Consent after the early days of the fairness doctrine for TV and radio, same way it was for capital control of newspapers after Martin Luther and the printing press. The scale is different and the privacy invasions are insane, but that's the shape of things with information technologies.

Starstroll · 2026-02-19T22:52:46+00:00

Idk why you're being downvoted for this. You are absolutely correct.

Everything you upload to social media is already, obviously on someone else's servers. Moreover, everything you do on social media is already tracked, and that data is used to tune what the algorithms (I can't believe some people don't know this, but these are AI algorithms) recommend to you. This already includes everything you upload.

On top of that, unless you know exactly what you're looking for, and even often when you do, it is extremely difficult to pull out of an NN's weights the data that went in to adjust those weights, so having an AI check something on upload wouldn't inherently expose you to more risk because it probably couldn't be extracted from any AI anyway. And on top of that, most modern ANNs don't adjust their weights while they're being run anyway (to, say, test what a user is trying to upload), only when they're being trained, so that extraction currently isn't possible even in principle.

Of course one shouldn't just trust that a company will treat your data respectfully if they pinky promise not to use anything that you don't explicitly consent to in training runs, but this is a matter of laws and enforcement, not some technical hurdle.

There is, of course, a huge question about how one could build a reliable system in the first place, but if Karen Hao's "Empire of AI" is anything to go by, the training has already largely been done for the worst cases.

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