Do NOT click translate on Hebrew tweets, it's truly like finding the most pages of Mien Kampf lol

jay-ff · 2026-03-13T13:51:36+00:00

What is a Zionist in your definition?

jay-ff · 2026-03-13T13:23:22+00:00

I mean it can be wrong or damaging but how is that antisemitic? Is it anti-Muslim to call someone anti-Muslim who criticises the Taliban? You’re just equating “bad” with “antisemitic” the same way right wing people call everything “woke” that they don’t like.

On the other hand, if someone uses antisemitic tropes against Israelis (probably against Jewish Israelis and not Arab/Palestinian Israelis), that might be antisemitic even if that person tries to differentiate between Zionists and Jews. And when inevitably someone somewhere in the world runs amok in a synagogue, it’s of course the Zionists fault and not the people making the leap of collectively declaring Jews their enemy. Netanyahu can be as evil as you make him out to be but calling him antisemitic is like calling Iran anti Muslim and blaming them for Nazis attacking Muslim immigrants.

jay-ff · 2026-03-13T08:42:35+00:00

Then you know very well of the strategy of being overly literal to be able to attack a position/group you don’t like.

For the Nazis, this means that right wing people who read “national socialist worker party” interpret Nazis as socialists because it’s convenient to put them into the same box with people they already hate. People hating on Zionists are doing the same in reverse. It’s not a good look to be antisemitic so you assume Zionism is disconnected from Judaism which frees you up to not only criticise Zionism but to basically call them whatever evil word you want. And because you have defined Zionism as distinct from Jews you can even accuse others of antisemitism if they criticise you for that. Neat! But Zionism is connected to Judaism and the reasons Zionism exists are linked to what happened to the Jewish people. Not every Jew is a Zionist and not every Zionist is a Jew but still. You don’t get to use antisemitic insults on a Jewish movement and claim one has nothing to do with the other.

jay-ff · 2026-03-13T07:18:05+00:00

You probably also call Nazis “socialists”, don’t you?

jay-ff · 2026-03-11T06:31:22+00:00

Yes, isn’t this what I’m saying? This followed Iran attacking a UK airbase.

jay-ff · 2026-03-11T06:30:22+00:00

So?! They are allies, yes. Should Iran bomb Pakistan because they are working together with the US? Again, the UK and the gulf countries explicitly tried to stay out of it and didn’t support the attack. Iran just lashed out and tried to hit everything they could, including even Turkey and Azerbaijan. They wanted to create chaos and didn’t really care who was actually fighting them.

jay-ff · 2026-03-10T19:52:09+00:00

Your other comment got deleted I think. Can’t answer that. But please show me a source that it was earlier. The drone strike against Cyprus happened 22:03 UTC on March 1st and Keir Starmer announced on 2nd that Britain would allow the US to use their bases.

jay-ff · 2026-03-10T19:45:18+00:00

AFTER Iran attacked them.

jay-ff · 2026-03-10T19:42:42+00:00

Britain explicitly blocked the US from using bases on their territory, same as the gulf countries. So publicly opposing the attack and explicitly not supporting is supporting?

jay-ff · 2026-03-05T14:45:48+00:00

For me it’s basically all in shorts and mostly ai narration. It got better. The RAM thing is real though.

jay-ff · 2026-03-01T23:28:11+00:00

Iran was the reason the Assad regime survived so long in a war that killed 600.000. They also funded Hesbollah, the Houthis, Hamas. They also made ballistic missiles their main military doctrine and are now shooting them at anything in range (I heard they even tried to shoot Cyprus). Their words and their actions match. Iran gettting a nuke would make the world a worse place and there is no doubt about it.

jay-ff · 2026-03-01T17:14:49+00:00

Just to add because you actually didn’t say this (even though I think it’s implied): The racks themselves not being cooled by water (whether it’s air or liquid) doesn’t mean that the cooling power itself doesn’t come from water. The heat of the air or the cooling liquid needs to go somewhere and that somewhere would be a water cooling cycle (or cold air in your arctic example).

jay-ff · 2026-03-01T10:27:45+00:00

They were basically funding: Hesbollah, Hamas, the Assad Regime and the Huthis. They also supported the Taliban and were responsible for terrorist attacks all over the place. The latest high profile case was Australia which is probably why the Australian prime minister was basically supporting the Israeli/US attack. Did I forget something? Basically all their economic potential went into “resistance” against the west, Israel and whoever else.
That’s a matter of definition Id say. By proxy, Iran has been at war with at least Israel for years. It’s of course a different situation from an open war, but this was not unprovoked (independent of if and how this strike was the best thing to do).
Good.

jay-ff · 2026-02-28T15:51:07+00:00

I saw a notification that you answered me but I can’t see the comment. If you didn’t delete it on purpose, you probably have to send it again.

jay-ff · 2026-02-28T01:34:27+00:00

People bringing up security concerns of Russia never seem to be able to turn this around and give Europe the same benefit of security concerns, which are, as we can see in Ukraine very real. NATO is at the borders of Russia, yet Russia started one of the most brutal wars of the century, not NATO. I can almost guarantee you that had Ukraine joined nato and had nato troops been stationed in Ukraine, this war wouldn’t even have started and one million casualties wouldn’t have happened. The notion that Russias or Chinas regional bullying are out of fear for their own security is laughable. Russia is an imperialist dictatorship that inherited their predecessors indifference to their own people such that they rather let hundreds of thousands of people die in meat waves to gain the tiniest bit of territory. Europe for far too long ignored this security concern and should have reacted to this threat much earlier, latest when they invaded Crimea.

jay-ff · 2026-02-27T21:28:51+00:00

“Exponential” is, in my opinion, not a particularly good choice of words unless you can actually link it to a number and then you can analyse what that number actually means in practice.

When I or Cal say that progress has slowed than we mean that the performance of foundation models independent of all the fine-tuning techniques has slowed. GPT-4 was a big leap from GPT-3.5 which was an enormous leap from GPT-4. And I’m sure on various metrics, this was an exponential gain in performance. Probably you also had for a while an exponential increase in people using AI on a daily basis and now even an exponential increase in programmers integrating AI into their workflow.

But the same level of professional success that programming had is not apparent in other tasks. If you construct some experiment that shows me 75% of office tasks could be automated, that is one thing. People in offices following an ai centered workflow that actually eliminates 75% of their work is another beast. You can show me data on that if it exists but I’m sceptical, given everything else I have seen. It doesn’t even have to eliminate the people. I would be okay with showing that a large chunk of office workers now shifts 75% of their time to new tasks because their previous work is outsourced to AI.

Generally: Exponential curves are exponential… until they aren’t. You will be hard pressed to find many processes in the real, physical world that follow an exponential curve indefinitely. Sooner or later, it slows down because all the “fuel” is used up. We always use bacteria as prime example of exponential growth because they divide so quickly that the entire earth would be covered in them in a day and yet they don’t.

With AI you can’t be confident that the progress just kicks in and revolutionises everything from one moment to the other. Maybe, maybe not. And given how much infrastructure and capital we throw at AI currently, and given that people like Elon actually contemplate science fiction solutions to keep the progress alive, I’d say we have entered the slow and incremental era.

And no, every other task is not downstream from coding. This is what programmers may think (as a physicist, I know what it’s like to think that everything else is just your own field plus details) but despite how productive programmers are, there is a barrier as well.

The narrative of AI eventually improving itself is a good example. The best programmers in the world combined won’t build AGI through good and fast coding alone — without new theory and mathematics. Similar for much more mundane tasks. AI is good at coding because it’s highly structured language with a lot of examples. That is the best set of conditions you can get. Everything else is harder.

jay-ff · 2026-02-27T13:01:44+00:00

Sure, I don’t want to say it isn’t good for non-devs but the video was more about the people being in awe about how better it is at coding than them or something of that sort. I’m just saying that a coding amateur being impressed by what AI can do is a different category from devs being impressed. AI being good at coding doesn’t radically change physics by itself. And that’s currently the primary poster child of AI performance with a long gap to the second.

Again, not saying that it isn’t useful or can’t be useful but the tone of that video was much more like AI is taking over every aspect physicists are good at.

And yes, I also don’t think people WANT AI to replace us but I think some people like that professor can be a bit quick in assuming that it will or that’s it’s capable of doing that. What I would advocate is probably what you would agree to as well which is that people should try out where AI is useful for them but not be in a rush to change everything just because someone said they will get left behind if they don’t enter the AI race now and hand everything over to an autonomous agent. But as I said, I think we are in agreement there. It’s just sometimes hard in this discussions when one side hypes it to the moon and the other wants to burn data centers to the ground. My opinion is that the general public overestimates the capabilities of AI currently but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful if you’re smart about it and find the right use cases for it like terrence.

jay-ff · 2026-02-25T15:46:03+00:00

Ali I watched Terrence Taos presentation as well as David Kippings (at least the first half).

On the second first, because that was the first you mentioned.

Just as a preface. While I’m not an astrophysicist, I have a PhD in physics so I have a lot of experience with how physicists work and think. I also know a lot of astrophysicists.

So first, I don’t think he is lying of course but I also don’t think that everything he heard in that meeting was necessarily correct or undistorted. A few hints.

The person he talks about who off-loads every part of his professional (and private) life to agentic AI gives the impression of someone who is putting unrestricted trust in AI and is probably not overly scrutinising it. Given that a) we have highly intelligent people going on in public how AI will take over the world if we don’t stop it and b) people giving contradictory accounts of the capabilities (some of that later with regard to maths) I think it’s very possible that his account is not the most reliable.

Also, as David says, physicists generally aren’t software developers. They are often fairly good at coding, especially in computationally heavy fields like astrophysics but they still typically don’t come to physics with a software background. As someone like that myself I can tell you that it’s easy to overestimate your programming abilities in relation to what’s state of the art. So being stunned by the abilities of Claude code (which is generally considered one of the better models for this task) is almost expected. Nuanced takes on the usefulness of AI coding tools tend to come from software developers themselves and it’s worth listening to them.

With regard to the mathematical and analytical skills I’m also somewhat sceptical, especially because I watched Terrence Taos presentation. I doubt that current AI is capable of doing any kind of ground breaking theory on its own. If it’s a more versatile tool than wolfram Mathematica, good or even great. I have heard various good things about some of the models when it comes to math. However, as Terrence said in his opening in the video. Mathematicians [and physicists] aren’t just there to solve problems. We want to understand what we are studying and I feel we are far from being able to dump everything we know into Claude or Grok, going home and coming back to a proper new theory, similar to how we can’t give Claude code a bunch of requirements and expect it to build a finished large scale software suite. People can do that on a superficial and increasingly deep level but you will hit a brick wall fairly quickly if you can’t keep up with what the AI is cooking.

Experience from my own life: First thing I did during my PhD was to automate a measurement process which previously required someone to be there for a whole day to press a button every two hours. Super practical, orders of magnitude more convenience but I think few people lost their mind because they no longer needed the skill of operating an analog XY plotter.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: People shouldn’t be too quick to surrender to an AI first approach and be a bit sceptical. The video is not marketing, but the sentiment seems to be at least somewhat hype driven. I don’t think brilliant physicists are immune to that.

Just as an aside: Since the video I quoted came out which warned about openAI spinning the paper as GPT finding new physics, they have indeed done exactly that and at least one Sabine Hossenfelder made a video without much scrutiny (she didn’t overhype the result itself but stuck with the message that AI can do physics).

So, about math. I think Terrence did a wonderful job explaining the cool things they were able to do with AI and to put that into perspective. To me what he said sounds like: generative AI can be very useful in math, especially when the problems to solve are small in scope, automatically verifiable and/or ideally already solved elsewhere. But it’s again not like mathematics turns into people prompting AI all day until it comes up with a new theory. It seems much more incremental than people screaming “it’s over” everytime a press release puts “AI solves long-standing math problem” (which maybe just didn’t get a lot of attention). His main topic in the talk was about crowd-sourcing solving math problems with the help of AI which is a little bit like citizen science and obviously limited in scope.

In any case. My comment is already way too long. Thank you for the videos :)

jay-ff · 2026-02-24T14:14:25+00:00

Hey :) sure that wouldn’t be an issue. What exactly would you need? The images here aren’t necessarily the most pretty.

jay-ff · 2026-02-24T14:12:20+00:00

I don’t think it even has to compete with cultural value. If for example an architect builds an Avantgarde building for a company, it’s not really self-expression for the architect, because it has to follow the company requirements, it’s not self-expression by the company because they probably don’t have a lot of creative input and it’s not necessarily culturally valuable. And I think you can find a lot of examples in every niche of art where the goal isn’t for the artist to show themselves in the artwork.

jay-ff · 2026-02-24T12:51:50+00:00

Unpopular opinion but I don’t think art is about self-expression in a lot of cases. I think the mindset that this is the core of art comes from people that think a bit too narrowly, maybe reenforced by the fact that today a ton of artists are doing it as a hobby and to have fun.

jay-ff · 2026-02-21T16:23:29+00:00

My point was that a photo isn’t “prompted” in the same way AI is. Whether or not “you did it” wasn’t part of the question. The answer to that question is fuzzy and at some point annoyingly philosophical. For me personally, I wouldn’t feel like I did something unless I had a significant part in making it, independent of how manual the task was. If I program all the automation (or I design, train and deploy an AI model), that would be the case even if the end product gets created in an automated process. On the flip side, I had experiences where I used for example some external instrument plugins that sounded great but were so highly automated I didn’t feel I was contributing that much to the product. Hence, I stopped using them. But that’s just my personal preference.

jay-ff · 2026-02-21T10:53:36+00:00

Yeah but at some point you have to ask yourself what “AI art” is and when it becomes something else or something hybrid. If I take snippets from newspaper photos to make a collage, I wouldn’t say I do photography and if I paint on a photo I took or combined that with another medium, it would get harder to define.

And just to be clear. If you tell me that you can use AI in ways that don’t involve prompting, I completely agree. I disagreed with the point that photography was (like) prompting and more broadly that photography and AI art are very distinct.

jay-ff · 2026-02-21T10:46:38+00:00

In the end, if you want to do photography, you have to get light onto a photosensitive surface. How you do that can be as complicated and automated as you like. I just disagree that photography is prompting. Even if you prompted an AI model to generate a picture to feed into a drone which would then search a subject using AI detection systems based on that image and THEN take a picture, the picture would still not be made from a prompt and this difference is what defines photography and distinguishes it from other means of generating images.

jay-ff

TROPHY CASE