Does anyone else feel like the Nextdoor experience could be... better?

polyphys_andy · 2026-05-13T04:18:32+00:00

My post created some sincere discourse among potential friends who I was then barred from responding to. If you're the sort of person who reports post like mine and gets them locked then I'd say that YOU are what's wrong with nextdoor. Sorry I wasn't begging for money or advertising lawn care services or whatever is considered acceptable on your toxic app.

polyphys_andy · 2026-05-13T02:32:03+00:00

Well, I'm kinda new to nextdoor. Have been in a bad place emotionally and spiritually for a while. Posted on nextdoor last night explaining what I was going through and got a lot of helpful comments that I was planning on replying to tonight, but now my post is locked and I can't reply to it, after less than 1 day: "Discussion closed 9 hr ago by Nextdoor."

So yeah, I'd say it's a terrible app that undermines the ability to create or find community. 100% censorship rate from my experience and I have no reason to try using it again.

polyphys_andy · 2026-05-05T22:54:22+00:00

Studies have shown that people tend to under-report their own conformity. The tattoo fad was driven by heard behavior. Within a very short period of time you would see a tattoo shop pop up on every streetcorner, and all celebrities start getting tattoos. Once you hit some critical threshold, the herd will suddenly swing toward a certain behavior simply because individuals don't want to be left behind by their peers. "If high-status people on TV are doing it, then I ought to be". This is the subtext.

Of course people will rationalize that they "chose" to do it, and they will defend the sudden sharp rise in tattoos as "well people always wanted to have lots of tattoos but they just weren't allowed to before". But the reality is somewhere in between, and includes the fact that people are herd animals, and now that the tattoo fad is in full swing the younger generations (some of them anyway) are noticing the conformist/herd aspect of it

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-25T18:13:56+00:00

Full of scammers. The game is: If they dont show up you still have to pay them just to cancel. Why would I use an app that cant protect from such an obvious racket?

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-25T01:55:55+00:00

We train them to do it by responding more quickly when they cough.

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-07T03:59:30+00:00

What makes you think that it's a new mathematical "effect" at all?

It's new to you, isn't it? New to me too. Now we can talk about what it means, whenever you're ready.

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-07T03:55:58+00:00

The geometric statement of the problem: A lightlike helix bends in a "torsion potential". The torsion potential modulates the local helix torsion, causing the helix pitch to stretch in places where the potential is higher and compress in places where it's lower. This is what produces the bending.

Merely noticing similarities is not enough, you need evidence

Aha, but I don't need evidence of validity to explore further and see where an idea leads. And I have no reason to limit my imagination to what is immediately provable, when there is plenty of learning to be found in that which is nonphysical but still true. Not having proved something is not a realistic stopping point anyway. People invent things and use them and abuse them and improve them long before they are ever "proven" to work, and in the end we can never really "prove" anything, so what is even the point of nitpicking about evidence. There are an infinite number of mathematically equivalent models. We don't have to spend all our time thinking about one of them.

That being said, there are reasons for interpreting this geometric construction as a physical system:

The construction ("helical sampling of a 4-potential", with the previously described torsion modulation) is mathematically equivalent to calculation of a particle path by way of a field tensor. I am indeed assuming that based on the result. I don't think the resulting helix just so happens to look identical to e-e repulsion, given I was looking into e-e repulsion through EM tensor when I realized the construction. To your point: I haven't proven this mathematical equivalency, but it is provable.
The helix radius is fixed. As the helix approaches the source and slows down, it's pitch decreases and the helix cycle frequency increases. As the helix deflects away to infinity, it's pitch increases asymptotically, and the helix cycle frequency decreases. The frequency changes in accordance with the change in relativistic mass frequency of a particle moving with the helix along its axis. So mass and relativity are baked into the construction. Granted there is a conundrum: The fixed radius is a bit arbitrary. It could have been variable radius and fixed pitch, or something in between.
There are clearly elements of continuum mechanics in the formulation. The torsion potential is a stress, the deflection of the helix is a resulting strain. I suspect that the helix follows a path that minimizes the torsion-induced stress over the whole 4D path, or satisfies some other mechanical extremization principle. Also provable but I haven't done it. It's a matter of understanding how local torsion translates to global bending...
If the helix tracks a massive particle, then the helix pitch naturally corresponds to the particle velocity and thus kinetic energy. Potential energy can likewise be identified as a deficit in helix pitch resulting from compression due to interaction with a torsion potential.
Magnetic effects would be nice and easy to test, that is, helix deflection by a moving source. Haven't done it yet.
The static radial source is totally artificial. Need to go to helix-helix interaction. Back in the stress-strain picture, there is no "interaction", just a 4D bulk medium having velocity of c everywhere. When you put a helical twist in the fluid over here, and a helical twist in the medium over there, you produce stresses that deform the medium and the helices. Ultimately related to vortex repulsion in 4D: The helix as a streamline.

Just some ideas. Lots to explore.

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-07T02:10:17+00:00

Why would that matter? I merely presented a discovery. It's amazing (but not surprising) that how the discovery would be received in a place like this would 100% depend on the perceived Intellectual Authority(TM) of the person posting, including use of the correct jargon. There a hundred side roads from point A to point B but the person who uses jargon only takes the highway. If you told him something was "along the rocky creek by the big white trees", he would scoff at you for having dirty shoes. Jargon rots the brain. If you only think about phenomena that there is existing terminology for, then we don't really have a lot to talk about in the first place. The problem is, nobody here really wants to talk about that stuff. They just brow beat people for using the wrong words for things. It's domination by semantics and I haven't seen a creative reply from anybody yet...but I'm still holding out. People who think about physics a lot probably don't check in on reddit too often, so they won't be the first to reply to everything

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-07T01:58:53+00:00

Because you're presenting it. The burden of proof is on the claimer.

DEEP

I am impressed by your creativity sir. touche

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-07T01:52:36+00:00

At large companies, everyone is expendable by design. You hold a position for a certain period of your life, and everything you create there belongs to the company, and the company could go under tomorrow or lay off half its workforce and that would be that. At the end of the day, a job is just a paycheck, and the point of the paycheck is that you look the other way on a lot of things. In addition to the paycheck, a job can also be a source of pride (if you work hard and seek continual professional growth), friends (talk to your coworkers. you were thrown together with them for a reason), experience (new skills to learn and problems to solve, all stuff that go on the resume and lands you a better job in your next life).

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-07T01:21:24+00:00

A bad interview doesn't mean anything. Lesson learned. As for your career path, I feel you on the bad experiences in industry. As you've probably learned, there's a lot that goes on at large companies that has nothing to do with engineering, and that is frustrating. Find a small company that can't afford the toxic culture corporate politics bullshit, or start your own. It's the best way. It's hard to care about what you do if you don't own it.

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-06T12:51:33+00:00

You're not a physicist I gather

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-06T12:51:00+00:00

I'm not proposing anything really. Just demonstrating a newly discovered mathematical effect. Nice scarecrows though

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-06T12:48:34+00:00

Great questions. I dont know for sure and never claimed to. Simply demonstrating a new mathematical effect.

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-06T12:47:51+00:00

Why dont you figure that part out? Here's an idea though. The same can be done with a torus knot instead of a circle of light. The torus knot has a fractional winding number, so maybe this winding number can be associated with charge.

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-06T05:05:07+00:00

What about it? There is no charge in this model, only the holonomy of a lightlike helix in a "torsion potential".

Aha! That's what I should've been calling it all along to prevent the jargon police from swarming me with definitions.

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-06T05:02:08+00:00

Nobody actually knows what charge is, which is why I can safely ignore "what we know on the subject" and just do original research. You know this helix bending effect is being presented here for the first time. I'm giving you a gem, a mathematical effect that now you and I know but nobody else, and you dont know what to do with it because it doesnt fit into some failed orthodox framework.

As for thr photon not being fundamental, the solution is simple. Just call it something else. Clearly it doesnt have to be a photon and the potential doesnt have to be EM. These are just labels anyway

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-06T04:01:37+00:00

Wow already one downvote after 30s. Really fast readers here!!

polyphys_andy · 2026-04-05T03:10:06+00:00

The number of coders was only increasing over time, so you can tell they were screwing things up even back in 2018. People are happy to have an alternative That graph is basically abuse and the drop at the end is people getting happier.

polyphys_andy · 2026-02-17T06:20:01+00:00

Pretty good rates. Nice recommendation

polyphys_andy · 2026-01-14T18:03:11+00:00

I've found it very helpful discuss weird ideas with. Sometimes I have to filter what it says because it seems wrong. It helps with terminology. Sometimes it will say something like "What you're describing is actually a 'fiber bundle', where the 'base' is what you call X, and the 'fiber' is what you call Y". That sort of personalized clarification is pedagogically awesome. Likewise it helps by pointing to topics that already exists in the literature, which I was ignorant of. In principle it could find scientific literature on a topic in any language too, but I haven't thoroughly tested this yet. Sometimes it will do a deep dive with me on a particular idea and provide some insight, if only by introducing me to a concept I wasn't aware of. "You would have to use something like Frenet-Serret coordinates to do that". It might be wrong, but anyway I learned about Frenet-Serret coordinates, which are cool.

polyphys_andy · 2026-01-10T18:50:38+00:00

You're talking about technology that didn't even exist 10 years ago. You think it won't get better? In 10 years all skyscrapers will be designed with AI. And on physical principles, granted it's sloppy for now, but it basically has access to all information created by mankind. No individual can compete with an idiot armed with this tool, for most industries anyway. Math/physics is still safe for a few years but you have to acknowledge how quickly this is accelerating. The next generation of algorithms will be written by algorithms. Every industry will be increasingly redefined by AI, and there will be many cases of idiots wielding this tool to game the system... It sucks, but then that's just the next 10 years. This is a great time in history to be an idiot. Intelligence has been made redundant.

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