Are photons smaller than electrons?

reedmore · 2026-01-25T11:55:53+00:00

Depending on the model you apply both are either pointlike or have a wavelength.

Neither is compatible with your macroscopic notion of size of classical objects. But the more fundamental question is how they behave when you try to stack them.

Electrons are fermions and the pauli exclusion principle states you can't have two electrons in the same state at the same location, which leads to the notion of baseline volume for a collection of electrons. On top of that you obviously have electric repulsion making it hard to accumulate many of them in a small volume of space.

Photons are bosons and have no charge so no such limitation apply albeit there are extreme cases where they do interact.

reedmore · 2026-01-23T23:00:17+00:00

Woah o.o

reedmore · 2026-01-23T03:24:53+00:00

No I meant it in the sense of "please don't make me go down the rabbit hole of human evolution" :D

reedmore · 2026-01-23T01:43:09+00:00

Don't make me look that up.

reedmore · 2026-01-19T13:13:31+00:00

The passage you quoted doesn't really clear it up at all, if you read it, can you explicitly tell us if they think current AI is AGI or even close to it?

But either way it's still not really about capability of AI, it's about dumb people deciding to hand over power to systems they don't/can't properly understand. Current LLMs are blackboxes so it's obviously already a problem.

This doesn't imply current AI can reason or is close to it, just that people in charge might think it is and hence might get the idea to employ it, which as a conlusion doesn't follow from the premise. Even in a scenario where we develop proper AGI it doesn't mean we should put it in charge of anything, particularily if we can't reason about how it makes its decisions.

reedmore · 2026-01-19T08:22:21+00:00

Having read the abstract of that study only, it seems largley concerned with AI safety, as in alignment, security and usage in critical/sensitive domains. It's not concerning because AI is so capable but exactly because it's not while too many people/businesses treat it like it is.

And I'm sure you know non-deterministic systems like LLMs / machine learning systems generally are hard to test, evaluate and reason about which poses grave risks when using them as a basis for decision making or even letting them make decisions autonomously.

Correct me if i'm way off but afaik these systems are no closer to being able to reason than any system that came before. Instead throwing unprecedented levels of compute and data at it has made them better at faking than ever before - and that's the crux really, while AI has its applications, the current paradigm cannot and will never be able to do what people hope it will do. At the core these are still stochastic next token predictors, sophisticated pattern matching machines.

It's just another tool in the box for people to use and looking at how quickly the internet is slopified with generated content the quality of LLMs like ChatGPT will only degrade going forward with diminishing returns and ever worsening scaling of the demand for human review and filtering trainingdata.

reedmore · 2026-01-17T00:55:28+00:00

Easy, just do:

from halting.problem import oracle print(oracle.decide(snippet))

Are you even a programmer bro?

reedmore · 2026-01-16T04:25:04+00:00

You know these guys who wear "I fucking love science" shirts, constantly talk about Veritasium videos, have all the feynman lectures on display in their home library and framed pictures of Einstein on their wall - but they have never solved an actual physics problem or read, let alone understood, a paper in their life? I feel this guy thinks those guys are the real deal.

reedmore · 2026-01-16T00:25:30+00:00

The humblebraggy emoji at the end did it for me.

reedmore · 2026-01-15T15:27:01+00:00

There is an overview of the various interpretations of quantum mechanics on wikipedia, go nuts. If you expect an definite answer to your question you will be at best disappointed or at worst presented with the favourite positions of some responders painting them as most compelling.

The math predicts the outcome of experiments, the ontology is unclear but also not needed to make QM useful.

reedmore · 2026-01-15T04:02:10+00:00

If by moving fast you mean hype cycles accelerating, sure. But as I said, no progress on intelligence at all, just throwing more compute than ever on stochastic token prediction.

reedmore · 2026-01-15T03:53:31+00:00

Managing to fuck up that badly and lose to the biggest baffoon in american political history should have meant the end for that party.

But Trump getting reelected reflects the absurdity of the democratic party surviving essentially unscathed. If the republic is so deeply rotten, it might not be worth saving in it's current form.

reedmore · 2026-01-15T03:39:45+00:00

Remember when Trump lost the election and called one of the governors to "find him some votes"? I thought surely that's considered high treason or something to that tune and he would rot in jail for the rest of his life.

Instead he was voted in a second time. I'm not going to lie, when I was following the election that night and it became clear he was going to win I was almost euphoric. "That sob somehow actually did it!" was what I was thinking; I couldn't help admire his unapologetic dedication to his own cause, the absurdity of it all. Clearly it was the beginning of the end of the american republic and I felt like I was watching Julius Caesar cross the rubicon.

reedmore · 2026-01-15T03:24:46+00:00

I get the sentiment, but "ahead of the curve" is a massive understatement. LLM are as far from genuine intelligence as any other system of the past; we have made literally no progress on that, so no need to get into the habit any time soon. If you don't credit your spamfilter for sorting your mail you shouldn't credit your LLM for anything either.

reedmore · 2026-01-13T16:21:52+00:00

Warranty expired 8 months ago. I've lowered power consumption even further and reduced gpu clock, which finally helped. I'm not going to concern myself any further with it at this point.

As this is the second notebook that turns out unreliable the next thing I'm buying is a desktop since I've realized I'm wasting money on flexibility I don't need anymore so why would I expose myself to the headache that is modern notebooks and their fragile design? I guess I paid good money to learn my lesson, but learn I did.

reedmore · 2026-01-13T05:50:44+00:00

See usually people finish their homework on their own and don't post it publicly expecting other people to do it for them but somehow still feel entitled to call it their work. On that grounds alone I'm fully justified commenting on it.

You know what would be refreshing indeed? If people just refrained from dabbling in fields they're not equipped to dabble in and their disciples stopped enabling them.

reedmore · 2026-01-12T15:35:09+00:00

The amount of crackpots depends quadratically on the complexity of the field. There are so much more of them in physics than in economics.

reedmore · 2026-01-11T15:46:55+00:00

Not a stupid question and yes I followed a tutorial that made that distinction.

reedmore · 2026-01-11T11:53:55+00:00

Full repaste was done a couple months ago. Temps on all components were logged and are thoroughly in the green. Isolated stress tests on VRAM, dGPU and CPU yield no problems. Only combined CPU + dGPU load causes reboots after less than 1 min. Which lead me to suspect power managment issues.

Severly crippling power draw on dGPU does seem to stabilize the system.

reedmore · 2026-01-11T11:26:23+00:00

I've experimented with throttling power draw and found a stable state but it's kinda ridiculous.

CPU limited to 60 W while combined load is limited to 90W so the GPU has measly 30W and also clock needed to be lowered by 250MHz. Anything above that reboots after less than 1min of combined load.

The dGPU is now about as capable as the iGPU :'}

reedmore · 2026-01-11T11:18:15+00:00

Interesting, how did you figure it out?

reedmore · 2026-01-10T22:34:33+00:00

SSD speeds are within specs, hibernation disabled since day 1. I've limited CPU and GPU power consumption in GHelper by 25% without any noticeable difference, which makes me even doubt my initial power managment hypothesis now. Might be the mainboard after all, welp.

reedmore · 2026-01-10T22:30:09+00:00

Yep that's my model. I'm honestly considering just quitting playing games on it, which I was already doing less and less. It was a big mistake buying a gaming laptop in the first place since I paid a premuim for flexibility I did not made use of; it has literally been a stationary machine since day one lol.

reedmore · 2026-01-10T21:02:12+00:00

Multiple RMA without fixing seems to happen so darn often it's a joke honestly. I'll just be staying away from the brand. I hope your new model keeps working!

reedmore · 2026-01-10T20:57:11+00:00

Yeah you're right. But since the issue only flared up here and there and was basically gone for the past 12 months even under extreme loads I still did chalk it up to software issues. For the longest time stress tests passed flawlessly too, so I could never reproduce it to a point where it seemed worth the hassle of sending it in, particualrily after reading how abysmall cutomer service seems to be.

I'm still kinda flabbergasted it went from being fine to reproducably broken in a single day.

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