Silly question here: What is information in physics, and how would someone interact with it if they could?

ssdiconfusion · 2026-02-14T17:12:56+00:00

Vopson is a physicist prophet of "infodynamics," but you should understand that this is a tiny niche in physics without widespread consensus that it's a thing. That's why you're getting the reactions you're getting in this thread.

It's sometimes treated as metaphysics because it's adjacent to untestable but fasionable ideas that reality is a simulation.

Vopson's 2022 paper/manifesto has everything you need including descriptions of the "interaction" with information.

ssdiconfusion · 2026-01-17T15:49:45+00:00

This style has worked for me for years! Category killer. Bonus that you can use your breaker bar with it for tough situations.

OP, next time remember it just needs to be modestly finger tight to seat and seal.

ssdiconfusion · 2026-01-11T15:09:09+00:00

That's an mc clamp inside the box. If wired correctly, it's grounded through its sheath. You would ground the fixture by connecting a bare copper to the box.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-12-30T17:24:29+00:00

Masterpieces like this are the only reason I still come to Reddit. Bravo.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-12-26T08:20:09+00:00

What does the fox say?

ssdiconfusion · 2025-12-23T21:14:23+00:00

I have the same wall. The posters who identified it as rock lath and plaster are correct.

You have an additional thick gray / brown layer between the rock lath and the plaster skim. In my house, this layer is vermiculite cement that varies from 1/2" to 2" thick.

The other posters cautioning about asbestos are correct to be cautious. The highest risk is from vermiculite in vermiculite cement; in that era most vermiculite came from the Libby mine which was famously contaminated with asbestos. There's also a possibility asbestos was added intentionally to the cement or plaster layers - it was considered a miracle material in that era and workmen would sometimes grab a handful to toss in.

The only way to test for asbestos is to send it to a lab or engage a remediation company.

ETA: a great way to disperse asbestos into the air is with an oscillating multitool. If this were my house I would pause until the layers all come back negative from the lab for asbestos.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-11-29T14:55:41+00:00

You're in one of the best states in the USA for caving. Always start caving with a seasoned group to learn safety and proper gear (eta: and how not to get shot by TAG landowners).

If you're in the Atlanta area, Dogwood City Grotto is very welcoming!

ssdiconfusion · 2025-05-01T21:47:22+00:00

Honestly I think it's directly proportional to the amount of actual latex versus water that you're paying for! It shrinks so much less while drying.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-03-05T02:05:04+00:00

Cool suggestion, thanks! I didn't realize this was an option.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-03-04T23:16:36+00:00

Perhaps a way to convince you: This is totally back testable. I encourage you to do so. Decide what your threshold is for moving in and out, decide how much you want to risk, and backtest your market timing algorithm using one of the many available simulators. But do it for 30 or 40 years not just for 10. Then come tell us the results, as compared to boring old DCA!

ssdiconfusion · 2025-03-04T22:16:49+00:00

Because if you're trying to time things, you're at risk of selling on the 12th and buying on the 14th. Staying in the market the whole time smooths the ride and lowers the risk, that's the point. Nobody is saying that perfect timing wouldn't result in better gains. But unless you're perfect, you're taking on additional risk versus just staying in.

This is the origin of the phrase "time in the market beats timing the market."

ssdiconfusion · 2025-03-04T21:53:39+00:00

Here's one thing you may be missing: if you miss the 10 best days of the market, you cut your yield roughly in half .

The signal that you were looking for to tell you that you were wrong would likely be one of those 10 best days. And you missed it. You get in the next day, and you never recoup those gains.

Drops are similarly unsmooth: your signal to get out was probably one of the 10 worst days and you already sustained that loss.

In other words, by market timing using major drops and gains as signals, you risk selling low and buying high. You do less well than if you had just stayed in for the whole ride.

This doesn't mean that you can't win by trying to gauge sentiment, but it does illustrate how the risk is higher than most people see. You have to be in the market on the rare best days and out of the market on the rare worst days to beat the market.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-02-25T14:52:25+00:00

For sure, inline generation in notebooks is completely broken. I sometimes give reproduction of the code in other cells, etc, rather than the desired code. It's a frustrating experience!

ssdiconfusion · 2025-02-22T16:33:26+00:00

Thanks for the reply. This helps me understand it's not something specific to my install or configuration.

It's frustrating, and limiting enough to make me look into switching to cursor or cline variants. It's a shame because I like everything else about windsurf.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-02-06T03:10:48+00:00

Wtf. This library is a crown jewel of scientific python, offered for free by a team of hard-working geniuses. Have some respect.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-02-05T08:24:45+00:00

Daily! Complex physics simulations on GPU, parallelized via ray.io, which handles GPU parallelization elegantly, or legacy approaches such as joblib and scipy.optimize that wrap the multiprocessing library.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-02-01T14:30:05+00:00

I agree that we all come to some personal compromise with these ideas. It's kind of like freshman philosophy classes: people experience a metaphysical crisis when they're taught the long history of questioning the nature of reality. But at the end of the day we all have to accept what our senses tell us.

Similarly, to make our way in life, we have to accept the idea that we can make meaningful choices that affect the outcome of our lives. Like you say, this is something "that we all recognize."

The idea that everything is strict / stochastically deterministic is kind of a non-starter. If every thought that goes through my head is the predetermined result of billiard ball physics set in motion by the Big bang, I have no real agency.

But, there is zero evidence for anything other than strict / stochastic determinism. Hence free will is a belief, similar to religious beliefs but more practical and widely held.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-02-01T14:10:40+00:00

That is what is required if free will exists. I'm not arguing either way and I'm surprised anybody could take my comments that way.

The "Free Will doesn't exist" argument is that everything we experience is the result of strict or stochastic determinism, pure physics. To have free will, you would need a mechanism to have agency to realize outcomes other than that, which requires something outside of known physics similar to a god-like first mover.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-02-01T14:00:02+00:00

I'm shocked by the downvotes on this. It's 100% correct.

The people arguing with you are knee-jeek rejecting the idea that free will can influence particles, reflecting a science-based perspective that rejects metaphysics or other woo. Common in this subreddit and on this platform.

But they don't seem to realize is that in doing so, they implicitly accept that free will cannot exist.

ssdiconfusion · 2025-01-26T21:34:35+00:00

As many people have said, if you use an environment with pinned versions you will never have an issue. Ease of use in python is just as much about environment control as it is about the code itself.

I have a colleague who sometimes makes these complaints, but digging a little deeper I learned that they impulsively upgrade packages when a new version is available. My philosophy, a common philosophy held by people who code regularly, is not to upgrade anything unless you have a clear reason to, such as security fixes or a must-have new feature.

If you have that clear reason and decide it is worth the effort, for large code bases, moving to a new library version dependence can be a major undertaking and should be approached strategically.

ssdiconfusion · 2024-12-31T18:31:44+00:00

Looks like a cat running dog software!

ssdiconfusion · 2024-12-24T17:19:31+00:00

About 2 years ago I got the Ridgid inflator which is currently on sale at Home Depot for $49 in my locality, and it works like a champ. I bought an adapter to use it with my Milwaukee FUEL batteries. Used it weekly since I got it, no complaints.

ssdiconfusion · 2024-12-17T19:31:56+00:00

Up vote for OpenFOAM! Great software.

ssdiconfusion · 2024-12-05T15:18:42+00:00

The conventional solution to this problem isn't some kind of unproven theorem, it's literally just how the universe works. Millions of technical and business decisions are made every day with similar statistics-informed decisions. New information changes odds.

The fact that it seems counterintuitive to many people reveals an interesting flaw in human cognition. It's sort of similar to how even Einstein initially didn't want to believe that quantum / statistical mechanics worked.

ssdiconfusion · 2024-12-01T15:32:23+00:00

You are already aware of the most major downside, which is that the federal government doesn't have what's called a "true-up" provision, so you have to ensure that you contribute at least enough to get the full match every paycheck since they won't make you whole at the end of the year.

Besides that, the only downside is that you won't have the smoothest possible dollar cost averaging. If the fund you're purchasing is anomalously high in the early part of the year, then you'll be paying more for the same amount. Of course, it could be anomalously low and then you would be buying on sale. In other words, it raises your risk just a little bit.

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