Physics love-hater
@halfspin.bsky.social
PhD student buys CDs at thrift stores. In a “wants to replace quantum field theory” and “doing research to show that QFT works” superposition.
Say what you want about the decay of the web; this home remedy of detergent, cold water, and hydrogen peroxide that I found by web search seems to have taken the two-week-old red wine stain out of my pants.
November 16, 2025 at 5:58 PM
Say what you want about the decay of the web; this home remedy of detergent, cold water, and hydrogen peroxide that I found by web search seems to have taken the two-week-old red wine stain out of my pants.
I got to the point that I was thinking more about the characters in this daily update webcomic than my friends, so I have abandoned the comic once again in defense of my own humanity.
October 16, 2025 at 12:09 PM
I got to the point that I was thinking more about the characters in this daily update webcomic than my friends, so I have abandoned the comic once again in defense of my own humanity.
Disgusted that my MacBook Air seems to run this parallelized scientific code in a virtual Debian box faster than this virtualized 16 core Ubuntu box I requested from research computing
August 14, 2025 at 6:15 PM
Disgusted that my MacBook Air seems to run this parallelized scientific code in a virtual Debian box faster than this virtualized 16 core Ubuntu box I requested from research computing
I’m proud of myself for fixing this formatting issue that was only letting people use 3% of the storage space on this USB stick, but it only got corrupted because I was using it as a hard drive for a Raspberry Pi, so this is solidly a case of me fixing a problem that I created.
July 28, 2025 at 9:21 PM
I’m proud of myself for fixing this formatting issue that was only letting people use 3% of the storage space on this USB stick, but it only got corrupted because I was using it as a hard drive for a Raspberry Pi, so this is solidly a case of me fixing a problem that I created.
The frozen meal said bake for 20 minutes, but it took over two hours to heat up last night. My bold attempt to put off spending an hour doing meal prep was a failure in the temporal realm, although it was a success in that I didn’t have to pull all of the stems out of these collard greens yet.
July 16, 2025 at 1:33 PM
The frozen meal said bake for 20 minutes, but it took over two hours to heat up last night. My bold attempt to put off spending an hour doing meal prep was a failure in the temporal realm, although it was a success in that I didn’t have to pull all of the stems out of these collard greens yet.
This loop of plastic held the lid onto my water bottle for ten years (before cracking and holding on another few months). It took half a second to cut off the broken plastic stub with cheap scissors, and now it takes two hands to drink from this bottle. Something something, societal metaphor. Blegh.
July 13, 2025 at 2:22 PM
This loop of plastic held the lid onto my water bottle for ten years (before cracking and holding on another few months). It took half a second to cut off the broken plastic stub with cheap scissors, and now it takes two hands to drink from this bottle. Something something, societal metaphor. Blegh.
Consider preordering this book: ifanyonebuildsit.com
Yudkowsky thinks clearly about AI doing things we don’t want, but his arguments are spread out over millions of words on various websites. I expect that writing with Soares made a clear, concise, and relevant case for avoiding doom.
Yudkowsky thinks clearly about AI doing things we don’t want, but his arguments are spread out over millions of words on various websites. I expect that writing with Soares made a clear, concise, and relevant case for avoiding doom.
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
The scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction — but it's not too late to change course, as two of the field's earliest researchers explain in this clarion call for humanity...
ifanyonebuildsit.com
July 11, 2025 at 3:56 PM
Consider preordering this book: ifanyonebuildsit.com
Yudkowsky thinks clearly about AI doing things we don’t want, but his arguments are spread out over millions of words on various websites. I expect that writing with Soares made a clear, concise, and relevant case for avoiding doom.
Yudkowsky thinks clearly about AI doing things we don’t want, but his arguments are spread out over millions of words on various websites. I expect that writing with Soares made a clear, concise, and relevant case for avoiding doom.
I might have a similar relationship to field theory as some people have to their cats. “Oh look, the vicious renormalization scheme just ripped up that poor integral, chewed on the higher order bits, and ignored all the bits at the end again. That’s disgusting. How adorable.”
June 25, 2025 at 3:29 PM
I might have a similar relationship to field theory as some people have to their cats. “Oh look, the vicious renormalization scheme just ripped up that poor integral, chewed on the higher order bits, and ignored all the bits at the end again. That’s disgusting. How adorable.”
On the one hand, good on me for grading all 200 exams worth of this multiple choice question in the time between when this song started and when it ended. On the other hand, it’s a Grateful Dead song.
May 1, 2025 at 3:47 PM
On the one hand, good on me for grading all 200 exams worth of this multiple choice question in the time between when this song started and when it ended. On the other hand, it’s a Grateful Dead song.
Me, thinking about physics: You ever get a strange desire to write a book?
My grandpa, who I expected to look at me funny: Oh absolutely. I once wrote half a memoir.
My grandpa, who I expected to look at me funny: Oh absolutely. I once wrote half a memoir.
March 19, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Me, thinking about physics: You ever get a strange desire to write a book?
My grandpa, who I expected to look at me funny: Oh absolutely. I once wrote half a memoir.
My grandpa, who I expected to look at me funny: Oh absolutely. I once wrote half a memoir.
Flying across the country and messing up my sleep schedule before teaching relativity is getting to be a nasty habit of mine
March 13, 2025 at 1:31 AM
Flying across the country and messing up my sleep schedule before teaching relativity is getting to be a nasty habit of mine
I got up early to get my wife to the airport this morning, so it’s 8am on a Saturday, and I’ve been up for 4 hours. It already feels like I’ve had so much more weekend than usual.
February 15, 2025 at 1:07 PM
I got up early to get my wife to the airport this morning, so it’s 8am on a Saturday, and I’ve been up for 4 hours. It already feels like I’ve had so much more weekend than usual.
Illness has taken me, but I am posting by the grace of acetaminophen.
January 12, 2025 at 7:05 PM
Illness has taken me, but I am posting by the grace of acetaminophen.
Modern ML tools have put me in a world where I can write a Python script using Torch which does a bunch of quantum mechanical linear algebra on my laptop in less than twice the time of my bespoke C++ code.
January 4, 2025 at 6:03 PM
Modern ML tools have put me in a world where I can write a Python script using Torch which does a bunch of quantum mechanical linear algebra on my laptop in less than twice the time of my bespoke C++ code.
I got married a few months back, and I haven’t been wife guy posting. I’m a failure of a husband.
This message brought to you by my wife letting me play this record I just bought by a band she knows she doesn’t like while we made dinner last night. This is what love looks like.
This message brought to you by my wife letting me play this record I just bought by a band she knows she doesn’t like while we made dinner last night. This is what love looks like.
December 16, 2024 at 8:44 PM
I got married a few months back, and I haven’t been wife guy posting. I’m a failure of a husband.
This message brought to you by my wife letting me play this record I just bought by a band she knows she doesn’t like while we made dinner last night. This is what love looks like.
This message brought to you by my wife letting me play this record I just bought by a band she knows she doesn’t like while we made dinner last night. This is what love looks like.
I guess I’m just going to get a cold every Thanksgiving forever now
December 2, 2024 at 4:37 PM
I guess I’m just going to get a cold every Thanksgiving forever now
I did not need my sister to tell me that manually writing actions which only differed by an integer was inelegant, but I guess I appreciate her shaming me into rewriting everything into for loops.
November 30, 2024 at 5:15 PM
I did not need my sister to tell me that manually writing actions which only differed by an integer was inelegant, but I guess I appreciate her shaming me into rewriting everything into for loops.
Do I be a cool person with a domain name Bluesky handle, or keep my meaningful-to-me bsky handle?
November 19, 2024 at 3:57 PM
Do I be a cool person with a domain name Bluesky handle, or keep my meaningful-to-me bsky handle?
A friend texted me a meme about two-factor authentication yesterday for no reason. I’m not sure I’m doing something right with my life, but I will accept this as my brand.
November 15, 2024 at 1:13 PM
A friend texted me a meme about two-factor authentication yesterday for no reason. I’m not sure I’m doing something right with my life, but I will accept this as my brand.
I learned today that there is a custom os that runs as a book on my Kobo and autozooms on pdfs to make them easier to read. And it lets me drop papers to read later via ssh. And allows custom screensavers.
Amazing what you can find on the internet.
Amazing what you can find on the internet.
November 1, 2024 at 10:21 PM
I learned today that there is a custom os that runs as a book on my Kobo and autozooms on pdfs to make them easier to read. And it lets me drop papers to read later via ssh. And allows custom screensavers.
Amazing what you can find on the internet.
Amazing what you can find on the internet.
I had to go to a meeting right after I wrote some code on Friday, so I guess I’ll extend through the weekend that glorious moment between when I come up with a clever coding solution and when I press compile and debug all of the horrible errors I made
September 7, 2024 at 5:44 PM
I had to go to a meeting right after I wrote some code on Friday, so I guess I’ll extend through the weekend that glorious moment between when I come up with a clever coding solution and when I press compile and debug all of the horrible errors I made
I’m so used to headless Linux boxes that when I mash my keyboard in frustration it comes out as lslslslslslslsls
August 9, 2024 at 12:05 PM
I’m so used to headless Linux boxes that when I mash my keyboard in frustration it comes out as lslslslslslslsls
I shocked my advisor out of thinking of me as a less lazy programmer than she is by admitting to manually loading a few dozen objects into a vector in the main body of this code instead of using for loops or an argument file or something.
August 4, 2024 at 8:13 PM
I shocked my advisor out of thinking of me as a less lazy programmer than she is by admitting to manually loading a few dozen objects into a vector in the main body of this code instead of using for loops or an argument file or something.
I get the feeling that building up this nonrelativistic effective field theory of nucleon interactions is showing disrespect to quantum field theory, and I’m here for it.
May 27, 2024 at 7:42 PM
I get the feeling that building up this nonrelativistic effective field theory of nucleon interactions is showing disrespect to quantum field theory, and I’m here for it.
This guy’s pandemic project was building an iPhone app store in case Apple opened up, so he shows up when Europe requires external app stores and Apple was like “uh, we didn’t expect anyone to actually do it, one sec.” Legendary: www.theverge.com/24150467/del...
Delta’s 10-year journey to the top of the App Store
On The Vergecast: emulators, AI voice notes, and the Rabbit R1.
www.theverge.com
May 8, 2024 at 2:15 PM
This guy’s pandemic project was building an iPhone app store in case Apple opened up, so he shows up when Europe requires external app stores and Apple was like “uh, we didn’t expect anyone to actually do it, one sec.” Legendary: www.theverge.com/24150467/del...