The idea of QFT was already around, of course, but Dirac and others had thought of the electron field ψ as a "relativistic wave function," not as a field to be quantized. It was Pauli & Weisskopf who set things straight once and for all. link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Definitely going to be reusing his characterization of the potential importance of the linguistic model: "We are not dealing with a bizarre piece of French nonsense -- at least not necessarily."

There's a pile of Bay Times magazines in this cafe with a cover story about Nancy Pelosi with the subtitle "Speaking truth to power for 4 decades" and not to nitpick but I don't know if that phrase is really meant to be used about someone who's spent 10% of her life as speaker of the house.

Naturally

I’m very lucky to have a best friend whose technical expertise I trust more than anything to reassure me every time I get scared that some ai booster has made a point I don’t know enough to refute myself.

The "what if three loaves worth of stuffing isn't enough" panic is setting in

Not sure what I think about the notion of a "flourishing index", but at least some interesting pictures and historical tidbits in here

When I'm mean to you it's because I'm doing science discourse and also because you dress weird (article looks very interesting)

this car kind of looks like it has a face. Scientists say it’s time to consider whether it’s smiling at me.

I bought Pettit's The Concept of Structuralism at a used book store over the weekend because I liked how it looked and also the idea of knowing what structuralism is. Anyway I started reading it last night and might actually be on the way to knowing what people mean when they say "structuralist".

Oh my philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27289/

I don't know about you but the way my brain works is by analyzing the contents of the entire internet to make an educated guess about what word I should use next.

my fellow nerds may appreciate this space i found on wikipedia (intersection of all these forever) that is one of the simplest examples of a compact connected metric space that is not a union of two proper closed connected metric spaces.

A month later I'm pretty certain this is true. Also gets at an important point, which is that I should be allowed to just sit around all day making absurd pronouncements about quantum mechanics and be paid a billion dollars a year to do it. Is that so much to ask?

So a couple small quibbles here.

Someone in a meeting just said that we're going to "implement the scientific method". Should I unmute and tell them that isn't a real thing?

Calling yourself a "worker" in the context of being angry at the system: yes, very good and cool, we love class consciousness Calling yourself a "worker" in the context of talking about your productivity strategies: no, cringe and embarrassing, have some self respect

Woman sitting across from me on the plane is reviewing a paper and just said to her husband “basically I think the problem with describing her results is that they’re meaningless”.

There's a mosquito in my apartment in san francisco??

Rorty in “Texts and Lumps”: “our ideal of perfect knowledge is the sympathetic knowledge we occasionally have of the state of mind of another person […] Realistic interpretations of natural science are thus hopeless attempts to make physical science initiate the Geisteswissenschaften.” (!!!)

Hard to understand these people. Being mayor sounds like a lot of work and kind of boring, if I were a billionaire I’d just go to the beach or something.

Things I’ve found in children’s Halloween candy

I get that I'm way too thin-skinned about this stuff, and that I should be used to seeing this by now, and that I'm a fragile little snowflake with way too much self-regard, and all that, but as someone who has spent most of my life just wanting to be given space to think, this is infuriating.

I’m crying www.semafor.com/article/10/2...

Every time I catch myself saying that something is "subtle" I stop and ask myself "is it subtle or do I just not understand it" and it's always the latter.

The funny thing about the invention of the wheel is the guy who invented it died penniless. It wasn't until much much later that pennies were invented

The story (gift link): www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/b...

Spotify is now running ICE recruitment ads. We asked them to stop. They ignored us. Let's show them what we showed Disney. No Kings, No Collaborators, No Capitulators. indivisible.org/cancel-spotify

This is so bleak: www.404media.co/a16z-is-fund...

They are also intentionally conflating machine-learning and generative AI slop to confuse and try to make GenAI seem necessary. Google Maps traffic stuff is machine learning, not GenAI, for example. Auto-correct is too. Don't let them make you lose the thread. GenAI slop is slop.

Today I learned!

I love putting all caps print statements in my functions when I'm debugging. The computer says "MELDING" and then I say "MELDING" and I feel like Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest.

Happy missing zoom calls with your American collaborators because of mismatched daylight savings times day to all my British colleagues!

Wow this sucks so much!

I don’t think a long book is even primarily about plot, or character, or any of the patterned information on its pages. A long book is practicing over time a way of being in the world. Reading even a very good summary is not the same as giving over some portion of your own life to that practice.

Gonna tell my grandkids this was Antifa

I guess he's posting from inside his dil fridge.

A lot of you need to grow up and stop blaming your parents for all your problems. Take responsibility. Acknowledge that it’s mostly your PhD advisor’s fault.

I think this might be workable: the measurement problem is an artifact of physicists rediscovering the problems of personal identity in the context of quantum mechanics and assuming that these problems have been solved already by the philosophers in the classical setting.

Serious question though: Boixo wrote on LinkedIn "A major step forward is that the results generated by this algorithm are verifiable—another quantum computer can repeat the process to confirm the output." Doesn't verifiability usually mean *classical* verifiability? Is this version meaningful?

As a Jew from New York, very relieved finally trying a Boichik bagel and confirming that they are not in fact good

Today would have been Ursula K. Le Guin’s 96th birthday. I celebrated by visiting The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin at AA Gallery in London. What a treat! A selection of her maps & drawings. And a beautiful book! Happy birthday @ursulakleguin.com www.aaschool.ac.uk/publicprogra...

This sounds like a cool talk, but also I can't get enough of the design here

You're also not a sucker for believing in people. I get the sense that this needs to be stated from time to time.

Do animals fall for optical illusions? It’s complicated. For instance, guppies are highly susceptible to the Ebbinghaus illusion. Ring doves? Not so much. arstechnica.com/science/2025...

would accept fairly dire personal consequences in exchange for this being true

Really interesting (and relatively accessible!) discussion of how geometry governs microscopic self-assembly processes in cells, viruses, etc.

If AI were actually that good, I wouldn't keep getting linkedin job alerts for jobs at openai that I have obviously posted way too much about my disdain for sam altman ever to be considered for

It's very trendy for the woke left to mock the police these days, but this is the kind of thing that you and I might miss.