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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • It’s a cynical way to view the C-staff of a company. I think it’s also inaccurate: from my limited experience, the people who run large tech companies really do want to deliver good software to users.

    From my much broader experience, this is missing the required cynicism that C-staff want to deliver software they think is good based on the criteria cynical yes staff tell them constantly is good. I’ve never met an exec that didn’t want to deliver something good; most execs I’ve met don’t actually understand what good is or how to benefit people.




  • Please don’t take me as a GH shill because I’m not. I’m not sure we read the same email given your projects. Actions on GH runners are dropping in cost and there’s a new fractional cost for self-hosted. For the average user, especially those on GH runners, costs are going down. Looking at your repo, you haven’t run anything since July. Your workflow files use GH runners. Nothing in your history suggests you’re leaving the free tier so I don’t get this FUD at all. General Microsoft hate? Fuck yeah. Shitty GH service? Fuck yeah. Plenty of reasons to dunk but this was not one of them. M








  • You’re missing the initial step.

    1. Assume that these proposals are correct.
    2. Given the proposals are correct, all of them contain a common structure.
    3. Given the common structure…

    Both OP commenter and myself take umbrage with #1 (if I can speak for them; they make disagree with me). I assume that if we trace the sources for the letter that we’ll see the reasons we’re able to make all of these logical leaps using other results in the field that come out of these proposals. I also assume that, if one of these systems is the foundation for a fully consistent theory of quantum gravity, then its conclusions are valid. This paper doesn’t address that initial assumption though so things like the article summarizing it are begging the question.

    There are many situations where we just have to agree to assume. If you read 14 and 36, you’ll find some of the core assumptions that go into this letter (both interesting ideas and the same authors so you can understand why they’d continue). An assumption Faisal makes is the rejection of objective observability which is one of those things you either believe or don’t believe. It’s analogous to the axiom of choice in that it could be contested but could be generally accepted.


  • Actually, F_QG is itself an assumption which isn’t backed up. See the paragraph before the one you quote when defining it. The beauty of axioms is that we can assume whatever we want but we need to either show nothing goes underneath it (eg Peano axioms) or have a very compelling case to make them (eg non-Euclidean geometry like parallel lines meet at infinity). This is a metasumary of some similar research at best. It’s not a proof in the way you think it is. Just because you don’t understand what you’re responding to doesn’t mean you’re right.


  • Yeah, the opening of the second paragraph on the page marked twelve basically says “we don’t have a true theory so we look at some proposals.” If anything, all it’s shown is that these specific proposals fall prey to the normal inability of mathematical systems to fully describe themselves, not that quantum gravity actively disproves a simulation. Everything after that might be sound if we trace all the sources. Nothing stood out as implausible or anything beyond some logical leaping. There was nothing that showed adding more to the system won’t fix the issues, which is the whole point of things like the updates their choice of set theory added to ZFC.