Notices by j_bertolotti (j_bertolotti@mathstodon.xyz)

From an engineering standpoint, TVs are a solved problem. We know how to make very good and reliable ones and we have known for a long time.
But the problem of selling good and reliable TVs (mine is well over 10 years old and still works perfectly) is that you only sell them once, so you don't make a lot of money on them. The way out of this conundrum is #enshittification. You make worse TVs, and you make the owner pay forever instead of paying a one-off. You force the TV to be forever online, use it steal the owner's data and feed them a neverending stream of bad adverts.

We truly live in the stupidiest timeline.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/cheap-tvs-incessant-advertising-reaches-troubling-new-lows/

I would expect all my fellow scientists to be able to spot a dishonest chart from 10 miles away, but it is still good to get a quick refresher from time to time.
Also a good resource to give to students, who are often very naive on these things.

https://flowingdata.com/projects/dishonest-charts/

@freemo
Are you listening to yourself? You made "kid getting shot in class" (something that in most places is so rare to happen less than once in a decade) almost as common as being struck by lighting (which is not as rare of an event) and you sound creepily proud of it. 🤮

@AlexanderVI

Reason number 10²³ why using Microsoft Office is a bad idea.

https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/microsoft-is-testing-a-free-with-ads-version-of-office-140030345.html?src=rss

Eight research groups disbanded (and 46 people fired) at the University of Twente (NL). This include the Complex Photonic Systems group, where I did 3 years of postdoc. It is the end of an era 😢
https://www.utoday.nl/news/75196/dismissal-for-46-st-employees-complete-research-groups-disbanded

#PhysicsJournalClub
"The Tumultuous Birth of Quantum Mechanics"
by Philip Ball

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v18/24

"quantum mechanics wasn’t created all at once. It took several decades and was a messy, confused process, during most of which the true nature of this revolution was obscure. In some ways it still is."

#QuantumMechanics #HistoryOfScience #Physics

Feels like the right time to start planning for moving all international scientific conferences to somewhere outside the US.

Brief list of useful online tools for #LaTeX users:

https://www.unicodeit.net to use Maths symbols on pages that do not support LaTeX (e.g. here)

https://www.tablesgenerator.com/latex_tables to generate tables without going mad

https://editor.codecogs.com to get an image of your equations you can copy-paste

https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html to find what is the command for that less-used symbol you can never remember

https://www.doi2bib.org to get a well-formatted revtex bibliography from the doi of the paper

Do you have more to add? 😀

@zleap Due to the scattering there is an exponential overlayed on top of it (Lambert-Beer law), so not a clean "inverse square law" example 😉

#PhysicsFactlet
Light propagates in a straight line (actually it is more complicated than that, but this is good enough for us here) and we see only the light that comes to our eyes. As a result you usually don't see the light going from its source to the objects it illuminates.
Unless it is misty, in which case light can scatter on the water droplets and you can "see" the light's path ("Tyndall effect").

#Physics #Optics #EverydayPhysics

@julesh Ludicrously Large Language Model (LLLM)

Yearly repost.
Happy new year!

@julesh Same with Italy and Germany.

@eniko President declared martial law and sent the military to the parliament (in the middle of the night). The head of his party immediately declared it was illegitimate. The opposition flocked to the parliament. Within 3 hours the martial law was voted out.
I don't think tomorrow morning is going to be fun for the president.

Scientist types as #DnD classes (part 2):

Paladin: Science is important, you get it. But why nobody else seems to care about the ethical implications of what they are doing? Things are bad, there are so many injustices around, and nobody seems to care. It is maddening!

Bard: You love giving talks (the bigger the audience the better) and the wide eyes of kids during your demonstrations. Everything else is secondary and you are happy somebody else is doing all the heavy lifting in the lab so you can talk about it.

Monk: All those tools are great and useful, but they are also a crutch, separating you from the essence of the problem and preventing true understanding. Nothing beats getting your hands dirty if you want to reach true knowledge.

Scientist types as #DnD classes:

Fighter: The best way to approach any problem is to do an experiment first and ask questions later (assuming there is any question left to ask). Very high volume of fire, but needs a constant stream of money to pay for fancier and fancier equipment.

Wizard: You dive deep into the mathematical foundations of your discipline. So deep you lost contact with reality a long time ago, but it doesn't matter, as you only speak with other wizards, who also lost contact with reality a long time ago.

Cleric: Never the first nor the last author. Your name is always somewhere in the middle, like an afterthought. But it is to you that the rest of the party always comes back to for help every single time they get in troubles.

Druid: You really care about the impact you make, and find the mathematical formalism at the foundation of your discipline a waste of time. So you developed a more intuitive approach, and rely a lot on your gut feelings.

Sorcerer: You are naturally gifted, and thus you never had to really study to be successful at what you do. You are a raising star, but true wizards look down on you as a shallow amateur (while at the same time envying you).

Thief: You are somewhere. Everybody knows that. But no one seems to be able to say where or doing what. Officially you are working for the good of the collaboration, and since everything seems to be working out everyone assumes you are doing your part.

Warlock: You are not as gifted as a Sorcerer, nor you put as much effort in as a Wizard. What you have is an extremely powerful patron, who grants you visibility, and the money you need to carry out your research. All for the small price of your soul.

One of the advantages of not having an algorithm is the freedom to put a like on a random post you found funny/interesting on a topic you don't really care much about, without being immediately being bombarded with a deluge of very similar posts.

"Zoom is now an AI-first work platform"

Does anybody know of a half-decent videocall app that is not infested by AI? I need one.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/25/24305942/zoom-communications-rename-ai-first-company

I have opinions on the starter packs on bsky [rant incoming, read at your own peril]:
I consider Mastodon my main Social, but I do have an account on bsky, and I have it since nearly the beginning.
After the US elections there was a big influx of new people on bsky, and a new useful-looking tool appeared: stater packs. A starter pack is a list of people you can put together which can be followed all at once. It is objectively useful when you have a ton of new people all arriving on a new social at once, as they will likely have troubles finding their way in the midst of a lot of other equally lost people. The interface to create one is atrocious, but they do their job. I created one for Physics in the hope to help newcomers to find a bunch of people posting about Physics to follow, and I think I succeeded.
Problem: in just about zero seconds people started behaving like being in a starter pack was some sort of golden medal, some "being part of the cool kids club". Even worse, a lot of people started behaving like being part of a starter pack was a shortcut to get a lot of followers without ever having to post anything interesting.
And now I have seen people starting to talk about the "duty" to curate those lists, like they were anything of actual importance instead of a tool useful in a very specific situation.

I think I will delete the starter pack I created, as it has outlived its usefulness.

There is nothing a word processor can do now that wasn't already perfectly functional 20 years ago. Same goes with a spreadsheet, a calendar app, or a email client.
Which begs the question why do we need ever newer versions of MS Office, when they are offering nothing we couldn't do before.

(I still haven't understood what makes browsers so fiendishly complex. You would think that after so many years it was a solved problem 🤷♂️ )

NB I don't use MS Office, or MS Windows. I am just wondering why you keep paying over and over for what is essentially the same product.