You’re not wrong, it obviously works because people do it. But whoo boy it makes my eyes water to even think about it too much.

Oh yeah that’s the stuff

This is a beautiful picture you’re painting. Imagine four hours a day of quiet time with a click-clack soundtrack.

(This isn’t really fair, some people want ten acres and 40k square feet and just can’t do that in the dmv unless … well it’s rude to say.)

Spending four hours a day in my car to own the libs

I mean a nontrivial number of people already do this

Ugh gross

Close-up photo of a dog lying on a carpet. His snoot is pretty close to the camera lens. He look sleepy

Sleppy

Sick of it tbh

It’s really Bar Khamsa season

I showed u my buffles please respond

Bison standing in a field. There’s a watering hole that some of them are wading in. There’s about 20 visible including a couple juveniles. No babies yet, which is what I was looking for.

u guys want to see my buffles

An enormous room with a two-story space telescope sitting in the center. It's a large cylinder with panels on one side, and mostly covered in dark protective fabric. The bottom end and stand is silvery metal.

The Roman Telescope is pretty much ready for space, apparently on time and under budget.

Anyway, LLMs for quantum physics make a bit of sense, since they're ostensibly good at transformations and inference in large-dimensional vector spaces. So I'm not as skeptical about this as I am about ... you know, some of the other claims out there.

Also, the notation in this paper is a little funny.

[Walter Matthau voice] "We're out of cornflakes, FU. It took me three hours to realize f(U) is a function of the unitary from Equation 1!"

Now, the theoretical basis for time crystals has been around since 2016, and there are experimental demonstrations dating from maybe 2018. The point is that in principle, a learning agent can be directed to look for interesting physics.

Chat, what do we think of learning agents for scientific discovery? Here's a paper in which researchers define an "interest function" for evaluating whether a particular quantum circuit is interesting to humans. Their AI then "discovers" discrete time crystals.
arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01013

Chatting with my MIL in the mornings, sometimes she’ll ask me “any meetings today?” Which is a little like asking your pet fish “Think you might go for a swim later?”

Sun Tzu taking off his glasses to rub his eyes exhaustedly and explain to the Emperor’s nephew “if you want to do things, you will need some information”.

Emperor’s nephew nods seriously and writes it down

Ha!

Seeing these reminded me that we still have a few of these OG iMacs still in active service. Here’s one.

Our extremely kind and thoughtful and goyishe neighbors would do this kind of thing when I was growing up — yahrzeit candles on Chanukah. Incredible to see it again in this context.

I’m skeptical that you could do this even if you had infinite money.

It’s one fab, Michael. How long could it take to commission and staff it? A year?

“Relax, Your Honor, there’s no law says I can’t have a connected earning device in here” [coughs for five straight minutes]

It’s too bad that it’s impossible to learn any lessons from history and that it’s illegal to study history. Otherwise there might be something worth looking at here.

Rejected album cover for Pretty Hate Machine

N/N stands for "Nes, Nease!"

Two old dusty blueberry iMacs on a cargo pallet

Turned a corner and stood very still when I saw these , like they were a couple of deer in a forest

Five cubic feet of junk peripherals in a cardboard box

Diving into a box of old clicky keyboards so I can swim around like Scrooge mcduck.