spontaneous symmetry breakdance

- "it can prove little lemmas. that's neat." (early 2025)
- "Well, guess I live in the future now" (Opus 4.5)

- "The scaling is undeniable, but there's definitely an IR cutoff somewhere. Besides, how smart can you get from minimizing loss against a corpus of reddit posts?" (late 2023-2024)
- "HOLY SHIT EVERYONE'S STUDENTS ARE CHEATING BAN THESE THINGS NOW" (2024)
...

- "You guys know they can't do physics at more than a word-association level, right? GPT just told me all CFTs are 2d." (early 2023)
- "They're good for brainstorming and like 5-10 specific tasks." (mid 2023)
...

Rough progression of my LLM opinions over time:
- "Clever Hans trick" (GPT 2)
- "Very cool Clever Hans trick" (GPT 3)
- "oh my god the novelty is wearing off can we please talk about ANYTHING else" (~ a week after ChatGPT)
- "Fuzzy query engine on the Common Crawl" (once I'd calmed down a bit)
...

I was a huge skeptic for a while, for approximately this reason

The math here is correct aside from typos, and while the code that it wrote has some mistakes (Claude isn't great at Mathematica and the problem doesn't lend itself very well to Python), it's way easier than teaching myself from scratch.

Sweet spot for LLM use in theoretical physics, aside from literature searches, is "have Claude automate a calculation you only sorta know how to do, and then check it by hand."

Me: Consider the 3d stress tensor mean-field theory (TMFT)---that is, the 3d conformal field theory dual to pure gravity in AdS4 with G=0. How can I enumerate the operators of this theory up to Delta=10 or so? Claude: This is a great question about a fundamental object in the conformal bootstrap / AdS-CFT landscape. The systematic way to enumerate the primary operators of TMFT is via the plethystic exponential of the stress tensor conformal character. Let me set up the computation and run it. The idea: the single-"particle" module is the conserved stress tensor (Δ=3,ℓ=2\Delta=3, \ell=2, Δ=3,ℓ=2 in 3d), with character [...] where the numerator subtracts the conservation null state. ...

yeah I'm sorry but this is just objectively useful

Does being in a war zone (junior varsity edition) lead to more or fewer university meetings? You will never guess (you will totally guess)

don't give them any ideas; my partner works at the Beinecke library and they already have to deal with enough cranks

i am in principle in favor of the middle east stopping all oil production. however,

oh did a new FdB piece drop?

If people who give a shit about the integrity of the whole enterprise turn their noses up at the technology as beneath them, it will not go away. What will happen is that the entire conversation about it in education will be dominated by EdTech snake oil salesman selling LearnLy to Vice Provosts.

Post: calling “you’re so brave” or “i hold space for trans people” or “my self work involves decentering cisnormativity” style rhetoric that is ultimately contentless and divorced from real concerns allyslop Reply: In This House signs, an allyslop classic

I feel like these are two different things, the In This House signs are a way for normal people to signify that they support trans/minority rights while the jargon is a way to tell people you've spent time in activist/academic circles

[talking to the hospital triage coordinator after an earthquake] "why are you so fixated on finding reasons to justify killing people?"

You can just say "that's a false binary" or "I think you're wrong about how many people are on each track". You don't have to do this best-of-all-possible-worlds polyanna bullshit where tradeoffs are fake, good people have unlimited political power, & every situation has a neat win-win third option.

hey everyone i found Candide's bluesky account

Anyway, I'm trying to avoid getting sucked into the linear algebra ensoulment debate atm, because I'm already at elevated risk of becoming a tile-the-future-lightcone-with-shrimp-orgasms guy, and I don't feel especially mentally grounded this week

lmao

it may be bijective but it's not the identity map

looking at niche microlabel pride flags with the reverance of a fallen people in exile and being completely unironic about it

"good" and "bad" implies tensors are moral *agents*. only sufficiently complicated tensor contractions, wrapped in a softmax and run in a loop, are moral patients.

good tensors.

thanks (to the both of you). That actually clears up a lot of my intuition about entanglement entropy

thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for!

@timhenke.bsky.social

like you have a contravariant map from open subsets of space to the category of Hilbert spaces

trying to learn more actual math, and I'm realizing that a local QFT on a fixed time slice is pretty obviously a sheaf. Is this fact useful at all?

If, like me, you're occasionally drawn to millenarian ways of thinking, I *highly* recommend becoming a "year of the Linux desktop" person. It is 100% the least harmful outlet for that energy.

We should take people who say these things seriously and take their ideas seriously. This is actual no-shit eugenics if taken seriously. The implicit claim here is that things like MRI machines or pharmaceutical medications were a mistake. In the age of HHS Sec RFK Jr it’s not just harmless granola.