MediaWiki does not seem like the right tool for this job, if one were starting from scratch. It’s… a lot of infrastructure for a small number of pages that will be changed very sporadically by a small number of people.

Hey, it looks like our very own corbin started the “complexity class” page at the nLab! Maybe we should flesh that out. (I started their page for the number 24 but am not very active at all.)

I copied this over to the recommendations thread for actual-science versions of things that the Sequences gesture incompetently at.

Here is a comment by corbin with relevant recommendations:

Gödel makes everyone weep. For tears of joy, my top pick is still Doug Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is suitable for undergraduates. Another strong classic is Raymond Smullyan’s To Mock a Mockingbird. Both of these dead-trees are worth it; I personally find myself cracking them open regularly for citations, quotes, and insights. For tears of frustration, the best way to fully understand the numerical machinery is Peter Smith’s An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems, freely available online. These books are still receiving new editions, but any edition should suffice. If the goal is merely to ensure that the student can diagonalize, then the student can directly read Bill Lawvere’s 1968 paper Diagonal arguments & Cartesian closed categories with undergraduate category theory, but in any case they should also read Noson Yanofsky’s 2003 expository paper A universal approach to self-referential paradoxes, incompleteness & fixed points. The easiest options are at the beginning of the paragraph and the hardest ones are at the end; nonetheless any option will cover Cantor, Russell, Gödel, Turing, Tarski, and the essentials of diagonalization.

And picking that as a username is… “I know I’m a grown man, but inside I am 12 years old, and when I grow up nerds will be cool, you’ll see!”.

Dang, I am missing a lot due to eating junk food instead of fast food.

Well, not all of the comments there are horrible. Though there is a guy calling himself “richardfeynman” saying some pretty silly stuff. His prior comment history is full of promptfondling.

There could be other “into the locker now” signals that are as strong as calling yourself “richardfeynman” on Hacker News, but I cannot think of a stronger one.

Variations on this theme have probably come up repeatedly in promptfondler circles.

Ah, gotcha.

No, that’s not what superdeterminism is. You are importing a whole lot of baggage about what it means to understand things “as quantum mechanical systems”. You are also making the same mistake that Tim Maudlin does about the implications of Bell inequality violations. He thinks that the EPR criterion of reality is “analytically” true, and he’s wrong. Since you have recommended Maudlin elsewhere on Lemmy (as well as promulgating the myth that a singular “Copenhagen interpretation” exists), I’m going to do something else than try conversing with you further.

Something is missing here:

damages their users’ critical thinking and mental acuity whilst , all

The very unscientific sampling I did just now suggests that those complexity classes which Wikipedia covers, it covers better than the Zoo does anything. Of course, the Zoo has room for #P/lowpoly and LOGWANK and all the other classes that are attested in one paper apiece.

And we don’t want to introduce all the complexities of solving disagreements on Wikipedia.

wait for it

There should also be some kind of support for multiple AIs disagreeing with each other.

“The Torment Nexus definitely has positive uses. I personally use it frequently for looking up song lyrics and tracking my children’s medication doses. I find it helpful.”

From the comments:

I wonder if you could do something similar with all peer-reviewed scientific publications, summarizing all findings into an encyclopedia of all scientific knowledge.

True believers are fucked in the head.

And hardly run, at that: this changelog is all spam. Tsk, tsk.

The issue of interpretation is wildly unresolved. Scratch any question in “quantum foundations”, and you end up in the territory of debates like whether mathematics is invented or discovered. Lovely fuel for online discussion threads, but by the same token, also exactly the kind of thing that many physicists try to ignore whenever possible. Even so, there are views that are very hard to argue for. The implication of Bell’s theorem (and a host of related results: Gleason, Kochen–Specker, …) is that you can’t find a consistent layer beneath quantum mechanics, not without something like a conspiracy of hidden causes propagating backwards in time. In other words, the hidden layer you postulate has to look baroquely nonclassical itself in order to be consistent with the real experimental data. 't Hooft occupies a position way out on the fringe, one that many people (including me) would say amounts to giving up on science and declaring that everything happens the way it does because Amon-Ra wills it.

I suppose one prominent thing is his book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus. I know of various other books about quantum information/computing, written from a physicist perspective. There are David Mermin’s Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction (Cambridge UP, 2007) and Eleanor Rieffel and Wolfgang Polak’s Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction (MIT Press, 2014). If anyone knows a decent undergrad introduction to Gödel incompleteness and its relation to the halting problem, that would probably cover a lot of the rest, apart from what I recall as rather shallow pseudophilosophical faffling. (I am going off decade-old memories and the table of contents here.)

The Sinfest subreddit does have some real gems.

What’s he doing with the hammer and chisel? According to this comic, you become a Christian by signing a contract that you believe will improve your life (or death, I guess). Several tiny undead Jewish skeletons will then enter through your mouth, and your eyes will become screens that display religious symbols. How will woodworking tools help with any of this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/sinfest/comments/1mvcffn/comment/n9plpf5/

I’ll raise the question here instead of in the thread that gave me the idea, since it feels not quite right to bring the awful to NotAwfulTech:

At this point, I have real reservations recommending anything that Scott Aaronson has written for any purpose. I’m not going to elide his actual contributions to science, but I can’t suggest that a student read any expository writing of his, not without such heavy caveats and contextualizing that my conscience would welcome any alternative. So, then: What do people read him for, and what are the alternatives?

The malware stole a lot of people’s login keys and, apparently, their crypto wallets.

Seinfeld "Shame".gif