Triton Station: “A Nobel prize in physics for something that is not physics”

Nearly forty years on, my concerns about string theory have not been misplaced. And while, in the strictest sense, I don’t think it qualifies as physics – it’s more of a physics-adjacent branch of mathematics – it is at least attempting to be physical theory. But machine learning is not physics. It’s computer science. Computers are a useful tool, to be sure. But programming them is no more physics than teaching a horse to count.

I’m not sure we should even consider machine learning to be meritorious. It can be useful, but it is also a gateway drug to artificial intelligence (AI). I remember the more earnest proponents of early AI propounding on the virtues of LISP and how it would bring us AI – in the 1980s. All it brought us then was dystopian fantasies about killer robots nuking the world. Despite the current hype, we have not now developed intelligent machines – what we’re calling AI is certainly artificial but not at all intelligent. It uses machine “learning” to reprocess existing information into repackaged forms. There is zero original thought, nothing resembling intelligence. Modern AI is, in essence, a bullshit generator. Now, we can all think of people who qualify as organic bullshit generators, but that begs the question:

Why is the Nobel prize in physics being awarded for something that is clearly not physics?

Stacy McGaugh

If you need more proof of the stagnation in theoretical physics over the past decades, look no further than this year’s Nobel Prize.

Chrome for Developers: “CSS Wrapped: 2023! text-wrap: balance and pretty”

As a developer, you don’t know the final size, font size, or even language of a headline or paragraph. All the variables needed for an effective and aesthetic treatment of text wrapping, are in the browser. Since the browser does know all the factors, like font size, language, and allocated area, it makes it a great candidate for handling advanced and high quality text layout.

This is where two new text wrapping techniques come in, one called balance and the other pretty. The balance value seeks to create a harmonious block of text while pretty seeks to prevent orphans and ensure healthy hyphenation. Both of these tasks have traditionally been done by hand, and it’s amazing to give the job to the browser and have it work for any translated language.

Una Kravets & Bramus & Adam Argyle

Nice to see the web platform introducing CSS features such as text-wrap that are easy to pick up and use – as opposed to things like grid layouts and nesting – while also being extremely useful and offloading to the browser tasks that would otherwise need complex work from web developers. The balance keyword is widely supported in browsers already, while pretty is exclusive to Chromium-based browsers for now. Even so, the lack of browser support for pretty won’t affect visitors in Safari and Firefox in any meaningful way, since the text will simply wrap in the default way.

Politico: “Europe should hope for a Trump victory”

A Trump win would immediately revive plans for more common EU debt for the bloc’s security and defense. That idea — initially pushed by Macron and supported by the EU’s new High Representative Kaja Kallas — had even won the tacit support of frugal Northern Europe, but it lost momentum after the French president’s election gambit. The shock of a second Trump term would undoubtedly rekindle it, not least because Germany — the country most reluctant to support Macron’s ideas — is also the country that fears losing America’s security guarantee most.

The same would be true for the Continent’s gloomy economic outlook. Former Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s diagnosis of an €800 billion-per-year investment gap can only be filled by more common financing. It also requires a different approach to EU-wide industrial and fiscal policy that, again, would start in Germany and spill over to rest of the EU — something that a trade war with Trump could help unlock.

Mujtaba Rahman

That may have been the case if Trump would have won a second term back in 2020, but I fear that now in 2024 and beyond the prospects of catalyzing European unity are much slimmer. European leaders have had another four years of ‘American leadership’ under Biden to lull them into complacency – I am using ‘leadership’ here in quotes as this was rather America pursuing its militaristic haphazard foreign policy and European leaders tagging along and pretending US interests perfectly match our own.

The Economist: “Ireland’s government has an unusual problem: too much money”

In September the European Court of Justice delivered a verdict in a long-running legal battle over whether Apple had benefited from unfair (and now closed) loopholes in Ireland’s tax code. As a result, the American tech firm will have to hand over €13bn ($14bn) to the Irish tax authorities, along with over €1bn of interest—an amount equivalent to 4.8% of the country’s annual national income. To the bemusement of other cash-strapped governments, the Irish authorities sided with Apple in its battles with Europe’s courts, arguing that the firm had done nothing wrong.

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Irish policymakers are aware that the tax base is narrow as well as bountiful. In 2022 just ten firms accounted for three-fifths of corporate-tax receipts. Moreover, corporation tax amounted to 27% of all receipts that year, more than double the oecd average. Recognising this vulnerability, the Irish government intends to treat the Apple windfall in the same way that Norway treated North Sea oil revenues: it will set up a sovereign-wealth fund. Two separate pots are being established. Ministers hope their combined value will reach €100bn by 2040, at which point they will start to spend the income generated.

The Economist

I have a rather straightforward answer if the Irish government doesn’t want – or know what to do with – this massive Apple fine: contribute this to the EU budget! It was after all the European Commission who fought this legal battle and won, while Ireland argued against it. And most of these profits on which Apple avoided taxes for years were generated in other EU countries, not on their operations in Ireland.

Windows Latest: “Bye USB, File Explorer gets Android storage integration”

Android storage integration in File Explorer is one of those Windows 11 cross-platform features that works really well. It works smoothly without hiccups, and I can now see all my documents, pictures, and files from my Android phone (Galaxy S23) in File Explorer.

It’s identical to accessing the storage using a USB cable, but thanks to deeper integration using Cross Device Experience Host, it’s completely wireless.

With Windows 11’s Android integration, you can open File Explorer and notice your phone’s name on the left sidebar. When you click the shortcut, your phone’s internal storage opens in the File Explorer.

Mayank Parmar

After seeing this article shared on Reddit, I tried it on my devices today and it is already up and running here. The initial beta announcement for the feature was in late July this year, so a relatively fast rollout. Kudos to Microsoft for including Windows 10 in the release (although a more cynic take would be that they felt bound to support it because of the slow adoption of Windows 11); hopefully this means I can use this equally well on my Surface tablet, which I don’t intend to update until Windows 10’s end-of-life.

Bloomberg: “Tesla Optimus Bots were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event”

Some attendees said on social media afterward that the robots had help and at least one video posted online purportedly from the Oct. 10 Cybercab event shows an Optimus bartender acknowledging that it was being assisted by a human. That wasn’t stated by Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk during his remarks on a webcast.

The use of human input raises questions over the capabilities and market readiness of the bot, which Musk said last week he expects to be the biggest product ever of any kind. The CEO told the crowd it will handle many household tasks and could eventually be available to consumers for $20,000 to $30,000 each.

What can it do? Musk said. It can be a teacher, babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do.

Edward Ludlow & David Welch

Awkward for the part that ‘stole the show’ for some attendants to have been faked all along (I chuckled at the top comment on The Verge calling them Decepticons). The main event itself, the launch of Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi, was considered underwhelming due to its vagueness on technical details and the economics of the supposed robotaxi business – more of a concepts showcase than anything else. At least this time around the company was met with a frosty reaction on the stock markets, with shares dropping 9%, the worst decline in more than two months.

The Atlantic: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is”

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information. What is clear from comments such as Kremer’s is that she is not a dupe; although she may come off as deeply incurious and shameless, she is publicly admitting to being an active participant in the far right’s world-building project, where feel is always greater than real.

What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit, as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. She followed with: I can’t believe I just had to type that.

Charlie Warzel

Certainly bad to have people threatening meteorologists – talk about shooting the messenger! – and claiming that the hurricanes were unleashed by the government. At the same time, is any of this honestly surprising to anyone who followed American culture? Half the country is in full-blown denial about global warming; the more extreme weather disasters become, the more they need to escalate their denial and blame-shifting, lest they would be forced to face the bitter reality that they ignored the problem for decades, let oil companies get rich and shape the narrative, and now the consequences of inaction are becoming inescapable and threaten their privileged and wasteful lifestyles.