For it to be like a human it wouldn't just need to solve existing phsyics problems, it would need to push the field forward and introduce new paradigms.
My comment wasn't very long, yet you somehow still ignored the main part, "and introduce new paradigms". The point is whether it can do everything humans can, entirely new theoretical frameworks and ideas, such as string theory or dark matter, are not coming out of AI at the moment.
AI could discover candidate novel physics without autonomously operating new physical experiments, and humans or instruments can later independently validate the result. This is analogous to how Einstein developed theories whose predictions were confirmed by experiments and observations only years or decades later.
Do we have any examples of an current day AI system introducing a novel concept or perspective. We've got plenty of counterexamples discovered and some theorems proven, but afaik nothing analogous to a new definition.
It could be a good theoretical physicist. Actually it could be a good experimental physicist as well since senior experimental physicists use grad students for the manual labor.
The simplest example being a stack buffer that expands to a heap allocation when required. There is an API pattern to facilitate this: when the size of the provided "out" buffer is insufficient to hold the result, return an appropriate error code and populate an out parameter with the required size. So you try once with the stack buffer, and if that fails, retry after allocating a heap buffer of precisely the required size. We used this pattern everywhere in Windows dev.
Are you saying that you’re forced to use a smartphone? Because I don’t use one. It does make some things harder, but I don’t know what people are expecting. A law to ban smartphones? There’s not enough people who want that.
I do think we need rules that require businesses to accept cash, and to have alternative flows that don’t require smartphones for ordinary transactions (like buying food) or financial management. I also think we need to break up the duopoly and ensure that FOSS based devices can gain a foothold.
Unless more people go without smartphones, voluntarily, the friction in daily life is only going to increase for those of us who don’t use them. That means accepting a little bit of inconvenience from time to time, but you make up for it in other ways.
No, I'm saying that going to live in a cabin in the woods if you want to is great, not so much if you do it for running out of options. Not a hard concept to grasp. Whether smartphones are optional or not depends on a lot of factors.
I guess I don’t see what this adds to the conversation. What position exactly are you taking here? What should be done based on what you just said? I can’t tell if you’re making a real argument or if it’s an empty complaint about the status quo.
I didn't have my phone physically on me at the time. They did not have paper menus at all. They kind of rattled off a selection of items from memory. I ordered something.
I've seen restaurants that required a QR code to get a menu. I simply walked out. Lots of other places to eat exist with more reasonable practices.
Forcing people to scan a QR code to see a price is a great way to use the data from their device to serve them a different price than the last person who scanned that code was asked to pay.
Anyone else who wants you to scan a QR code as part of a check in process can be told you don't have a phone or that it doesn't work. It's their job to figure that out.
> Restaurants: Menu is QR only. In one case, ordering food was QR only.
Or worse, a physical menu but they want to pay you with your mobile wallet using a QR code. Even if there are alternatives presented when you complain, that still turns you into an outcast.
Do you mean leave if they don't have an alternative?
I'm not religiously opposed to QR-code linked menus myself, but it just so happens that the last restaurant I ate at, the QR menu was broken and I was forced to ask for a paper menu anyway.
Now if a restaurant puts a lot of care and curation into a web based menu (and posibly ordering system!), and lovingly craft a complementary QR code to point to it, then why not?
A lot of the time the caring is the important part.
I certainly would, unless it was something I was doing for someone else's sake (like a birthday dinner for someone). Why would I do business with a restaurant that can't be bothered to provide a good experience for customers?
I personally do not use QR codes. I suppose there could come a time where I could benefit from scanning one but I still have access to restaurants where you can order manually from humans and they cook the food themselves also.
If they wouldn't find another to help me? Absolutely. I can't imagine I couldn't just ask the server a question like "what's cheap and good?" or "I'll take the soup of the day."
Restaurants have thin enough margins already. They aren't turning away a customer for not bringing a phone. There's one tiny burger place just around the corner from me that's delivery/pickup only, not even a QR code, but they have a sign outside saying 10€ combos and they're 15€ on the website... I just asked them. They have very good halloumi burgers and perfectly cooked fries. They were happy to accept my cash, too.
Depending on what type of computer (if not smartphone) you have at hand, you can probably use a search engine to find the same menu. Or ask somebody at your table. Or ask the server. Or point at somebody else's food and say you want what they're having. Or eschew the menu entirely and ask to be surprised. Chef's choice can be fun.
Or leave yeah, I think that's valid. TFA is predicated on the notion of pretty-much-lying to people by telling them you don't have a smartphone even if you do. Leaving a restaurant if you can't find a menu seems like it'd be on similar ideological footing.
The idea is you shouldn't have to have any sort of computer on your person to participate in public life. If a proper eat-in restaurant can't maintain a paper menu then it's an indication of the level of service that's sure to follow.
Perhaps that's the grandparent commenter's idea but I don't think it's the point the article is making:
> So, seriously, I do really like the smartphone idea. It’s just that I don’t have any browser or "social" app on it. And I don’t want anything else than what I have.
> I wish I could say it is all I have, that I’m a true minimalist.
He defines true minimalism as having an _ideologically conformant_ computer, not no computer at all.
Well, yeah, people have been using that phrase for years, if not decades. I'm not sure if you were aware, but they actually trained Claude on human text, so it naturally sounds like the human text it trained off of.
the word “decades” is doing a lot of work here. Knowing that Claude is trained on human text is really the load bearing point. I can’t unsee this argument.
Jokes aside, of course it’s trained on human text. The issue is that it has a specific tone which leads to formulaic sentence construction that is tiring. But the plus is that it’s easy to spot if you want to avoid AI generated text.
I don't think she is untalented as a researcher in physics. Where she did not have talent at (and which is why she became a science YouTuber) is in "playing the career game" in physics research. Being a great researcher in some science requires very different talents than climbing the career ladder in this area of academic research.
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