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David Pfau

@davidpfau.com
10K followers 548 following 953 posts

So far I have not found the science, but the numbers keep on circling me. Views my own, unfortunately.

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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 25/09/2026
gg
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 20/09/2026
Having a seeded bagel on unceded land
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 20/09/2026
We spent $100m building a robot that can pirouette at 5000 rpm and performs Swan Lake beginning to end in 30 seconds. Ballet is solved.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 20/09/2026
It's called salami publishing and it happens all the time. Well managed labs do things like this. Poorly managed labs just have three people working independently stabbing each other in the back.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 14/09/2026
Prime example I can think of is all the discourse around data centers and water usage, but I see echoes of it in people getting upset at OpenAI because they "stole mathematician's ideas" (probably not) and not because they're destroying the soul of mathematics.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 14/09/2026
Ok, it's time to coin a law of social media discourse: when something happens that is legitimately worth getting angry about, social media will drive people to get angry about it for the wrong reason.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 11/09/2026
Taking over the nukes is well above that ceiling. There simply is no mechanism for a chatbot to do that.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 11/09/2026
I can too, but I think there is a ceiling on what "havoc" means here.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 11/09/2026
And if that is something you're worried about, the obvious solution (besides just...not doing it) is arms control and nonproliferation, which is something I support.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 10/09/2026
They don't even hook that shit up to the internet. It's as airgapped as is physically possible.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 10/09/2026
Nobody would do that.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 10/09/2026
It's the forecasts of mass death and literal threat to civilization itself on par with nuclear weapons or climate change that I find absurd.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 10/09/2026
FWIW, I don't doubt that AI will cause a reckoning about our place in the universe on par with the Copernican or Darwinian revolutions, or that it will cause massive disruption in the digital realm.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 10/09/2026
Do the Zoomers know about the Y2K bug?
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 10/09/2026
Correct. You join Anthropic yet?
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 10/09/2026
I can't believe how many of my normie friends I had to explain superintelligence, AI safety, rationalism and x-risk to today.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 10/09/2026
Well there is for conventional superconductors (Eliashberg theory) but it doesn't work for high temperature superconductors like cuprates
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 10/09/2026
The CEO was a former VP at OpenAI.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 10/09/2026
OpenAI is not the company trying this. Take a look at Periodic.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 15/08/2026
Oh Bluesky....
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 15/08/2026
I sort of assumed everyone here was still in such a bubble that they didn't even realize the rest of the world had moved on. Or conversely, so many woke people had moved here that people still on Twitter didn't realize it was still going.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 15/08/2026
Oh shit, this site has an influence on the discourse?
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 15/08/2026
To be fair they are mostly talking about it in a sort of "ok now that we can honestly look back and discuss some of the problems, let's figure out what we can do better for Woke 2" sort of way.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 15/08/2026
Are people on here aware that on The Other Site all the remaining left wing people are talking about "Woke 1" as some wild thing that is very definitively in the past? Has that discourse made it over here at all, or does everyone here believe Woke is still alive and well?
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 06/04/2026
Ah, you haven't heard the news. Ask Sean.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 06/04/2026
Using AI to cure cancer or fight climate change makes as much sense as using neuroscience to figure out AI. It's all yak shaving. If your goal is to "solve X" just go solve X, don't try to solve Y then use Y to solve X.
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Reposted by David Pfau
Chris Simms @chrisnsimms.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
This is an awesome discovery: A single-celled organism with no brain called Stentor seems capable of Pavlovian learning. Yes, it can actually learn to associate two things despite having no neurons. My latest for @newscientist.com. 🧪 #science #memory #learning www.newscientist.com/article/2519...
newscientist.com
Single-celled organism with no brain is capable of Pavlovian learning
A trumpet-shaped, single-celled organism seems able to predict one thing will follow another, hinting that such associative learning emerged long before multicellular nervous systems
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 03/03/2026
Maybe somewhere.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 03/03/2026
There's some kind of lesson there.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 03/03/2026
I miss when ideas mattered in machine learning.
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Reposted by David Pfau
Simon Evans @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org · 12/02/2026
NEW ANALYSIS: China's CO2 has now been 'flat or falling' for 21 months * Down in 2025 * Still below Mar 2024 * Clean energy wave a key factor If this is China's peak (TBC) it's the climate story of the century so far… www.carbonbrief.org/...
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 09/02/2026
How does Esoteric Claude feel about this?
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 30/01/2026
"Alexander (Smbat) Abian (January 1, 1923 – July 24, 1999)[1] was an Iranian-born Armenian-American mathematician who taught for over 25 years at Iowa State University and became notable for his frequent posts to various Usenet newsgroups, and his advocacy for the destruction of the Moon."
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 30/01/2026
This you, @truebe.horse ? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...
en.wikipedia.org
Alexander Abian - Wikipedia
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 20/01/2026
One year, and we're on the brink of war with the rest of NATO. God help us after three more years of this.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 10/01/2026
Wasn't Eric Adams the one who brought trash bins to NYC?
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 09/01/2026
I'm not really sure how to square this with the US spending 1% of GDP on datacenter construction.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 08/01/2026
If anyone DMed me recently - to use DMs for this app in the UK, I have to go through age verification, which I have not done yet on principle. If you are trying to reach me privately, email or Twitter DM works.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 08/01/2026
Ok apparently some people thought I was talking about a movie. I meant the US foreign policy establishment in DC.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 07/01/2026
I'm starting to think The Blob might not have been such a bad thing after all.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 03/01/2026
A friend who lives in Denver says that at least sorta soft vaccine skepticism is sadly popular there.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 22/12/2025
All-around fantastic work from Andres Perez Fadon and collaborators, and this shows how these calculations could be done for systems where we still don't know how to write down even qualitatively correct solutions.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 22/12/2025
This requires the calculation of multiple degenerate ground states. People have used neural networks to calculate *a* ground state for the FQHE, and have calculated fractional spin statistics in lattice models, but no one has done these calculations in the continuum before.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 22/12/2025
Rather than write down a solution through a stroke of genius, we trained a Transformer-like neural network to calculate these fractional spin statistics using "entanglement interferometry", and got answers more accurate than the Laughlin wavefunction.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 22/12/2025
This behavior was so weird and unexpected that it ended up being the subject of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics. No one even knew how to write down a wavefunction that explained this phenomenon until Bob Laughlin just dreamed one up one day. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physi...
nobelprize.org
Nobel Prize in Physics 1998
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1998 was awarded jointly to Robert B. Laughlin, Horst L. Störmer and Daniel C. Tsui "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations...
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 22/12/2025
The collective excitations of many electrons behave a lot like particles...but instead of particles with integer spin (bosons) or half-integer spins (fermions) they behave like they have weird fractional spins like 1/3, 1/5, etc. This is the *fractional quantum hall effect*.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 22/12/2025
Fundamental particles are either fermions or bosons. Fermions, like electrons, make up matter, while bosons, like photons, are force carriers. But in two dimensional materials in a magnetic field, things can start to get weird...
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 22/12/2025
Excited to share our latest preprint, on using deep learning to extract the weird fractional quantum statistics of 2D topological materials: arxiv.org/abs/2512.15872
arxiv.org
Extracting Anyon Statistics from Neural Network Fractional Quantum Hall States
Fractional quantum Hall states host emergent anyons with exotic exchange statistics, but obtaining direct access to their topological properties in real systems remains a challenge. Neural-network wav...
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 09/12/2025
Not sure why they bother asking for my age on this app, everyone knows everyone on Bluesky is exactly 39.
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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 04/12/2025
I am not at NeurIPS.
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