iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 12h

I was just being snarky about a shared adversary of ours and their word policing, since “going rogue” could be interpreted to imply agency.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 12h

Going rogue or *decoying* going rogue??

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Kashana @kashana.blacksky.app · 08/10/2026

Honestly live streaming an execution for the clicks feels like a natural consequence of not regulating the tech industry

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

(You can actually put anything you want in quotes and then you legally can’t be wrong)

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

I.e. I’m objecting to the metaphysical use of coherent states, not their use in calculations or even (maybe) “explanations” of phenomena

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

Yeah, I agree that these are (clearly lol) very useful, and I think you’re right that many physicists do view them as forming a bridge in this way. I just think that that’s wrong in the same way that it’s wrong to say decoherence solves the problem of definite outcomes.

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Gianmarco Soresi @gianmarcosoresi.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Man who won’t give his employees piss breaks claims many piss breaks on the horizon

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

Agreed! Maybe there’s something to be said about throwing out QM and replacing it with a series of effective QMs?

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

As long as you don’t claim this means they both *actually* have values I agree that this is a useful way to think about macroscopic behavior

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

But what if x and x+dx straddle a steep potential spike?

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

I don’t think this works at a fundamental level, though. Surely if I’m allowed to say that a superposition of x and x+dx represents a particle at a single point (let’s maybe throw in a reference particle at y to avoid issues of spacetime substantivalism), then this ought to be true at all times.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

Anyway congrats you’re an Everettian now!

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

Each particle gets one instant of reality, that’s it. Sorry!

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

Yeah I think that’s a good way to look at it — the “sequence of positions” is shorthand for “set of single-time observables that we interpret as a record of a sequence of positions”

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

Or rather, is different within some orthodox and realist version of QM, and you might want to deny that the first proposition even makes sense if you were a psi-epistemologist of some flavor.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

Also note that a particle having a position x at time t and x’ at time t’ is different from you *measuring* a particle having position x at time t and then *measuring” it to have position x’ at time t’.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 13h

Macroscipically! I bet you’ve also seen stuff have simultaneously well-defined position and momentum, or bar magnets have X and Z components of their magnetic field.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 14h

Oh ok I see what you mean. Yeah maybe there’s not really any indication there that this guy thinks the people are irreducibly responsible.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 15h

Why should that be a “good property” in a way different from “particle j has position x and momentum p”?

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 15h

I do think both things are real horrors, and there’s a distinct way in which turning this into a spectacle is disturbing, and a very bad signal, which is worth commenting on. But I agree that we shouldn’t let it get lost that whether or not it is made consumable, the death penalty is an abomination.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 15h

I.e. not as a criticism of the Atlantic’s coverage, but as frustration that there isn’t more like it

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 15h

Hopefully she’s wrong about the level of coverage this will get, but the other guy dominated the entire news cycle for a week. I’d read the post as a comment on that rather than on the content of this one article.

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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 08/10/2026

This is a moral atrocity and it needs to be loudly condemned as such. There is a reason that democracies *don't* do publicly televised executions (and why many don't execute people at all): it inculcates and rewards bloodthirst, which corrupts the spirit and corrodes the foundation of the polity.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

going home for winter break freshman year of college and ruining Christmas dinner by telling your grandparents you no longer believe in the real numbers

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Ah yes, I’m making the dumb (or very in touch with my human physical intuition?!) approximation that a narrow cylinder has huge curvature

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Like…collect data? No thanks, I’m a theorist 🫸

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I guess it’s that it is in fact a smooth manifold at all

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It’s in a “simpler way” than a fractal somehow? Maybe there’s a way to say that?

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

So of course it is *not* a paradox, but it is a clean demonstration of a place where our physical geometric intuitions fail to carry over to our mathematical formalization of them

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I.e. something like "let the Gaussian curvature of a closed surface in R3 be upper bounded by K, then the volume and surface area satisfy some bounds"

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

And also that the horn is a counterexample to a perfectly precise mathematical statement to which the cube is not.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

But I think the point here is that our mathematical intuitions *do* have these physical origins, which sometimes can't survive these unphysical limits.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Ah but I see your point about filling it.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Oh I was thinking of painting the outside, does it matter which side you want to coat?

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I'd argue that this version of the question is more in line with what people have in mind when they're confused by the counterexample.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

And this doesn't happen for a "normal" shape.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Agreed, but for the Gabriel's horn shape, isn't it the case that if you say "let's suppose a layer of paint has thickness d, so that the volume of a layer of paint covering a surface area A is A*d. How many times do I have to fill the horn to get enough paint?" is infinitely many times?

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Which is not to say that there's anything mysterious going on with the counterexample, or even that it's hard to understand once it's pointed out, just that I don't think it's a dumb mistake to find it surprising at first.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I think that actually misses something. The "paradox" (I claim) is about the intuition that a bound on the volume of a solid should give a bound on its surface area, and vice versa, for any chosen units of either. And it's interesting that this isn't true for reasons other than the different units.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Ok see now *that* I’d peer thoughtfully at in a museum

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Beautiful but I think you could elevate it even more by spilling a tiny bit of coffee on the notebook.

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Did you know: A fault tolerant quantum computer would be able to perfectly simulate a smaller quantum computer!

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Jeffrey M Epstein @jeffreymepstein.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Oh that referred to the fact that the company is called TypeSafe, which I guess I only learned on googling, and isn't in the post

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