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Patrick Crotty

@patrickrcrotty.bsky.social
510 followers 122 following 6.4K posts

Physics prof. Basic philosophy: Data > Theory, Facts > Narrative. MAGAs, bigots, doomers, people with a hammer-and-sickle in their nym, and other obnoxious rabble get instablocked. Posts are my personal views and I don’t speak for any institution etc.

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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
The 1000 monitors thing is standard practice going back decades. People shouldn’t make too big a deal of it. The armed agents at polls thing is most certainly not standard practice and would provoke a thermonuclear response from state governments and the public.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Absolutely. You have my most solemn word I’ll be thinking of you as on the ballot.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Good. I hope they do to this lying, honorless sack of shit what the Sandy Hook parents did to Alex Jones.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
It’s almost as if actual experts in national security view Gorka as a glib, pseudo-intellectual poseur with a phony PhD and no meaningful academic contributions to the field, or something.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Seriously, what purpose does capital punishment serve when it's carried out 31 years after the crime, and possibly not even then? Let's just join the civilized world and get rid of the death penalty. Life without parole suffices.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Gonna be fun when the Dems are hauling this fuckmuppet into House hearings on a weekly basis next year.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Jesus, I hate being governed by stupid people.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Watched a doc last night about Dark Ages Britain, the cities emptying after the Romans left, literacy disappearing, technology devolving, any semblance of government beyond the local level vanishing, etc. *That* was civilizational collapse, and is far beyond anything we face short of nuclear war.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I solemnly pledge to boycott any media organization that hires Bari Weiss in any capacity.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The past decade has convinced me that people to the right of Mitt Romney or to the left of AOC are, without exception, unserious clowns who should never be in any position of authority.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
One of my top-3 favorite classes in college was on classical Chinese philosophy, and I was a physics and math double major.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Just anecdotally, I had a real-deal math-prodigy friend who started at a top-5 math PhD program when he was 18, and he was very much *not* like Eliezer Yudkowsky. Incredibly nice and humble guy, in fact.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
This nonsense will continue until early next year, when the Democratic Congress pulls all funding for the war.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Let’s worry about that when and if it actually happens.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
From what I’ve read, they’re unlikely to rule on that case before the election
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Fortunately — according to some election lawyers I follow here — the effect of this on the 2026 election is likely to be minimal, since we’re inside the time window when mass purges of voter registrations are prohibited by federal law.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
This article makes it clear that with a certain type of person, the most constructive, considered, and appropriate response to their criticisms of something one has said or done is “Fuck off.”
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I suspect that will happen at around $6/gal. So, by this time next month
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
(c) mathematics, particularly nonlinear/complex/chaotic systems and their extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, which means you can predict the socioeconomic effects of your present-day actions on the people of 4000 A.D. about as well as you can predict their weather.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
no matter much science advances; (b) astronomy, particularly how *ridiculously* far away from us even the other planets in our own solar system are, let alone other stars, and how *ridiculously* hard it will be to find or engineer the specific conditions needed for Earth-based elsewhere;
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Great thread. A lot of these Muskist/EA/et al. guys just seem to be generally ignorant of (a) real-world physics, which almost certainly makes faster-than-light travel a la Star Trek impossible — not hard, not even *really* hard, but solvable with enough ingenuity — but literally *impossible*
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
48!
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
We get it. You hate us. Message received. You can fuck off now.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Patel is an insufferable little shit, but that doesn‘t seem to be what he’s saying, just that there will be agents deployed to FBI field offices.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Himes is incorrect. Bessent is *not* better than that.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Pompous little bitch.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I‘m not sure whether there’s an organization or group dedicated specifically to organizing mass boycotts of any and all companies associated with Elon Musk. But if there isn’t, there should be.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I consider doomers (“the election will be rigged, trump will declare martial law, etc”) to be in this category of bad-faith narcissistic trolls too, or at least adjacent. (Not to deny the genuine need to stay vigilant about Republican electoral mischief.)
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Let it close then. It would be a tragedy to lose the Kennedy Center, but it would be much worse to put the dipshit sociopath’s name back on it — because that would be an *obscenity*.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
We need to be ready to be in the streets in vast numbers until the rightful Congress is seated. I hope it doesn’t come to that, and on the balance I don’t think it will. People, including judges and courts, are utterly sick of this shit. But we need to be ready, just in case.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I hate these people. They’re the enemy as much as MAGA.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
IMHO this scenario is somewhat unlikely, if only because Congressional GOP leaders are smarter than trump and probably understand that the American people simply would not tolerate this. But even so, we need to be ready to take to the streets in the tens of millions if that becomes necessary.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
You mean Luttig?
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
If it’s any consolation, I just blocked Parker Molloy
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Yeah. I try to stay receptive to informed, good-faith criticisms of our system and country from non-Americans, but my god there are so many uninformed, bad-faith ones on here polluting that discourse.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Did he succeed in overturning 2020? I’m under no illusions about his respect for the law and constitution. I‘m just pushing back on the notion that he has some kind of evil omnipotent power to vaporize them.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
You can fuck right off too, you useless parasite
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
whenever this topic comes up that he *cannot* overturn a valid election just because he doesn’t like the results, at least not without setting off a civil war.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Whether trump “accepts” a Congressional election is legally and constitutionally irrelevant, and this kind of question from journalists grants him power that he doesn’t actually have. I’m not discounting that he may whine it was “rigged”, file frivolous lawsuits, etc. But it should be made clear
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I‘ve gotten to the point where I’m just auto-instablocking vulgar, snarky twits as soon as they reveal themselves in any thread I’m reading, even if their abuse isn‘t directed at me. Absolutely nothing of value will be lost.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
💯
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
and the truly world-ending stuff. That, IMHO, will remain the case with AI. We certainly need to be vigilant about keeping those barriers and safeguards robust. But Skynet is almost certainly going to remain science fiction.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
is that the threat from AI is kind of like the threat to society from genius sociopathic hackers with multiple PhDs. Such people exist, but they aren’t destroying the world because they fundamentally *can’t* destroy the world. There are just too many barriers, safeguards, etc between them
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
than techno-wizardry like finding unsuspected fatal weaknesses in extremely well-studied encryption algorithms (especially before any mathematicians or computer scientists, many also using AI assistance, had found them). So, my take — which, again, carries no particular weight —
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
power that can crack the standard AES-256 encryption in use today on even a cosmological time scale, for example. So much like present-day hacking, AI-assisted hacking is more likely to involve exploiting human errors — weak passwords, falling for phishing attempts or forged emails/voicemails —
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
people developing psychologically unhealthy relationships with chatbots, etc. Undoubtedly they’ll be used by hackers, or autonomously try to hack into systems themselves. But is the risk there that much greater with AIs than without them? There is no amount of existing or foreseeable computing
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Giving an AI operational control of a nuclear submarine or a BSL-4 lab or something would obviously be madness. But assuming those things remain tightly safeguarded, I think the risks from AI are most likely to be social/political: forgeries, misinformation, plagiarism and cheating in schools,
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Only a few existing technologies *could* realistically end civilization/humanity — nuclear weapons, genetically-engineered super-viruses, etc. — and the rigorous regulations and restrictions around those things will need to be updated to include AI.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
that (b) will produce real long-term stresses on human society and (c) will lead on occasion to localized catastrophes, but (d) isn’t realistically going to cause the collapse of human civilization or the extermination of the human species.
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Patrick Crotty @patrickrcrotty.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
For some reason, several people recently IRL have asked me, on hearing I’m a physicist, what I think of the threat from AI. I don’t think my background gives me any special expertise or insight on the question, but FWIW: I think it’s going to be like climate change, in that it’s (a) a real issue
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