Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 11/10/2026The usual explanation is that Putin has compromising videos or other material, but the evidence suggests that Trump would shrug, ignore it or say it was faked by Biden, Obama or Clinton, and his supporters wouldn’t care at all. 110
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 07/10/2026Mathematicians might have to face up to the idea that mathematics isn’t objectively very difficult but humans just aren’t very good at it. 020
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 07/10/2026The United States ought to consider joining Canada as additional provinces! 110
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 29/09/2026I’m looking forward to the next AI Winter, which will provide some respite from the seemingly interminable stream of bad takes on artificial intelligence. 010
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 27/09/2026Does the Hackett complete works of Plato have annoyingly thin paper? 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 26/09/2026For almost a century we’ve known that there’s a sort of original sin inextricably woven into the fabric of logic. I don’t think we’ve yet fully come to terms with it. 010
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 20/09/2026Social media has declined so precipitously since its peak in the late 1990s that I’m finding it increasingly difficult to see any point to it. 010
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 16/09/2026At some point in every discussion of AI, someone will claim that future AIs will be magical in some way. 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 14/09/2026Any objectively consequentialist morality with scope over actions that execute arbitrary programs contains moral assertions that no effective procedure can decide. 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 13/09/2026Sooner or later, we’ll have to face the fact that the tangible effects of AI on people’s lives is too marginal to justify the vast expenditure. If this is the Technological Singularity, shouldn’t it be less boring? 011
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 13/09/2026There’s an awful lot of conflation of “improving the model” and “improving the app” around, isn’t there? 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 11/09/2026I started watching that show for the first time this week. Just the pilot, so far. 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 10/09/2026Or, I suppose, the stories might be such hard sf that we make some of the things they describe and those artefacts cause human extinction. 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 10/09/2026We might believe the stories made by our automatic science-fiction generators so strongly that humans become extinct. What an argument! 100
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 09/09/2026I notice that Marco quit Mastodon yesterday. If it’s addressed on the next ATP it’ll be an interesting listen. 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 06/09/2026Perhaps the charitable reading is nostalgia for a time when the open expression of fascistic and ethnonationalist views was suppressed by public opinion rather than being a major part of mainstream culture. 010
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 06/09/2026I would much rather be as right as I can be in each of a range of overlapping domains at the cost of being globally inconsistent than be globally consistent but less right in each domain I care about. 010
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 06/09/2026OMG! The last time DHH came up in my awareness it was for that storm about trying to suppress the expression of progressive values at his company, but I had no idea he’d gone full-on Nazi. Reading more about 1Password now… 010
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 06/09/2026The argument held more water in 2016, when people might have judged that the fascistic bluster was all just an act to get votes, and when he won he’d be more moderate and just broadly pro-business, but surely someone would have to be an actual bigot to vote for him in 2024. 100
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 06/09/2026Is there *anybody* who voted for Trump in 2024 who didn’t know exactly what they’d get on the basis of his first Presidency? 111
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 06/09/2026…or not people ought to be sent to concentration camps or denied life-saving healthcare or killed by roving paramilitary death squads for being the wrong colour. 120
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 06/09/2026I was so disappointed to read Marco’s post, and it’s hard to square with the long history of support for trans people and other marginalised or oppressed people on ATP. At best, I can read it as nostalgia for a time when politics seemed to about the appropriate level of tax rather than whether… 120
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 04/09/2026I just signed up for Threads and before I even saw the main UI my account was disabled for activity violating their community standards. I had not interacted with the app in any way except entering a validation code sent to my phone. They have genius devs over at Meta. 120
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 31/08/2026What are your favourite examples of what Arthur C Clarke would have called “mysteries of the second kind”? 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 30/08/2026The key question here, I suppose, is how often humans escalate to nuclear threats or actual nuclear exchanges in the same scenarios. 110
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 30/08/2026I want something I can recommend to people arguing about evolution who clearly have no idea what the theory even is. 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 30/08/2026Is there a better, clearer explanation of evolution by natural selection than The Blind Watchmaker? 100
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 29/08/2026Do the people who think that their God guided evolution never pause to consider how vastly, inconceivably evil such a God would have to be? 010
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 26/08/2026After languishing on my computer for twelve years, my new homepage is finally live. It’s still full of placeholder text but the basic design is done.decoherent.comDecoherent — the personal website of Richard BakerPhysicist, software engineer, designer and writer. The central node of his web presence since 2001. 010
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 23/08/2026If we receive from deep space instructions for building a machine, and nobody knows what the machine will do, should we build it? How about if every country in the world has a copy of the instructions? 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 23/08/2026She thinks that the stuff Cofnas is doing is “science”, and says she’s strongly on the side of it. Looking for new particles: not science. Saying that some races are genetically inferior: science. 042
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 14/08/2026@annagat.bsky.social Just saw you mention Liv Boeree favourably on Twitter. I’d assumed you blocked me immediately after I mentioned her because of some kind of fundamental disapproval of her. Glad to see this isn’t the case, but more puzzled than ever! 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 29/07/2026Amazing how their position is roughly “Nolan’s film is a woke attempt to undermine the foundations of Western Civilisation, but we must defend it from the even more woke opinions of Emily Wilson at all costs.” 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 16/07/2026Don’t men approach space opera by treating science and technology as a kind of poetic magic? 010
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 16/07/2026I think a lot of them are just “engineering fiction” or rewarmed Napoleonic naval stories, really. 030
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 11/07/2026I’m glad that Starfleet Academy ticked the representation boxes for holograms (twice) and weird humanoid/fish aliens, and none of these panels will convince me it’s woke gone mad. 0201
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 09/07/2026None will say it until January, when Vance can hope for two and half terms. 010
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 07/07/2026It’s not even a theory! It’s an interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is very definitely an extremely well tested theory. 040
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 06/07/2026Why do people watch football when there have been thousands of episodes already and the plot is always the same? 020
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 04/07/2026Russia’s long-term future is probably as a demilitarised buffer-state between the EU and China. The sooner it accepts this the better for everyone, including Russians. 120
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 04/07/2026The real America will always fall short of the ideal America, but the real must always be measured against the ideal, and the struggle to close the gap must never end until humanity has run out of new freedoms to win. 000
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 04/07/2026America is not just a country but the idea of a liberal state, in which there are no privileged classes, races, ethnicities, languages or religions, in which the weak and the powerful alike live under the rule of law, and all have equal rights, equal dignity and equal liberty. 110
Richard Baker @sharp.blue · 02/07/2026It’s basically always the same plot. They ought to freshen it up with vampires or shapeshifters or aliens sometimes. 010
