So a couple of intergalactic hydrogen atoms could exchange a photon across light years and become entangled for the rest of time, casually sharing some quantum of secrets as they coast to infinity.
No "secrets" are being exchanged between these particles.
The point wasn't that the discussion is stupid, but that believing particles can be in two states at once is stupid. Schrodinger was doing a kind of argument known as a reduction to absurdity in his paper The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics. He was saying that if you believe a single particle can be in two states at once, it could trivially cause a chain reaction that would put a macroscopic object in two states at once, and that it's absurd to think a cat can be in two states at once, ergo a particle cannot be in two states at once.
In his later work Science and Humanism, Schrodinger argues that all the confusion around quantum mechanics originates from assuming that if that particles are autonomous objects with their own individual existence. If this were to be the case, then the particle must have properties localizable to itself, such as its position. And if the particle's position is localized to itself and merely a function of itself, then it would have a position at all times. That means if the particle is detected by a detector at t=0 and a detector at t=1 and no detection is made at t=0.5, the particle should have some position value at t=0.5.
If the particle has properties like position at all times, then the changes in its position must always be continuous as there would be no gaps between t=0 and t=1 where it lacks a position but would have a position at t=0.1, t=0.2, etc. Schrodinger referred to this as the "history" of the particle, saying that whenever a particle shows up on a detector, we always assume it must have come from somewhere, that it used to be somewhere else before arriving at the detector.
However, Schrodinger viewed this as mistake that isn't actually backed by the empirical evidence. We can only make observations at discrete moments in time, and to assume the particle is doing something in between those observation is by definition to make assumptions about something we cannot, by definition, observe, and so it can never actually be empirically verified.
Indeed, Schrodinger's concern was more that it could not be verified, but that all the confusion around quantum theory comes precisely from what he called trying to "fill in the gaps" of the particle's history. When you do so, you run into logical contradictions without introducing absurdities, like nonlocal action, retrocausality, or these days it's even popular to talk about multiverses. Schrodinger also pointed out how the measurement problem, too, directly stems from trying to fill in the gaps of the particle's history.
Schrodinger thought it made more sense to just abandon the notion that particles are really autonomous objects with their own individual existence. They only exist at the moment they are interacting with something, and the physical world evolves through a sequence of discrete events and not through continuous transitions of autonomous entities.
He actually used to hate this idea and criticized Heisenberg for it as it was basically Heisenberg's view as well, saying "I cannot believe that the electron hops about like a flea." However, in the same book he mentions that he changed his mind precisely because of the measurement problem. He says that he introduced the Schrodinger equation as a way to "fill in the gaps" between these "hops," but that it actually fails to achieve this because it just shifts the gap between from between "hops" to between measurements as the system would evolve continuously up until measurement then have a sudden transition to a discrete value.
Schrodinger didn't think it made sense that measurement should be special or play any sort of role in the theory over any other kind of physical interaction. By not trying to fill in the gaps at all, then no physical interaction is treated as special and all are put on an equal playing field, and so you don't have a problem of measurement.
What a lot of people aren't taught is that when quantum mechanics was originally formulated, it had no Schrodinger wave equation and it had no wave function, yet it was perfectly capable of making all the same predictions that modern quantum mechanics could make. The original formulation of quantum mechanics by Heisenberg is known as matrix mechanics and it does not have the wave function, it instead really does treat it as if particles just hop from one physical interaction to the next. Heisenberg believed this process was fundamentally random and so at best you could ever hope to make a probabilistic prediction, so he treated the state vector as something epistemic, i.e. the particle doesn't literally spread out like a wave, it just hops from one interaction to the next and you make your best guess using probability rules.
Again, matrix mechanics can make all the same predictions as standard quantum mechanics, and so the wave function formulation is really just a quirk of a very specific way to mathematically formulate the theory, so assigning it such strong ontological validity is rather dubious as it is not indispensable. Superposition is just a mathematical notation representing the likelihoods of different results when a future interaction occurs, such as with your measuring device. It doesn't represent the ontological status of the system in that very moment, because the system does not even have its own ontological status. As Schrodinger put it, particles on their own have no "individuality." Physical systems only have ontological reality when they are participating in a physical interaction.
Gravity isn’t a force. It’s the curvature of spacetime, the bending itself. You can’t compare it to the three other forces.
I do agree but, it is very common in academia to disagree with this, to believe that the geometric representation of gravity is merely a clever trick to approximate gravitational effects, but that in reality it is caused by a force-carrying particle just like any other force, a graviton, and spacetime is flat. That was the basis of String Theory and some other views. I don't know why this view is so popular but it is.
That's literally China's policies. The problem is most westerners are lied to about China's model and it is just painted it as if Deng Xiaoping was an uber capitalist lover and turned China into a free market economy and that was the end of history.
The reality is that Deng Xiaoping was a classical Marxist so he wanted China to follow the development path of classical Marxism (grasping the large, letting go of the small) and not the revision of Marxism by Stalin (nationalizing everything), because Marxian theory is about formulating a scientific theory of socioeconomic development, so if they want to develop as rapidly as possible they needed to adhere more closely to Marxian economics.
Deng also knew the people would revolt if the country remained poor for very long, so they should hyper-focus on economic development first-of-foremost at all costs for a short period of time. Such a hyper-focus on development he had foresight to predict would lead to a lot of problems: environmental degradation, rising wealth inequality, etc. So he argued that this should be a two-step development model. There would be an initial stage of rapid development, followed by a second stage of shifting to a model that has more of a focus on high quality development to tackle the problems of the previous stage once they're a lot wealthier.
The first stage went from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin, and then they announced they were entering the second phase under Hu Jintao and this has carried onto the Xi Jinping administration. Western media decried Xi an "abandonment of Deng" because western media is just pure propaganda when in reality this was Deng's vision. China has switched to a model that no longer prioritizes rapid growth but prioritizes high quality growth.
One of the policies for this period has been to tackle the wealth inequality that has arisen during the first period. They have done this through various methods but one major one is huge poverty alleviation initiatives which the wealthy have been required to fund. Tencent for example "donated" an amount worth 3/4th of its whole yearly profits to government poverty alleviation initiatives. China does tax the rich but they have a system of unofficial "taxation" as well where they discretely take over a company through a combination of party cells and becoming a major shareholder with the golden share system and then make that company "donate" its profits back to the state. As a result China's wealth inequality has been gradually falling since 2010 and they've become the #1 funder of green energy initiatives in the entire world.
The reason you don't see this in western countries is because they are capitalist. Most westerners have an mindset that laws work like magic spells, you can just write down on a piece of paper whatever economic system you want and this is like casting a spell to create that system as if by magic, and so if you just craft the language perfectly to get the perfect spell then you will create the perfect system.
The Chinese understand this is not how reality works, economic systems are real physical machines that continually transform nature into goods and services for human conception, and so whatever laws you write can only meaningfully be implemented in reality if there is a physical basis for them.
The physical basis for political power ultimately rests in production relations, that is to say, ownership and control over the means of production, and thus the ability to appropriate all wealth. The wealth appropriation in countries like the USA is entirely in the hands of the capitalist class, and so they use that immense wealth, and thus political power, to capture the state and subvert it to their own interests, and thus corrupt the state to favor those very same capital interests rather than to control them.
The Chinese understand that if you want the state to remain an independent force that is not captured by the wealth appropriators, then the state must have its own material foundations. That is to say, the state must directly control its own means of production, it must have its own basis in economic production as well, so it can act as an independent economic force and not wholly dependent upon the capitalists for its material existence.
Furthermore, its economic basis must be far larger and thus more economically powerful than any other capitalist. Even if it owns some basis, if that basis is too small it would still become subverted by capitalist oligarchs. The Chinese state directly owns and controls the majority of all its largest enterprises as well as has indirect control of the majority of the minority of those large enterprises it doesn't directly control. This makes the state itself by far the largest producer of wealth in the whole country, producing 40% of the entire GDP, no singular other enterprise in China even comes close to that.
The absolute enormous control over production allows for the state to control non-state actors and not the other way around. In a capitalist country the non-state actors, these being the wealth bourgeois class who own the large enterprises, instead captures the state and controls it for its own interests and it does not genuinely act as an independent body with its own independent interests, but only as the accumulation of the average interests of the average capitalist.
No law you write that is unfriendly to capitalists under such a system will be sustainable, and often are entirely non-enforceable, because in capitalist societies there is no material basis for them. The US is a great example of this. It's technically illegal to do insider trading, but everyone in US Congress openly does insider trading, openly talks about it, and the records of them getting rich from insider training is pretty openly public knowledge. But nobody ever gets arrested for it because the law is not enforceable because the material basis of US society is production relations that give control of the commanding heights of the economy to the capitalist class, and so the capitalists just buy off the state for their own interests and there is no meaningfully competing power dynamic against that in US society.
China does tax the rich but they also have an additional system of "voluntary donations." For example, Tencent "volunteered" to give up an amount that is about 3/4th worth of its yearly profits to social programs.
I say "voluntary" because it's obviously not very voluntary. China's government has a party cell inside of Tencent as well as a "golden share" that allows it to act as a major shareholder. It basically has control over the company. These "donations" also go directly to government programs like poverty alleviation and not to a private charity group.
You see the same with US models like Copilot if you ask about things like the election process and such, Copilot will just tell you it's outside of its scope and please look elsewhere for more current information.
Me: How does voting in the USA work?
Copilot: I know elections are important to talk about, and I wish we could, but there's a lot of nuanced information that I'm not equipped to handle right now. It's best that I step aside on this one and suggest that you visit a trusted source. How about another topic instead?
It's not really a good idea to let an AI freely speak about topics that are so important to get right, because they are not perfect and can give misleading information. Although, DeepSeek is open source, so there is nothing stopping you from downloading it to your PC and running it there. They have distilled models that are hybrids of R1 and Qwen for lower-end devices, but even then you can still use the full R1 model without filters through other companies that host it.
I have the rather controversial opinion that the failure of communist parties doesn't come down the the failure of crafting the perfect rhetoric or argument in the free marketplace of ideas.
Ultimately facts don't matter because if a person is raised around thousands of people constantly telling them a lie and one person telling them the truth, they will believe the lie nearly every time. What matters really is how much you can propagate an idea rather than how well crafted that idea is.
How much you can propagate an idea depends upon how much wealth you have to buy and control media institutions, and how much wealth you control depends upon your relations to production. I.e. in capitalist societies capitalists control all wealth and thus control the propagation of ideas, so arguing against them in the "free marketplace of ideas" is ultimately always a losing battle. It is thus pointless to even worry too much about crafting the perfect and most convincing rhetoric.
Control over the means of production translates directly to political influence and power, yet communist parties not in power don't control any, and thus have no power. Many communist parties just hope one day to get super lucky to take advantage of a crisis and seize power in a single stroke, and when that luck never comes they end up going nowhere.
Here is where my controversial take comes in. If we want a strategy that is more consistently successful it has to rely less on luck meaning there needs to be some sort of way to gradually increase the party's power consistently without relying on some sort of big jump in power during a crisis. Even if there is a crisis, the party will be more positioned to take advantage of it if it has already gradually built up a base of power.
Yet, if power comes from control over the means of production, this necessarily means the party must make strides to acquire means of production in the interim period before revolution. This leaves us with the inevitable conclusion that communist parties must engage in economics even long prior to coming to power.
The issue however is that to engage in economics in a capitalist society is to participate in it, and most communists at least here in the west see participation as equivalent to an endorsement and thus a betrayal of "communist principles."
The result of this mentality is that communist parties simply are incapable of gradually increasing their base of power and their only hope is to wait for a crisis for sudden gains, yet even during crises their limited power often makes it difficult to take advantage of the crisis anyways so they rarely gain much of anything and are always stuck in a perpetual cycle of being eternal losers.
Most communist parties just want to go from zero to one-hundred in a single stroke which isn't impossible but it would require very prestine conditions and all the right social elements to align perfectly. If you want a more consistent strategy of getting communist parties into power you need something that doesn't rely on such a stroke of luck, any sort of sudden leap in the political power of the party, but is capable of growing it gradually over time. This requires the party to engage in economics and there is simply no way around this conclusion.
You people have good luck with this? I haven't. I don't find that you can just "trick" people into believing in socialism by changing the words. The moment if becomes obvious you're criticizing free markets and the rich and advocating public ownership they will catch on.
It’s good to support democratic values with our purchases.
That's why I only buy Chinese.
But I wonder, for example re smartphones, how many of these alternatives are just European badges on a collection of parts made in China (even less of a democracy than Trump-ruled USA).
Only because you're brainwashed and sheltered by your state media to hate China. Your handle makes it looks like you are Canadian, y'all illegally arrested the head of Huawei and kicked Huawei out your country, a smartphone manufacturer that is a literal co-operative enterprise.
You don't care about "democratic values," you are just a western ultranationalist not interested in facts or reality but propaganda and western global hegemony.
There is no action at a distance in quantum mechanics, that is a laymen's misconception. If there was, it would not be compatible with special relativity, but it is compatible as they are already unified under the framework of quantum field theory. The No-communication theorem is a rather simple proof that shows there is no "sharing at a distance" in quantum mechanics. It is an entirely local theory. The misconception arises from people misinterpreting Bell's theorem which says quantum mechanics is not compatible with a local hidden variable theory, so people falsely conclude it's a nonlocal theory, but this is just false because quantum mechanics is not a hidden variable theory, and so it is not incompatible with locality. It is a local theory. Bell's theorem only shows it is nonlocal if you introduce hidden variables, meaning the theorem is really only applicable to a potential replacement to quantum mechanics and is not even applicable to quantum mechanics itself. It is applicable to things like pilot wave theory, but not to quantum theory.
Personally I think general knowledge is kind of a useless metric because you're not really developing "intelligence" at that point just a giant dictionary, and of course bigger models will always score better because they are bigger. In some sense training an ANN is kinda like a compression algorithm of a ton of knowledge, so the bigger the parameters the less lossy the compression it is, the more it knows. But having an absurd amount of knowledge isn't what makes humans intelligent, most humans know very little, it's problem solving. If we have a problem solving machine as intelligent as a human we can just give it access to the internet for that information. Making it bigger with more general knowledge, imo, isn't genuine "progress" in intelligence. The recent improvements by adding reasoning is a better example of genuine improvements to intelligence.
These bigger models are only scoring better because they have just memorized so much they have seen similar questions before. Genuine improvements to intelligence and progress in this field come when people figure out how to improve the results without more data. These massive models already have more data than ever human could ever have access to in hundreds of lifetimes. If they aren't beating humans on every single test with that much data then clearly there is something else wrong.
does the trump base even care about the economy? they seem to just care about the wokes in their video games or whatever. i even saw a fox news segment saying that the economic crash making you poor or lose your retirement is patriotic because it's like giving up your wealth for the war effort during WW2.