SmoothOperator
@SmoothOperator@lemmy.world
- Comment on Thousands of UK farmers protest against inheritance tax hike 22 hours ago:
If a farm is worth too much for an individual to pay inheritance taxes on, let it pass on to a collective or company of individuals with enough pooled money to run it. No need to have a single person own such a massive piece of industry.
- Comment on Patient gamers, which games have you discovered/played this week? 1 week ago:
One of the finest games of the genre. Enjoy!
- Comment on What? 1 month ago:
I think the bluer bird is younger, not knowing that summer ends, and being even more surprised that this involves immense journeys
- Comment on Steam Families is out of beta, letting you share games with up to five others 2 months ago:
I’ve bee on the beta for a while now, and I still haven’t encountered a game that couldn’t be shared like this. I played Cyberpunk 2077 through Steam Family.
- Comment on Any good games that break the mold 2 months ago:
I quite liked the vibe, but got frustrated about the artificial progress blocks. If you’re a competent deck builder it’s pretty easy to build a deck that beats the game master, but then you get to a point where he just throws infinite enemies at you and you are forced to lose.
I get it, the gameplay requires you to lose a number of times, but it just turned me off from finishing the game.
- Comment on Monthly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing? 2 months ago:
Replaying Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but this time no save scumming and on the Steam Deck. It’s really good, but the slight vibe of sexism bugs me.
Also playing the excellent Tactical Breach Wizards.
- Comment on Monthly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing? 2 months ago:
It’s incredible, feels like such a perfect addition to an already excellent game.
- Comment on Monthly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing? 2 months ago:
I had a similar experience. I think it was mainly the small combat encounters that dragged out, as well as there being something off about the tone. But it’s hard to put my finger on exactly.
- Comment on Peak Fantasy 2 months ago:
I mean, the tags literally say fantasy, so I guess OP is getting what he asked for
- Comment on Microsoft to retire Paint 3D, plans to remove the app from Store across Windows devices 3 months ago:
I like using it for collages and memes - the magic cutout plus the 3D tools made it really easy to edit things together quick and dirty.
- Comment on What is a good starting point for learning about quantum fields 4 months ago:
From its own cover,
It is written by experimental physicists and aimed to provide the interested amateur with a bridge from undergraduate physics to quantum field theory. The imagined reader is a gifted amateur possessing a curious and adaptable mind looking to be told an entertaining and intellectually stimulating story, but who will not feel patronized if a few mathematical niceties are spelled out in detail.
This might sound pretty casual, but it gets into all the math of it, with an aim at practical use.
- Comment on What is a good starting point for learning about quantum fields 4 months ago:
The book “Quantum field theory for the gifted amateur” is really good. It’s helped me understand quantum fields a lot better, and I work with quantum mechanics every day.
- Comment on Favourite patient modern game? 4 months ago:
Calling HITMAN a crappy live service thing is hardly fair. True, the always online part feels really unnecessary, but beyond that it is a stellar single player game with the best Hitman gameplay of the last two decades, a large selection of excellent maps with variants and extra missions, as well as a really impressive rogue-like mode added later for free.
The elusive targets and seasonal content can be completely ignored, and the game would still be a major milestone in modern singleplayer games.
- Comment on Patient gamers, what are your favourite city builders? 6 months ago:
Anno 1800, love working with the supply chain.
- Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth? 6 months ago:
Sorry about your issues, I never meant to diminish them. I was genuinely curious about how one can become so limited in ones protein intake, but clearly worded my question poorly.
- Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth? 6 months ago:
Thanks, I’ll try to be mindful of that! English isn’t my first language, so there is surely some nuance to be learned.
- Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth? 6 months ago:
Thanks, hadn’t heard about that before.
- Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth? 6 months ago:
Sorry, I was trying to ask a genuine question, I didn’t mean to come across in a negative way.
I’d still be very interested in the answer.
- Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth? 6 months ago:
I’m not able to obtain enough protein without meat
How does that work? Isn’t egg white pure protein? Surely eating a pile of boiled eggs would give you the same amount of protein as a steak, not counting stuff like cheese and legumes.
- Comment on ‘Eugenics on steroids’: the toxic and contested legacy of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute 6 months ago:
That’s only “longtermism”. EA as introduced by Peter Singer in “the life you can save” is an incredibly sincere and well founded philosophy of charity.
- Comment on The reason why we never meet time travelers is because our civilization ends before the technology can come to fruition. 7 months ago:
The “message” does not have any local effect on reality - when you measure your particle, you have no way of figuring out if its partner was already measured elsewhere. The effect it does have is on the global state, maintaining the correlation that was encoded from the start.
If you write up the density matrix for the system before and after measurement of one of the particles, you can see that while the density matrix changes, it does not change in a way one can measure.
What I will concede is that before the first measurement the global state is |00>+|11>, afterwards it is |00> or |11>. This projection appears to happen instantaneously, no matter the distance, which is indeed faster than light.
But calling the wave function collapse a signal or a message or a transfer of information is misleading, I would say. In your example, we know that the initial state is |00>+|11>, and that the result of the first measurement is then, say, 1. Then no further information is required to know that the other measurement will result in 1. No messages required, no hidden variables, simply the process of elimination.
I would like to say that this is indeed a confusing subject, but that the math is clear, and that I am arguing what is my impression of the mainstream view in the field.
- Comment on The reason why we never meet time travelers is because our civilization ends before the technology can come to fruition. 7 months ago:
I fully understand the concept of entanglement and the experiments you mention, but I’m still to understand what you mean when you say “something” is being transmitted between the particles.
As you say, this “something” cannot contain information, and it also cannot influence the particle physically, since there is no way to distinguish the physical state of the particle before and after it receives this “something”. So the signal contains nothing, and has no effect on physical reality. That sounds a lot like “nothing” rather than “something”.
I completely get the argument that somehow the two particles must agree on what result to give, but in the theory this is just a consequence of how entanglement and measurements work. No transmission required.
- Comment on The reason why we never meet time travelers is because our civilization ends before the technology can come to fruition. 7 months ago:
Indeed. I’m not sure what point you are trying to make, but my point is not a hidden variable point. The states can be in a perfectly correlated superposition without any hidden variables, and still not share anything upon collapse into an eigenstate.
I will concede that it looks a lot like one particle somehow tells the other “hey, I just collapsed into the |1> state, so now you need to as well”, but at a closer look this seems to happen on its own without any such message being shared. In particular, while the collapse of one state causes the collapse of the other, there is no physical way to distinguish between a state that was collapsed due to entanglement, and one that wasn’t. At least not until you send a sub-FTL signal to explain what happened.
So if physically, the state of particle 1 before and after particle 2 was measured is indistinguishable, how can we say that “something” was shared from particle 2 to particle 1?
- Comment on The reason why we never meet time travelers is because our civilization ends before the technology can come to fruition. 7 months ago:
I’m not sure what you mean. If something is “shared”, but this something contains no information, how can we know that it was shared? In what sense does this something even exist?
The perfect correlation of entangled particles is well established, and very cool, but perfect correlation does not require sharing of “something”. The perfect correlation is baked into the system from the start, from local interactions only.
- Comment on The reason why we never meet time travelers is because our civilization ends before the technology can come to fruition. 7 months ago:
Quantum Mechanics does not allow for FTL transmission. Disallowing information flow is the same as disallowing transmission.
- Comment on Mystical land pirates (with pizza) 8 months ago:
Who did you choose?
- Comment on Useful information 9 months ago:
Remarkably similar to the Icelandic railway map