this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1580 readers
13 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hourglasses work by inverse Weeping Angels rules, doncha know?
I should also have mentioned the part where they say that the entropy of the "uniform distribution over (0,x)" is the base-2 logarithm of x. This is, of course, a negative number for any x they care about (0 < x < 1), and more strongly negative the smaller x becomes.
Argh. These people just don't know any math and never call each other out for not knowing any math, and now I have to read MIT OpenCourseWare to scrub the feeling out of my brain.
This sounds like the setup to a Greg Egan book.
I think there is in fact a notion of continuous entropy (essentially just the Kullback-Leibler divergence from a uniform distribution) where that is actually true, and it does appear to be used in statistical mechanics (buit I am not a physicist). But there are clearly a lot of technical details which have been scrubbed away by the LW treatment.
The fact that the naive continuous version of the Shannon entropy (just replacing the sum with an integral) can go negative is one reason why statistical physicists will tell you not to do that.
yea i did try to read the lecture notes and got reminded very fast why i don't try to read physics writing lol