feb vid

New here and don't know the right protocol for topic suggestions, but here's a new discovery I thought might be of interest, a demo of 2D magnetism in ultra-thin materials. Still cryogenic, but it struck me as fitting in with some of your previous topics: https://interestingengineering.com/science/two-dimensional-magnetism-bkt-six-state-clock?_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9K9Q-4DHGnMnu140VbZnOf-dy3OfiVeXcDU1nHPYTmTpHNNYpsWTNqoHG0IJHwhbxulwLwZobGYkBNYp_U0NFaUVyhvlFLQdjKuVwl1t2XL8WYElg&_hsmi=406636237

I hate to make you do another AI video but I personally need a video debunking the ChatGPT 5.2 "solving" a physics problem that's been floating around.

Maybe not worth a full video, but I'd be really eager to get Angela's ranking of all Griffiths' textbooks. I remember Elementary Particles being awesome, Quantum being weirdly and personally hostile to Niels Bohr and E&M being decent, but I never read Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Physics.

Nothing is more Angela than alluding to a problem and then having a 26 minute tangent that is more than half the video! No shade, and yes absolutely main channel material. I just love how tangential it all is. Great as always!

I am literally a person who went to college a long time ago and am currently working the problems in Chapter 1 of Griffiths Intro to QM! So I already have a head start on the homework you assigned!

I would think that imposter syndrome sells a lot of self help books.

I think your thoughts on billionaires and LLMs is a public service. You say things I want to say to the world, and you do it better than I ever could. Thank you for putting it out there.

As both a patreon member and Nebula member I just have a question since this video isn't on nebula will there be patreon videos that aren't on nebula

Yes to main-channeling. I agree with you that it’s important to make fun of billionaires and to explain why AI is bad at things (like really if a summary was all you needed to absorb a book, why would we have whole books??). I also knit and it’s been really fun getting the combo of your videos and knitting, so yes to more of that, and all the other topics you mentioned for videos sound great!

Please don't give up on your second channel. It's my #1 place for book recommendations! The knitting stuff is fun too!

Very much enjoyed all of that -- thank you! Also, a knitting tutorial would be great. I was raised by a pensioner, and did a little back in the 80s. And now in my mid-forties I'm always looking for things to bring contentment despite the horrors.

Gosh. That was just, really great. Your hair was OK. Improve yourself in whatever ways you like. Your appearance doesn't need improvement, in my book. I'm here to support you, and from my point of view, your YT channel is still the main product. You're the creator, you know better than us what you want it to be. Please use your material toward the health and prosperity of that venue and for your audience there. Like, I'm conflicted which parts of this video are most appropriate for the YouTube. Use your good judgment, you'll figure it out. If I had a comment on the look of the video, maybe it's that I noticed a lot of green. I like green, green's great. I have a green coat. I don't have any green denim garments. I wondered if your jacket might look like just blue denim if the light were different. What would that lighting need to be? Last year, I forgot I was wearing blueblock sunglasses on the hospital elevator, and so I couldn't tell what floor I was on. Then I realized the illuminated numbers were blue colored. My face was red. P.S. Ah, there it is. Problem solved. My PC's night mode was on. Heh. Did it again!

My official position is that your video essays should be disseminated as widely as possible. Think of it as a public service. No sane person wants to live on a planet run by (REDACTED) billionaires. Although I suppose we always have been in one form or another. The coffee in my mug looks very much like yours except there are no little bubbles floating in mine.

My personal theoery is that Blinkist is for the Silicon Valley types who want to sound smart at parties with "important people"

As a federal scientist my department asked me to do a presentation on my work. The department posted it to Youtube. More recently, I see an AI generated video on the same subject. The AI generated video used photos that were completely off-subject. The content was overly general, and jumped across subjects. In contrast, my video was very specific. All the photos were precisely on subject. The one thing the AI had was that the AI voice was very smooth, while my own voice is the reason I don't make videos. Well, your voice is fine.

This was a rather chaotic but a very very rich compilation. I must admit there is one AI application I enjoy quite a lot, that's the automatic transcription service. Previously, it happened with me all the time that "gosh, I remember that guy said in one of his videos Christianity is based on three core beliefs" and then he had thousands of videos and I never found the right one. Now I just transcribe-transcribe-transcribe and I find it in a couple days.

Without having watched any of it, I can say that pre-patreon I loved the pure low stakes physics/maths content as the occasional relief valve to the world falling to crap and your excellent videos pointing all of that out. Only seems more necessary now. And I don't mind as a subscriber if patreon vids appear on the main.

As a statistician by training, physics nomenclature and notation for probability related concepts bother me (they tend to omit to mention key assumptions too...). But it's a personal preference. Would love to see a Nebula original if you get to make one, best of luck in that endeavour!

Vacuum tubes are still alive and well. Should I invite you to our vacuum tube discord? :) My particular niche is photomultipliers. I like to make scintillation detectors with them. I have some I've made which are pretty wild. :P

Please put this video on your main channel. Thank you for this episode. I especially like your original thought, which I plan to borrow and use in my corporate meetings in the context of using AI tools to create corporate document summaries. LLM simply makes up a bunch of sticky words as a summary of a document. To quote: "This summary is literally the index of the book but made more verbose. It's nonsense." Short, concise, brilliant.

I would definitely be interested in a "state of the channel" video, or "what I'm thinking now about the videos I made way back when". After all, some of your content is you actively engaging with the interactions of viewers. Since the vibe is very much that you're candidly sharing views, because you know that this is a gated community, if you publish it on your main channel, I fear the next time you would hold back more, and that's not what I'm here for. And take your time with Maxwell! Thank you for this lovely video.

Great video and it would be a great addition to the main channel. We need more acollierastro in the wild

I watched this video while sitting in a surgical waiting room. It made me laugh out loud several times so thanks for that! And the patient did great so bonus 🙂

This definitely feels like a main channel video, and the problem you did was easy to follow along as someone who struggles to follow some of the other problems you do. And I think pointing out that specific ai scam you covered is something that should be brought to your broader audience, it's absolutely insane that that service exists. Also the state of the channel video sounds interesting, I'd like to see it. Hoping the nebula thing works out and you get to make that bigger project

Billionaires shouldn't exist. LLMs are horrible. I have done some hand knitting, but I really like my flatbed knitting machine. I've made a bunch of hats, and some sweaters for my dogs.

I'm not going to pick up knitting just yet, but I actually would love to watch a video that explains it. But first I'll have a crack at those problems from the Griffiths book. :-) I agree it's a good idea to keep making videos mocking billionaires. Or other political topics, for that matter. I engage in discussions in youtube comment sections all the time, for the same reason. I know that one critical or snarky remark is never going to change anyone's mind; that's simply not how the brain works. But every comment has an impact, no matter how small, on the people who read it. I find my own ideas getting challenged as well. Mostly my mind isn't changed, but sometimes it is. That's the goal: constantly challenging ideas, so people don't stick with ideas just because those are the ideas they already happen to have. People should go with ideas that make sense. Constant debate is important to keep the good ideas bubbling to the surface. And everyone has a part to play in this, not matter how big or small their platform may be.

The realtor story is a perfect example. Exploitation is painted as cleverness, if you can get away with it, in the US. The ethical base contract of this society is "listen, everyone is free to scam and trick and royally fuck everyone else, and because we have agreed on this and because we're all doing it, it is NOT reprehensible". Someone from the US who has never lived somewhere else for a time will probably think that that's the way the whole planet is rolling. It is not. Most societies in every corner of the world have an ethical framework that massively shames ripping other people off.

I'm not sure how fast to play this video but I am certain I'm at timestamp 00:00

AI rants are appreciated. And useless businesses should be called out. Science videos are missed. Really excited for the Maxwell video.

Maybe you can tell us about Power's law? Dr. Power from The University of Texas at Austin stated a new era of Moore's Law, but for the electricity grid. Something about the physics of copper wires restricting the growth of the grid by some factor I do not know. I have not seen the paper. It might be in pre-print.

Adam Neely made some interesting observations about AI and the current political climate in his recent video. YouTube: Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future https://youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk

Minor quibble: I assume Blinkist mainly exists (and is priced for) ladder climbers in the wannabe CEO class to claim they read all of those supposedly influential books without actually doing the work so they can pretend to be literate.

I think the AI videos are important too. I'm surrounded by hype and it really does help. The gaslighting is intense. I'm also excited to see your knitting. You've come so far so fast!

I finished "There Is No Antimemetics Division" the other day. Can you do a video with spoilers on your book channel. Curious to hear more of your in-depth thoughts.

May i randomly recommend Morgan Drinks Coffee on YouTube for just improving your coffee life. She's also blogging infrequently at https://morgandrinkscoffee.substack.com/

A Nebula Original! Exciting! (also any chance you could guest star on Jet Lag? 😉) I don't know why people would yell at you for writing in pink, but I want to note that pink-on-black is more readable than green-on-black with the blue-light filter on (which makes everything reddish and after reading Goethe's Farbenlehre we all know what that does to green!).

Hi I'm so thrilled there's a new video thank you!! Instead of commenting on it which I can't because I need to study for my exam in 3 days can I just mention I had a question on a problem yesterday for which they somehow didn't upload the answer. and the teacher (is it teacher if it's uni but they're not a professor but like a grad student?? sorry I don't know English terminology) kind of answered it via email but not really and then referred me to the university's own AI chat for questions and solutions and can I just. scream?? like his answer made 30% sense and it took me hours to realize that probably he just asked the fucking uni chatbot for that, too. I stg I will finish this course with or without their fucking help but I really don't know if I would have made my fist semester without a) your "How to Teach Yourself Physics" video (the Shankar lecture reference and the Serway/Jewett textbook, specifically), and b) your stance on "AI". Because this? is just depressing. So. thank you so much. I wish you all the best.

Would the nebula project recreate a classic experiment? Revisiting the history of science to look at what they looked at and *attempt* to see it through their perspective is really valuable, I think. It helps to strip the mythology from the textbook version of events, among other things.

23:40 - New t-shirt required: "Why do I have a wooden chair?"

If your issue with talking physics on public youtube was that you were attracting anti-science weirdos, I'd imagine they'd bounce off hard from a coffee and the problem video.

y'all are reading qntm's stuff? coolest audience.

you guys how did I edit this video and not realize my hair looks bonkers until staring at this auto generated thumbnail. I need a haircut but I have curly hair and I don't know of a curly hair place here yet. Please be kind in this trying time.

I just finished reading Foundation by Asimov. Moving to The Martian later today. When my local bookstore finally gets their shipment of No Antimemetics Division I'll read that! When I was a kid I had a hard time maintaining my attention span for fiction, I read textbooks just fine because they contained science and that was my favorite subject, but other than that reading was difficult. Summeries like cliffnotes didn't really teach me anything but they definitely gave me motivation to read the full book. Audiobooks also helped. Haven't had to use a summery for a long time and I'm an avid reader now, but it took me a long time to train my attention span.

I think the point of Blinkist is to pretend to be a reader without taking the time to actually read.

Yay! Coffee and the Problem is my favorite.

We are reading Gravity's Rainbow in our book club. I am finding this painful and hard to keep up with, so there is some need for summaries. On the other hand there are many summaries of this book available, all free.

Reading “there is no antimemetics division” and talking to my son (15) about the monster that stays in a concrete room and everybody forgets about it. “Oh that’s an SCP entity object dad, I think that’s 0055” me: “wait, what?”