carl feynman (@carl_feynman) / X

carl feynman

1,781 posts

carl feynman

@carl_feynman

I’ve spent a lifetime switching my Special Interest every year or two. By now I’m surprisingly knowledgeable in a lot of fields— a skill now obsoleted by AI.

Arlington, MA

Joined September 2021

carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Feb 26, 2025
My master’s thesis in 1986: “Modeling the appearance of cloth”. It took library research and cleverness and originality and months of work and days of time on big computers. Now I’m outdone by an AI in a few minutes. They still pay me, but for how long?
Deedy
@deedydas
Feb 24, 2025
Wow, Sonnet 3.7 w/ Thinking just solved a problem no other model could solve yet. "Can you write the most intricate cloth simulation in p5js" Grok 3 and o1 pro had no usable results. This is truly the best "vibe coding" model.
00:00
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carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Nov 3, 2025
I wish someone had told me when I was a kid “Some mathematicians will invent a new kind of curve called nurbs and in your forties everything will be nurb-shaped for a while”. It’s such a science-fiction thing to have happen.
doomer
@uncledoomer
Nov 2, 2025
its funny that an entire decade of cool looking consumer products was caused by the addition of NURBS to CAD. it wasnt that this stuff naturally looks futuristic, it just suddenly became possible to model, so *became* the look of futuristic stuff for a brief unforgettable moment
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carl feynman
@carl_feynman
May 2, 2025
Idea: make new edible fruits. Choose an inedible species. Most are inedible because of a few anti-insect phytotoxins. Find the biochemical chains that make these toxins, and knock out one link in each chain. This is easy nowadays. (1/)
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carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Jun 3, 2025
Replying to @DeGatchi
I never got much world-changing out of pure math. But applied math changes how everything looks. Hamiltonians, optimization basins, Fourier transforms, fractals, statistical mechanics, stochastic dynamics, coupled oscillators, I see them everywhere as I walk through the woods.
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carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Feb 17, 2024
Replying to @daniel_271828
Feynman was my father. Once when I was in about second grade I said something like “The other kids in my class are like me except I’m smarter than them.” He sharply retorted “Don’t ever talk like that.” The lesson I took from that is that I could think it but not say it.
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carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Jan 27, 2025
Replying to @sgdeverything and @shlevy
I am an American and I approve this message.
80K
carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Apr 10, 2025
Replying to @SoliSolstice and @TetraspaceWest
Philosophy is where we keep the questions we don’t know how to answer. Occasionally we figure out how to solve some of them, and we create a new field, and call it physics or linguistics or psychology (all of which used to be philosophy). So yes, it’s a field consisting
26K
carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Nov 9, 2025
People tell me I resembled Richard Feynman when I was young.
131K
carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Oct 30, 2025
I read some of the marketing material on their website. They have a way of sampling simple probability distributions in a very energy-efficient way. They claim this will scale to better algorithms. I happen to have worked extensively in the field of random sampling, for
Extropic
@extropic
Oct 29, 2025
Hello Thermo World.
00:00
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carl feynman
@carl_feynman
May 2, 2025
Replying to @carl_feynman
Then do conventional breeding for deliciousness, appearance, etc. But how to choose which fruit to start with? You need a fruit which tastes good if it weren’t for all the bitter toxins.
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carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Nov 5, 2025
I read the paper. Seems like impressive stuff, with one major proviso: it doesn’t think up or do experiments. It looks at the literature and data sets, and tries to come up with a model for some phenomenon. If that model has features heretofore not noticed, great, maybe you’ve
Andrew White 🐦‍⬛
@andrewwhite01
Nov 5, 2025
After two years of work, we’ve made an AI Scientist that runs for days and makes genuine discoveries. Working with external collaborators, we report seven externally validated discoveries across multiple fields. It is available right now for anyone to use. 1/5
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carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Jul 16, 2024
Let’s freeze the excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere! Antarctica is almost cold enough. Make it colder by building a circular wall around the South Pole, 12 km high and 50 km in diameter. The land inside never sees the sun and is protected 1/
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carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Feb 17, 2024
Replying to @TomVaid and @daniel_271828
Did he actually say it? It strikes me as unlike him, but I’m not a perfect expert on what he said vs what was attributed falsely to him. About 25% of the things he was supposed to have said don’t stand up to investigation.
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carl feynman
@carl_feynman
Jul 25, 2025
Replying to @NetIterator
We have pretty good visual acuity, but the real win is in the brain. We have pattern-detection skills second to none. We are the best pursuit predators on the planet because we are the best trackers. (Epistemic status: exaggerated for effect.)
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