The Pat Hayes

Sabine Hossenfelder, my favorite theoretical physicist, just posted a new paper arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11037 with this zinger at the end:

"Acknowledgements
I acknowledge help from ChatGPT 5 for literature research
as well as checking this manuscript. I swear I actually wrote
it myself."

So that he can declare martial law and cancel elections. Think I am exaggerating? Wait and see.

He made the unforgivable mistake of letting someone video him.

Sure, you can contact me any time. I'm currently in California. I love that word in this context. I will refer to myself as an AI antecedent from now on.

Congratulations!

Except this is BS. Sme humans DO use the em dash (option-dash), if they know anything about how to type English text properly. I have been using it for 40 years.

The bird dance for the ages

The Real Reason for the Trump-Musk Feud is Uglier Than You Think Strip away the ego contest, and what you really see here is a competition about how to screw over poor and working people more effectively.

The Real Reason for the Trump-Musk Feud is Uglier Than You Think newrepublic.com/article/1962... via @newrepublic.com

Why the one big beautiful bill is the single ugliest you can imagine The truth

Why the one big beautiful bill is the single ugliest you can imagine
open.substack.com/pub/robertre...

Opinion | Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. America’s Police State Has Arrived. (Gift Article) Those of us who’ve seen secret police in action can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity.

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/o...

Cats know everything. The cat knows, but it does not care.

Fellow NSA - National Security Agency veterans. Look at what’s happened at the National Cryptologic Museum. They covered up with brown paper the photos of Women in American Cryptology. All in response to President Trump’s anti-diversity executive order.

Tumbling driven by fast-moving water?

He didn't even get the joke right. It used to be about 'radical feminists', and the reply is: "One, and it's not funny!"

Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas Yes, Peter Thiel was the senator’s benefactor. But they’re both inspired by an obscure software developer who has some truly frightening thoughts about reordering society.

Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas newrepublic.com/article/1839... via @newrepublic.com

If you think this is just cute, try going down an escalator with bare feet.

medium.com/@patrickjohn...

... he jumped backwards in shock, sloshing his wine, and said, "Are you THE Pat Hayes??". And I was obliged to say, almost apologetically, that yes, I was.

So you see, I am just using the name I was given.

...at the time, I was wandering around a social evening at a giant AAAI conference looking for someone I knew, when another lost soul clutching a plastic plate of munchies and a plastic glass of wine saw me, smiled tentatively and leaned in to read my name badge. But when he did, ...

By way of introducing myself, an explanation of my handle. First, there are way too many 'Pat Hayes's (google it), so I needed something extra, and all the obvious ones have already been used. But long ago, while I was AAAI President, and hence something of a public figure in the AI world...

bsky.app/profile/did:...
If you haven't used this one I definitely suggest you do. 👇💙👩‍🍳🏳️‍⚧️

Individual selection can favor altruism, when altruism increases the chances of reproduction.

None of the above. It is the individual who is most likely to cause the reproduction of the gene which is expressed in the trait. We are devices that genes have developed to increase their chances of being replicated in future generations. For more, read Dawkins.

A right triangle has sides (a, b, c) where c is the hypotenuse. Scale up three copies by respectively a, b and c to get similar triangles with sides:
(a|2, ab, ac) (ab, b|2, bc) (ac, bc, c|2)
then the first two fit exactly inside the third, sides a|2 and b|2 fitting exactly into c|2. QED

Just read "Hidden Harmonies" by Robert & Ellen Kaplan, a history of Pythagoras' theorem woven into a kind of humanist hymn in praise of number theory and geometry, a great read. I learned two new (to me) proofs of Pythagoras, one of them stunningly simple, see next post.

Well, nice to find a friend in the city :-)