David Pfau

Yeah when I posted this I couldn't remember which plan was the Nazi one and which was the one briefly entertained by the Zionists.

I can post the exact same thing about Israel here and on Twitter. Over there, I'll get the most vile antisemitic shit in my replies, while here I'll get accused of being a vile antisemite.

Beats me!

Hope springs eternal. Let's see if RFK Jr actually lets them spend it on anything.

How could I forget the oblast!

God this website fucking sucks.

No, Zionism as an organized political project originated with Herzl in the late 19th century. Sure, wanting an end to the diaspora has been a part of Jewish identity for millenia, but it was not actually a serious political project before that.

Not sure what your point is?

Well I did say they were naive. Most people thought they were crazy (with good reason). They were utopian dreamers. Herzl was bipolar.

But there were lots of different proposals prior to the Holocaust for where Jews could move en masse. There was the Icke plan to resettle them in Alaska. Some people floated the idea of Uganda or Madagascar.

I think the early Zionists were mostly just naive about how easy it would be. I think they really believed it was mostly empty and they could just show up and there wouldn't be that much resistance. "A land without a people for a people without a land", all that.

I really don't think Theodore Herzl was puttering around in 19th century Europe thinking to himself "man, I just really hate Arabs, that's why we've all gotta move to the Levant".

Certainly good news, but no mention in the article about how USAID was going to spend millions on distribution and now that's all been cut.

I'm not sure that it's a paradox that aiming to impress the government leads to more openness than aiming to impress VCs or win market share. It's kind of the basic justification for government funding research in the first place.

The way that I was raised, being Jewish meant believing that every human life was sacred; to save a single human life meant saving all of humanity. That no law or ritual was more important than saving a single human life.

It's unfathomable that any Jew can accept what Israel is doing in Gaza.

Pathetic that this is where we're at now.

Is that his real name? I assumed it was a pen name playing on "El Dorado".

The Abundance Institute is a different group of people from Klein and Thompson. It's mostly Eli Dourado, who is a Republican.

It's just a deeply San-Francisco-brained book, that's all.

"thin diminished straw" is a great turn of phrase.

Grassmann Variational Monte Carlo with neural wave functions Excited states play a central role in determining the physical properties of quantum matter, yet their accurate computation in many-body systems remains a formidable challenge for numerical methods. W...

New work with Douglas Hendry and Alessandro Sinibaldi: Grassmann Variational Monte Calro with neural wave functions arxiv.org/abs/2507.10287
This is a formalization and an extension (e.g. natural gradient descent-wise) of the nice excited-state framework for VMC developed by @davidpfau.com et al.

icml.cc/virtual/2025/poster/44075 share.google/uIcBNTspWK9E...

I'll be at ICML this week, presenting our paper on Wasserstein Policy Optimization on Tuesday! If you're in Vancouver, come say hi!

And actually if you install a heat pump, you *do* cool your neighbors in winter.

You have no idea how insane you sound to Americans, or for that matter anyone living in a tropical country, where AC is an absolute necessity.

I really wish it was killing thousands of children across the globe, destroying our scientific institutions or all the, like, actual fascism that turned people against him, but if it's the Epstein thing that does it...fine, whatever. Live by the conspiracy theory, die by it.

non-ironically, there's much more tech innovation going on in a trench dugout near the frontlines in Ukraine than San Francisco

Did you read the post?

Doubly bizarre because AC is fully electrified, while heating is still mostly gas. Every eco-conscious person is pushing for heating to be electrified so that it automatically becomes green as the grid becomes green. But somehow the same logic doesn't apply to AC here?

I'm tempted to gloat about this, because it confirms basically all of my biases, but I actually wonder if this is the sort of study where the results change dramatically based on very subtle differences in how it's set up.