During the last months the world has changed. The internet has changed. This shift already began a while ago, LLMs entered the focus of public perception and now they are around every here and there. And there is a wide spread customer base around the world with a lot of people using it via an app on their mobile phones, and the competition between several companies is hard. Finally these companies are in the business of making money, not making the world better. Keep this in mind.
The LLMs need input data to learn from, and they acquire this content from the internet, especially from websites, without paying. The content is free as in free beer. The costs of content creation are externalized, which is a pretty neat business model. On the technical level this is the same method used by search enginge spiders aka web crawlers. In the context of LLM companies we use the label scraper with an explicitely unfriendly connotation. Why that?
This can be summarized as the first level of evilness, being a Padawan of the Order of Assholes (POA). But there is more to learn for a real Sith apprentice:
This is much better - why only annoy other people when there is a chance to increase the level of evilness. Now the second level is reached and you get the attention of a Sith Master. The next level a Sith Lord needs to know is blaming:
This is an interesting behaviour since it might cover legal trademark issues. But we haven't yet reached the end of evilness. To become a Sith Master yourself, you need to learn the art of deception and make other people follow and help you, presumably without their knowledge.
Now we have got a new benchmark. I'm looking forward to the next level of escalation. Will it be enough to destroy the internet? Or will it continue and destroy the planet by energy consumption? The future will tell us...
If those companies enforce a survival war upon the internet, guess who has got a chance to survive at the end. Hint: it's not those companies. But there is one outstanding and conspicuous company among them all, Let's call it Chinesus Palpatinus Sidious Sauronus. People involved in the matter will have no difficulty to figure out which company I'm talking about. The final words are especially for you, CPSS:
Have you ever heard of the United System Administrator Corps (USAC)? If not, be patient. You are on their list. Always remember: We're Not Only Good Looking' - We'll Kick Your Ass Too.
The Few. The Proud. The Sysadmins.
Gregory Chaitin in a conversation with Curt Jaimungal about the state of modern research structures in academia and other thoughts. He is known for the Chaitin omega number Ω with the strange property to be definable, but not computable.
Frederic Schuller (University of Twente) gives some insights into his approach to theoretical physics, research and teaching philosophy and concepts. The interview with Curt Jaimungal lasts ~2.5h and is a highlight for inspiration.
There are teaching videos available from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg / FAU:
The YouTube account is not official and not owned by F. Schuller, but the videos are available there, too (uploaded 2015-09):
This is Eric Weinstein’s 2025 UCSD lecture about Geometric Unity. Data from DESI, published on 19 March 2025, might indicate a problem with the ΛCDM model. Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity opens up a possibility for a time dependent cosmological constant. Data from Rubin Observatory might bring more insights in the near future. An interesting aspect of Geometric Unity is the unification of Riemannian and Ehresmannian Geometry, which looks like a squaring the circle problem.
Curt Jaimungal made a deep dive into Eric Weinstein's theory of Geometric Unity. He published a video which he calls the Iceberg of Geometric Unity and a comprehensive and technical addition. It took 250 hours to produce ~3h explanation, and it will presumably take much longer than three hours to understand the different pieces of mathematics (excerpt of interesting topics with links below) just as preliminary, let alone the assembly into a theory of the universe.
Why we should stop saying "explain it to me like a five year old"
peregrination
There is a lot of mathematical background which might be helpful to understand the video.
At timestamp ~3m50s it is visible that this list is by far incomplete.
Starting in the 1980s Eric Weinstein developed a theory called Geometric Unity which belongs to the category theory of everything (TOE). The first time Eric Weinstein presented his idea and theory of Geometric Unity to a broader audience was at Oxford May 23, 2013. There is footage available including an introduction by Eric Weinsteil from April 1, 2020 (during the pandemic). The lecture itself starts with a kind and two minutes short introduction by Marcus du Sautoy emphasising scientific speculation [...] is by no means discouraged at timestamp 35m18s.
WP: Marcus du Sautoy
WP: Theory of everything
The Portal Group
WP: Eric Weinstein
Geometric Unity
Theory of Geometric Unity - The Portal Wiki
Geometric Unity: Author’s Working Draft, v 1.0
Geometric Unity: Author’s Working Draft, v 1.0 (PDF)
2013 Oxford Lecture incl. transcript
At timestamp 27m42s Eric Weinstein talks about equations he discovered at Harvard in 1987, which showed up again later presented by someone else at MIT in 1994. A first glimpse of mathematical context:
There are some older horror films made by John Carpenter in the 1980s and 1990s. They are entertaining. This kind of horror is welcome and I can enjoy it. To the contrary a different topic is on the menu. This blog post might be summarized as: We are not amused.
Last week I stumbled over a YouTube video made by Sabine Hossenfelder mid July. It's a comment about another video from the YouTube Channel Piers Morgan Uncensored in late May, where two guests, Sean Carroll and Eric Weinstein, didn't share the same ground and had a little chitchat resulting from a disagreement regarding a scientific paper written by Eric Weinstein. Phrasing it this way is probably my last chance of winning the diplomacy award. Sabine Hossenfelder is quite clear, straight and blunt about her point of view. Warning: by using this video as an entry point your emotional state might be out of balance at the end, which takes less than a quarter hour. Prepare to have a break (and maybe a cup of coffee or tea), and then watch it again to fill in the details which you might have missed while watching it the first time.
A few words to avoid misunderstandings: every now and then I tend to write in an ironical, satirical or even cynical way. This is my personal style. Deal with it. This doesn't mean in any way that the topic, especially the behaviour of parts of the community, is funny or even acceptable by any civilized standards. To the contrary the topic is a long chain of ignoble events. Obviously manners and social graces went down the drain and some folks are even proud to aim for or have already achieved maximum distance to what is called a gentleman. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. If you have a feeling to be addressed by these lines, please continue reading here.
At timestamp approximately 0m55s Sabine Hossenfelder introduces the phrase Carrollgate. This was the beginning, but not the end. There is quoted YouTube footage from Piers Morgan Uncensored at timestamp 5m02s, where Sean Carroll is speaking:
The good news is: I have read Eric's paper. Here it is. I actually have it here, right here, and it's worse than you think, you know, it's not serious. It's the dog ate my homework kind of thing.
WTF? Obviously I missed the memo where the new peer review style was announced. At least this could explain my confusion. I suppose it is save to assume the paper is this: Geometric Unity: Author’s Working Draft, v 1.0 or as PDF Geometric_Unity-Draft-April-1st-2021.pdf.
There was also some more detailed critique from Sean Carroll on the show, which was answered by Eric Weinstein on X. Since the above mentioned paper is available online you can check for yourself. I don't have an idea how to comment. Instead let me repeat quoting Sean Carroll: I have read Eric's paper. Let's read this quote very exactly. No claim whatsoever was made concerning any level of understanding the paper. So far fair deal. Sean Carroll is in good company. I don't understand the paper either (yet).
There is ~1h footage from the gladiator meeting at Piers Morgan arena available on YouTube since May 23, 2025. Hence you can watch the whole start of an ugly story uncensored and hopefully unbiased, not only some cherry picked quotes.
As you should have noticed (scientists check data, don't they?) the quoted footage of Sean Carroll, which I transcripted above, was cutted in the first video. You can compare it beginning from timestamp 37m49s, ending with you know and unquoted text until timestamp 38m54s starting again with it's not serious. However, the paper about Geometric Unity wasn't the only topic. The scientific or academic environment and community was part of the debate, too. At timestamp 22m40s Eric Weinstein nails this down to: And this kind of toxic sociology is the true problem. A few minutes later, at timestamp 26m53s, he arrives at the core: The first rule of physics fight club is don't talk about the problems with physics fight club. This is his essential and important takeaway. Let me repeat and emphasise it:
The first rule of physics fight club is don't talk about the problems with physics fight club.
It didn't take a week for things to pick up speed and go off the rails. The first issue I found wasn't from a member of the physics community but those followed shortly after in less than two weeks. This is in total another part of the story and Sean Carroll wasn't (to my knowledge) involved anymore. But the avalanche of holy shit was on its way to exorcise the heretic and burn him at the stake.
In the first video above at timestamp 10m19s Sabine Hossenfelder mentions Brian Keating. Guess what happened - exactly. Later in the story he will be in the line of fire, too. There is a quite famous song about this situation: You never burn alone. Maybe someone from Liverpool can tell some details... However, as long as things were still on the rails there was time for a civilized conversation between Eric Weinstein and Brian Keating.
The first reactions on YouTube were still quite moderate and irrelevant. But events developed towards a rougher baseline. After Sabine Hossenfelder's video it became clear she had pushed herself into the line of fire. The mob made crystal clear she has to be sentenced to and burned at the stake. Obviously she is a witch serving the Prince of Darkness. This makes three to the cost of one stake - an impressive ROI. Digging deeper and expanding the context a little bit we can find more people on the blacklist of the mob. Among them are the brother of Eric Weinstein, the employer of Eric Weinstein, podcaster Lex Fridman and of course Curt Jaimungal, who dared to talk to Eric Weinstein. In the latter case this was predicted by Sabine Hossenfelder (which proves her witchcraft). The whole picture is an empirical proof of toxic sociology and thus, at least regarding this point, Eric Weinstein is proven correct. At the moment I don't publish the unappetising details of quotes and sources because I don't want them to be distributed easily. It is not difficult to find them, e.g. in YouTube videos or descriptions or on Twitter/X.
Just to avoid any misunderstanding: Sean Carroll is not part of the mob. He had the guts to talk to Eric Weinstein directly on Piers Morgan's show. The problem is the ecosystem of wimpy cowards and snipers who always chicken out when Eric Weinstein invites for a dance.
Update (2025-08-09): https://mstdn.social/@fmg/114998367700855960
To be continued...?
Tim Maudlin discusses our understanding of quantum mechanics with Brian Greene in an episode of World Science Festival videos. There are some essential problems which have been challenging us for 100 years but still remain unsolved. Is quantum mechanics a theory at all or rather only a recipe for computing and predicting results of experiments without a deeper explanatory power? Do the principles of quantum mechanics and relativity fit together on a deeper level? What are the caveats we need to rethink?
WP: Quantum mechanics
WP: Tim Maudlin
WP: Brian Greene
WP: World Science Festival
Defending cyberattacks is one of the most challenging topics in a digital world. Proactive activities regarding protection and security concepts are essential in cybersecurity. One of the goals is cyber resilience. Another essential piece is data analysis. Administration of servers requires log file analysis every now and then. One important data point is the IP address to identify possible attackers. This data point can be enriched with additional information from the whois database, e.g. subnets, autonomous system numbers, company names or geolocation data. This transformed data set can be used to aggregate and extract more information and to make tactical or strategic defense decisions.
Running a real world server you can observe log files becoming arbitrarily large - especially during heavy cyberattacks the number of lines can exceed any expectation very easily. The main tool for IP database queries is whois, which sends network requests to whois database servers of one of the regional Internet registries (RIR) by default. This might leed to rate limit exhaustion depending on whatever the RIR has got configured, and even without a rate limit it is a dependenciy on external ressources which is not the best way to be included in a security concept.
External dependencies and rate limits can be avoided by running a local whois server. This consists of two pieces: software and data. Assembling a solution from scratch by developing software and collecting huge data sets might be an approach, but maybe it can be done in a more feasible way.
IPinfo provides the IPinfo Lite database with a subset of whois data as CC licensed download in several data formats (e.g. MMDB, CSV, JSON). From the Frequently Asked Questions:
IPinfo Lite is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which allows you to freely use and incorporate the data into commercial and non-commercial applications.
A simple Python script is provided by the community: Create a WHOIS server from scratch. The script server.py can be improved, some minor details are added below: the route in CIDR notation, no eternal wait state on missing IP ranges and a dbstatus which indicates presence or absence of IP ranges in the database. You can check all of this at once by choosing e.g. 127.0.0.1 as query.
import argparse import asyncio import maxminddb import ipaddress SEPARATOR = b"\r\n" class Handler: def __init__(self, database): self.reader = maxminddb.open_database(database) async def handle(self, reader, writer): data = await reader.readuntil(SEPARATOR) # Convert bytes to UTF-8 and lookup data in the MMDB. ip = data.split(SEPARATOR)[0].decode() info , prefix = self.reader.get_with_prefix_len(ip) bgp = ipaddress.ip_network(f"{ip}/{prefix}", strict=False) writer.write(f"route: {bgp}".encode() + SEPARATOR) # Output one key/value pair per line. if info: for k, v in info.items(): writer.write(f"{k}: {v}".encode() + SEPARATOR) writer.write(f"dbstatus: ok - data found".encode() + SEPARATOR) else: writer.write(f"dbstatus: warning - no data available".encode() + SEPARATOR) await writer.drain() # Close the connection. writer.close() await writer.wait_closed() async def main(): parser = argparse.ArgumentParser() parser.add_argument("database") parser.add_argument("--host", default="localhost") parser.add_argument("--port", default=43, type=int) args = parser.parse_args() handler = Handler(args.database) server = await asyncio.start_server(handler.handle, args.host, args.port) await server.serve_forever() if __name__ == "__main__": asyncio.run(main())
On the shell level prepare a folder for your local whois server python environment, download the MMDB database IPinfo lite and prepare the server:
mkdir whois cd whois python3 -m venv .venv source .venv/bin/activate pip install maxminddb editor server.py # script above python3 server.py --port 8043 ipinfo_lite.mmdb
Now the queries might look like:
$ whois -h localhost -p 8043 -- 127.0.0.1 route: 127.0.0.0/8 dbstatus: warning - no data available $ $ whois -h localhost -p 8043 -- 8.8.8.8 route: 8.8.8.0/24 as_domain: google.com as_name: Google LLC asn: AS15169 continent: North America continent_code: NA country: United States country_code: US dbstatus: ok - data found
WP: Information security
WP: Computer security
WP: Network security
WP: Cyberattack
WP: Cyber resilience
WP: Data analysis
WP: Subnet
WP: Autonomous system (Internet)
WP: Tactic (method)
WP: Strategy
WP: Regional Internet registry