I have been thinking about sharing posts from this blog to Mastodon, but I did not want to share them from my personal Mastodon account. I would rather keep blog updates separate from content that I toot directly to Mastodon.

A “sub-timeline” for my personal Mastodon account would work well enough if they actually existed. But they don’t, so the next best thing is to have a dedicated account for blog updates. It turns out that RSS Parrot fits my needs perfectly here, where it provides a dedicated account for an RSS feed with updates posted to the timeline and nothing else.

So the blog now has its own account at @blog.chungyc.org@rss-parrot.net. It is technically not a Mastodon account, but the distinction is moot for the purpose of providing updates to Mastodon followers.

To learn how the universe works at a fundamental level, is it better to take a reductionistic approach or a holistic approach to elementary physics? xkcd says it best: it’s hard no matter what!

There may be two supermassive black holes in a distant galaxy on the verge of merging. A high-energy burst of light first observed in 2021 was not consistent with being a supernova, but it did fit with what would be expected when two supermassive black holes orbiting each other pass through a cloud of gas.

What most caught my eye was that they are expected to merge in about 70,000 years. These black holes are estimated to be about 2.7 light years away from each other, and yet they must be radiating away so much energy in the form of gravitational waves that they are close to merging with each other in a relatively short time, astronomically speaking.

Most giant stars which collapse into a black hole explode in a supernova first. However, some skip the supernova explosion and collapse directly into a black hole, which is observed as the star simply disappearing. The second such star has been confirmed in the Andromeda galaxy.

There is a concept called the Singularity which some think will happen in the near future. The idea is that there will be artificial intelligences that will be able to create smarter artificial intelligences, which in turn will create even smarter artifical intelligences, ad infinitum, resulting in an exponential rate of change and advancement that humans would have no chance of keeping up with.

I am one of those who are skeptical of this prediction. It assumes that an intelligence can quickly create an intelligence greater than itself. However, I suspect that increasing the same amount of intelligence, for whatever definition of intelligence one chooses, will require far more effort the more advanced the baseline intelligence is after some level. For comparison, we have yet to create an intelligence that is as smart as us, much less an intelligence that is smarter than us.

I would not be surprised if there are initial exponential advancements in artifical intelligence, which in fact we may be in the middle of, but I strongly suspect the rate of advancement will plateau at some point and advance linearly at most instead of continuing exponentially with no end.