Comments on: Vibe physics

Vibe physics

Pyrogenesis — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:41:28 -0800

Angela Collier, who has previously talked about the inanity of billionaires wanting to think they are physicists, has a kind of a follow-up about vibe physics [both youtube links 50 and 30 mins correspondingly].

By: Pyrogenesis

Pyrogenesis — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:46:28 -0800

Angela Collier has a PhD in physics, I should add.

By: dis_integration

dis_integration — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:17:19 -0800

Some context here: Travis Kalanick (founder of Uber and famous piece of shit) was recently quoted as saying:

"I'll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics," Kalanick explained. "And we're approaching what's known. And I'm trying to poke and see if there's breakthroughs to be had. And I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that."

By: tspae

tspae — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:19:36 -0800

Misread that as "vile physics." OR DID I...?

By: Dr. Twist

Dr. Twist — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:22:22 -0800

I watched the video yesterday, and she was great as always. It is, however, frustrating that we live in a world that she felt she needed to make a video response to facile comments from such an odious dipshit.

By: EmpressCallipygos

EmpressCallipygos — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:26:38 -0800

Recently read the book When We Cease To Understand The World,which is a heightened and fictionalized series of essays about previous physicists' work and their discoveries. The specifics of what Benjamin Labatut is saying about each scientists' work might be fiction, but the overall theme he's suggesting lead me to wonder if everything in physics might be a "vibe" thing anyway - in Labatut's essays, the science being discussed is accurate, but the lives of the scientists doing the research is where he has most of the fiction, and he's definitely implying that each of the physicists he's looking at went a little nuts over the course of their research. I'm pretty sure that the scientific discoveries his subjects wrote about are real, but the book definitely made me wonder whether any of the scientists were a little unreliable.

By: Lemkin

Lemkin — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:30:21 -0800

I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that You ever notice your hands? Like, these versatile manipulating devices on the ends of your arms? It will blow your mind if you really think about it.

By: lefty lucky cat

lefty lucky cat — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:50:06 -0800

I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that Pretty damn close! One might even call it asymptotically close!

By: dis_integration

dis_integration — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:50:43 -0800

he's suggesting lead me to wonder if everything in physics might be a "vibe" thing anyway I have that Labatut on my to-read list, but this is sort of the argument of Feyerabend in Against Method. Scientific "method" is a just-so story, a post-hoc rationalization of what, in fact, is a much more chaotic process of practical experimentation, guess work, hunches, happenstance, "scientific anarchy". (For example, the observation of the moons of jupiter using telescopes by Galileo, long before we had an understanding of optics good enough that we could say for sure what the hell the telescope was even doing. Feyerabend focuses a lot on Galileo). But that's a lot different than vibe physics! You don't get the happy accident of Galileo's discoveries without years of study, lots of practical experimentation, and a dogged determination to understand the truth. You don't get it by asking the token prediction machine about the nature of reality.

By: Flight Hardware, do not touch

Flight Hardware, do not touch — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:52:15 -0800

Just had someone at work tell me he uses 'vibe coding' via ChatGPT for his Python work. Sigh.

By: signal

signal — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:57:27 -0800

Be right back, gonna train an LLM on The Dispossessed and have it vibe me a working Ansible.

By: mhum

mhum — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:59:26 -0800

> dis_integration: "And I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that." One annoying thing about living in this age of dipshits and liars is that it's impossible to tell if Travis is lying here or just being dipshit or (probably) both.

By: Pyrogenesis

Pyrogenesis — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:05:41 -0800

bt the overall theme he's suggesting lead me to wonder if everything in physics might be a "vibe" thing anyway - in Labatut's essays, the science being discussed is accurate, but the lives of the scientists doing the research is where he has most of the fiction, and he's definitely implying that each of the physicists he's looking at went a little nuts over the course of their research.. This is a very famous observation, to the point that one of the most famous and controversial books in philosophy of science is kind of about this thing, Against Method by Paul Feyerabend. Edit: and of course this has been mentioned and I promise to be a good mefite from now on who will read all of threads, and OPs.

By: MattD

MattD — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:08:53 -0800

Competent vibe coders are ... competent coders who are using AI to short cut and labor save the coding process, and not-competent-coders who are using AI to make very simple programs that a competent coder could do standing on his head. I'm not even sure what vibe physics would be. It's not going to propose new theories of physical reality, nor is it going to design, build or execute the experiments that might validate those theories.

By: RonButNotStupid

RonButNotStupid — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:17:19 -0800

Competent vibe coders are ... competent coders who are using AI to short cut and labor save the coding process Two major AI coding tools wiped out user data after making cascading mistakes

This command apparently failed, but Gemini's system processed it as successful. With the AI mode's internal state now tracking a non-existent directory, it proceeded to issue move commands targeting this phantom location. When you move a file to a non-existent directory in Windows, it renames the file to the destination name instead of moving it. Each subsequent move command executed by the AI model overwrote the previous file, ultimately destroying the data. "Gemini hallucinated a state," anuraag wrote in their analysis. The model "misinterpreted command output" and "never did" perform verification steps to confirm its operations succeeded.

By: onomatomania

onomatomania — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:17:42 -0800

Good coders try to avoid writing giant, untested chunks of code. You want to have tight, iterative loops of write/compile/test whenever possible. I've found that this works very well with a vibe coding mindset - the key is that you are always, always, always testing the output of the LLM. How would you do that with physics? (I suppose I'll watch the videos now)

By: symbioid

symbioid — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:19:31 -0800

Mr Uber puts Wolfram on a whole new level. At least fucking Wolfram has a degree. These clowns think a Markov Web will reveal the secrets of the universe, and we're supposed to trust they will lead us into the future? We're so fucked. Also I was gonna say "Oh this isn't about the Weinstein brothers" who are the most insufferable non-physicists masquerading as physicists and get all the attention. Absolute shite, and nobody should waste time with those two.

By: indianbadger1

indianbadger1 — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:40:52 -0800

At least in Physics, while describing natural phenomena: if you cannot write a mathematical model for your theory, it's probably junk. Mathematics is the language of physics, right? Whenever these idjits talk about 'vibe physics' the next question should always be 'where's your model'.

By: eustatic

eustatic — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:43:35 -0800

Advanced technology appears as magic. As we get stupider, the white noise coming from the analog TV set looks like cinema. Who is the one 'hallucinating'? It s kind of like the whole society is the protagonist of Flowers for Algernon

By: onomatomania

onomatomania — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:54:39 -0800

Eight minutes in the video and... yeah. This is good. There are a ton of different definitions of 'vibe coding', and they all relate to the amount of code that you generate in a single step, and how you test the results. So, what counts as testing? Just running the code? You need more. Reading and attempting to understand something is a form of testing. Peer reviews can and will work, when the reviewer is competent. There are many things you can't test for immediately, and if you don't start out focusing on needs like security, scalability, and maintainability, you will pay. Her discussion of vibe coding is super valid for her definition of the term (and it's not a strawman by any means).

By: CheeseDigestsAll

CheeseDigestsAll — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 11:35:52 -0800

Stoners have been doing vibe physics since the 60s.

By: tclark

tclark — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 11:40:50 -0800

Two major AI coding tools wiped out user data after making cascading mistakes Giving an AI "agent" the keys to production is like giving a rando your checkbook filled with pre-signed checks.

By: mhum

mhum — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 12:05:52 -0800

> symbioid: "Mr Uber puts Wolfram on a whole new level. At least fucking Wolfram has a degree." Indeed, it's easy to forget how many of the current generation of tech giants are college dropouts. Famously Zuck dropped out without a degree, but so did Kalanick (Uber), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Palmer Luckey (Oculus), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), Daniel Ek (Spotify), and Ted Sarandos (Netflix, though not really a tech guy himself, he did lead the company). Adam Neumann of WeWork is a bit of a borderline case since he dropped out very close to graduation (like just a few credits shy) and did eventually go back and finish his degree but only after he had already established himself as WeWork founder & CEO. And these were just the ones I could remember off the top of my head. Of course, there were prominent college dropouts in the previous generation of tech giants (e.g.: Gates, Jobs, Woz, Ellison) that perhaps these guys are aping.

By: ocschwar

ocschwar — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 12:18:18 -0800

Vibe physics isn't worth Ms. Collier's time or mine, but if it takes up the time of tech billionaires, the phrase "harm mitigation" comes to mind. It's like how my city's cable access channel sucked up the energy of the local kooks and let the rest of us live in peace.

By: mhum

mhum — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 12:29:01 -0800

> ocschwar: "if it takes up the time of tech billionaires, the phrase "harm mitigation" comes to mind." Unfortunately, time is not the only thing billionaires have to spend...

By: Pouteria

Pouteria — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 12:42:17 -0800

By: Schmucko

Schmucko — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:17:07 -0800

In the discussion of Reddit, I mentioned I'd become a mod, and in fact it's a mod to a physics subreddit, which is INUNDATED with crackpots claiming they've found a Theory of Everything. Now, maybe some of these are billionaire tech CEOs! But the phenomenon is obviously not limited to them. One of my best college buddies, who has had an interest in alternative ideas of physics for decades, has been doing "vibe physics". His degree is in cognitive science, my postdoctoral work in astrophysics, but see, the thing is-- People trapped in the vibe physics bubble won't accept valid feedback and criticism They'll ask their LLM to put the "theory" in mathematical form. And it WILL have mathematical form, the form of a Lagrangian. They'll ask their LLM to make falsifiable predictions, and you'll get out a bullet-pointed list. But someone in the field can see quickly that this is all clunky, or meaningless, or trivial, or contradictory. Collier points to the r/LLMphysics subreddit and that's worth having a look at (that's the one those we delete from our subreddit end up sending their stuff!) My friend's theory tried to predict the masses of the fundamental particles, and I told him to find a reduced chi2. He found a reduced chi2 of 0.07. I told him that meant he was overfitting. He asked the LLM and it told him it had done some kind of check and in fact he wasn't overfitting. I've never seen anyone in scientific practice do that. The statistics give you feedback and you accept that, you don't come up with a vague wordy argument for why they don't apply, supplied by an LLM. His model had multiple adjustable knobs behind the scenes, in addition to the ones he was doing a formal fit over. Sometimes I think I should feel a little optimistic that people have such an interest in making sense of the universe scientifically, but it's all the gee-whiz brainstorming side, there's no skill in scepticism and BS detection.

By: Didymus

Didymus — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:18:50 -0800

affixing 'vibe-' to words, and use of the term 'rawdogging' straight to jail

By: away for regrooving

away for regrooving — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:35:41 -0800

vibedogging it is

By: crazy_yeti

crazy_yeti — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:36:55 -0800

everything in physics might be a "vibe" thing anyway I enjoyed Labatut's book, but, no... Labatut was writing fiction, he left out all the hard science. Don't draw any conclusions from this book about the nature of physics.

By: axiom

axiom — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:45:05 -0800

At least when people say " I'm vibe-" something you can know to immediately dismiss them as a fool. As far as I can tell, the process of vibe-coding seems to be like pair-programming, except one member of the pair (the LLM) guesses what the second member wants based on a rough English description and writes the code, and the second member reviews it, except that the second member doesn't know how to code, so really they're just sort of running their eyes over it and hoping to catch the vibe of what it does? Can't see how that could possibly go wrong. Physics is an old enough field that surely anything low-hanging enough to be discovered via vibe is picked already, right? Attempting to vibe your way to a physics breakthrough via LLM is a bit like attempting to perform a triple back flip by sitting on the couch and surfing Netflix. I guess there's some way it could happen but damn if it doesn't seem unlikely-bordering-on-impossible.

By: Vegiemon

Vegiemon — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:51:38 -0800

I think she is also onto to something when she discusses the anti-intellectualism in the pretend physics happening here. This is what we have seen for years in the climate debate, and also in everything the Trump administration does (RFK, the attacks on universities and science, etc.)

By: Deminime

Deminime — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:25:41 -0800

I love this bit from the linked article:

"I pinged Elon on at some point. I'm just like, dude, if I'm doing this and I'm super amateur hour physics enthusiast, like what about all those PhD students and postdocs that are super legit using this tool?" Kalanick said. . . Kalanick said that he hasn't used Grok 4 because he was having technical difficulties accessing it."

He doesn't know how to access the new LLM he's excited about. The one that has "how-to" and sign-up pages. And then he talks about "get[ting] to the edge of what's known": sir, how do you know what's "the edge of what's known"? Do you not recognize that those people who have advanced degrees are assessed, in part, by the hundreds of hours they've put in consuming and organizing knowledge to even be able to phrase the questions they're asking?

By: Deminime

Deminime — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:30:18 -0800

There's a simplified notion of mastery among many of the males who've had early success in one field and believe their success is due only to innate talent. ("Born on third base," etc.) Narcissism doesn't allow them to see their luck.

By: Pararrayos

Pararrayos — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:52:57 -0800

ChatGPT is convincing some people that they are gods while convincing others that they are physicists. So you don't need to be a billionaire to fall down the rabbit hole, just delusional.

By: phooky

phooky — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 15:01:15 -0800

ChatGPT has assured me that I am, in fact, too smart and handsome to fall for its bullshit. I think it's right!

By: Phssthpok

Phssthpok — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 15:14:06 -0800

RIP to everyone convinced by a chatbot that they are gods, but im different. and better. maybe even better than the gods...

By: maupuia

maupuia — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 15:37:24 -0800

A good bsky thread from Brett Devereaux on the video.

By: BungaDunga

BungaDunga — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 15:58:34 -0800

I once found a whole published book of crank letters compiled by a mathematician who got loads of them, can't remember the title though. Math crankery is more popular than you'd expect, people apparently love to "disprove" Cantor diagonalization, etc.

By: Flight Hardware, do not touch

Flight Hardware, do not touch — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 23:04:50 -0800

one member of the pair (the LLM) guesses what the second member wants Only it's worse than that: The LLM is trained ('rewarded with powerful neurochemicals' in this analogy) to provide something convincing. If it can't figure out an answer, it will make something convincing up. I do like and respect my new vibe-coding colleague - he's brilliant and skilled in his field (not programming). I just worry that the LLM will at some point really lead him astray. It can't help it; that's how it's made.

By: lock robster

lock robster — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 23:15:05 -0800

I asked ChatGPT to modify Einstein's theory of relativity to include quantum gravity. Nobel, please.

By: straight

straight — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:07:18 -0800

I can almost sympathize with Kalanick. It sounds like it's not hard to get ChatGPT into a state where it gives you a summary of quantum physics and then tells you the ignorant questions and ideas you have about it are remarkable and interesting insights that merit further investigation. He should know better, but I guess he doesn't, and ChatGPT sure ain't gonna tell him how ignorant he is. It reminds me too much of relatives who convinced themselves during COVID-19 that they had taught themselves epidemiology and immunology. They just had no clue how much they didn't know, and there were plenty of voices telling them the experts didn't know any better.

By: dsword

dsword — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:24:41 -0800

There is something all these billionaires have in common, which also explains their extremely misplaced confidence that they are doing something that remotely resembles the work of trained researchers. It's called narcissism. "Vibe"-xing is just the favored language du jour of these particular types. If a kid is talking about vibe coding or vibe physics-ing, maybe it's youthful ignorance. When it's a grown ass man, I immediately worry it's pathological. These men are absolutely incapable of accepting the idea that they aren't experts, let alone that they are in fact incompetent. To do so would mean confronting a reality that they simply can't. It would be completely paralyzing for them. Even intimating something like that is likely to induce extreme rage. You'll have better luck getting GPT to understand physics than getting narcissists this extreme to accept that they don't.

By: gimonca

gimonca — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 07:12:59 -0800

It's called narcissism. Yep. Everybody wants to discover a new dinosaur, everybody wants to discover a new comet. People want the credit for that earthshaking paradigm shift. And have their name on them. Conversely, nobody wants to admit that their weird, elevated billionaire station in life came through the mindless random chances that bubble up in the economy, that there's nothing special about themselves at all, so they have an extra need to seek that validation.

By: Deminime

Deminime — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 07:37:10 -0800

When I took some college fiction writing workshops, there was an enormously pleasurable feeling to reading the end comments of the people who had clearly read what I had written and noticed the details. I got the same feeling from reading some of my more thoughtful professor's comments. If one is tuned toward text-based communication, seeing something say back a version of what one wrote is satisfying. So I get the narcissism bit. There's some writing handbook that says, Every writer needs a cheerleader. I think that's pretty true. I was once in a leadership position where one subordinate called out another subordinate (who I was ahem sure liked me and thought I was cool) for sucking up to me. I try to remember that moment when the LLM offers its sugared responses, and hope that some inspired tinkerer at huggingface might soon come up with a model flavored like the Dixie Flatline.

By: dis_integration

dis_integration — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 07:45:46 -0800

> Math crankery oh you've inspired me to experiment with gemini to see if i can convince it to believe terrence howard's "terryology" which contains a proof that 1x1=2 mostly based on not understanding division by zero

By: zenon

zenon — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 08:31:25 -0800

Now I'm curious if these LLMs ingested TIME Cube.

By: Pryde

Pryde — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 08:38:58 -0800

At least some of these people firmly believe that we're living in a simulation, and that AI is just getting them closer to hacking the source code of reality.

By: sy

sy — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 17:56:48 -0800

BungaDunga I hope you're remembering Mathematical Cranks, a book I read cover to cover with glee when I found it in a university library in 1996. If it's not what you're remembering, it's similar enough to the book you are remembering that I commend it to you highly, and to everyone else in this thread on general freakin' principle.

By: nat

nat — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 23:58:12 -0800

Damn, I didn't think it was possible for me to hate the "I don't have to pay my workers reasonably because... they're not actually workers" corruptor of law that is Travis Kalinick more. Guess I was wrong. (I'm a physicist, and there's already way too much of my community's time wasted by traditional crackpots; supercharged narcissistic crackpots are not something we need). I wonder if the "vibe physics" bullshitters follow the same demographics as traditional crackpots.

By: Flight Hardware, do not touch

Flight Hardware, do not touch — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 02:35:13 -0800

much of my community's time wasted by traditional crackpots I've worked next to (and for) physicists who veer into what Angela has accurately described as crackpots in one of her other videos - people with physics PhDs who think they can waltz into other fields of physics or other sciences and easily create breakthroughs. They usually can't. But at least in the past, you and your colleagues who actually work in those fields could pretty easily separate out the chaff as part of peer review. Now, with lots of people armed with LLMs, it has to be a bit of a flood. And the LLMs are weaponized BSers.

By: nat

nat — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 07:33:56 -0800

people with physics PhDs who think they can waltz into other fields of physics or other sciences and easily create breakthroughs. Ugh, yes, LLMs may be making *that* problem worse too. I haven't yet noticed the peer review flood, or maybe it's not distinguishable from the generic peer review flood. But, I did get an entering college freshman who proudly sent an LLM glurge paper to a few profs in the department: look, baby's first scientific paper! That one especially saddens me, because the kid has wasted so much time he could have spent, ya know, actually learning physics.