Neutrinos weren't detected until the 1930s because they interact very weakly.

Neutrinos were hypothesised in the 1930s to provide a "classical" fudge factor in a reaction that was expected to be fully quantised. Further observations showed that a "neutrino" (IT: "little uncharged one") would also balance the angular momentum in a number of reactions involving charged (viz: easily detected) particles, which would have made them that much more useful.

But neutrinos weren't detected (and filled a substantial and insubstantial hole in the theories) until the mid-1950s - late 50s even - by mucking around in nickel mines. Sorry - nuclear reactor, not nickel mine ; and 1956.

404.

But if so, then yes it's a "single case", but not at all " very willing" as some sort of general rule, let alone in a way that doesn't just require better training data**. If you could convince and get refunds en masse, then everyone would be doing it. It's just not happening.

  ** - Actually, that's being too generous, because most of the "AI agents" out there aren't even trained, they're just ChatGPT told to roleplay something and given some basic info (this is thankfully starting to change).

And... you are exemplifying why I find talking about nuclear power is pointless.

I already had one long and pointless discussion on that recently; https://slashdot.org/comments.... ; I'm not interested in another long and pointless discussion.

For some applications, yes. Economic for some applications is not the same as economic for all applications.

Well, at least when it comes to solar, you understand that problems can be solved. Your idea of putting quadrillion-gallon water towers on top of mountains in Cuba for terawatt-hours of pumped electrical storage to send electricity to people in Florida is innovative, but you do understand that it's not workable, right? Still, it shows you understand that, at least for solar, there's room for technology to solve problems.

Unfortunately the remainder of your analysis of nuclear is simply uncritically believing all the analyses that support one side, and uncritically handwaving away all the analyses that don't. Yes, if you listen only to the detractors, you'll think that problems can't be solved. (And if you listen only to advocates, you'd think all the problems have already been solved).

From the last paragraph of the summary: "The study was not able to prove cause and effect"

So, let me be the first to cite the well-known slashdot slogan, "correlation is not causation."

I wouldn't cite this as flaw in modern science, though. I'd use this as one more example of how much of social sciences use the tools of science, like statistics, but really aren't science.

People keep saying this, and meanwhile, AI keeps getting better, because, surprise surprise, (A) the data sources that get weighted the heaviest are those with the highest quality-filters**, (B) trainers impose their own filters, (C) preexisting datasets continue to exist and can be used at will, and (D) it's entirely a myth that synthetic data is harmful; some degree (indeed, increasing degrees) of synthetic data are quite useful, so long as some fresh data continues to enter the system.

Re, D: put a group of scientists from around the world on a well-stocked desert island to debate an issue of interest for a month. Do you think they'll come out dumber? No, of course not. Synthesis, bouncing ideas off each other and learning from that, is absolutely a way to learn, to draw new conclusions from preexisting knowledge. You may know "Blue whales are mammals", and "mammals make milk", and through synthesis deduce "blue whales make milk". Etc.

Now, if you put said scientists on a desert island for millennia (let's pretend they're immortal, and ignore the other issues with the analogy), with writing things down being forbidden, and no new sources of information: yes, there will be loss of information over time, eventually offsetting what they gain from synthesis. Their minds will still be coherent, but facts will slowly leak out of the system. New information input into the system is also important.

Re: **(A), much of the internet is in effect filtered. Look for example at this website, which isn't at all remarkable. Yes, sometimes spam bots make it in in the comments, but they eventually get kicked out. Even when they get in, they get modded down. Article submissions are also moderated by editors. Now, an AI might do such a good job with its comments or submissions that it doesn't get noticed, but if so, so what? If it's doing as good or better than humans - and it's disadvantaged, by probably coming from a limited subset of IPs, maybe having a recognizable personality, etc - then GREAT, sounds like good training data.

Maybe I'm an AI right now that's been given old hacked Slashdot users' accounts as part of a botnet, tasked to try to mimic their past personalities while trying to convince other users to support AI development. And maybe I'm mentioning this fact to try to throw you off the mark so that you don't think it's true.

Indeed, the original Luddite movement was really an amazing mirror to that of today's anti-AI crowd. They were FURIOUS that their hard-built-up-skills were just being copied by soulless machines, who they saw as producing inferior copies en masse and leading to mass unemployment that was going to destroy society.

And of course, they were completely and utterly wrong. The Industrial Revolution was unambiguously a good thing. Standards of living skyrocketed across the board. With less labour devoted to drudgery, more flowed into education, science, medicine, etc etc, and discoveries took off. Unemployment dropped. The average work week, rising before and at the start of the Industrial Revolution, reversed course once machines became common and started heading strongly downward. It was very much a good thing. Efficiency in production is very good for quality of life.

But in the meantime, the Luddites were outraged. And they became increasingly violent, moving from protests and letter-writing campaigns, to threats, to physical attacks against factories, their staff, and their owners. But it didn't change anything.

I feel we're in the same situation we were in the 80's again where computers replaced typewriters, and the people making ink and paper were flipping out. So we kept printing stuff just because old people wouldn't embrace email. There are still people who print every email to read it.

What a weird analogy to make in opposition to AI. Or do you think that the people who refused to switch to computers are the good guys in this analogy, rather than Luddites refusing to adapt to the times?

AI chatbots are very willing to give refunds, so start asking for refunds for the littlest annoyance. "paint chip on my 300 dollar thing, refund me the $2 dollars needed to paint it"

Show me a single case of a person actually getting a refund for something like this.

I mean, let's be clear: it gets easier to train AIs every day, both on the hardware and software level. What's a massive corporate project one year becomes an easy community-funded project the next. And finetunes and mergers of preexisting foundations are things anyone can do already. Including applying new techniques to make preexisting foundations more capable.

People simply cannot stop this. Even if you get Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, all the Chinese players, etc etc etc to stop... it isn't going to stop. And as an FYI to these "pause AI" people, almost nobody in the indie AI development community gives a rat's arse about "safe AI". They want uncensored tools that do whatever they're told. So if you end up moving more development away from companies that have to deal with PR flak as encouragement to stay safe, and shift more to randos on the internet, well, you're being counterproductive.

It doesn't and I don't think it is.

Being having some competition to china in processor production is sensible to avoid monopoly, and for national security.

IMNSHO the only bad thing about CHIPS is that stands for "Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors". But at least is shows that the administration is spending their time on the material and the content of this legislation, because they clearly didn't waste any time coming up with that backronym.

primordial black holes

That one has been pretty dead since the late 1980s. People have been looking for the flashes produced by such objects in the galaxy (against a background of more distant parts of the Galaxy since the early 1980s. They have been seeing occasional such flashes - but not enough to provide the mass necessary to account for the Galaxy's anomalously fast rotation. Whatever the "missing mass" is, MAssive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs, to name one of the searches ; I forget what "OGLE" - another search - means, but "meh" ; I'm sure you can wiki them) are not a large component of it, and as the search statistics get better, the proportion of the "missing mass" that can be in MACHOs is going down.

Interestingly (to me, maybe not to you), I came across a paper recently on the consequences of a Primordial Black Hole - asteroid or "Everest" size - becoming lodged in the Sun. It would be surprisingly hard to notice, from Earth. The authors introduced (to me) an interesting diagram for summarising such behaviour, where you plot the behaviour of the star (or even, Thorne-Åytkow object, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) with the diameter of a behaviour zone (compact object ; accretion disc ; nuclear fusion ; convective zone ; photosphere) against log(enclosed mass) on one axis, and log(time) on the other axis. You'd be surprised how long a sun-like star can survive against being eaten from the inside. I scratched down a few ideas about it when I saw the paper (so I don't have to remember all the details) at - good grief, was it a year ago? https://wellsite-geologist.blo... Odd, I thought I'd included a couple of those weird "wotsit" (EDIT ; "Kippenhahn")diagrams in my discussion, but they're in the original paper at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.073... - check page ... Damn. Wrong paper. This is why I write things down - it's easier than remembering them, or than having to do the research again. So, now I'm going to have to do the research again, and then re-write my "notes" page tomorrow.

The diagrams I'm thinking of are called "Kippenhahn" diagrams - thank you, sole remaining functional brain cell, and presumably Mr Kippenhahn. An example is at https://www.nature.com/article... (figure 1 ; get the PDF, it's Open Access), which describes models for the internal structure of stars which may (or may not) undergo oscillation in their structure. There is other work on the Sun as a TÅO, but I've got to search deep to find it, and write the details down. But it's way past bed-time now.

They're really fun objects, Thorne-Åytkow Objects. Fun, but I'm not sure I'd want one in the next stellar system over. With an estimated 20-odd in the Galaxy, that's hardly likely.

It's an AI joke. Probably the most famous foundational paper of modern AI is called "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the Transformers architecture based on an advanced attention mechanism.

But the title certainly applies to Altman ;)

The problems I see with WIMPs is we would have discovered these objects by now.

How do you make that out?

We've explored a range of particle masses, from the 511keV mass-energy of an electron-positron pair down to the (small) handful of eV for neutrinos (all flavours, though their exact masses are still buried in the fog of measurement noise), and up to the 13.6TeV working energy of the LHC, recognising the Higgs boson at an energy of 125-odd TeV. We've explored in a less-controlled way, the "landscape" up to small numbers of ZeV (10^21eV). Beyond that ... we know (in technical terms) diddly squat. I haven't heard any serious arguments about a maximum mass-energy for a particle (though I've occasionally played in those waters, and found them decidedly unsettling), and we've already got the words for describing them - up to 10^30eV, before one needs to get involved with the administrivia of the BIPM.

If a WIMP has a rest-mass of 10^31 eV, we wouldn't have either words for it, or a technology for detecting it - or even differentiating it as "brighter than current airburst measurements can differentiate". But that doesn't mean we know such things don't exist - just that we haven't a technology to detect them (or a motivation to develop such a technology).

But dark matter curves space-time inwards (toward the center of mass).

So - exactly like "bright" matter. Which - from a gravitational point of view, is exactly correct. Dark matter has the same effect on gravity as normal matter - it's oddity is twofold : that it doesn't produce as much light as a similar amount of "bright matter" (baryonic matter), and it seems to interact less with electromagnetic radiation than"bright matter" in other ways then generating EM radiation. Which also - automatically - means it's going to be harder to detect in the lab. (Show me a measurement technique that doesn't involve EM interaction, and I'll buy you a pint while I find the holes in your argument.)

Yeah, bleeding edge indeed, about a century old at that point.

Give or take a couple of millennia. Simply describing it as "non-Euclidean" means someone has looking at Euclid's axioms, and wondering "what if?"

By the time that calculus and projective geometry were around, and in particular the routine use of complex numbers (for example, in infinite series for calculating trigonometric ratios and constants like pi and e) - which really challenge the algebraic interpretation of geometry - people were starting to see that it might be worth actually following these loose threads in the fabric of knowledge.

"Head Canon" has a very suggestive misspelling. "Just stick your head in this small round metal-edged window", your Pontificate."

"Next Pontiff, please!"