Western pharmaceutical companies have gotten fat and lazy and do not take the risk of doing R&D anymore, with rare exceptions. If China kicks their collective behinds, all the better.

AFAIK, nobody has demonstrated a viable SMR prototype of any kind. No, marine reactors do not count, they have the wrong characteristics and are far too uneconomic for this, even worse than civilian designs. The two that exist (Russian and Chinese) do NOT come with any or any believable cost figures. In addition, the he Russian one is a military design and the Chinese one is a highly experimental pebble-bed reactor based on German patents. The Germans wrecked three of these and two are still highly radioactive ruins that nobody know how to dispose of. On the plus-side, pebble-bed reactors cannot melt down, which is a decided plus.

Still, anybody that has high confidence in the approach is simply an idiot.

They are NOT going to make it. And then the whole bubble will burst.

SMART tests are not really defined. But reading a cell should automatically trigger a refresh if the read was weak or did require ECC. This is not a visible "write", more like housekeeping.

Good luck with that. The occasional hallucination will kill that dumb idea.

IOW: "We've only got $3.5T in capital to work with, so this is just too hard for us to figure out. You'll have to switch to an OS made by unpaid volunteers."

The movie analogy is old and outdated.

I'd compare it to a computer game. In any open world game, it seems that there are people living a life - going to work, doing chores, going home, etc. - but it's a carefully crafted illusion. "Carefully crafted" in so far as the developers having put exactly that into the game that is needed to suspend your disbelief and let you think, at least while playing, that there are real people. But behind the facade, they are not. They just disappear when entering their homes, they have no actual desires just a few numbers and conditional statements to switch between different pre-programmed behaviour patterns.

If done well, it can be a very, very convincing illusion. I'm sure that someone who hasn't seen a computer game before might think that they are actual people, but anyone with a bit of background knowledge knows they are not.

For AI, most of the people simply don't (yet?) have that bit of background knowledge.

And yet, when asked if the world is flat, they correctly say that it's not.

Despite hundreds of flat-earthers who are quite active online.

And it doesn't even budge on the point if you argue with it. So for whatever it's worth, it has learned more from scraping the Internet than at least some humans.

We didn't. The media and the PR departments did. In the tech and academia worlds that seriously work with it, the terms are LLMs, machine learning, etc. - the actual terms describing what the thing does. "AI" is the marketing term used by marketing people. You know, the people who professionally lie about everything in order to sell things.

It is not just ludicrous, it is irrationally dangerous.

For any (current) LLM, whenever you interact with them you need to remember one rule-of-thumb (not my invention, read it somewhere and agree): The LLM was trained to generate "expected output". So always think that implicitly your prompt starts with "give me the answer you think I want to read on the following question".

Giving an EXPECTED answer instead of the most likely to be true answer is literally life-threatening in a medical context.

I know you're being facetious, but it's worth noting that US pedestrian fatality rates are three times the median rates of 27 other high income countries, and that's despite American walking far less.

We know it weakly interacts electromagnetically, which means one of the ways in which it is posited planets form, initially via electrostatic attraction of dust particles, isn't likely to work. This means dark matter will be less "clumpy" and more diffuse, and less likely to create denser conglomerations that could lead to stellar and planetary formation.

What this finding does suggest, if it holds true, is that some form of supersymmetry, as an extension fo the Standard Model is true. Experiments over the last 10-15 years have heavily constrained the masses and energy levels of any supersymmetry model, so it would appear that if this is the case, it's going to require returning to a model that some physicists had started to abandon.

It is marketing. So what? And there is reason to believe US (and European) car-makers stupidly left the market to China. And now China is ahead by a large margin. That is not how you win the future.

Yep. I do not think this has changed today. If you want to know, it matters little whether it is a trip to the library or to wikipedia.

I do not doubt that. We have some large-ego-small-insight "tech" people here, same as any tech forum. These then state total insightless nonsense with confidence. People like that are unable to tell when to fact-check, but have total confidence in their knowledge. And they are always around in some form.

Come to think of it, modern LLM communication is modelled on these idiots, because they can convince people. People like that also do well in sales, religion and politics.

Funny thing: I was asked about the same thing about 15-20 years back by a security consulting customer (very large bank). They wanted to store their Root CA secret keys by just putting them on bootable memory stick in a safe. My recommendation was to use industrial CF instead (which are essentially SLC FLASH with better properties that has 10 or 20 years data endurance and that endurance is in the data-sheet), but by any means to have several laser-printed copy on paper in addition. As CA secret keys are small, they went wit that. But they would have faced a real possibility of an expensive disaster otherwise.