Even as we realize there is a continuum from biologically programmed behavior to "intelligence", there does seem to be that quantum jump to what i'll call, probably incorrectly, self-referential consciousness. Dolphins seem to recognize themselves, perhaps elephants, but do they stand around thinking "woe is me", or wondering what tomorrow will bring ?

What I think most people ignore is that we are closer to animals than we like to admit. People behave in a very predictable manner in many situations, just like my cat does.

This why stress is even more problematic in society than we realize even though it's considered to be a very important consideration in the behavior of individuals and therefore influences society as a whole.

The more stress, the more the lizard brain takes over and behavior is a result of instinct rather than rational thought (as rational as it can be anyway) and that's generally not good.

So you think that the transition from a temperate earth to one that was covered in miles of ice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth) could not be called a "tipping point".

huh ? have you just invented the "no true tipping point" fallacy or something ?

The reason climate scientists are worried about a tipping point is because we're dumping millions of years worth of carbon into the atmosphere in less than a century.

your argument is utter nonsense. essentially your saying the earth has never experienced a tipping point in climate because it hasn't been destroyed, or something.

It is not a highly evolved SDR.
It is a highly evolved antenna.
An SDR is a radio which can, through the magic of DSP, understand the signals presented to it, and can change itself on-the-fly to understand FM, AM or whatever modulation you program it to understand.

This is, at it's core, an extremely flexible antenna. It is controlling the various parameters that can be attributed to an electromagnetic waves by manipulating meta material elements. meta materials can be thought of electronic devices that are on the boundary of being lumped and distributed, i.e. they are smaller than a wavelength, but not too much smaller.

This is actually an impressive bit of work. Don't bother reading the traditional media buzzword compliant dribble, RTF nature paper. It's definitely quite technical but you should be able to get the general idea of how it was implemented.

Also unlike so many things of a technical nature that are 1-offs, this is completely feasible to implement commercially. It's a bit surprising this showed up in Nature, I would have expected to see it in an IEEE journal. It's more engineering than basic science. Meta-materials have been in the R&D space for quite a while.

What they've done is relatively simple , but was very clever and an excellent bit of engineering.

you went with "everybody knows the hockey stick was debunked" AND the Russians. lol.

I can't believe you didn't just tell us all it's due to variations in the solar output and not CO2.

You might as well go for all the denialist tropes if your not going to bother providing any evidence at all.

Another embarrasing climate related moderator fail.

At one point in time that was true.
However the hardware companies are legacy.
They are hiring _more_ people in India and Eastern Europe than they are in the US, never mind CA.

Software has been dispersing. If you need engineers for your new software project you most definitely do not need to be in the bay area, and in fact it would be a hindrance to be located in the bay area.

and that's ok. I don't mind a little extra info every once in a while...

However this story continues to make the rounds. Which I don't really understand.

Are we just interested in laughing at CA ?

Are people really that confused about the fact that CA has high housing costs (and a big middle finger to the NIMBY liberals keeping it that way) and is REALLY CROWDED.

Isn't this the free market at work ? Some place becomes crowded and too expensive so less people move there. Really seems a bit suspicious that this story is all over the news and has finally reached slashdot (sorry editors you didn't get the scoop).

You know what the real story is in CA ? Silicon valley is trying really , really hard to be completely inconsequential to technological development.

Google figuring out new ways to sell ads is not really technological development.

LLMs are new and shiny, but could have been done anywhere. Microsoft with it's investment in OpenAI and what will soon be the borgification of OpenAI will probably move the leadership center to Seattle. But really the research is decentralized so there may not be a "center".

Apple ? we keep making the same thing ! only more expensive !

It will be interesting to see what happens to CA economically over the next decade. Sadly I don't think it's going to do well. And that's too bad. I want ALL of the states to do well.

They used to have a much better balance.

Thanks automobile.

maybe we can restore that balance. Sadly if it does happen, it will take years.

That's assuming of course the current overlord propaganda about how you all have to be in the office doesn't keep citiies as repositories of office buildings and parking structures.

Of course the answer is no, since It's going to be Cowboy Neal.
Is there really any doubt?

is it my imagination or is a breakthrough in materials at the root of every solution to a host of problems.

spoiler alert, this is an academic exercise. i expect that when somebody looks at the numbers this process will be hopelessly inefficient.

gotta publish or perish.

that doesn't change the fact that the underlying physics is real and is a nonobvious solution to a real world problem.

A realistic incarnation probably requires a ... materials breathrough.

Obviously we don't really have a handle on all that wacky physics because interesting discoveries like this keep popping up (see also, perovskites).

I hope somebody finds a way to improve this enough for use in the real world. Getting rid of the coolant is a really, really big win.

Amazing how he didn't mention global warming as a large and looming risk.

- who face risk head on, and who are focused -- so totally -- on making the world a better place.

what a bunch of bullshit.

I also think it's hilarious that he thinks removing Altman is setting back progress. yeah, because nobody else is working on LLMs or can make progress on them.

techbros like Khosla, and Altman, are becoming completely intolerable. They are demonstrably making the world a worse place for a buck.

How I miss he good old days when Silicon Valley used to actually make something.

Now they just create snake oil and tell us all how lucky we are to have our brilliant overlords.

unlike Tesla which doesn't really appear to be a Musk start-up but something he leeched onto (hard to tell), space-x does appear something that he was key in getting off the ground, kudos for that.

Meanwhile if he could just shut the fuck up sometimes every body would be a lot happier. I guess the ability to think your opinion is always important about everything goes with the oversized ego territory. Bill Gates has a similar problem.

Damn good thing the engineers are in charge of space-x and not Musk.

could be, but the problem right now is the lack of accountibility.

no one has any idea if it's effective because they are effectively out of the public school system, which is really the whole point.

waiting over a "student's lifetime" in not a great plan.

The schools have to teach to the test, why don't homeschooled kids have to take those same tests ?

then we'll find out a lot sooner how ineffective it is.

also, destroying the public school system is an important secondary goal.

knows it's a complete clusterfuck.

Before there was a drought the Klamath river was being overdrawn. Now that there's permanent drought it's really, really overdrawn.

Meanwhile everyone who wants some perspective about dams in the Northwest should read "Salmon without Rivers".

Dams do non trivial amounts of far reaching environmental damage. It's just all baked into our current landscape so everyone thinks 100,000 salmon coming up the Columbia is normal.

it's pretty fucking far from normal.

why ?

and if we can't just make it illegal the least we could do is charge them 5x the normal rate for electricity.