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Comment Re:amazing (Score 4, Informative) 58

This is also vanilla RAM. Well, rad-hardened to the best of their ability back then, but as far as I can tell, there's oy error-correction in transmissions, not in the RAM itself.

https://destevez.net/2021/12/v...

Error-correcting RAM is used in business on Earth because cosmic rays can corrupt data over the brief lifespans of a business server. Imagine being in deep space with no atmosphere, no magnetosphere, and no heliosphere. The radiation the Voyagers are having to endure is orders of magnitude greater than designed for and for decades longer.

That a chip has fried is news because it's just one. NASA does amazingly well, but I doubt New Horizons will last as long, and I sincerely doubt any private firm will be capable of building a probe that can Voyager's achievements.

Comment Re: Cloudix? Lincloud? (Score 1) 32

I agree. If you are talking about negotiating for billions, setting up an alternative is also a good way to improve your position and the amount you stand to improve .. say at least 10 per cent of billions â" is definitely enough to hire or buy your own cloud infrastructure and consulting and development outfit. You could even then sell or share solutions to other governments.. hmmm.

Comment Speed and resolution (Score 1) 29

The slideshow was really cool. It says the camera moves *really* fast but what does that mean, does it spin around the entire horizon at a visible rate? Also this talk about golf balls and how many full moons it covers is difficult to follow. I know it is not designed to look at the moon or planets but if it did, how small an object could it see on say the Moon, Mars or an Asteroid? Could it easily image an astronaut in orbit, and would he have to remain still for 15 seconds? Can it be used to find dangerous high-speed shrapnel in orbit for potential cleanup one day? Also I cannot log in to see the fact sheets, too bad. But it mentions recoating the lenses in house when needed, when would that be, like if they had gotten too pitted from acidic particulates?

Comment Re:How about involving the international community (Score 2) 75

Um, that's a lot of shade you got there. IIRC they devised watches running on Mars time for Mars rover project, and I see the ESA also made a Mars watch with Omega. Coordinating with the community (at least EU and Japan, and other countries that have actually made it to or near the Moon) makes a lot of sense obviously. But given they have spent more time driving around on other bodies than Earth they ought to be able to make a pretty good proposal.

Comment They really ought to be able to do this (Score 1) 40

My conversation with Siri today
Siri, Show all alarms
(long list)
Show active alarms
-> I found one, a 15:30 alarm
Turn it off
-> I turned off your 15:30 alarm

This seems to be quite an advancement, in that there is persistence of memory, minimally.
Sure it fails at anything beyond this but without LLMs just Siri and existing technology they ought to be able to handle a lot of tasks.
It also works at "Play (song name) on Youtube Music" though it picks the audio only version not vvideo and requires me to log in to the iPhone againl
There is a lot they should be able to do since they are already there on your phone and you are asking some very easy to figure out requests about it.

Comment Re:Bunch of useless bullshit. (Score 1) 185

Strangely, that's not actually true. Our brains did indeed evolve to work with maths, and indeed many animals (including insects) work with maths in identical ways. When independent cultures discovered maths, they discovered the same maths. They used different number bases and different symbols, but the formulations are identical.

Archimedes' formulations for statistics are virtually identical to Pascal's, and Archimedes' formulations for calculus work the same way as Leibnuz' and Newton's. Three independent forms of calculus that are basically identical, and two independent formulations of statistics that are also basically identical.

If everything from bees to crows to humans have identical maths, and all humans of all cultures have identical maths, then it gets seriously problematic to call it an invention.

If you cannot build a universe in which Pi or e take different values, then those values are not artifacts.

The only thing humans have done is chosen which axioms apply to a given system. Everything else is a consequence of the axioms chosen. Neither the steps to derive consequences nor the consequences themselves are manufactured.

Comment Re:Bunch of useless bullshit. (Score 1) 185

Space, time, matter, and possibly energy as well are thought to be emergent phenomena ultimately resulting from field interactions (with space and time emerging from particle interactions and particles resulting from field interactions).

If Prof Tegmark is correct, fields themselves emerge from maths. If string theorists are correct, fields emerge from brane interactions.

No matter who us right (if anyone), concepts like "physical" take a beating. If space and time are the result of interactions between interactions between fields, then all if our equations are upside-down. Nothing occurs in space over time, space and time occur in interactions, which then presumably must vary over some other quality.

We've also got a problem with objective reality. Quantum calculations work between measurements, but definitely don't work if you try to calculate intermediate states. You almost have to assume there aren't any, that reality only exists when it's observed.

If concepts like "reality" and "physical" don't refer to anything that is useful, if assuming them produces calculations that are always wrong, then they might not be useful concepts. Quantum Mechanics seems to describe what the universe does, but not why it does it or how it does it. The numbers "just work". That's indeed the basis behind the standard interpretation.

But if that is the case, and if seems to be, then it seems reasonable for theoreticians to try and produce models that say why that's the case. However, I've no issue with it being left to theoreticians, which Elon Musk et al certainly aren't.

Comment Re:That's ONE possibility (Score 1) 185

If Professor Penrose is correct about the nature of consciousness, then Many Worlds cannot be correct.

If quantum uncertainty in position applies to spacetime and not just space, then Many Worlds would require that particles can experience interactions that don't actually occur in the timeline of the observer.

Many Worlds is mandatory if (a) information must be conserved, (b) superposition is information and not just potential information, and (c) the universe along any given path is an open system. But if it is an open system, with the sum of all paths being a closed system, we must consider the other conservation laws from that standpoint.

So there might be possible openings.

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