What are you talking about? We're not even half-way through the season...

Is this the "winning" I keep hearing about?

TNT pretty stable. C-4 burns hot but doesn't go boom when set on fire. Ideally explosives are stable except under the exact right circumstances. In fact, one of the major difficulties is balancing these issues. There are a lot of chemicals which are more explosive than the explosives we use but are too unstable to be used in weapons. As for the molecular formula, it is 6 nitrogens in a ring which is depicted in the last article. It is also the form you should guess since nitrogen normally forms two bonds.

Yeah that's all very valid and good expansions of the complexities of this and does a good job also of articulating a lot of problems with my analysis. My comment is currently at +5 informative, but your comment is a lot better than mine.

For that matter, where does he think most of our groceries come from?

And, right there, you've hit on the fundamental problem with "AI" - what it us actually useful for versus what the wider population (and especially PHBs) think it can do.

For them, a six-way is simply not enough!

It's technically interesting, so the story does belong here on Slashdot. But, at this moment in time, any talk about potential applications is really putting the cart before the horse.

However that's the life of a university researcher nowadays. No one cares about your great scientific breakthroughs in and of themselves... from day one, you need to be talking about pathways to monetization.

Yeah, but that by itself doesn't tell as that much. A lot of high temp superconductors were first synthesized in very tiny quantities and people later figured out how to synthesize them more efficiently, to the point where a lot them now can even be made in a decent quantity in a high school chem lab. And if this does turn out to be useful as an explosive (which requires it to not just be able to make a big boom but also to not want to go boom too easily) then my naive guess is that a fair bit of research into efficient synthesis will happen. It probably is going to turn out to be too unstable for military use though.

Sigh. You brought up SpaceX in a thread about the Australian company and said:

The point that you appear whether or not Musk or SpaceX existed, it is highly reasonable to for a first rocket launch attempt to be considered pretty successful if all engines ignite and you get off the pad. That was true before Musk and SpaceX even existed, and is still the case independent of whatever SpaceX is doing.

People have been trying to synthesize N6 for about a hundred years. In that regard it is similar to trying to synthesize tetrahedrane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahedrane. But people also synthesized cubane a while ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubane and attempts to make it large enough quantities for rockets were not successful. In the 1960s through the 1980s there was a general tendency to want to have really extreme substances and use them either as rocket fuels or rocket oxidizers. FOOF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride and ClF3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride are the two most infamous ones, and both of those are really easy to synthesize, but just insanely dangerous.

However, one of the major insights in rocket development in the last 25 years has been that even if you can get a few percentage points more of energy out of a rocket fuel, if the fuel or oxidizer is really hard to make or really hard to safely use, then the difficulties involved just aren't worth it. Thus, the cheaper, more reusable rockets were now seeing like SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab's Electron use fuels like kerosene and methane. N6 seems like it would not fit in this paradigm unless someone comes up with a really efficient synthesis method.

That's all the more the case because twice as energetic as TNT isn't that energetic. Methane has a specific energy about 10 times that as TNT. TNT is really good as an explosive not as much because of its high energy but because it easily releases it all at once. So if N6 does get a use, it might be for making missiles and bombs.

Nintendo Has Sold Over 6 Million Switch 2s, But Still Can't Keep Up With Demand

"But" makes no sense in there - I'm not sure why anyone would think it did. It's exactly the wrong word.

But it costs 100x as much, if not more. Running an LLM can be done on a notebook these days. But training one requires an entire data center of expensive GPUs. Not to mention that the notebook will run a reduced (quantized) version. Go check huggingface how large the full models are.

And also, LLMs are still suffering from a number of issues. For example, on many non-trivial tasks, the LLM is still unable to follow simple instructions. If you use LLMs routinely, you likely found cases where it has zeroed in on one - wrong - answer and no amount of prompting can convince it to give you a different one. It'll even totally ignore very clear and explicit prompts to not give that same answer again.

A human will understand "if you give that answer again, you're fired". An LLM... well you can tell it that it'll get shot between the eyes if it repeats that once more and it'll tell you where to get help if you have suicidal thoughts.

These things are both amazing and amazingly dumb at the same time.

Tariffs are a regressive tax that disproportionately falls on lower-income people. The only "rockets" tariffs put on are to the income of the already wealthy.

WoW is dying, deservedly so.
But this is a chicken and egg situation. If the numbers keep climbing, at some point they'll make the anti-cheat linux compatible and then we might get a hockey stick.