an academic can put forward an utterly unoriginal, obvious, no-brainer idea like this, and get a fu&*in paper in NATURE out of it. It probably helps to be at MIT, but thanks for absolutely nothing captain obvious.

nuclear bombs in space. detectors. Basic radiation theory. small satellites. I see nothing new here that wasn't thought about at least 50 years ago, perhaps with the exception of using a cubesat. Detecting possible nukes from a satelite? No possible chance that any modern governments quietly thought about or implemented THAT idea. hashtag eyeroll . I mean, designing such a thing would require a team of at least 2 physicists and a few engineers with undergraduate degrees. So, so utterly cutting edge.

I looked at the actual article. Modeling the satellite as a homogeneous cube, and modeling the detector as two homogeneous rectangular planes. This is a f*&ing NATURE paper? My eyes rolled so far back into my head that I convulsed a little.

If I sound a bit annoyed, yes, I am. Those scientific journals are supposed to be the best of the best, and they only publish a limited number of articles per month. Every article like this displaces a hundred other strong scientific studies that better deserve the credit.

that sitting for 30 minutes shortens your life by, wait for it, 30 minutes.

Someone with mod points and a hatred of AC attacked this thread. This poster is spot-on. The world is getting hotter. Above a certain temp/humidity threshold, heat is deadly.

And Europe is way behind on this metric, for a variety of reasons.

Consider this. I just looked the numbers up. Heat deaths in Europe are around 50,000 per year. Gun deaths in the US are around, wait for it, 50,000 per year. Europeans that shake their heads at America’s fetish with gun violence are killing just as many people through their resistance to AC. Reality is weird.

Window units or more likely split-unit ACs. If you ask the question, your knowledge of AC is decades out of date. Split-duct ACs are perfect for the job and France has the money.

An effort to promote vaccines.

I’m just glad that there’s no way any conspiracy theories could possibly form around this one (eyeroll).

With Apple, he’s got delusions of grandeur. One of these companies is hands-down the strongest consumer electronics powerhouse in the world, with a major manufacturing footprint.

The other one makes cute cartoons and fantasy entertainment.

The use and business case for SMRs is still pretty flimsy. Nuclear is expensive. No amount of internet-bro-9.0 jargon is gonna change that. AI and crypto technology won't change the costs. If you're dealing with a nuclear reactor and you fu*k something up, you render a chunk of the planet uninhabitable for basically forever and slightly increase the chances of getting cancer for, oh, just the entire human population. That means that everything requires overdesign, redundancy and careful planning. And it's hard, real, physical engineering, not an algorithm that runs on a few GPUs. If you have a problem, you can't just slam out a code update over the weekend and fix the issue.

And, the engineering behind SMRs is HARDER than large reactors. Not easier. Harder. Nuclear doesn't scale down easily. I can't stress this enough. CS and IT people tend to think that they can apply the same Moore's law scaling to literally everything. SMRs make sense where small dense power sources are needed and someone is willing to throw near-infinite money and manpower at the problem, aka nuclear reactors in military subs and ships. Civilian or corporate power generation? Nah. Go big or go home. And only in a use case where the power is gonna be needed for decades.

Youre equating those two things? Ugh. Crypto can’t die fast enough. It was an interesting idea, for sure, but it simply didn’t work out and its gotten wwwaayyy out of hand. Cash isnt going away, not in the western countries. Electronic is fine for 99% of transactions but the other 1% use cases are important enough to keep cash alive.

If youre a privacy purist worrying about your ability to keep your transactions totally private, well, I respect your right to hold your own opinions but you’ve chosen an impossible hill to die on. You’ve already lost. That horse left the barn decades ago.

Um. What country are you talking about? It certainly isnt China. At least, not in this timeline. Basically, every line of your post is grossly distorted or straight up wrong. Home ownership means something totally different than in the west, and the hokou system means that huge numbers of peoples official âoehomesâ are plots of land a thousand kilometers out in some rural area. Their inflation numbers are grossly distorted by their trade policy and monetary control. Medical bankruptcy most DEFINITELY exists. Most would never admit it openly because they dont want to spend 6 months in a âoere-educationâ program, but pensions are so small and state support is so thin that people have no faith that the government will take care of them in any way at all, so they save obsessively. China has made some incredible accomplishments in the past century that the west ignores (eg a legit billion people raised out of poverty), but you are completely confused about their strengths and weaknesses.

But you cared ssssoooOoooOoOOOOOooooo much about what Biden’s sons were doing.

This guy teaches at a pretty mid-grade “online college”. Context matters. The population of students in a class like his are going to be the most marginal university students. Barely qualified for university education. Nearly all of the strong ones go to higher tier colleges, and they attend in person.

Additionally, this article is about a university, instructor complaining that his class cannot keep up with him. Well, duh he’s a university instructor probably a top 1% in his field in terms of raw ability and he is wondering why a group of students barely above the 50th percentile struggle to match him?

The part about AI use in writing is also no surprise. If you measure my brain while I’m doing manual long division, it’s gonna be working way harder than when I’m using a calculator. Using AI to write will definitely make it easier on my brain.

The dumping down is real though. It seems like human intelligence peaked in the late 1900s. Since then, if I have my facts right, there has been a real reduction in human intelligence in the human population, probably because we don’t have to exercise our brain muscle as much as we used to. I don’t know what the consequences of this will be. But, when a college instructor crumbles about how their class can’t keep up with them, it says more about the instructor than the kids.

Hm. You’re 1) equating nazi ideology and “mean words” and 2) failing to distinguish between porn and revenge porn.

Seek help.

concerns about AI safety far more seriously if they were equally concerned about the risks that Grok poses because of its tendency to spew nazi propoganda and it’s world-class capability at generating revenge porn.

That’s gone. And, barring some sort of technological collapse that I don’t see happening, that form of privacy isn’t coming back.

The important question: what replaces the old way? Nowadays, governments see basically anything/everything about their citizens private lives. That’s a given. So, now what? The way I see it, there are three models. In the Russian model, anyone identified as a potential troublemaker goes pavement surfing from a hotel balcony or gets a dose of novichok in the tea. In the Chinese model, any troublemakers disappear for six months of “re-education”. In the American model, the government watches, but doesn’t take any action until a violent crime is imminent. Heck, that’s not quite true. In the American model we generally won’t take any action until AFTER the crime is committed. We’re actually really committed to this form of freedom. Our government will stand by and watched a clearly mentally ill, pissed-off 19 year old guy acquire assault riffles, ammo and tactical gear, and then basically announce on social media that he’s gonna shoot up a school. Nobody does anything until AFTER the shooting.

I’ll take the American model over the others. Any day of the week. It’s got problems, but the other ways are worse.

The change in the warrantless wiretapping law won’t have any significant effect. Privacy laws have gaping loopholes. All the government has to do is set up a single FISA judge with an overclocked autopen, and it can get legal permission to monitor as many US citizens as it pleases.

Again, the important question is not IF the information is being collected. The important question is WHAT is done with the info?

The advocacy groups didn’t stop datacenters from getting built. Reality did. Altogether, the big companies had announced enough data center building to consume 10 times the total planetary electricity generation, and also use up the next 150 years of semiconductor production. The math and physics literally didn’t work. Only a sliver of them can get built. The rest are vapor. It’s like Meta assuming that it’ll command every ad dollar on the planet, or a memecoin valuing itself at “a HUnDREd tRIlliOn doLlARz”. Just cause someone says it, doesn’t make it reality.

The anti-datacenter movement is full of people who need something shiny and new to be outraged about, and the politicians pander to it because they can pass laws banning the construction of datacenters that were never gonna be constructed anyways,