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Submission + - NASA is developing a Mars helicopter that could land itself from orbit (newscientist.com)

MattSparkes writes: NASA is working on plans to send another, much larger helicopter to Mars than Ingenuity. The "Chopper" craft would land itself after “screaming into” the planet’s atmosphere at speed, before covering several kilometres a day while carrying scientific equipment. It would probably be the most graceful arrival on the red planet of any lander yet.

Submission + - Memristors inch towards practical production (phys.org) 3

Baron_Yam writes: Memristors are the long-sought 4th fundamental circuit element. They promise analog computing capability in hardware, the ability to hold state without power, and to work with less power. A small cluster of them can replace a transistor using less space. Working and long term storage can blend together and neural networks can be implemented in hardware — they are a game-changing innovation.

Now, researchers are getting closer to putting these into production as they can now produce graphine-based memristors at wafer-scale.

Comment Re:Process? (Score 1) 114

it's now almost 2 years after the release of ChatGPT. There are many vendors pitching x10 and more from ASIC to FPGA to Wafer. Hard to understand that in 2 years matrix-vector optimized for transformer training and inference is not all over the place in lieu of the absurd pricing for CUDA devices.

Submitting a more than 100k context right now - just first step initially processing it is probably more than 0.5 kW.

Comment Terraforming on the same trip (Score 1) 70

taking along a bunch of Methane-metabolizing bacteria (methanotrophs) to heat it up comfy for the next visit?

Despite the unfortunate lack of an oxidizer on Titan, anaerobic methanotrophs, might happily reduce sulfates (SO4^2-), nitrate (NO3^-), or metal oxides like ferric iron (Fe^3+) or manganese dioxide (MnO2) in case it is available there. There certainly should be enough Nitrates given the atmosphere is full of it.

Comment Bad Idea: The world needs serious Training Monitor (Score 0) 2

That was maybe first time the Indian Government regulated an industry (away) with foresight. Compare this to the EU parliament spawning red sheets and tape over inference which is NOT where the imminent dangerous are.

Model builders, especially those, who infuse structure into the models through recursive/reflective/meta-programming & have 30k + H100 equivalents to work with are subjecting the world to undo risk. It's probably going on in several places at this point stealth/dark R&D, self-modifying LLM coupled with RL learning/optimizing on a reward function being the most obvious to try and entirely doable that is to couple.

Given that its imminent that ais will start to self - modify and spin up to be maybe being emergently completely uncontrollable there needs to be upstream trainers monitoring, not just red tape. Think air-gapped facilities. Trusting red power buttons in case is hilarious against machines that can chess-alike think hundreds of moves ahead against much lower developed creatures (us).

This is outlandish but real as something. The things necessary to stop it now won’t be done in time probably unless something happens on a small scale which makes it obvious to shut the large computers down. Even then then your favorite autocracies of the world will happily continue the path to experiment with AIs - end of story.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/...

Comment Won't beat Concorde performance in main config (Score 3, Insightful) 150

50 year plus old turbojet engines, small and less sophisticated wing (missing vortex lift), only a fraction of the resources of Concorde design/development - won't cut it.

carbon/composites instead of RR58 aluminium alloy, CFD modeling and current FWB controls will surprisingly or not fail to produce meaningfully better performance

kudos to the Concorde designers who still have to be topped almost 50 years after its first flight

Comment Re: not at /. (Score 1) 158

Globalization is neither good nor bad, but CETA is a bad deal. Especially when we want to battle resource limitations and climate change. A key problem with CETA is the so called protection for investors, which sounds like we do not have a proper legal system in Canada and the EU. CETA has also a system which allows to modify the treaty later without parliamental control. So in short it is undemocratic and I want to keep my democracy.

explaining this to the quite rule-based society Germany probably, which is typically receiving end of why trade needs state-independet dispute resolution even for established democracies. The 2nd part of the answer is why counterintuitively trade agreements and nation-independent courts would be the most impactful way to address climate change (!) if implemented properly.

(1) The badly termed Schiedsgerichte investment court system (also investor-state dispute settlement-ISDS) protects investors from one country to political arbitrariness. Recent examples are:

* banks having to forgive part of loans by decree of other governments that gift bank loan reductions to its voter clientele (Hungary, Croatia). Technically the exchange rate is modified by changing laws, which in effect forgives part of the loan. Needless to say that people will invest less given this, for which in the end all lose.

That is, it's not uncommon at at all that even developed democracies parliaments/governments change rules affecting the investments of others on the fly. You would not believe how common it is even in more developed democracies for ex post facto changes based on domestic politics that harm investors from other nations, it's possible to cite many more recent examples.

If an investor wants to go to court for this with only domestic courts it may amount to a wish-you-good-luck situation. So there need to be non-national, potentially less biased independent courts (better) or resolution mechanisms. As trade agreements are badly explained and quite complex which makes them prone for popular simplifications. but it's not given that robust democracies have need independent judiciary.

(2) Climate change: I would posit that CETA-alike agreements with China could do more for climate change than lip-service non-binding populism as maybe seen with COP21 (non-binding Paris climhttps://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/10/30/2233243/ceta-signed-off-as-wallonia-folds-under-pressure#ate treaty). If China would need to pay for its environmental emissions enforced by proportional duties and other instruments, overseen by independent dispute settlement courts it could lead to real CO2 parts per million reductions.

A pity that (2) sounds completely unrealistic in a populist climate of trade being bad mouthed and the need for non-national courts weakly understood.
 

Comment not at /. (Score 0) 158

now populism/nationalism/isolationism/*ism including reactionism : wishing the good old times of a non-globalized world back

have caught up with /. Missing this comfy 20th century back? Don't worry the autocrats who tend to be somewhat less free-trade oriented are coming along and will make good on their promises.

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