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Comment Freeman Dyson entered the chat (Score 1) 47

Wasn't Freeman Dyson at least skeptical of ever bigger and better particle accelerators as reaching diminishing returns on the amount of physics knowledge gleened per dollar spent.

Forget Freeman Dyson. Hasn't anyone taken ECON 101 as a college freshman and remember "diminishing marginal returns." And forget the harm to the environment, isn't the outragious electric bill a sign of more and more resources thrown at something to "scale it up" without considering where the scaling law levels off?

Comment Enstuffification of AI? (Score 1) 47

What is the revenue model? Selling what you disclose to the AI?

Or will anything beyond the most brain-dead AI be a big monthly subscription?

Will your employer insist that you not use their paid-for AI for personal use in the way of Cyber Monday that you weren't supposed to use your work Internet to purchase your Christmas presents but people did this anyway?

Or will AI gradually become useless owing to who pays the most coin to train the neural networks a certain way, becoming useless like Web search?

Comment Parallax problem (Score 1) 25

The Heliocentric Theory had a problem with a negative result for the parallax of stars. Think of it as the Michelson-Morley result of its day.

This is why Tycho Brahe rejected the Copernican interpretation, the best observational astronomer of his day--he couldn't measure any shift in stellar positions as the Earth went around the Sun. No one had the imagination that the nearest stars were so freakin' far away.

Comment Humans hallucinate too (Score 0) 147

I started using Google Gemini to evaluate applications of transfer students for credit for specified courses at my university.

What a person in my role is supposed to do is email faculty colleagues teaching the course in question, but good luck with that. A faculty member wants such requests to just go away. Even if you know the contents of a course you have taught for years, how do you know that Cow College's offering is anywhere close?

The AI not only has a lot to say on how equivalent a pair of courses, if it is just making stuff up, I don't see how it can be worse than what my colleagues say.

Maybe if I don't call attention to what I am doing, no one will notice the difference. Maybe it is an improvement. A grad student turned in a form and left out which courses they wanted credit for. It came to me but requesting an undergrad-level course, and this topic is in the "wheelhouse" of the student's PhD advisor who approved. I sent it back that my "research" indicates that the course taken at MIT is advanced-graduate level at our Cow College and suggested an advanced grad level course here that according to the AI is a "great match."

I sent this back to the student--is the student going to complain?

Comment Roundup vs glyphosate (Score 1) 66

Is the mix to increase potency or is it for apparent potency.

Don't know about farming, but the homeowner squirts glyphosate and nothing happens whereas Roundup causes the weeds to turn brown right away.

Is this about effectiveness or is it about lack of patience for the glyphosate to kick in.

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