Sure, and we here on Slashdot are criticising the silly article. And I'm criticising your silly repeating of the silly claim that polarization is not a quantum phenomenon because you can "explain" it (in a very narrow energy range if you squint and don't look too close) using classical physics. I probably wouldn't have replied at all if you hadn't told one of your other replies "it's okay if you don't understand quantum mechanics."

The actual paper doesn't use "first quantum material" at all. It says "first class of room-temperature quantum materials that are intrinsically sensitive to the quantum statistical properties defining all forms of light". They actually write it all out twice, which suggests to me that they were aware that shortening it to "quantum material" would sound ridiculous.

In fact, on casual reading it appears to be a fancy polarizing filter that's also sensitive to coherence.

It's pretty straightforward. Instead of simple counting on your fingers you treat your right thumb as a 5, your left fingers as 10s and your left thumb as a 50, which lets you count to ten on one hand or a hundred on both. It's fairly obvious once you understand digital notation, but you could also teach the concept using it, just like an abacus.

If you really wanted to get carried away you could treat your fingers as binary digits and count to 1024.

The systems aren't creative they're just really really fancy search engines that regurgitate what they have ingested.

Are we still saying this? These systems have solved a wide variety of open math problems some of which were borderline famous.

But what are the practical implications of that? Isn't it just as likely that those math problems haven't been solved because there was not any particularly good reason to solve them?

'Dem goal posts are a walking.

Here's a little more detail.

Researchers a few years back ran tests. ADHDers and neurotypicals were asked to harvest berries and edible plants.

Neurotypicals tended to over-harvest and damage bushes to the point where recovery would be slow if possible at all, and tended to pick areas clean, wiping out local populations of edible plants.

ADHDers tended to move relatively quickly from area to area, harvesting a decent amount from each area but not excessively. The quantities tended to be at the sort of level that have long been established as a good balance, such that plants and populations would tend to actually do better the following year. Not only that, but they tended to gather more.

https://www.psychologytoday.co...

Crofts and small farms rapidly went to three-stage and four-stage crop rotation, but different fields would be with different crops. This meant that the failure of a single crop would be much less of a survival thing.

You'd see fields with a mutitude of diverse crops, because diversity was critical. Failure was highly likely, so you localised it. Failure in one area had no meaningful impact overall. Things like the Irish potato famine and the parsnip failures across France in the 1700s were relatively rare in history. Likewise, when industrialisation wiped out cottage industries, farms that had been very successful suddenly went bankrupt and mass starvation was common. The ability to task-switch and have a large number of small projects going was essential to life at the edges.

You're absolutely right, more ADHD would have indeed curbed the excesses. The industrial revolution caused huge problems by trying to do too much with too little diversity. Which eventually destroyed the economies built around the early mills, because the markets were too easy to undermine. There was no capacity to switch. But during the IR, the obsession with coal meant nobody really looked at alternative fuels or alternative activities. Economies became tightly constricted, which was devastating when it came to global warming, but equally devastating when it came to distributing metal-devouring bacteria (which did enormous damage to infrastructure) and radioactive particles (old mill areas are still unusually radioactive).

More ADHD wouldn't have eliminated the problem, but it would have diversified the solutions and would have diversified the markets, resulting in a much more robust, much healthier marketplace and a much more robust, much healthier population.

Uh, no. As in, 100% of gatherers would be ADHD. IF they weren't, you'd be extinct within the year. 20% of the hunters would also be ADHD, because over-harvesting was also going to wipe out your food source. 100% of your explorers would be ADHD, 100% of your experimenters would be AuDHD.

ADHD was essential to survival. If you didn't want to die out, you stuck the neurotypical outside so that the wolves and other nasties actually hunting (tigers wouldn't be present) would get them. Neurotypicals were the main threat to survival.

Actually, their name is a dick joke.

No, it's more likely that girls and women learned to mask symptoms early for survival reasons.

If you look at hunter-gatherer societies, ADHD is paramount to survival because it avoids over-harvesting. Too little ADHD produces cultures prone to driving plants and/or animals extinct. ADHD is a critical stop-gap that prevents this. Studies show ADHD gatherers will not only collect more, they will do so in ways that cause far less damage, resulting in a far better second harvest and far better sustainability.

Into more modern times, ADHD was a valuable survival trait. Too little and you became vulnerable to diseases, pests, crop blight, etc. If you wanted a stable population, right the way through to the industrial era, you needed a high level of ADHD in the population.

It is only when neurotypical bosses decided that they had to micromanage everything and decided who lived and who died on the streets that you see ADHD symptoms suddenly and massively suppressed. But masking changes nothing. The levels will still be the same, they're just hidden.

It isn't. The under-diagnosis of girls is astronomical.

You are assuming ADHD is a new thing. No, it isn't. It is a survival thing. ADHD was critical in a very large percentage of the population for the bulk of the last 350,000 years. Without it, humanity would have gone extinct. It's merely not appropriate in a world in which neurotypicals make neurodiverse solutions a "bad thing".

They might drop by a little, but honestly not by much. Boys are mildly overdiagnosed for the reasons you give (but few places still medicate), girls are however massively underdiagnosed.

I never got myself into the whole "masculinity" obsession, even back in the 70s and 80s. The result of this was a discovery that computers launched me head-first through far fewer windows and pelted me with far fewer rocks. So, yeah, I was definitely seen as disposable though my childhood and teen years by pretty much everyone. (It's one reason anyone looking back at those as "golden years" is unlikely to win me over.)

Escapism is pretty much all I had at the time, and these days remains pretty much all I have - reality has grown far worse over the years and knowledge by the neurotypicals has not come with empathy but ammunition. There is guilt and shame in playing with creative writing or inventing, and the demons have got really bad on occasion, but you're right, it's not doing anyone any harm.

Both. It's best thought of as a positive feedback loop.

Sure, and we are looking for thing that cannot.

We are? We're talking about somebody using the term "quantum material", not looking for evidence supporting quantum physics.

Even so, you should be able to pretty easily notice deviations from Maxwell. It's a pain in the ass with film but pretty well any modern CCD or CMOS sensor should be able to detect shot noise from a double slit, crossed polarizer or just plain old light source experiment at tabletop scale. If not, add an ND filter.

'd be very careful about interpreting QM as "how it works".

Yeah, I didn't say that. It's pretty easy to show that both quantum mechanics and Maxwell are not how it works. Your claim that a polarizer is not a "quantum material" because you can explain it's behaviour with a classical theory (in very limited circumstances) really is assuming "that's how it works" though.

Or Slashdot will tell you you need 10 terabytes of the fastest VRAM and a few dozen of the very latest processors from Nvidia.

There it is!

You don't need any RAM at all. You can read each weight from an SSD, a hard drive or a stone tablet. If it's an SSD it's not necessarily "incredibly slow" if you're just playing around and aren't ready to spend fifty thousand dollars on your chatbot. There are benchmarks for running big models on Raspberry Pis for example.

The 50 B generally means you're going to be able to do things like hold most or all of the matrices in memory while you multiply them, which is usually a pretty big performance increase.

Convenience comes before the rare occasions when it's actually pleasurable to drive a standard day to day. I do not miss a clutch crawling along in traffic or cruising on the highway. And for the in-between bits my car has both a shift by wire stick and paddle shifters if I want to make vroom vroom noises and pretend I'm in F1.

Nah. Learn Chisanbop, Korean finger math, instead. An abacus you'll always have with you. Hopefully.