The article at least shows it's very plausible that the people who cut it down didn't know that this particular tree was record breaking, only that the type of trees in that area were known to be extremely old
If someone is equal in talent to Von Neumann it's probably extremely difficult to discourage them enough via gatekeeping to stop them from making progress.
Why should we not expand into space? To make sure that all the lifeless rocks in it stay lifeless? If earth were twice as large would you say that logically we should only inhabit half of that earth or do you believe that human beings have a natural claim to everything that can be reached via boats and legs but not via rockets?
Personally, I would like a future where I can see other planets with my own eyes and dislike a future where the entire species is dependent on one planet being habitable.
This. Significant portions of the Epstein files are random noise. Though even for a popularish author it'd be strange to be in enough 1990-2018 news snippets to reach that many EF hits. In any case "is in the Epstein files" should in general be replaced with "is in the Epstein files, including this email to/from them I found"
Demographic collapse is a major issue unless agi automates away completely the need for human intellect, drive, and labor on complex tasks. If x% of your population are consumers without producing then that's a net drain on the economy sustained by the 1-x% of the population that is producing. All automation does is lessen the impact of the smaller labor pool
There are uses for AI running on the platform, you can see this in Ukraine right now where many kamikaze drones use AI for terminal guidance if the connection to the operator breaks after a target has been selected. How intensive that workload is and how it needs to be however I can't say.
Dog fighting is not a serious concern in modern fighter combat because missiles have gotten so effective that the current strategy has been forced into beyond visual range combat. And stealth doesn't just "fail". In bvr the first side that sees the other is the side that gets to fire a salvo first, which is the primary advantage of stealth technology: so that the enemy doesn't see you from as far as you can see them. All stealth does is linearly lower the radar return of your plane for a given distance and angle, but radar return is inversely proportional to the fourth power of distance. This means that if you get close enough then any decent radar can eventually make out an f35. The whole point of stealth is to make that distance as small as possible.
youd want some number of both. The ideal defense net against shahed type drones looks very different from the ideal defense net against f35s. Namely, shaheds require very cheap and numerous interceptors and radars, and f35s require very expensive radars and interceptors (and a dream). Anything that works against an f35 would be an egregious waste against a shahed and anything that works against a shahed wouldn't against an f35
That's because the United States official position in the civil war was that the south was a part of the US that was in rebellion, and not a sovereign state that we were at war with.
No. Solar bought mostly from a foreign power only gives you a dependence for continuing to expand solar or (much less so) maintaining the solar already in your country over the 15-30 years it gradually breaks down / gets less efficient. Once you're at peak solar youre not that bad off even if embargoed. Meanwhile since oil highly inelastic, even relatively small portions of your supply being disrupted at any point means an almost instaneous increase in the price to do almost anything industrial or commercial in your country, as is shown by the current Hormuz crisis
Rusts memory safety constructs do also impose a (much smaller) runtime performance penalty. Every Arc / Rc is a memory safe abstraction with runtime cost since rust has no way to prove cyclic reference graphs are safe at compile time.
The issue isn't in generating short wavelength light, it's in focusing it accurately enough to print a pattern with trillions of nanoscale features with few defects. We can't really use lenses since every material we could use is opaque to high energy photons so we need to use mirrors, which still absorb a lot of the light energy hitting them. Now this only explains why we need all the crazy stuff that asml puts in it's EUV machines to use near x-ray light, but not why they don't use x-ray or higher energy photons. I believe the answer to this is just that the mirrors they can use for EUV are unacceptably bad for anything higher, but I'm not sure
Invading Taiwan isn't about chips at all, and in fact chips are actively disincentivizing invasion. Semiconductor fabs and the oodles of atomically precise ultra clean and ultra expensive equipment inside absolutely do not mix well with bombs.
Tangent but while the joint strike fighter program's decision to "save costs" by developing one platform for three branches may arguably have been a bad idea, by all respects except for perhaps long term maintenance costs the f35 is the most effective fighter in the skies.
All semiconductor manufacturing techniques are based upon precisely flat layers of material that can be stacked and/or drilled into to produce a useful design. All vertical irregularities propogate to the layers above and can cause thinner layers when an upper layer is milled flat
I don't think it's stupid to believe that the brain is somehow beyond turing computable considering how easy it is to create a system exactly as capable as a turing machine. I also don't think that anything in philosophy can provide empirical evidence that the brain is categorically special as opposed to emergently special. The sum total of the epistemology I've studied boiled down to people saying "I think human consciousness / the brain works like this" with varying degrees of complexity.
That's the estimated total cost of the joint strike fighter program including research, acquisition, and maintenance, up to its current intended retirement in the 2060s