5,936 karma · joined October 7, 2012
We are so early on in the AI revolution, it seems very premature to make this claim.
I would wager we can't even imagine the scope of the kind of data we'd have available in the coming decades, let alone how the latest AI tech will use it, or which company will lead the way with its application.
Academia is so dysfunctional right now. It's parasitic off the drive of young people who just want to make the world a little better. It's very unfortunate it's ended up this way.
Yes. It's exhausting. I'm several years past post-grad, have had a succession of one-year contracts, doing work I love and believe in and I genuinely believe has a lasting value, but the lack of any kind of security sucks. I'm rapidly approaching a wall where by I have to either go for tenure track/something more managerial/teaching or leave for something hopefully more lucrative in the private sector.
Sadly continuing with my present (rewarding, interesting) work is not an option even though after I leave, the work will still exist and will still have to be done by someone. But the academic system, such that it is, is a conveyor belt, and you gotta move on or get off.
And I got lucky too. My postgrad experience was short, went relatively well, and I'm well paid by academic standards now. I'm constantly surprised I made it out ok given the amount of stress it generated. I know many people who had much more miserable experiences in postgrad.
Speak for yourself, most of my social group is split between iMessage and WhatsApp.
Even so, what Facebook has that MySpace didn't is enough money to buy up its competitors to stay relevant (e.g. WhatsApp). So this might be what will happen, even if Facebook itself fades in relevance.
(Bear in mind that even if Facebook Messenger grew in popularity as AIM declined, so too did the number of people online increase, and the number of people with smartphones -- saying that one increased while the other decreased is not sufficient.)
They're not meant to be lasers in Star Wars (: They're packets of ionized gas (a gas Lando and friends mine at Cloud City).
Actually, to my knowledge, Apple doesn't do this. All their product photography are photos of real objects.
Would any expert reading this like to comment?
One of my favourites is 'electride' bonding, where you compress a crystal so much that the electrons get squeezed into the gaps (interstices) between atoms instead, essentially making the electrons themselves act as anions.
This is really cool, and makes you wonder what other exotic high-pressure physics waits to be found.
Work a lot in crystallography, your work definitely inspires me to give it a go myself one day.
Personally speaking, I'd take great mono over sub-par stereo any day anyway.
It's a fair question, but I'm pretty sure we could. We have constraints: we know the object can be stored in a warehouse, we presumably can infer it can be touched, and can be seen.
Even if it were of alien origin, wondrously advanced, made of some kind of matter that fits outside our standard model of the universe, we would at least know it interacts with light, with the electromagnetic force. We understand that force very well, so we could still characterize it. And that's if it's something deeply weird; deeply strange. (And if it were really that bizarre, it'd be the discovery of the century and obscene to keep it locked up in a warehouse somewhere.)
Far more likely, it's just made up of atoms (which is what we'd expect, given its temperature and density are within the realm of 'objects that can exist on earth in a warehouse'), and then we can use all our normal techniques just fine and it's not a problem.
> Do you think someone from 500 years ago could analyze a microchip or some superconducting ceramic?
Again, to emphasize, this is a valid question -- but we've already gone past that threshold. We can see individual atoms now, so there's not much further to go when it comes to the question of what things are made of, at least to a rough approximation.
However, the next question would be "can we make it?" and the answer to that is very different. If someone gave us some electronics from the future, we could still find out what it's made from quite easily. Understanding how it works and how to re-create it would be vastly more difficult, and possibly beyond us. But this is true of the past too; there were ways of making steel and concrete in the distant past that we've long lost the knowledge of how to make.
[0] To be charitable, I have no doubt that there exist substances in the universe we can't currently characterize. But if you restrict it to objects that you can physically store in a warehouse (that is, they're stable under ambient conditions), I have little doubt we can figure out what they are without much trouble.
The point is that there is no claim. It is very very straight forward to identify an unknown material (figuring out how it was made, what it's for, etc., is the difficult task). If you want to claim there's an 'unknown' material, show us your XRD patterns, your EELS/XPS/NMR/EDX/PL/SIMS spectra, your AFM surfaces, your electron micrographs, atom probe tomography, any number of a hundred other characterization techniques ... then you'd actually have a claim we could have an intelligent conversation about.
At this point, there isn't even a claim that needs an expert opinion to respond to, it's all just BS.
(Edit: thought it looks like it's not using small-caps variants for numerals, which is a shame)
Being able to persuade a customer service rep to provide access to an account (even if indirectly by changing a recovery email) should never be possible.
Given the small size of the laser projector, I imagine natural movement from the phone being hand-held would result in significant displacement of the projected dots over a 1s interval? Have you tried integrating the 15 frames to see what it looks like?
As @braddwyer himself notes, you can probably get a much better mesh integrating over time. It depends how long it takes to capture a single frame, but I imagine that's not long, so getting an order of magnitude improvement is probably quite easy.
> 4) The scary part, which is vast dystopian databases of facial fingerprints is already being done with normal photographs. The depth data is not needed.
And yes ... after all, humans are quite capable of identifying people with high accuracy from 2D photographs. Depth maps are not required for there to be serious privacy issues with such databases.
Edit: glTF? Not sure how good tooling is for this yet, but looks promising.
Also saw in your documentation that you're concentrating on lossless compression right now, which makes complete sense. However, as a scientist, I just want to put a vote in for lossy compression too: it's not uncommon to work with large datasets given in float64 (because float64 is used for any intermediate processing steps), but that actual final precision we need to store is much less than that, but we're stuck with these huge binary files.
True, but it's defined relative to the kg. It's the quantity of Carbon-12 atoms in 12g of Carbon-12.
As for why it isn't an 'simpler' number, it's because if you want a standardized definition of something you have to have a reliable reference. Which is precisely why the kg itself is being redefined.
Side-note: the act of creating this ultra-pure kg of Si-28 has actually created a lot of useful science in its own right, which is nice.