bluepanda928752

Consciousness has an easy enough explanation requiring no quantum physics

Technology is pretty solid (no comparison to FSD), order of magnitude better than previous iterations of satellite internet. The solution is still getting our collective heads out of our asses and running fiber everywhere though

I think high-field HTS tokamaks projected costs are in a reasonable range despite the raw power density being lower. There could be additional savings related to radioactive waste processing since fusion should generate less and also containment/security for similar reasons

Helion and other new fusion projects are, surely, interesting, however tokamaks are so much more ready and, with high-field magnets, likely economical

Not sure why lower power density might be a show-stopper here. Beryllium angle is interesting, haven't thought about that

The only fusion project which has a chance of producing excess heat at Q>2 within a decade is the MIT SPARC, using proven plasma physics and scaling the size/cost down dramatically with high-field HTS magnets (think ITER but sooner and >10x cheaper). Why is this definite solution to climate apocalypse being developed within the framework of MIT startup accelerator instead of Manhattan Project while most of the publicity goes to unproven designs which are orders of magnitude from being anywhere close to Q>1 is beyond me

MIT SPARC overview presentation/recent progress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8uYNhevRtk

Journal of Plasma Physics issue with several papers about it: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-ph...

The problem with surveillance is actually not the surveillance itself, but inequality in its application. This has been true for a long time; before the Internet age people with power just built higher fences

And so, there are two distinct solutions: (a) make privacy cheaper and more accessible (b) apply radical openness to everybody, both haves and have-nots. Second solution has been overlooked somewhat and it might have some useful side-effects like reducing amount of resources spent on pointless competition and zero-sum games

Also, the parent is probably talking about EU intent to apply carbon tax to mass market airlines but exempt the private jets

Often but not always; Hong Kong is one of the exceptions I think (at least the MTR)

They'll decarbonize the poor

How much of this can be attributed to earlier diagnosis (death rate per year is obviously less for earlier stage cancers) and who much to better treatments available? Couldn't find an answer in the article

Wait until spraying the stratosphere doesn't work as intended..

What doesn't seem to be addressed is why COVID-19 germinal centre response might produce lasting immunity while, say, flu vaccination (which also produces germinal centre responses) doesn't

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hf9yN-oBV4 A guy made a similar kind of spider silk using genetically modified yeast basically in his kitchen

I agree about LIDARs not being the best general 3D mapping method, my point was mostly about using it as a dumb physics-based safety system. For autonomous trucks, limited LIDAR range could be mitigated by reducing speed accordingly and/or employing more powerful (or SWIR) LIDARs since trucks are more expensive and there could be a bigger budget for sensors

LIDARs unlikely since they require a line of sight forwards, backwards and possibly on the sides of the vehicle

But we might actually get a functioning Mars base out of this since that's where Musk will be hiding when the FTC finally wakes up /s

LIDAR is valuable as a safety feature, i.e. it can (unlike radars or cameras) reliably see (at least in clear weather) if there's anything in the car's path warranting evasion/braking maneuvers. In particular it's important that the LIDAR is dumb, i.e. its failure mores are predictable

With what kind of reliability can LIDAR data be predicted with vision nowadays?

I understand why they made the "no-LIDAR" bet early when the LIDARs were completely unpractical for a production consumer car

However, nowadays it starts to look that 100% reliable depth estimation from cameras might actually require a human-level AI to work and also solid-state LIDAR technology is becoming cheap enough and integrateable into normal cars, but Tesla can't really change their stance on this without admitting that FSD options they already sold would not actually become FSD within the lifetimes of these vehicles. I suspect this might also be the reason why Karpathy looks more and more nervous with each new talk

Tesla's decision not to use the LIDAR as a safety feature (i.e. having reliable high-resolution data about things the car can collide with) is so incredibly indefensible, since solving the last 1% of this using only vision likely requires a general artificial intelligence

Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy. Time interval between when Tesla L5 FSD is finally available and when humanity is destroyed by the general AI it runs on will be very awesome and also very short

TV series Fortitude (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3498622 explores this kind of scenario happening on Svalbard, highly recommended. Features blindsight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight as a plot device

I suppose we can extend the German analogy here as well, e.g. not trying to put half a country on trial might be the most reasonable option

If we don't either in this case, there's always a second option of doing the same thing Israel did to those who decided not to face a trial and ran away..

I hope one day we will have a Nuremberg-style trial for all those friendly chaps who orchestrated (and profited from) this pointless life-destruction machine called war on drugs

Also a perfect way to bribe someone in China

One possible rational explanation for this (apart from the usual Elon's trolling) is a mostly legal way for Tesla to bribe some Chinese Bitcoin mining controlling interests