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If life evolved here on Earth, then somehow, CHON+trace all self-organized into all of Earth life today, including us, and all we humans have done and will do in the future.

Now: say we could go back just before life evolved. Even with very very good data, and with whatever talent (AI, science, anything) and technology from today, would we be able to truly describe the emergence paths for those CHON+trace atoms?

Impossible. This would be far beyond our level of science and technology. We can't even do this for much simpler systems and shorter time horizons. You'd have to predict the emergence of life, the full properties and behavior of all forms of life in the last 4 billion years, and last but not least, humans and all that humans have done and thought since then.

Yet clearly nature emerged all this from perhaps small amounts of 11 elements or so. Complexity is one of the greatest unknowns in our present civilization.

Another MIT study: if we AI-augmented R&D widely in the US, our productive economic growth rate would double. The authors argue this would be permanent, forever increasing the rate of technological progress:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873332...

I bet a true accounting of all the economic impacts of semiconductor technologies will show these have far more value than Meta, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok all combined. The stuff built on top of deep technology has higher PR value -- but the deeper tech has far more economic value. Same with AI.

Asking out of genuine intellectual curiosity, not with political or other overtones (even with the highly political character of the news today).

I mean, what have we come to, when a European will go and take a risk, for a chance at an awesome discovery, and an American dare not? ;)

The explorers who first went sailed into the deep Atlantic, with unknown seas and lands beyond, were full of doubts too -- but they did it anyway. Because they had to. In our time, we humans have to continually rekindle our explorer spirit, no matter how settled or distraught our ambient culture becomes. We must explore, with optimism and willpower -- and yes, with plenty of intellect and skepticism too, but end with optimism -- precisely in order to solve the actual problems our world faces.

In reality, your sentiment is correct. Sure, there are laws of physics. But they are also unknown, as the ones humans understand don't describe all observed phenomena by a long shot. There are still restrictions even so, but incredible unknowns await us. As they always have.

What engineering-minded folks frequently don't understand is the need to apply sheer old willpower, after using all that intellect. Ending with a positive, with the notion that it can be done; we just have to figure out how.

1) Engineering (what software folks call hardware), especially cross-functional engineering across several fields, such as chemical and electrical.

2) Software, typically including applications of ML.

3) R&D. Research And Development, folks. The thing investors don't want you to do.

Those types of companies will almost never come out of venture capital. They start with a small founder investment (what VCs tell us is called 'bootstrapping'), significantly supported by federal government grants and contracts (the best source of funding for true R&D), and then product development and commercialization.

The ZIRP-era of pure software, VC-driven type of technology entrepreneurship tries to skip all the way to the end, scale beyond all bounds, and exit big and fast. No wonder we're experiencing groupthink, and why the Bay Area is hollowing out: in this form of technology entrepreneurship, there is no deep economic basis for growth.

In short: technology entrepreneurs should take on technology risk. That means raising capital late, not early, because investors will always be skittish about R&D and longer timeframes. And it means following your own vision first and foremost, rather than letting venture capitalists define how you see the world.

Investors are not where the action is. It is founders and early employees who built the likes of Sony, Qualcomm, General Atomics -- each of these, a real technology company.

I disagree though with the general notion that employees are taking similar or even greater levels of risk. If you get a stable monthly paycheck, and the reasonable worst case is you're laid off because the company runs out of money (or downsizes), then the risk is in finding a new job.

That situation exists in a job at a large company too. Founders however are so tied to their ventures, that getting a new job is effectively out of the question, because it very likely means the death of the company.

And starting a company is an exceedingly difficult, stressful, and sacrificial thing to do. There is a clear and significant asymmetry in risk, and frequently in blood, sweat, and tears. So the nonlinear rewards should be commensurate too.

All modern digital systems are by comparison, distraction machines. You never know when the next interruption ('notification') gets surfaced, the next update, the next forced restart, the next bug, the next battery problem, the next broken or lost charger cable.

Physical books require light, the book, and your mind. All else fades away, and your mind is given free reign to ponder, to consider, to deliberate. No wonder civilization flourished whenever the physical written form was embraced at sustained scale.

Is that men experience much that is improbable.

- Fragment of a lost play by Agathon, ca. 2,400 years ago, quoted in Aristotle's The Art of Rhetoric

Why can't you just refill the gas? Because the precise gas combination that makes for a stable, reliable laser tube was monopolized ages ago.

Because of that one trade secret, countless tubes end up in the trash and way more than necessary are manufactured. Classic case where monopolization of scientific knowledge can end in significant unnecessary waste.

What kind of technology would produce such ultra high energy particles?

What would they use such technology for?

Can a technological source be inferred from the data we already have?

It could also 'just' be a new particle which behaves differently than anything on the board. (Would still be a VERY strange particle though for sure, and still leaves open the question of what produced it.)

In my mind, this is what real technology entrepreneurship looks like. As opposed to the latest crypto or social media thing.

If only we could find a cheap way to get the metal out of titanium dioxide. Like a Haber process-level breakthrough.

Then we could start replacing steel with titanium in many applications. Think entire freight trains, cargo ships, containers, cars, trucks, tractors -- all that heavy steel replaced by titanium alloys.

Enormous quantities of fuel and energy saved by lower density and higher strength. In many applications, it would likely make stainless steel obsolete.

Trillions of dollars of value may be locked up in such a breakthrough.

Sam pontificated about fusion power, even here on HN. Beyond investing in Helion, what did he do? Worldcoin. Tempting impoverished people to give up biometric data in exchange for some crypto. And serving as the face of mass-market consumer AI. Clearly that's more cool, and more attractive to VCs.

Meanwhile, what have fusion scientists and engineers done? They kept on going, including by developing ML systems for pure technological effect. Day after day. They got to a breakthrough just this year. Scientists and engineers in national labs, universities, and elsewhere show what a real commitment to technological progress looks like.

So because the amounts are large (compared to commercial, in terms of when a customer first buys from a small company), those cases really make a huge difference.

And that's federal gov contracting. State/local is even more of a Wild West. So much so that many, maany companies just never have the bandwidth to even find RFPs and navigate those ancient sites.

Hopefully they'll make it like $5-$10 for small teams.

Or maybe not 'hopefully'. If they don't, a better and cheaper alternative will probably appear. LLMs are slowly being commoditized, thankfully.

It's curious how we humans fail to remember that we're not able to generate all explanations just by thinking about them. Getting to explanations requires experiments. But spirits and demons are so vaguely defined that we just can't test their existence empirically.

Hence, in my mind, this should be in the realm of metaphor, not science. Let spirits and demons live in the humanities, so they can continue to inspire art, books, games, and much thought. They're about the internal human experience, not external reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI0mkt6Z3I0

It would be easier to accept him as someone who is genuinely altruistic. Instead, he turns out to be just another self-serving 'tech' bro.

I write 'tech' because clearly this guy does not actually care about pushing technology forwards for human good -- which is the cause, in my view, of all real technologists. It's about himself, just as it is with the great Technoking.

"“Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the person said, adding: “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.”"

Yep, the great Technoking's narcissism manifesting itself in critical technology decisions. Hopefully the ongoing stories of severe mismanagement at Tesla will show people that severe personality flaws matter, especially in technology.

But not all mission statements are meaningless, and not all attempts by executives to create a family-like culture come from a bad place.

Much of it comes from a good place, and it often works. But people who experience this I think are less likely to write on HN.

We sit wayyyy too much in business and tech. There is not nearly enough movement. Yet our bodies are built for movement, not for sitting on our duffs for most of the day.