why_at

>A bunch of radioactive stuff together is basically the definition of a nuclear reactor though.

It really isn't.

A pile of radioactive waste isn't a reactor. Marie Curie's notes are famously contaminated with radioactive materials but they aren't a reactor. This is about as close as the boy scout got.

The Oklo fossil reactor is unique because it happened to form in the right circumstances to produce a fission chain reaction, which does make it a reactor. Not every uranium mine is a reactor, in fact this is the only one known.

>Of course. "tried to" being key words in the comment.

Fair enough, I misread your original comment.

The broader point stands that the limitation on creating nuclear weapons and reactors is not knowledge but materials. Even if he himself had a PhD in nuclear physics he still couldn't have built one in his backyard because he wouldn't be able to get the materials. A nuclear physicist can't build a reactor without materials anymore than a pilot can fly without an airplane.

For an example of how closely this is monitored see the Oklo fossil reactors[1]

The proportion of fissile isotopes being mined was off by a fraction of a percent, which caused the French government to launch an investigation. It turns out that millions of years ago the site had formed a natural fission reactor which depleted some of the fissile isotopes

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

He didn't create a nuclear reactor, this is a common misconception. It even says this in the wikipedia article.

He basically got a bunch of radioactive stuff and put it together. He wasn't anywhere close to making a nuclear reactor let alone a nuclear weapon. For a weapon you need isotopes which he didn't have access to.

>it would mean I think bats are people, just non-human ones. That's what being a person is: a subjective experiencer.

Okay, I think this is part of what I found confusing about your initial comment, since "person" is often used interchangeably with "human". But if you're using it to mean something that has a subjective experience then that's fine.

>I can't be fully sure that bats aren't persons, but I would agree that I think it's unlikely they are.

This sounds like it would put you with the "extremists" then? It's widely agreed that all mammals if not all vertebrates have some subjective experience, consciousness, sentience, or whatever you want to call it.[1][2] As you've said though we can't be fully sure.

Do you think any non-humans have this?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness

[2]https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciou...

I think he makes it pretty clear he's only talking about the second one of your two definitions

>What it is like to be a bat could be rephrased as what it would be like to experience being a bat if a person were being a bat

He says:

>[what] it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat

The point is that bats do have a subjective experience of the world which is very different from a person's. It seems like you think only humans have this?

I had no idea there were 1500kW fast chargers, this is insanely high power for a car.

Maybe this would be useful for long haul trucks or something where they have large battery capacities and want to save as much time as they can, but it seems like way overkill for any normal person.

>The 1,500kW charging stations are significantly more powerful than Tesla’s 500kW V4 Superchargers

>it charges to 70 percent in five minutes on the new chargers.

By my math this means it would charge to 70% in 15 minutes on the 500kW charger? That's already plenty fast, my car does nowhere near 500kW and it's fine the couple of times a year I need it.

I agree with the ruling, but this makes me wonder if it will be possible to have any AI agent at all if it's consistently applied.

After all, if I can get ChatGPT or Claude to say something false that should count too, right?

The title is misleading IMO. It should say "German ruling declares Google liable for libel in AI Overviews"

I was prepared to say the same thing as you but after reading it seems totally fair.

The key difference is that this would be illegal if a human wrote it too.

It's strange to me that this isn't the emphasis of the article.

I assume the MRL the lowest amount which could possibly cause harm? If so then why does it matter for the rest of the products where the levels are below that?

It could be for potential environmental harm, but then the fact that these are being exported at all should tell you that they're being used, you don't have to test consumer goods.

Their recommendations include this:

>2. Automatically lower all maximum residue levels (MRLs) of non-approved pesticides to the limit of detection to prevent these substances from making their way back onto European plates via a dangerous ‘boomerang effect

But is this scientifically supported?

I've recently gotten into microscopy as a hobby and comparing the relative size of microbes is really interesting. There are entire animals (tardigrades for one) which can be smaller than some single celled organisms.

There are even single celled organisms which will prey upon and eat multicellular animals.

It seems to me like there's a fair amount to be concerned about, I wouldn't consider myself an expert on finance by any means so if you have some explanation of why it's not that bad I'd love to hear it.

Two other indices changed their rules to allow these companies specifically. Pensions and retirement funds rely on these indices to have continual, stable growth. Often the people whose money is being invested don't even have control over its allocation into these funds.

Coupled with the precarious state of the economy due to all the money already flowing through AI, changing the rules to throw retirement fund money into brand new extremely highly valued stocks with P/E ratios in the hundreds seems like a recipe for disaster. It reminds me of subprime mortgages.

I was having a hard time pinning down what bothered me about this but I think you put it pretty well.

It draws an analogy between us and the skeptical aliens in the original story which feel silly to us, so the obvious implication is that we're being as silly as they were.

But it doesn't really give a reason to accept the analogy, it just asserts it.

There's a big difference between a whole civilization and a piece of software that can output text.

I'm a big fan of Star Trek but I recently rewatched this one in the context of recent AI developments and it's not as good as I remember it.

They barely touch on the issues of consciousness, Picard basically says "What if Data is conscious?" and then goes off on a tangent. The judge eventually rules in Data's favor but doesn't give much of a justification IMO.

It's still a good episode, but it doesn't add much to the conversation on consciousness. It's a hugely complicated topic which people have devoted their entire careers to.

I can appreciate LLMs for some use cases, but writing emails for the user is the one that really baffles me.

It's one thing if you don't speak English well and could use some help making yourself understood, but the amount of native speakers using this is so strange to me. How does this help you? If you can write to the LLM telling it what kind of email to write, you might as well just write the email.

Worth mentioning that this is from 2021 and there are now faster speeds and more options.

We have OSFP/QSFPDD with 8 lanes and lane speeds of 100Gpbs and 200Gbps for up to 1.6Tbps on a single DAC at the bleeding edge. Although with these signal integrity limits the maximum length to about 1m.

You probably won't see this on a NIC or anything for home use any time soon though.

No you have to get the yesses back out

  cat /dev/null | yes

I'm a totally biased EV owner, and I agree that it's only fair that EV owners pay for the roads they use.

But it's annoying to see the US government find a new way to discourage one of the most clear cut ways to reduce fossil fuel usage. If things were fair, we would be taxing gas for its contribution to air pollution and climate change.

We should be doing everything we can to encourage EV adoption, but the current administration is interested in doing the exact opposite. They apparently found a way to do so which gets bipartisan support.

It's got better reviews on Goodreads than Moby Dick too. I know what I'm reading next

I'll throw my two cents in, this still exists today. The difference between now and then is that now a college degree is seen as a requirement for a higher quality of life. (And not in a eudaimonia way)

Many people are going to college primarily to make more money in their adult life, the actual learning is secondary. If you're already well-off or just don't care, you can still get the education for its own sake.

The issue is that we've created a perverse incentive to get a college degree.

The burning question for me is how does this compare to previous years?

Looks like they started doing this senior survey in 2022, so unfortunately there's no pre-COVID info.

2022 20.9% cheating, 31.5% non-reporting

2023 25.4% cheating, 33.6% non-reporting

2024 28.8% cheating, 42.0% non-reporting

2025 29.9% cheating, 44.6% non-reporting

So from this it seems like cheating has been increasing significantly over just the last few years

Yeah I think there could be something to the integration of AI in an operating system so that it can handle things going on in different applications the same way you can already copy and paste between things.

But if it's going to require phoning home to some Google/OpenAI/whoever then forget it. I don't want a constant connection to my OS from one of these companies.

My first impression coming away from this is skepticism.

Anything with voice controls for routine use is a pretty tough sell. Doing this when you're not completely alone would be annoying to everyone around you.

Most of their examples seem like they could have been done with a right click drop down menu so they don't really need to "re-invent the mouse pointer".

So is this thing talking to Google's servers all the time for the AI integration? So it won't work if you're not connected to the internet? Privacy concerns are obvious; now Google wants to have an AI watching literally everything you do on your computer?

Does it cost the user anything for the LLM use? If it's free will it stay free forever? That's quite a lot to give away if they're expecting people to use it to change a single word like in one of their examples. I guess they're expecting to make the money back by gathering data about literally everything you do on your computer.

There might be a killer app for AI integration with personal computers that has yet to be invented, but this doesn't look like it.

Yeah fair enough. I'm not sure I really agree with the piece either tbh. More likely these different narratives are coming from different groups of people.

I'm not even convinced of the main premise that McDonald's is now much more expensive relative to other things. I think it just feels that way because we had a few years of high inflation.

I read it more as a segue into the main point about conflicting narratives in the American public regarding food.

Despite our excuses that we have to eat unhealthy fast food because it's cheap, we still eat it it once it's expensive. We all talk about how there is an obesity crisis yet we constantly promote and glorify unhealthy food on social media.

>Or maybe no one is fully logically consistent in their views. In the end, people will continue to consume this food even knowing full-well it’s unhealthy and overpriced. And for that, McDonald’s should not be too concerned.

>Discussions of plant consciousness are nearly always dominated by very loud self-proclaimed skeptics

I have to say I have had the opposite experience. Ever since "The Secret Life of Plants" the average person is much more open to the idea that plants have some kind of conscious experience than is warranted by our current understanding of them. Myths about plants growing better when exposed to classical music etc. are still around thanks to this book and will seemingly never die.

Pop science journalists are eager to report any new finding on some physiological capability of a plant as the plant "thinking", "feeling", or they invoke the classic Betteridge's law of headlines: "Are plants conscious?" In almost every case the original author of the scientific piece never described it as such.

This is one of the things that makes a spoiler free run hard to imagine. I think the Oracle can tell you about the ritual but geez it would take you forever to figure this stuff out

One of the oldest photos on my phone is the screenshot from the one and only time I beat Nethack. (As a tourist BTW)

Hmm this is interesting. I was playing on mute so I didn't notice the radio messages.

I was thinking the "convergence point" was the center of camp with the sign since that's where all the paths meet up and the book mentions something about that. The radio also says "I just put a sign on it".

>it seems to me the audio may be outdated and that the star map was initially in the book and was since moved to the telescope

He also mentions he wrote it in 1967 but the book says 1987

Is there anything to the weird book in the treehouse or is it just for flavor? It seems to be alluding to something but I can't figure it out.