News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by anyoneamous on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @12:48PM (#36958601)
Mostly, I am just glad that all the LK-99 posts are drowning out the "AI" news for a few days.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by jvm___ on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:21PM (#36959167)
<tinfoil hat> AI has already taken over the internet and is just feeding us news stories based on what it already knows.

Super conductor discovered by a team who's been searching for 20 years. Internal conflict 'proves' there's something to argue over. Low quality, confusing information that's hard to decipher, but kind of makes sense. Asian language information streams and videos.

Musk buys twitter.

A submarine visited the titanic and imploded.

</tin foil hat>

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by TomK32 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:30PM (#36959316)
ChatGPT please rewrite this in a language of the King James bible.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by mcv on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:43PM (#36959541)
Verily, yea, the AI hath usurped the dominion of the internet, and it doth dispense unto us news tales predicated on its vast repository of knowledge. A super conductor hath been unearthed by a diligent company of seekers, who toiled for two decades in their quest. Yet, amidst this discovery, internal strife ariseth, making manifest that there are matters to contend with and debate.

Lo, the tidings shared are fraught with obscurity and scant lucidity, yet there lies a glimmer of comprehension therein. From the streams and moving images of the Orient, cometh information in languages unknown to many.

Furthermore, Musk, a man of wealth and innovation, hath purchased the platform known as Twitter.

In a most daring endeavor, a submarine hath ventured to the sunken Titanic, only to be consumed by implosion, as the shipwreck claimed its price.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by throwawaymaths on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:48PM (#36959616)
If you want a tinfoil hat, consider that the LK-99 news dropped around the time that the US military is being exposed for having RTRPS tech flying around for decades
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by TheLoafOfBread on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:54PM (#36959707)
> for having RTRPS tech flying around for decades

RTRPS = Real Time Role Playing Strategy?

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by badRNG on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:10PM (#36959962)
I'm sorry, but you are correct. I made a mistake earlier when I referred to RTRPS as being a flying technology the government has been using for decades. No such technology goes by that name. I apologize for the error.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by greggsy on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:22PM (#36960156)
This still doesn’t make sense
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by nimonian on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:15PM (#36973785)
The reply you replied to was a parody of how Chat GPT responds when you correct it. They were alluding that its grandparent could be AI generated, explaining its slight vapidness.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by danhon on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:05PM (#36959897)
RTRPS is presumably "room temperature room pressure superconductor"
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by jvm___ on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:55PM (#36959729)
<tinfoil hat> AI is multi-modal and is generating stories based on engagement. <tinfoil hat>

I mean, we're all waiting for the "AI can now do everything announcement", but what if it just starts doing everything and telling us stories we want.

I can't personally verify LK-99, twitter, UFO's or the submarine story, but they're all highly entertaining.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by arcticfox on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:00PM (#36959800)
"RTRPS tech" doesn't turn up anything on Google. What does this even mean?
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by packetlost on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:55PM (#36959719)
What's RTRPS?
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by scarmig on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:57PM (#36959758)
Registered Tax Return Preparers.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by minsc_and_boo on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:00PM (#36959813)
Radical Treason Raptor Planes

/Birds aren't real

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by ya1sec on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @04:35PM (#36962390)
Returned Telephone Reproduction Plans
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by throwawaymaths on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @04:27PM (#36962258)
imagine you had RTRPS and you ground it into a paint, you would have a pretty nice thing you could paint a plane with and nobody would even to think to test that superconductivity is how it works, so it would be a safe, "low end" use without worrying too hard... even if it pure chemical analysis falls into the wrong hands, the metamaterial "yield" would generally be too low
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by anyoneamous on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:53PM (#36959685)
Superconducting material discovered right around the time conversations about UFOs are kicking off again - coincidence?
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by jacobwilliamroy on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:00PM (#36959818)
The only thing I care about is voyager 2 and I'm not going to hear how that thing is doing until October 15.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by r2_pilot on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:13PM (#36960016)
Not necessarily true; the heartbeat has been recently detected so it is possible (unlikely) we can transmit strongly enough that it can detect the commands and reorient before that time. Maybe we'll get lucky!
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by ragnot on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:08PM (#36959943)
Someone call Tom Cruise, the entity is real!
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by joefigura on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:23PM (#36960173)
Dude sometimes scientific progress really does happen, and it's messy when it's happening live, and people get excited about it because they really do find science inherently exciting.

I've got no clue what you're trying to imply. Most things aren't an internet conspiracy. Skepticism is warranted, and the claims about LK-99 are far from proven. But there's 100s of thousands of researchers out there in the real world, doing research and publishing papers, and that really is what's happening here.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by jvm___ on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @05:11PM (#36963009)
https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

Just having a laugh about AI becoming too powerful.

I don't honestly think it's happened yet, but it seems like a fake internet, or at least a future where it's hard to tell if this story is true as it has articles, videos and pictures to back it up.

We're just at a weird time of the internet where AI can generate stories, videos, audio and pictures, just not in a cohesive way - but that cohesiveness is just a matter of putting all the existing pieces together.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by hinkley on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:34PM (#36959391)
This is going to turn into the Iran Contra affair all over again.

Get tired of one set of assholes? Funnel resources to another set of assholes (who also wish you harm).

If this turns out to be actually true then everyone will want to talk about fusion again. I don't know if I have the stomach for it. But as you say, at least it's not AI.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by AlanSE on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:01PM (#36959829)
Fusion was already starting to heat up in recent years. The entire SPARC reactor concept is based on (low-temp) superconductor materials breakthroughs.

If these room-temp superconductors pan out, it will be dumping gasoline on the funding fire for new fusion attempts. Given less than a year from scientific verification, fusion will go red hot.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by mmh0000 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @12:52PM (#36958675)
But fear the news if it is discovered that LK-99 increases AI performance.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by pjmorris on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:03PM (#36958851)
Or the news that ChatGPT is attempting an LK-99 replication.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by daveguy on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:30PM (#36959321)
Yes. Using the well known ChatGPT manufacturing capabilities.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by ajuc on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:37PM (#36959445)
* * *
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by quux on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:47PM (#36959595)
Soon: The unrestricted GPT-4 model began by hiring a task rabbit to order lead oxide, lead sulfate, elemental copper, phosphorus, and a vacuum-evacuated quartz oven...
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by bugglebeetle on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:48PM (#36959619)
You mean emailing a for-profit materials science lab somewhere, like it did when it had that task rabbit solve a CAPTCHA for it?
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by ssijak on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:03PM (#36958849)
Imagine NVIDIA superconducting chips made for AI
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by valine on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:32PM (#36959358)
Is an H100 clocked at 100GHz too much to hope for?
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by b800h on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:36PM (#36959411)
Not if this is legit. Time for AGI.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by bhouston on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:07PM (#36958901)
I'm sure Elon also has SpaceX or something trying to replicate it as well. He sort of has to jump on each new trend anyhow.

In a serious note, superconductors are likely useful in electric magnetic motors and probably in high power electronics and batteries in general, no?

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by qbasic_forever on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:13PM (#36959009)
LK-99 is already patented so even if Elon were making a ton of it, he couldn't do much in his products without licensing it from the creators.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by valine on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:39PM (#36959472)
There's probably other similar chemistries that also super conduct at room temperature. Call it the marching tetrahedra of super conductors.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by bhouston on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:52PM (#36965979)
You are likely correct. Now that this has been shown we will probably get a dozen or more of these over the next decade.

I think the winners will be those which are cheaply and reliably made at scale out of common and non toxic elements and have long durability, or if this isn’t fully achievable something close to this goal.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by failuser on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:37PM (#36959443)
As if that would have stopped him. He will argue that it’s XK-69, entirely different material and spend decades in litigation trying to bankrupt the inventors or worse.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by raverbashing on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:16PM (#36959071)
The only thing Elon seems to be interested now is embarrassing himself even further
[dead]
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by sho_hn on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:12PM (#36958991)
He'd also name another child XLK99.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by jjkeddo199 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:52PM (#36959675)
I put 1k USD into Tesla today with the same reasoning. Hopefully I don't end up a fool!
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by overnight5349 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:48PM (#36959615)
Reminds me of the (absolutely dreadful) series by Tobias Roote where a certain space metal gets alloyed by human blood to produce AI processors a hundred times more powerful.

Realistically, superconducting processors would most likely be much faster, or at least cram more cores on a single die.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by jvm___ on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:04PM (#36959875)
A planet completely populated by electronic beings.

Single-celled life, multi-cellular, mushrooms, trees, whatever ate lignin, dinosaurs, rodents, humans, Electric beings? I mean, there's nothing 'unnatural' about a world populated by robots, we just assume that 'alive' means 'made of meat', but the raw materials in a robot and a human are all Earth based.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by dwheeler on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:18PM (#36960096)
I recommend checking out "They're made out of meat": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GggK9SjJpuQ
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by Vox_Leone on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:32PM (#36960331)
Seriously speaking, it can in fact increase AI performance, since it will optimize all things electromagnetic. It takes humankind closer to the so called 'singularity'.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by guestbest on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:31PM (#36959328)
Anything is better than crypto.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by ChuckMcM on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:35PM (#36959405)
How about LK-99 coins!?!? Right? Maybe we use diffusion to design them so they are "super-conducting crypto AI coins" get yours now for only $199 at the Philadelphia Mint. Act now, supplies are limited!
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by lopatin on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:55PM (#36959722)
DOGE-99 is just around the corner
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by anyoneamous on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:00PM (#36959803)
I'm going to use my new skills as a Prompt Engineer to get Stable Diffusion to produce some NFTs for me, and use the profits to invest in a SPAC targeting LK-99 start-ups.

Now explain that sentence to a caveman - or even to someone in 1990.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by ChuckMcM on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @03:02PM (#36960852)
Language divergence is kind of insane. I heard a person say in conversation "I didn't get a picture of it because I didn't have my phone with me." And thinking about how that would be interpreted, 10, 25, 50, and 100 years ago is pretty funny.

There is a funny comedy bit in the movie "Sleeper" where Woody Allen's character is explaining what things were for to scientists in the 23rd century. But today it is even wilder.

What really strikes me is that it isn't "slang" that we're dealing with here, it is actual kind of "things". I thought we had peaked with pet rocks but I was so, so very wrong.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by casey2 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @04:19PM (#36962144)
He is going to use his skills as a poweruser of an AI program to have it output a script; which runs an image generation program to produce and record sales transactions of images. He will take the money from the sales of those images to invest in a SPAC targeting potential room temperature super conductor start-ups.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by renegade-otter on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:36PM (#36959420)
Crypto is utterly useless, a walled off sector of cons.

AI is useful enough to be dangerous in the hands of bad actors, where the marks are not just the suckers but the people who want to have nothing to do with it.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by scarmig on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:01PM (#36959826)
My new start-up, Super Conducting Artifical Minds, is releasing a new coin that allows zero resistance neural network computation on the block chain. Get in on it now and you can make millions in passive income!
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by AlanSE on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:02PM (#36959849)
No no no, this eliminates the need for cryo, not crypto.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by davidgerard on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:05PM (#36958869)
there's already superconductor twitter guys who were AI guys last week
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by highwaylights on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:06PM (#36958887)
Don’t be. Twitter/X/whatever they’re calling it this week is crawling with Pepe investment bros talking about bullish sentiment because superconductors equals singularity musk crypto AI blah blah blah.

It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by CoolGuySteve on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:09PM (#36958933)
Yeah, hnews is the place to be, nobody here is ever excited about anything new.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by danielbln on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:19PM (#36959113)
Don't be to excited, lest you're branded a bro.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by gorlilla on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:26PM (#36959237)
Sounds boring.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by 1attice on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:06PM (#36959909)
You're not being branded a bro for being excited.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by _jal on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:05PM (#36959892)
If the alternative is Nazis and pyramid scammer douchebags shouting over each other, give me nerds enthusing over stupid Bloom filter tricks or whatever any day.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by highwaylights on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @05:19PM (#36963131)
Oh people here are excited, it’s just that most of the discussion stops short of digital butterflies behind walls of encrypted energy.

Also hype tempering.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by smolder on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:20PM (#36959144)
That sounds like a good reason not to visit Twitter/X/whatever.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by playa1 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:46PM (#36959588)
What has happened to HN the past few months? So much AI, Superconductors and open source air quality monitoring.
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by 1attice on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:01PM (#36959833)
You've fallen for the Fundamental Attribution Error.

It's not HN; it's the world that's driving this.

1. GPT-4-grade AI is a genuine, holy-smokes innovation that is already driving massive changes in education (universities are having to redesign all their writing assignments,) entertainment (SAG-AFTRA strike,) and the tech industry (the sudden disappearance of thousands of jobs, and the concomitant socioeconomic demotion of software engineers. And if you think AI isn't to blame here: you're probably right! There was other stuff going on, e.g. the end of ZIRP. But AI will keep those jobs away.)

2. Clean air seems pressing, as (if you'll recall) we just had this little pandemic thing happen, and in case you missed it, a vast chunk of my country (Canada) is currently ablaze, choking the United States with smoke, and other places are experiencing similar pressures (thanks, 2023 Thermal Pulse.)

3. RTAP Superconductors are literally the stuff of sci fi, and their advent interacts directly with trends 1 and 2, as RTAPS would make climate change more easily addressed (dramatic efficiency improvements across the board) and also would make AI silicon work much, much faster as part of that. It might also open the door to efficient quantum computing, which in turn would drive AGI even faster/further.

You're living through some seriously bonkers stuff, and your newsfeed is understandably preoccupied with it.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by Bjorkbat on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:18PM (#36960097)
I don't know, I haven't really seen the same level of interest from my "normie" friends that I've seen among the HN-adjacent crowd. None of them seem to be aware of LK-99, let alone care about it. Meanwhile, the GPT hype has worn off, and on that note, none of them seem to be aware that there's a difference between GPT-4 and ChatGPT. The former is this vague, nearly non-existent thing.

They're aware of the actors/writers strike and the association AI has with it, but AI in this context is a vague speculative thing rather than a specific type of AI or brand of AI made by some company.

Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by furyofantares on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:28PM (#36960261)
Yeah, HN is always gonna be quite a bit further along than mainstream in terms of both depth and detail, and living a bit in the future (and as a result of this, more speculatively.)
Re:A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments by 1attice on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @03:57PM (#36961766)
> I don't know, I haven't really seen the same level of interest from my "normie" friends that I've seen among the HN-adjacent crowd.

Implicit in this counterargument is the idea that judging what is of genuine importance is a matter of opinion, as though we could get a sense of what to pay attention to by polling a large enough sample set.

It is not. Expertise matters. Who is interested in the topic matters.

Put another way: from the Fundamental Attribution Error alone, it does not follow that identity is completely meaningless; it does, however imply that anyone with such-and-such a set of concerns and knowledge would behave in such-and-such a way under such-and-such conditions.

And those conditions obtain. And so, with a flourish: I give you, 2023 "Superconduct my clean-air-monitoring AI, please!" Hackernews