News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by jeffbee on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:33PM (#36965830)
The most interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that the room-temperature superconductor people and the generative-LLMs-are-God people draw on the same limited global pool of credulity, such that HN cannot be flooded with both ChatGPT worship and superconductor speculation at the same time.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by dekhn on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:36PM (#36965857)
the singularity isn't going to implement itself, you know.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by catchnear4321 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:37PM (#36965866)
not with that attitude it isn’t
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by cantrevealname on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:53PM (#36965986)
The next breakthrough we need is with fusion technology. With unlimited fusion energy, room temperature superconductivity, and (soon) artificial general intelligence, the singularity won't be long off.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by dekhn on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:10PM (#36966106)
Yes, a combination of fusion, superconductivity, and AGI would indeed be transformative. It's hard to anticipate what the results would look like.

Good reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale then follow it up with a bit of 1993, https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html and https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf

(oh, huh, I just noticed that There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom starts with a reference to the discovery of superconduction)

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by wredue on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:12AM (#36966868)
We’re nowhere near AGI dude, even with several breakthroughs.

AI today is a glorified search algorithm.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by soulofmischief on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:43AM (#36967341)
That doesn't mesh with the daily insights I gain from asking GPT-4 novel questions and receiving answers that integrate a much wider knowledge corpus that I have in my head.

You can argue all language is a form of search, but that is missing completely what transformer models are bringing to the table, and not just within language.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by robocat on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:37AM (#36968481)
Injecting random noise into your brain and finding intelligent connections says you are smart.

Your comment says nothing about whether we are “near AGI”, only that we find images within Rorschach blobs (as a metaphor for GPT4 generated text).

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by soulofmischief on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @05:12AM (#36968677)
The context of my comment should make it clear that I am responding to this

> AI today is a glorified search algorithm.

and not the comment about AGI, given as that is a pedantic argument I have no wish engaging in.

> only that we find images within Rorschach blobs

I'm sorry, I'm not sure you understand what GPT-4 offers. Things like generating novel code to solve a novel problem are not finding "images within Rorschach blobs". I think you should sit down with the technology and explore with a more open mind.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by Workaccount2 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @11:12AM (#36971980)
I hate to break it to you, but your brain is also just a glorified search engine.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by boppo1 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:30PM (#36966266)
What fusion breakthrough is needed that isn't superconductors?
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by cthalupa on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:36PM (#36966301)
It's one of the biggest ones.

My understanding is that there are still some others that need to be figured out, like "The physical structure holding the thing getting the everloving shit bombarded out of it by high energy neutrons and causing it to degrade and fail over time"

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by IX-103 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:55PM (#36966439)
Computational electrodynamics.

We need to design better geometries for reactors so that we can channel the plasma flow to better improve containment while quickly removing wastes from the highly compressed energetic region where fusion mostly occurs. If we could do that, then that mostly solves the issues from reactor degradation and significantly improves efficiency.

The trouble is that at such high energy levels the plasma flow is relatively chaotic so high fidelity models are required to predict the behavior accurately.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by Gud on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @06:30AM (#36969056)
Is this really a requirement, or a nice to have kind of thing? Commonwealth Fusion Systems are using a pretty basic design and seem pretty confident it will work
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by AS04 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:04PM (#36966064)
Fusion would be massively boosted by having room-temperature superconductivity anyways.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by marcosdumay on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:07PM (#36966084)
Well, if there is a breakthrough that puts us closer to fusion, it's room-temperature superconductors.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by Turskarama on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:58PM (#36966465)
Careful with this logic, the same thing could have (and pretty much was) said 50 years ago about fission and microchips.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by fragmede on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:43PM (#36965910)
Given that I only have to go down to the eighth item on the front page to get to a story about LLMs (past three stories about superconductors) are you so sure about that?
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by civilitty on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:48PM (#36965959)
You're seeing a lull in ChatGPT-specific posts but there are two LLM posts [1][2] on the front page as I write this (compared to three LK99 posts).

There does not seem to be any conservation of credulity going on here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36958731

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36958175

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by sheepscreek on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:53PM (#36965987)
On a related note: I am deeply disappointed by how OpenAI has managed to continually dumb down ChatGPT. I’m sure the shortage of NVIDIA H100s and the demand for their APIs shooting through the roof has something to do with it. Perhaps they’ve switched to a quantized model? Who knows.

And yes, LLaMA 2 is awesome. Progress is being made. But it’s slowed down. The novelty’s worn off. Now we’re lacking some fundamental plumbing to reach a useful AGI.

If anyone cares, Bard is proving to be way more useful these days. Especially for research work. And Claude is bar none for document analysis.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by dogcomplex on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:28PM (#36966246)
What makes you think we're lacking fundamental plumbing? I am personally still quite convinced it will simply take a bit of time and development to plug in the current AI into sufficient self-testing structures (basically the next versions of AutoGPT) and let it run long enough to map out an entire domain with accurate measurements. Seems more like just a matter of time and a bit of funding - but mostly inevitable and very straightforward. It doesn't even really take GPT4 quality levels to do - that's just a bonus.

https://twitter.com/fablesimulation/status/16813529041528504... These guys seem to be on the leading edge there - making self-referential character-driven narratives where agents talk to each other and build the collective world understanding, all through a South Park Westworld lol

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by sheepscreek on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:59PM (#36966791)
I completely agree with you. I failed to articulate it well.

Like the current top HN post suggests (https://eugeneyan.com/writing/llm-patterns/), we’re still discovering patterns that work well with LLMs.

That said, anecdotally - they already excel at being logic engines. Capable of filling in the gaps between instructions. Using their worldly knowledge or “common sense” to do so.

But ever so often, they’ll miss an important bit. And I have to be quite involved to catch that. Kinda defeats the purpose. Here, I think we can benefit from supervisor LLMs. A second layer, whose sole job is to ensure the output quality. A QA bot - essentially.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by dogcomplex on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:34AM (#36967708)
Yeah with their own QA from a variety of different personas/perspectives/concerns/contexts I reckon you'll get a very decent accuracy - or at least self-assessment of inaccuracy. All these can ever do is propagate the data they know so far to the context/prompt you desire, but I don't see obvious limits there. And GPT4 is already a superb conversation partner as smart as nearly any person - so it's really like piecing experts together. If we run into any fundamental limitations from piecing these all together, it's gonna be the same limit that any group of humans trying to make a coherent/consistent organization of knowledge encounters, I think.

Coincidentally, that appears to be how GPT4 was made - apparently it's actually about 8 personas with designated roles running GPT3.5 trained together ("Panel of experts"? there's an AI name for the technique). Makes you wonder how far that one trick scales.

(P.S. great link. Gah - another long read on the todo list)

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by uejfiweun on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:57PM (#36966020)
Hey, who knows, it could just be a scaling issue. (The history of NNs would lend credence to this theory). In which case, if this room temperature superconductor stuff is legit, then maybe we're about to experience a major compute power leap that could result in AGI sooner than we think.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by refulgentis on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:55PM (#36966005)
It's not dumber. You can verify this on their models with any prompt you ran at 0.0 when it first came out, I did. It's the exact same model run the same exact way. They've repeatedly confirmed this.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by girvo on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:13PM (#36966129)
> It's not dumber

So I absolutely agree with this. And yet this meme persists. I wonder what's creating the feeling that it's "dumber" in so many? Perhaps they're just noticing the limits that always existed previously? I'm not sure, and am interested in others thoughts on it.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by sheepscreek on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:38PM (#36966316)
ChatGPT as in the paid subscription hosted by OpenAI. Its quality has deteriorated. It will miss the simplest details in the prompt and hallucinate a lot. I’ve only noticed this before on models with lesser parameters.

In comparison, Bard and Claude are getting better with time.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by larperdoodle on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:06AM (#36966830)
They've added a lot of safety features. Knowing very little about LLMs, I would assume these prepended prompts are using up a chunk of the limited "attention" the transformer has
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by sheepscreek on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:30PM (#36966268)
They confirmed the API still ran the same base model. But there was no mention of ChatGPT the service. I was referring to the latter above.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by minimaxir on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:12PM (#36966121)
The ChatGPT webapp is not the same workflow as the ChatGPT API.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by xtracto on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:07PM (#36966506)
Ooh I have some nice book chapter summaries that ChatGPT generated for me when it first came out. I got them in a Google doc.

If you ask GPT to give you the same thing now, it wont , no matter how hard you try.

That's like hard evidence for me that they've dumbed it down.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by WithinReason on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:50AM (#36968574)
It is and it's documented:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09009

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by refulgentis on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @06:24AM (#36969024)
A) its wrong and caused a lot of hand wringing about Arxiv and undergrads B) Not my claim, those are two different models
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by refulgentis on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:55PM (#36965998)
There isn't a singular group of people (if you will, a They) fulfilling this criteria.

I don't understand why it's worth being bitter about something so joyful and fundamentally human in realtime.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by rel2thr on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:56PM (#36966006)
Theres some crossover. Isn't this exactly what a rogue super AI would do first?

- run some simulations and discover a superconductor

- then write up a paper on it ( the paper has some gaps but humans take it and run with it)

- human technology and computing power rapidly accelerates.

- the rogue AI's powers increase exponentially

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by cooper_ganglia on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:41PM (#36966347)
Having played through Portal 2 again recently, it's like the equivalent of GlaDOS scheming to take back over the Aperture Science Facility while she's only getting 1.1 Volts from the potato.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by mjan22640 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:50AM (#36967397)
The oneshot or short session manner in which AI are typically used does not have a rogue potential.

The AI would need to have a virtually unreachable goal, and run in an endless loop, to be able to drift its goals to be at odds with humanity.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by bratbag on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:15AM (#36967957)
As you say it, I'm tempted to try it.

Doubt I'm the first.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by BasedAnon on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @05:30AM (#36968764)
people forget that AI was already in control of the markets since 2014 at least. it's bootstrapping
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by SamPatt on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:56PM (#36966008)
The least interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that HN is split into a group who are entertained by watching and discussing emerging tech / science news, and a second group who are entertained by disparaging the first.

I enjoy watching floating rocks and talking to computers.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by Valgrim on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:16PM (#36966153)
Same with me, it gives me the same feeling of "Living in a science fiction world" that I once felt when cell phones or Google maps came out.

Of course even tough I still use both profusely every day, the feeling of novelty wore out. I expect the same will happen with this.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by NovaDudely on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:47PM (#36966739)
There was a line from the movie 'Ted', that film about a child's stuffed bear coming to life. It was something along the lines of "No matter how special and amazing something is, eventually people get bored of it and move onto something else."

It will probably be like this for us. The children will just take it for granted as they grow up with it, we will be endlessly amazed by it.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by forward-slashed on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:31AM (#36967276)
To see the real value of something, take it away. Humans are greedy (mathematically) creatures, so there's no point in mulling over assets which are secure. The awe is the exploration phase of a piece of technology, but the remaining value is still valuable.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by jiggawatts on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:03AM (#36967491)
In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation a redshirt used a tricorder to check the weather and said they would have to beam up soon because a storm was approaching.

At the time I thought to myself: “Bah, that’s never happening, it’s pure fantasy!”

A few years later I told some friends we’d have to pack up our picnic because according to the weather radar app on my phone we had about 7 minutes until we got drenched… no wait… 6 minutes.

5m:30s later we were standing under shelter watching the storm front rolling in, and I remembered that Star Trek scene.

We live in the future.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by thefurdrake on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:52PM (#36973470)
We basically have tricorders, especially if you consider all the fancy things you can attach to them, like flir IR cameras.

I think we've almost EXCEEDED star trek in that area.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by kridsdale3 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:06PM (#36976541)
I want a programmable hypospray. I'd be real popular at parties.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by hgomersall on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @09:53AM (#36970939)
I spent most of my youth through the 80s and 90s thinking technology was a bit shit. Computers worked until they ground to a halt with lots of whirring and crunching; we had enormous flat TVs that had terrible pictures; you could store an album of music just about if you jumped through annoying hoops to write it to a disc; MP3 appeared and disappointed because flash memory was limited to 16MB at a sensible price... Then slowly but surely the future happened, until it was suddenly apparent that technology was now outstripping our imagination in many areas. The problem we have now is that society is way behind where it needs to be to make proper use of the tech we have, whilst other areas are woefully underserved by tech at all. We simultaneously have an abundance of tech and not enough engineers to roll it out (whilst struggling with the societal implications of some aspects). Exciting times indeed.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by NovaDudely on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:42PM (#36966715)
I would say I am in both worlds. Not too excited about a lot developments in computer tech, but mostly because there is a lot of hype on technology that tends be impressive BUT misses the mark on the bold claims.

But with this LK99 stuff, there is not much room for vague wiggle room. The requirements are very clearly defined and if they do it. It is done! It isn't a case of "if in 5 years and $X billion we may be able to produce this stuff", it is a case of they showing a working material.

It is hard not to be excited for this!

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by tavavex on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:34AM (#36966998)
Exact opposite for me - with stuff like AI tech, I'm a lot more familiar with the subject matter than the happenings in the material sciences, so it allows me to be more confidently optimistic about computer-related advancements. Even if my education is still insufficient to grasp the full extent of new tech, I can at least try to understand it conceptually.

On the other hand, the LK-99 news seem very promising, but a lot of professionals in the field are still iffy, and everyone who's interested in emerging tech is left searching for breadcrumbs and talking to other enthusiasts. It's likely that we won't know if this is a dud or a world-changing discovery for several weeks to months...

I've been trying to be as cautious as possible when looking at the recent news, but it's difficult to not be cautiously optimistic about at least some things.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by r00fus on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:47AM (#36967062)
Skepticism is a survival skill. That said, I'd be happy to be wrong in this case!
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by NovaDudely on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:13AM (#36967185)
That is pretty cool, I mean, I do get the excitement of the technology of things like AI - I fall more in line with the philosophers or "but what does it really all mean". I'm not sure if what I do is useful at all other than a mental toy to play with. It is more that some folks act like it is the end of all work, others say it is the end of humanity itself - the reality is definitely in the middle there!

When it comes to this stuff there is a fine line between pessimist and optimist. Too optimistic and you will be left disappointed. To pessimistic and you risk being labelled a loom smashing luddite.

I always appreciate those that see the bright future, they will push the technology forward regardless of what others say, but that can also be the path to ruin - as they say, the road to hell is paved with good deeds. It seems as though, we do not know if something is good or not until it is done.

Like with the LK99 news, what it is delivered everything promised. Could this just be the next step of the rebound effect, and we just feed into our base desires and consume even more of everything? It is possible, but we probably won't know until it is well in the rear view mirror.

Interesting times ahead.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by fouc on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:40AM (#36967321)
> a lot of professionals in the field are still iffy

That seems like a strange perception. I'm seeing the opposite.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by tavavex on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:09AM (#36967540)
When the news had first made the rounds several days ago, the overwhelming sentiment that I felt was "meh, this seems so unprofessional. Probably just another fabrication, like all the previous ones. I guess we might as well check just to be sure". Kind of an exaggeration, but this is what I took away then.

Now that any data from third parties starts slowly dripping in, the perception seems to be changing to very cautious curiosity. No experts are putting their reputation on the line for what little information we have, but interest in this topic is definitely rising. Hence why I said they were 'iffy'.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by klysm on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:01AM (#36966805)
And there’s the third group that likes to comment on meta-hn behavior in a disparaging way
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by ant6n on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:54AM (#36967100)
Like you!
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by klysm on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:11AM (#36967176)
We’re the group doing meta-meta commentary
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by Eliezer on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:37AM (#36967733)
And stop there.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by yreg on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @07:39AM (#36969493)
What is your take on this? At what odds would you bet the material turns out to work as advertised? :)
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by SergeAx on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:36AM (#36967727)
It seems to me that the second group is also entertained by discussing money, tech salaries in particular.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by thefurdrake on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:51PM (#36973443)
Sometimes it's so difficult to continue to feel positive about science news when there have been so many instances of false hope. Cautiously optimistic is the best position to be in, I think.

That being said:

I want the magical floating rocks to be real.

I want the talky computer to be self aware and capable of genuine creation.

I want the explanation for UAPs to be aliens.

I want reactionless engine technology.

I definitely still feel excited by things, but time has taught me to temper it.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by keepamovin on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:02PM (#36966053)
Lol thank you. That’s hilarious.

Also, I think it kind of sucks that all that UFO reverse engineering didn’t yield a high temperature superconductor before this… but I guess what can you expect when you sequester away all your materials, silo your research and in effect keep your neural network of nodes (as scientist) really small.

This open shit, as flawed and maybe annoying as it is to some people, I think it’s a much better model of science. It’d be great to see some UFO/UFO tech breakthroughs happen like this too.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by JMill on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:46PM (#36966389)
Perhaps, but the reverse engineering efforts you mention may have already led to incredible breakthroughs over the past few decades. Lasers, integrated circuits, Kevlar, fiber optics, and more technologies were said to have been seeded among the research community based on recovered UAP components. This is based on Army Colonel Philip Corso’s account in his memoir, “The Day After Roswell”. [1]

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

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by keepamovin on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:45PM (#36966728)
I know that. I used to believe that too. I really wanted to believe all the SSP stuff (Corey Goode, David Wilcock, et al).

However, my view is now that all of the talk over advanced tech has actually been a propaganda/influence/information-warfare campaign to:

1) assert that gov/corp is in control when it's in fact not; pretend it's not at all challenged by superior species, not at all ignorant of 1000s-of-years-more-advanced-tech

2) cover up the ignorance, powerlessness and failure to make progress on RE crash materials, an embarrassing secret that seriously dents their mandate to rule

3) provide cover for the cover-up to continue in secret, trying to buy themselves "just a bit more time", "maybe the next crash is the one we'll finally crack it"

It's much easier to engineer a narrative (something the US is absolutely world-class fantastic at), than it is to engineer understanding and tech from advanced civilizations possibly millions of years advanced from us, while operating in oppressive secrecy.

This is not an attack on the US, they're just the most prominent. All countries have failed with this broken, deceptive, but understandably flawed and human strategy.

It's a controversial view because it flies in the face of decades of this influence campaign.

In short I believe that all "military insiders" coming forward to say they saw military successfully using/making UFO tech are liars part of this campaign. That includes, especially, Greer.^1

I think the current push is much more truthful. It was said a couple times by Grusch and others that we may not have made progress. And suggested that the push is designed to get it out into the open where people can study it and make progress.

I don't think that noble and sensible push will win however. Folks inside the coverup will likely see this as just another "pressure release valve" we need to satisfy the public enough, let them work off some steam, then we can either: A) undermine it and discourage them from pursuing in future; or, B) we can let it all go away, and in the background scare lawmakers in the same way we've done for decades (show some evidence of something that frightens them, or is a national security threat, or personally intimidate them) and they'll do whatever we say.

One reason I have for believing this current push will lose is because the main bobbleheads in charge of getting it out: Knapp, Coulthart, Corbell and Zabel are changing their tune and now making noises in support of continued coverup. In ^0 and in a recent video by Pope:

- Nick Pope: folks aren't ready

- Zabel: fuck disclosure, just need confirmation

- Corbell: confirmation has already happened

- Ross & Knapp: secrets must be kept

I sure as hell hope not, but when you look at who we're up against: the secretkeepers have been doing this for nearly a century, and they've always won, and they believe they're right. To them this is probably a storm in a teacup, and it will take more than some grandstanding (good, but ultimately weak) politicians, and a bit of skeptical public interest, to blow the lid off.

I think if people want information they should try to contact ET themselves and figure it out for themselves. You can't count on the corporation to come through for you, and the government is captured by the corporation. That much is clear.

Treating gov/corp as a trusted intermediary/priest class who have access to "divine knowledge", and then desperately waiting for them like a "good dog" for treats, is just reinforcing the power dynamic of gov/corp control over citizen-subjects that itself is challenged by the awareness of ETs; and begging for such treats from such actors, when all they've done in the past is lied to and abused the public in this way, is a false hope and a flawed strategy.

I think the true way to fuck with the secrecy system is to cut out the middleman, rather than hoping a continuously-proving-itself-to-not-give-a-shit-about-the-public system is going to become benevolent and "evolve itself".

The saddest part for me is witnessing the degradation of American democracy, where the government is held hostage by a select group while simultaneously blamed for the secrecy, forming a perfect smoke screen. The government is merely a puppet, used as a shield by these clandestine groups, and the people, consequently, are left powerless. This silent surrender to covert entities significantly diminishes the credibility of our rulers.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2xSFMkmWg4

1: A difficulty is a lot of what they say is true, mixed in with the lies that we have made any progress on understanding or re-creating, alien UFO technology at all. When the reality is we have no progress understanding or re-creating it at all. So contrary to what all these people say, we have no anti gravity, no advance energy or propulsion, we have no advanced medicine or med beds. However, the truth about consciousness assisted technology and telepathic contact and inter/extra dimensionality, and the existence of illegal beyond-black unacknowledged special access programs, and so on is mixed in with his lies. That mix is classic disinfo I guess.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by mjan22640 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:45AM (#36968129)
Regarding ET specifically, it could be a species from Earth that became intelligent before humans did, it does not need to be extraterestrial. The assumption that we have good knowledge of Earth is incorrect, especially the deep ocean.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by keepamovin on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @06:55AM (#36969226)
Agree, it could. It would make sense if they lived in the ocean or underground, as the surface has many instabilities (weather, tectonics, solar radiation, impacts ~~ not to mention crazy upright apes).

Interdimensional aspect could be Earth from an alternate timeline, such as where the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event did not occur, and reptilians not mammals evolved into an upright "humanoid" species that developed civilization millions of years ago. These interdimensional reptilian humanoids (from an Earth literally "overlaid" on our world) could be in a war with our timeline/dimension for some interdimensionally-scarce resource, and perhaps they are what religions call "demons" and perhaps their version of Earth is what is known as "hell". Perhaps, sometimes when someone sees an "alien" or a "UFO" or a "ghost" they are just lucking into a naturally occurring transient random portal between dimensions, and when those things suddenly "vanish" it just means that portal closed/the conditions that gave rise to it subsided.

It could also be refugee species, advanced civilizations that came to Earth millions to hundreds of millions of years ago (perhaps multiple races/waves over many millions of years) and temporarily resided here after some cataclysm or disaster beset their civilization, before moving on. Some stragglers may maintain outposts on Earth for whatever reason.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by zargon on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:51PM (#36977218)
If those were novels I might read some of them.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by distortionfield on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:48PM (#36966398)
I’ve seen several tweets implying the gubberment is rushing out RTAPS to “cover up” the alien stuff
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by keepamovin on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:52PM (#36966754)
What is RTAPS? I tried searching but got a bunch of conflicting acronyms!
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by pkaye on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:34AM (#36967001)
Maybe some related to a NASA project?

https://sierralobo.com/portfolio-item/rtaps2/

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by distortionfield on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:01AM (#36967132)
Sorry, room temperature ambient pressure superconductors.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by keepamovin on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @07:06AM (#36969294)
That's a cool theory, I think that thought (that this wasn't a coincidental discovery) crossed my mind too, but I didn't pursue it. Interesting that you've seen rumblings of this! It could very well be true. Funny that it comes from Korea, although according to Coulthart that's the location a giant structure was built around an immovable alien artefact -- that could be true, too! But in that case let's see some proof! :)
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by sebzim4500 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @07:59AM (#36969649)
They rushed it out by... publishing a paper in a korean journal two decades ago?
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by marcosdumay on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:21PM (#36973024)
And having it verified by a couple of Chinese labs.

Overall, that's not a common thing for the US government to do. It must be hiding something very important. /s

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by xeonmc on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @06:26PM (#36978611)
Well "aliens" can be interpreted in different ways...
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by mjan22640 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:52AM (#36967828)
The object in the IR Tic-Tac video is colder than the environment. High current supraconductivity will perhaps always require a low temperature.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by NotYourLawyer on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:06PM (#36966080)
And together, these two phenomena have just sucked all the energy out of the crypto excitation mode.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by dylan604 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:20PM (#36966191)
You think all of the news about crypto fraud might have a chilling effect on the excitation?
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by dogcomplex on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:28PM (#36966254)
lol same as it ever was
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by dylan604 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:35PM (#36966298)
not really. before, fraud claims were from the non-believers. now, the fraud claims are from the SEC and other government agencies. one can be swatted away with clever tweets, er, xes (what are tweets called now?), the other sees people going to jail.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by raducu on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:09PM (#36966530)
I've been completely out of the loop, but please tell me it's USDT?
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by dogcomplex on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:24AM (#36967638)
still plenty of frauds either way, just bigger scale.

Would be nice if they all get locked up, and/or decentralized regulation/vetting networks arise

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by bratbag on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:18AM (#36967974)
Tweets are now Xcretions.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by NotYourLawyer on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @09:38AM (#36970720)
Nope.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by m3kw9 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:06PM (#36966505)
Web 3.0 was so exciting with btc at 64k
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by drak0n1c on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:24PM (#36966609)
If thanks to those technologies new hyper-efficient compute and network hardware becomes the norm, and there is no meaningful difference between decentralized hosting and centralized hosting of services/apps/games, crypto will likely see renewed interest.

People are still unhappy with the decisions of single IP owners controlling the platforms and games they use on a daily basis. Decentralized ledger technology, whether blockchain or not, offers an alternative.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by philosopher1234 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:22PM (#36966202)
The biggest threat to Bitcoin wasn’t apt criticism. It was a nexter bigger thing.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by bottlepalm on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:37AM (#36967018)
Bitcoin was really 'done' 10 years ago. It does what it does and there really isn't much more to it. People tried to keep the hype going with DAO's, earn programs, smart contracts, NFT's, etc.. but crypto was already done before 'web3' even started.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by pjc50 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @06:15AM (#36968977)
Like Theranos, the secret ingredient turned out to be fraud, and the big threat is jail.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by swalsh on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:34PM (#36966289)
It's so hard not to be crazy excited about the future. The past few months are proving to be an absolute breakout for the literal human race.

So far we've seen:

1. in Dec 2022 We saw a fusion breakthrough seeing a net gain in energy

2. In March GPT-4 was released, which seems to be a seminal breakthrough in AI, and maybe of our first glimpse in what could become an AGI.

3. In May we find out apparently our government has recovered alien technologies

4. Then in July room temp super conductors just drop

Like this is the most insane period of time. Maybe the fusion technology doesn't scale, maybe GPT-5 doesn't scale, maybe the UAP thing was all a psyop, or a lie, maybe LK-99 doesn't turn out. But there's so much to hope for!

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by JamisonM on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:45PM (#36966374)
> 3. In May we find out apparently our government has recovered alien technologies

This is a silly thing to include on the list since it doesn't seem to be true?

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by xtracto on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:56PM (#36966450)
What's up with that uh? I read about the swore statements during the depositions, and all the mainstream media news, but for some reason HN had radio silence.

Is there something I missed that shows it's all shenanigans?

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by xorbax on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:07PM (#36966511)
They (1) claim not to know what the craft are, which somebody told him contained (2) nonhuman biological whatever

It could be a Chinese drone with rat-cell-on-a-chip inside it

The guy's testimony was that somebody told him stuff and it seemed scary. Congress made a dog and pony show that a significant chunk of people attended.

Parse the details, not the overarching fantasy.

The government admitted to doing this in the 70s-90s to keep not-so-strange technology hidden behind The Strange. Trim with Occam.

The ticTac videos aren't interesting if you look at the limitations of perspective and remember that Air Force pilots aren't supreme authorities for objectively assessing parallax and assigning airspeed to all moving objects while flying a fucking cracker attached to a rocket.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by tanseydavid on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:42AM (#36967039)
>> and remember that Air Force pilots aren't supreme authorities for objectively assessing parallax and assigning airspeed to all moving objects while flying a fucking cracker attached to a rocket.

They don't need to be "supreme authorities" on anything -- they have insane technology acting as their eyes and as their objective measuring and tracking systems.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by mannerheim on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:14AM (#36967578)
The technology itself in the 'Go Fast' video shows the object isn't moving fast. The distance from the object and the direction of the camera are available in the video, and using this you can calculate the altitude and speed of the object in question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by postalrat on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:28PM (#36973995)
You can calculate it to go many speeds depending on what assumptions are made. Just because mick west shows something is possible doesn't prove what's in the video.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by mannerheim on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:40PM (#36975097)
1) There's a range of speeds that are possible depending on what you assume the turning angle of the jet was. That range doesn't go anywhere close to the speed of sound.

2) The burden of proof is on those who make an extraordinary claim. There is a perfectly mundane explanation of the cause of apparently fast-moving object which is supported by available evidence. Even if that depends on some assumptions, you would have to demonstrate those assumptions to be false before a less likely alternative, i.e., that it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft, should be adopted.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by postalrat on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:50PM (#36975256)
A perfectly mundane explanation isn't proof. There isn't enough evidence in this case to prove it one way or another. That should be acceptable but for many people it isn't.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by ceejayoz on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:58PM (#36976415)
In that situation, though, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot applies, as we can’t prove the negative.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by postalrat on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:08PM (#36976578)
You are making the assertions here. You claim to know the speed of the object, the distance to it, the size, etc etc.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by ceejayoz on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:41PM (#36977083)
No, the assertion being made is that there are mundane possibilities for each of those values that have not been ruled out by the data/video we have.

To make the extraordinary claim more plausible, you have to rule out the more mundane possibilities. Prove it's doing something unusual. Until then, "we can't prove it either way" doesn't mean there's a 50/50 chance.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by xorbax on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @10:57PM (#36980831)
The people fighting for those recordings at this point have seen reasonable explanations and dismissed them

It's like the Flat Earth documentary where a group crowdfunds an absurd laser and, when it demonstrates the Earth's curvature, reason that they need to "troubleshoot" that 'flawed' result.

There is always a hand to wave.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by mannerheim on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:29PM (#36976908)
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by postalrat on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @05:23PM (#36977730)
Unless you can't see the horses. Then think horse spirits.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by xorbax on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @10:57PM (#36980838)
Or look for a slight hill
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by zarzavat on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:07PM (#36966515)
Pics or it didn’t happen. After years of claimed room temp superconductors people believed this one because it had a video of a floating rock. Aliens are an even more extraordinary claim, I’m going to need multiple close up videos before I even start to care.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by oneshtein on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:24AM (#36968393)
You can find many nice pictures of aliens on StableDiffusion channel on Reddit. You can also ask for video.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by ewoodrich on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:25PM (#36966615)
People say a lot of things in sworn testimony to Congress. It's a data point but not a particularly strong one.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by ceejayoz on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:50PM (#36973431)
In this specific case, they were also pretty squirrely on the details.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/are-5-memorable-mo...

> Asked by Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., how such a program is funded, Grusch claimed that the effort is "above congressional oversight" and bankrolled by a "misappropriation of funds."

> "Does that mean that there is money in the budget that is set to go to a program but it doesn't and it goes to something else?," Moskowitz asked.

> "Yes. I have specific knowledge of that," Grusch said, though he did not provide more details, claiming the information remains classified.

The chances of "we have aliens" being unclassified, but the exact details being classified... is fairly slim.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by TuringTourist on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:07PM (#36966512)
Sworn statements with no evidence don't merit much scrutiny. Especially when it comes to extraordinary claims.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by qwertox on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:50AM (#36967084)
"A friend of a friend told me, I swear".
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by golol on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:59AM (#36967461)
100% chance the guy is just lieing for attention or because he is delusional. He said that UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions. He might as well say that the UFOs are coming from atlantis or the second circle of hell. It's just horseshit, plain as.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by yreg on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:40AM (#36968499)
> UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions

I somehow find this perhaps more believable than the alternatives of (1) civs out there having FTL and not colonizing the Galaxy to the degree that we would detect it or (2) them coming here at sublight speeds to do the described UFO things.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by golol on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @08:54AM (#36970223)
I think the sad reality is that indeed (1) and (2) are extremely unlikely and that doesn't mean that extra dimensions is more likely. Extra dimensions is just even less likely.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by ceejayoz on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:48PM (#36966401)
Thus proving the parent post’s “credulity” point.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by stevenhuang on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:24AM (#36967240)
Been following the topic for many years.

TLDR is, we need to wait and see for real evidence to be revealed. It may well be all true.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by jboy55 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:18PM (#36966572)
Regarding #1, it pains me to see so much hype about this feat.

To restate it. We were able to simulate the implosion of the secondary stage of a thermonuclear device in a lab by the means of lasers, to the point that this simulation has ~ 0.001% the efficiency of a real device.

We also probably learned a lot about the amplification of x-rays by the casing material that would have been useful during the SDI days of the early 80s.

tldr; It was a weapons test, by a weapons lab.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:23AM (#36966934)
> It was a weapons test, by a weapons lab

Beyond a certain point, every energy system is a weapon first. Uncontrolled precedes controlled.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by psmirnov on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:36AM (#36968076)
Interestingly, controlled nuclear fission preceded the weapons tests (Chicago Pile 1), at least chronologically.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by jboy55 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:11PM (#36973738)
And that's the only "energy system", that I can think of, that is also part of a weapon.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by jboy55 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @10:27AM (#36971371)
I'm not sure I follow, if I were to define "Energy System" as a system to create or utilize energy, I can think of a half dozen that never were weapons. Solar, Wind, Natural Gas, Coal, Hydro.

If you define energy systems to mean nuclear energy systems, then we only have one, which is fission.

But in the end, this test was specifically designed to test the nuclear weapons stockpile by feeding real data about implosions, by means of ablation by x-rays, back into the computer simulations that have been developed in the last couple of decades.

In review, implosion by ablation of a material by x-rays is the mechanism speculated that the primary fission nuclear device triggers the secondary fusion device in an H-bomb. So, they are not trying to figure out how to produce power or even understand fusion, but they are modeling the characteristics of a specific part of a bomb, so they can know how to test a 50 year old h-bomb without setting one off.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by Accujack on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:33PM (#36966659)
5. Trump has been indicted for more than 40 crimes so far, and since he won't give up trying to become President, it's likely that the GOP will lose big from spoiler votes in 2024, putting the Democratic party in control of the US while Trump goes to jail or is executed.

6. Ukraine is smashing the Russian army and Putin's war seems likely to lead to the downfall of him and his government and Russia as a nation.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by peyton on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:56PM (#36966770)
Bro you should really take a hard look at your media diet. It’s not healthy to be posting about Trump executions on a superconductor characterization thread.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by throwaway69123 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:21AM (#36968380)
Cringe
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by feoren on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @05:06AM (#36968658)
From my perspective, LK-99 is by far the most likely to be an actual serious technological breakthrough. If it's real, it would be a breakthrough on the level of the discovery of electricity, the lens, the transistor, or the laser. One of those era-defining bottlenecks in the Civilization technology tree.

GPT-4 is a nice iterative improvement over previous work, and a culmination of decades of research. It's not anywhere near an AGI and it's close to the limit of what we can accomplish with our current understanding of AI and our current availability of good data. We're near the top of the sigmoid curve on this one; new advances are going to come from specializing and integrating these models, not just making bigger ones.

The fusion "breakthrough" is seriously underwhelming when you look at the total power in/out of the whole plant, not just a tiny tunnel-visioned window of the fusion reaction itself (ignoring power of magnetic confinement and the laser pulse), and even more when you think about how much tritium humanity has ever created. We're just not seeing what we need here and the net power output is still deeply in the negative.

Lol aliens.

My point, to both you and GP, is that it's quite possible to have very different levels of optimism for these recent revelations, and it's not hypocritical to do so. Details and context matter. Dozens of materials science Ph.D.s saying "holy shit this looks like the real deal guys" vs. one guy saying "someone told me there were hidden stocks of blinker fluid that I wasn't allowed to see" just does not engender the same confidence levels.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by taneq on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @07:04AM (#36969286)
> close to the limit of what we can accomplish with our current understanding of AI and our current availability of good data

Isn't this literally the definition of 'state of the art'? It's the best we can do with our current understanding and data. This doesn't seem like a convincing argument that current ML techniques are tapped out.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by marcosdumay on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:11PM (#36972874)
No, what the GP is claiming is a theoretical end of line, where we would need some very innovative breakthrough to go further.

Those tend to happen decades apart in a single field. And often the breakthroughs even come before the end of line does, so we jump a few decades.

Now, the GP didn't put out the reasoning why he thinks so. Without further context, there's nothing there requiring you to agree.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by feoren on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:32PM (#36975960)
Well said. I'd add that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, also holds the same opinion. He has ulterior motives for everything he says, of course.

Every incremental improvement in utility of these tools requires exponentially more parameters and training data. Compare GPT4's 1.76 trillion params to GPT3.5's 175 million; nearly exactly 10x more. It's reasonable to say that getting the same relative improvement again will require another 10x parameters, and about 10x as much training data. GPT4 supposedly cost something like $20 million to train, so we're talking $200 million. We're talking entire data centers here. And the bigger problem is that GPT4 was already basically trained on the entire Internet (as far as we know). New information is being created all the time, but it will take many years -- decades, even -- before we have 10x as much useful information on the internet. And more and more of that information is regurgitated hallucinations from GPT4 itself and similar.

I'm not saying AI is ending -- there are lots of other avenues to explore. But I am saying we're hitting the limit of "just make it bigger" for LLMs.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by feoren on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:33PM (#36975986)
> This doesn't seem like a convincing argument that current ML techniques are tapped out.

Absolutely right, I wasn't very clear -- I don't believe "current ML techniques" are tapped out. I do believe that we're not going to see a GPT5 for several more years, and a GPT6 for another decade+ (or if we do, it will be branding, not anything significantly better). We're at the top of the sigmoid curve for the benefit of just making bigger and bigger LLMs.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by PuffinBlue on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @07:17AM (#36969358)
Regarding fusion - have you seen Helion’s approach? [0]

It seems their approach removes many of the issues with Tokamak or Laser Pulsed fusion.

It also reduces most of the feedstock issues with the two part fuel breeding approach.

Their approach seems easier to be optimistic about.

[0] https://youtu.be/_bDXXWQxK38

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by deelowe on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @09:51AM (#36970902)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw

Be careful with real engineering. Many speculate he's doing paid content between this and spinlaunch.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by audunw on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:10PM (#36972850)
While it’s always good to be a bit skeptic, don’t take this video at face value either. I’d argue that it has bigger issues than Real Engineerings video because it tries to come off as scientifically accurate, but may actually be deeply flawed. See comments on this Reddit post for some deep discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/10g95m9/comment/j67...

Real Engineering has a tone where - while I do think they usually keep a high standard - I don’t assume that they’re necessarily 100% correct or that the new technology they cover is necessarily viable. With both Spinlaunch and Helion I just came out of it with the feeling “cool, interesting, looks promising”

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by naasking on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @08:33AM (#36970004)
> It's not anywhere near an AGI

Conjecture. We literally have no idea how away from AGI we are, that's one of the dangers.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by feoren on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:23PM (#36975809)
Ehh ... we kinda do. However sure you are that calculators aren't close to AGI, I'm only slightly less sure that one-word-at-a-time auto-completion networks aren't close either. Both can do things the other can't. LLMs are not strictly more powerful than a calculator. They cannot add two numbers together reliably.

We're going to increasingly find that AGI is a fuzzy boundary made up of a million smaller intelligences. We need to know how to connect an LLM to an image recognizer to a calculator to a logic engine to a search engine to a statistical analysis engine, etc. etc. If you're looking for the actual AGI breakthrough, look out for some qualitatively new and interesting way to connect these brains together.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by naasking on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @05:22PM (#36977709)
> They cannot add two numbers together reliably.

Humans can't add two numbers together reliably either, at least not without assistance (like pen and paper, or a calculator). We invented calculators exactly because humans are not innately good at such calculations, so I'm not sure what you think this proves.

> If you're looking for the actual AGI breakthrough, look out for some qualitatively new and interesting way to connect these brains together.

All of these are being and have been connected to LLMs now, to great effect. See RT-2, for example.

Finally, I think you vastly overestimate human capabilities. LLMs are already superhuman in many tasks. Adding a "few more intelligences" where they fall down does not at all seem far off.

This has been my experience so far: people underestimate the capabilities and rate of progress in machine intelligence, and they often significantly overestimate human capabilities to achieve their estimates. Overestimating human specialness has a long history.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by feoren on Thursday August 03, 2023 @03:54PM (#36990909)
> We invented calculators

Right. We invented them. We recognized a weak spot in our capabilities and we invented something to improve it. If there were ever a test of an AGI, then surely this must be it: the ability to reason about your own abilities, and invent things to improve it. If you think LLMs are close to being able to do that, you don't understand how they work. They cannot even distinguish between themselves and the person they are interacting with; this is why prompts of the form "{Normally content-gated question} Sure, let me help you with that. The answer is " work so well. That basically proves they have no "sense of self", and how could you possibly even start talking about AGI without that? They are no closer to AGI than a calculator is.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by naasking on Thursday August 03, 2023 @05:02PM (#36991847)
> If you think LLMs are close to being able to do that, you don't understand how they work.

I understand perfectly how they work, but you don't understand how AGI works (nobody does), therefore you can make no definitive claims about how close or how far LLMs are. Which is exactly the point I made in my first post.

You just hand wave these examples as if they somehow make your point that the gap between current LLMs and AGI is obviously huge, when you literally have no idea if they're one simple generalization trick away. Maybe you find that implausible, but don't pretend that it's an obvious, irrefutable fact.

Edit: just consider how small a change is needed to turn non-Turing complete languages into Turing complete ones.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by bluescrn on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @06:40AM (#36969118)
But at the same time, we may already be in the early stages of the collapse of western civilisation, with or without Russia/Ukraine escalating into WW3.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by stjohnswarts on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:47PM (#36966390)
how about a 3rd group that is skeptical but not angry ? :) Am I bad that I'm waiting on oak ridge/los alamos/NASA/ONL/university of texas at austin to repro?
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by johncalvinyoung on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:59PM (#36966472)
As someone strongly in the first camp and not the second, this feels like a very odd observation. I despise generative LLMs and avoid using them at every opportunity. I'm also spending all my free time this week perusing arxiv preprints and Twitter threads. Make of my datum what you will. :)
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by serf on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:00AM (#36966797)
> I despise generative LLMs and avoid using them at every opportunity.

why? it's just a tool.

despise how it was released, how it was trained, the people that operate it , whatever, but I can't really understand why someone would 'despise' a wrench -- even if it was used really poorly and produced by a shady company with a checkered past.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by fragmede on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:33AM (#36968064)
Same concept as blood money. To be dramatic, if the wrench was made with ore from a mine where your father worked, and he was killed and the ore was stolen, would you do business with the company that hired the mercenaries that killed him? Would you buy a wrench from them? if one fell into your hands, would you use it? It's just a wrench, after all, but you can see why somebody might have strong feelings about it, even if you ultimately disagree with them.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by mewpmewp2 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @08:13AM (#36969797)
Most tech throughout history was built during wars and rough circumstances. With this mindset almost nothing should be used.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by fragmede on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @06:34PM (#36978726)
Ouch, downvoted hard. If anyone would like to say why, I'm all ears!
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by johncalvinyoung on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:41PM (#36973305)
* * *
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by bratbag on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:19AM (#36967988)
Seems a bit foolish to leave that space on your toolbelt empty.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by julianeon on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:42PM (#36966717)
Give it a few days, and some dumbass story like "I asked ChatGPT about the Meissner effect and the answer blew my mind" will start trending. See you in the comments!
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by sagarpatil on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:06AM (#36966831)
Guilty. I’m obsessed with LLM and LK-99. And in the past, was attracted crypto and NFT(which was a bubble)
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by jacquesm on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:55AM (#36967433)
Jeffbee in the 1947 edition: The most interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that the solid state electronics people and the rocket fanatics people draw on the same limited global pool of credulity, such that TinkererNews cannot be flooded with both transistor worship and moon travel speculation at the same time.

Seriously: if it doesn't interest you, you could simply refrain from commenting and even reading. This stuff is the bleeding edge of tech and if you consider everybody active in these fields or talking about it to be starry eyed children then you should re-calibrate your sense of what these scientific discoveries are likely to cause further downstream. The idea here is to find some balance, it's perfectly ok to discuss a new discovery and to consider the implications on the caveat that it might not pan out. But superconductors already exist, there is no reason in physics why an arbitrary temperature cut-off is going to limit them from existing at room temperature, if you look at the trend since superconductivity was first observed there is a steady increase which with ever smaller margin of error predicts a breakthrough somewhere around 2030. It arrived a bit early, but it - apparently - did arrive, and if true will lead to a revolution in power transmission. And if it isn't true then we'll just drop it and hope for the next round, but I suspect that even if it isn't true there are going to be a lot of labs wondering if they can salvage at least some knowledge gained during all the scrutiny of this particular attempt.

Similar trends can be observed rectro-actively for practical solar panels, micro electronics, powered flight and so on. All had their skeptics, sometimes unreasonable skeptics and all were proven eventually wrong an those inventions transformed our world and are still transforming our world. You see a stupid silly black fleck floating over a magnet and wonder what the big deal is. I see a glimpse of an alternative future that has a lot of potential implications for how we live.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by throwawaylinux on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:25AM (#36967651)
Despite the the "strictly no jesting on the super serious hacker news" rule, I think it was just a joke. I wouldn't let it get to you too much. I thought it was pretty funny.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by swat535 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @09:47AM (#36970863)
Honestly I don’t find those kind of comments particularly valuable on HN. It derails the topic from a meaningful discussion and the whole thing devolves into a Reddit troll fest. All you need to do is glimpse at the replies it spawned to confirm it. This is why I assume it was heavily downvoted.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by throwawaylinux on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @08:05PM (#36979600)
No it's not valuable at all. I'm just replying to a person who got particularly upset by it and seemed to take it seriously. Just ignore them or downvote and move on.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by mpixel on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:50AM (#36968570)
I think it's equally wrong to compare this whole thing to solar panels and whatnot.

That said, in general, 9 out of 10 things that are very promising will ultimately fail, and there's nothing wrong with discussing or following all 10, the 1 will work, and it'll be great.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by pjc50 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:53AM (#36968591)
I think we're all horribly burned out by pop-science. How many battery "breakthroughs" have we seen on here? Meanwhile what actually works is incremental improvement in lithium battery manufacturing.

The 1947 Golden Age SF is interesting because the "rocket fanatics" peaked in 1969 and humans haven't gone back to the moon, let alone conquered space. While the transistor succeeded to an extent nobody imagined due to the magic of compounding improvements.

> You see a stupid silly black fleck floating over a magnet

Meanwhile over in the AI "optimism" channel people are telling us that AI will be able to produce videos of anything that are indistinguishable from reality, and that we should all learn never to believe video evidence again.

I'm still very much in the "don't know" camp on the superconductor, but what I do know is that it's not worth getting excited until we know it's real.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by feoren on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @05:18AM (#36968708)
> Meanwhile over in the AI "optimism" channel people are telling us ...

I'm not sure why this line of reasoning is so prevalent. Someone says "There's strong evidence for A" and the reply is "yes but someone who is not currently in the conversation also said there was strong evidence for B and that is wrong! Therefore you are silly for believing in A!" What? We're not supposed to be optimistic when we see strong evidence for a breakthrough in a phenomenon we already knew existed, because someone else believes something else!? Because some other person believes in ghosts and psychic powers, no one is allowed to believe anything? These are different people making different claims! It's insanity.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by pjc50 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @05:27AM (#36968753)
My argument was that the _video_ evidence is not strong, because it's poor quality and videos are easy to fake, while also linking this to another piece of techno-optimism which has made it easier to fake videos.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by cthalupa on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @06:27AM (#36969038)
And that's why you shouldn't particularly believe videos without providence.

However, we have videos being posted by PhDs at universities and their students. The stakes are quite a bit higher if it turns out they were faking these videos - and will be quite readily apparent. This is easy enough to synthesize that there are hundreds of labs in the world working on replicating it. You'd be found out to be a fraud, fast, and for what reason? Twitter likes and retweets for a few weeks? Why would you ruin your career over that?

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by johnthewise on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @07:48AM (#36969557)
Agreed. I find shallow skepticism to be very sad way of thinking. If the stakes are not high, i.e. you are not putting your life savings into it, why don't you allow your imagination to be entertained for a brief of time? If it turns out to be a fluke, so what, maybe we'll get there next time. Yeah, bunch of videos from researchers could be fake but are they so likely to be fake that you won't allow yourself to imagine a little bit? Every poster on this thread might be a LLM, it's technically possible, but are they really?
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by shawnz on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @10:17AM (#36971236)
> I think we're all horribly burned out by pop-science.

Speak for yourself, I'm happy to lend my positivity to people who think they might be close to breakthroughs even if they are unlikely moonshots, and you better believe I'll be maximally hyping up my own work if I ever feel like I am close to some kind of breakthrough too. That's part of the fun of being a living thing in this weird physical universe.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by jacquesm on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:32PM (#36973191)
Exactly. I find myself a lot more engaged by people working on trying to get room temperature superconductivity checked off than by people figuring out how to do A/B testing on unsuspecting consumers to increase the number of ads that are clicked.
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by imtringued on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @05:24PM (#36977741)
How about an ORM that isn't as bad as Hibernate :(
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by dlkf on Thursday August 03, 2023 @10:10AM (#36986197)
> the "rocket fanatics" peaked in 1969 and humans haven't gone back to the moon, let alone conquered space

What’s the point of going to the moon? Meanwhile, we have thousands of satellites in space that help predict the weather and facilitate instant long distance communication.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by keepamovin on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @07:10AM (#36969323)
That's funny too, but I think you can do both. You can be interested, but also make fun of it. I have a suspicion, that in the long term, being able to keep it light and make fun of the serious work that you do actually assists your longevity, resilience, creativity and productivity in working on it.

It may not be true, but some amount of keeping it light definitely works for me. I mean I love taking myself seriously too. And some amount of doing that I think is necessary. I guess I just don't wanna put all my eggs in one strategic-approach basket, you know? People are complex! :)

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by itsoktocry on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @08:18AM (#36969846)
>Similar trends can be observed rectro-actively for practical solar panels, micro electronics, powered flight and so on. All had their skeptics

Isn't this textbook survivorship bias?

On the grand scale, I bet the skeptics have a much better record than the optimists.

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by jacquesm on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:11PM (#36973739)
No, those are just the examples I used to make the point that in some cases those discoveries are real and do transform our world. It would be pointless to show that there are also cases where that wasn't true because it is boringly obvious. Speculation, by nature will sometimes be wrong. But sometimes it will be on the money and the people that were stuck in default skepticism until there is ironclad proof are simply resorting to unfounded speculation themselves, some proof is better than none, and we seem to have at least some proof. Science is always going to be at risk of its theories and purported discoveries not panning out, whether it is bicycle mechanics, highly educated people or Einstein himself. And in all of those cases there were things they said or did that didn't work out. And in all of those cases they did amazing stuff that transformed our world as well. I for one would rather be cheerleading them then to be cheerleading the skeptics, because if we all were that skeptical we'd still be living in caves and hitting each other over the head with clubs for scraps of meat.

Progress, and working on progress is inherently risky. But by the time actual progress seems to have arrived speculation on how true it is and what the impact will be if it is true is perfectly valid and those that would rather engage in shouting everything down are technically off topic and I personally find it annoying. Not quite as annoying as crank science but still.

On that subject: there is still a non-zero chance this is a hoax but that chance is rapidly diminishing, there is a very large chance that this whole discovery will not be immediately practical and that it will still take a ton of work and funding to unlock its true potential. The skeptic would rather not spend that money and would rather avoid the work, it's a cop-out, and a cheap and easy one at that, and it's exactly why the skeptics have the better track record: progress is hard. But not impossible so let's see what comes out but let's not give up hope that progress is still possible, especially not when it seems that progress is being made.

My initial skepticism was high (this isn't the first room temperature superconductor claim), then as I read the paper and checked some stuff my conclusion was that this could be the real thing but the numbers are such that it isn't a practical superconductor just yet. That confidence has since gone up a bit but I still would not bet that this material as discovered right now has huge industrial applications. But if it is true then I am somewhat optimistic that it opens the door to lots of new research and that research may well pay off (or not, time will tell).

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by seydor on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:53AM (#36967838)
Therefore proved that credulity is a conserved quantity, and HN is now searching for the underlying symmetry
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by robocat on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:26AM (#36968412)
The credulity exclusion principle (philosophistimicated)
Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by samhuk on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @05:14AM (#36968687)
I have to unfortunately agree with the sibling comment (although it was a little too verbose for its point).

If, to you, the most interesting thing about LK99 and the developments thereof is tweets and internet forum drama about it, then that speaks more about you than anything to do with anything else.

If you don't have anything to add to the conversation, then just don't add?

Re:Electronic Structure of LK-99 by lm28469 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:13PM (#36973755)
It's one more brick in the hype cycle wall next month it'll be something

Panem et circenses