6 ms·

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 see

by swalsh 3y ago

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!

JamisonM 3y ago
> 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?
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Thus proving the parent post’s “credulity” point.
- xtracto 3y ago
  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?
  - xorbax 3y ago
    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.
    - tanseydavid 3y ago
      >> 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.
      - mannerheim 3y ago
        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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M
        postalrat 3y ago
        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.
        mannerheim 3y ago
        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.
        postalrat 3y ago
        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.
  - TuringTourist 3y ago
    Sworn statements with no evidence don't merit much scrutiny. Especially when it comes to extraordinary claims.
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    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.
    - oneshtein 3y ago
      You can find many nice pictures of aliens on StableDiffusion channel on Reddit. You can also ask for video.
  - ewoodrich 3y ago
    People say a lot of things in sworn testimony to Congress. It's a data point but not a particularly strong one.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      In this specific case, they were also pretty squirrely on the details. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/are-5-memorable-moments-congress-ufo-hearing-rcna96476 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.
  - qwertox 3y ago
    "A friend of a friend told me, I swear".
  - golol 3y ago
    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.
    - yreg 3y ago
      > 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.
      - golol 3y ago
        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.
  - emptyfile 3y ago
    [dead]
- stevenhuang 3y ago
  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.
jboy55 3y ago
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.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > It was a weapons test, by a weapons lab Beyond a certain point, every energy system is a weapon first. Uncontrolled precedes controlled.
  - psmirnov 3y ago
    Interestingly, controlled nuclear fission preceded the weapons tests (Chicago Pile 1), at least chronologically.
    - jboy55 3y ago
      And that's the only "energy system", that I can think of, that is also part of a weapon.
  - jboy55 3y ago
    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.
Accujack 3y ago
[flagged]
- junofan 3y ago
  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.
- throwaway69123 3y ago
  Cringe
emptyfile 3y ago
[dead]
feoren 3y ago
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.
- taneq 3y ago
  > 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.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    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.
bluescrn 3y ago
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.

by swalsh 3y ago

JamisonM 3y ago

> 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?

ceejayoz 3y ago
Thus proving the parent post’s “credulity” point.
xtracto 3y ago
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?
- xorbax 3y ago
  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.
  - tanseydavid 3y ago
    >> 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.
    - mannerheim 3y ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M
      - postalrat 3y ago
        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.
        mannerheim 3y ago
        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.
        postalrat 3y ago
        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.
- TuringTourist 3y ago
  Sworn statements with no evidence don't merit much scrutiny. Especially when it comes to extraordinary claims.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  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.
  - oneshtein 3y ago
    You can find many nice pictures of aliens on StableDiffusion channel on Reddit. You can also ask for video.
- ewoodrich 3y ago
  People say a lot of things in sworn testimony to Congress. It's a data point but not a particularly strong one.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    In this specific case, they were also pretty squirrely on the details. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/are-5-memorable-moments-congress-ufo-hearing-rcna96476 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.
- qwertox 3y ago
  "A friend of a friend told me, I swear".
- golol 3y ago
  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.
  - yreg 3y ago
    > 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.
    - golol 3y ago
      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.
- emptyfile 3y ago
  [dead]
stevenhuang 3y ago
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.

jboy55 3y ago

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.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> It was a weapons test, by a weapons lab Beyond a certain point, every energy system is a weapon first. Uncontrolled precedes controlled.
- psmirnov 3y ago
  Interestingly, controlled nuclear fission preceded the weapons tests (Chicago Pile 1), at least chronologically.
  - jboy55 3y ago
    And that's the only "energy system", that I can think of, that is also part of a weapon.
- jboy55 3y ago
  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.

Accujack 3y ago

[flagged]

junofan 3y ago
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.
throwaway69123 3y ago
Cringe

emptyfile 3y ago

[dead]

feoren 3y ago

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.

taneq 3y ago
> 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.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  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.

bluescrn 3y ago

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.