8 ms·

It’s a breath of fresh air reading about actual revolutionary science happening. The deluge of news about non-replicable results, fabricated data, overhyped pr

It’s a breath of fresh air reading about actual revolutionary science happening. The deluge of news about non-replicable results, fabricated data, overhyped press releases from both academia and industry had become really depressing. For once after a long time it’s the real deal. Even if this is not a RT superconductor, it’s now evident that the original authors didn’t cheat and are not crackpots as initially suspected by most.

mieubrisse 3y ago
Agreed. It's felt like so many of the technological marvels have either happened quietly (e.g. the reductions in chip size) or in the past (e.g. all the physics breakthroughs of the 1900s). Like ChatGPT, this seems to have the characteristics of being both accessible and completely novel.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I feel like the host of “in 30 years we would have X” made 40 years ago are suddenly manifesting.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    What is interesting is that assuming it all pans out these are all in entirely unrelated fields. That sets the stage for a whole raft of follow on inventions. Similar to how the telephone + basic electromagnetism led to radio, tv, radar, transistors and ultimately to computers small enough to be practical for businesses, the internet, cell phones and so on. My grandmother was born in a house without running water, no sanitation and no phone. That's just a bit over a century ago. The rate of change on an annual basis isn't all that large, a decade and you'll see big changes, our world can't be compared at all to 120 years ago in terms of luxury, communications, personal energy budget, food, travel options etc. Still, there are large areas of the planet where the last 120 didn't bring any progress and there are those where they actually went backwards, not rarely to our (the western world for me) benefit.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Yeah - I think the next 40 years are going to be absolutely stunning to witness. It’s an amazing time to be alive and be a nerd.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        The last 20 are already mindblowing to me, to the point that I am a bit overwhelmed. Just reading to keep up with all of the tech developments is basically impossible today.
        javajosh 3y ago
        In terms of basic tech, other than CRISPR what are you thinking of? Smartphones + internet are important, but are more combinatorial. Early quantum computers are cool, but niche (and even if perfected, seem to have application for breaking PKI). Reusable rockets are great, but not fusion. The standard model is locked in, at least up to LHC energies modulo sensationalist PR.
        zarzavat 3y ago
        Fusion is progressing well, just look at MIT SPARC. Better (conventional) superconductors and better supercomputers are pushing the field forward. Back when ITER was the only game in town it looked like workable fusion was never going to happen, but things are looking more hopeful now.
        JohnBooty 3y ago
        mRNA vaccines would be on my list. I don't know if we'd consider that basic or more combinatorial tech.
        gibolt 3y ago
        GPUs have been huge, unlocking so much more compute than was possible with CPUs. Most of the burgeoning AI industry is thanks to that cost decline, which is only getting started.
        3y ago
  - robotresearcher 3y ago
    Im posting this reply from my mainstream smartphone: a pocket supercomputer with a 4K 60Hz HDR video camera. I’m chock full of designer vaccines and can watch a catalog of almost all the movies ever made on demand tonight. I listened to an podcast in my EV on the way to work. And SpaceX probably launched 60 satellites this week on the 14th flight of a rocket that flew home afterwards. Things have been moving along. edit: comments are quibbling about the fraction of all movies ever I can see on a paid streaming service. This is like complaining about that the meals and elbow room are not wonderful on a $400 flight from LA to London. It's a goddam miracle and you're still grumbling. Please tell me now how your $12/mo Spotify account doesn't have the June 1972 Grateful Dead New Jersey show your mom was at, and is thus near worthless. I spent $12 in 1980s money on single album in my youth. Let me amend my grossly hyperbolic statement and say I could stream on demand more movies than I could ever watch even if I did nothing else the rest of my life, including many but not all of the good ones. Now the statement is strictly true, but did this make my contribution better?
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      And it’s only going to get faster… unless it all ends suddenly.
      - a_vanderbilt 3y ago
        I feel we will eventually outpace our own means of destruction. The next big step is getting self-sustaining colonies off Earth, which will do wonders for our ability to survive as a species. The biggest threat is perhaps nuclear weapons and climate change, in my opinion.
        fnordpiglet 3y ago
        I actually feel like the biggest threat we face is a collapse of world order and another world war, even conventional coupled with a degradation of humanism. These lead to a global decay of basically everything, including our ability to outpace our own means of destruction and an entire inability to address climate change. The global environment becoming increasing toxic to our age’s life, including humans is I think ultimately the end of our line.
xbmcuser 3y ago
For me from how the saga of 1st paper and 2nd paper started I had a feeling that something really unique has been found and the drama and politics is because of trying to claim the glory of it not because it was fake.
SubiculumCode 3y ago
You know, most of that stuff you hear about are bad takes on science. Science has moved into the realm of trying to understand complex systems with a lot of noise and with unknown variables. There will be a lot of misses; but that is how sausage gets made.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Exactly, it's like sifting a mountain of ore looking for diamonds. The original Korean team has essentially been doing a slightly guided brute force search in a domain that they thought was promising doing 100's or even 1000's of experiments. It's a clever approach: you have a real problem because the parameter space is so large but if you get 'close enough' to pick up an anomaly that might help you home in on something that is really promising. I'd love to see their notebooks and everything they tried. This is pretty much how we first got electric light: endless failures and then one success.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Well steady on there. The problem people have with bad science is not that there are misses, it's that there's no way for them to reliable decide when they've had a hit and so they end up inventing fraudulent pseudo-science. What's happening with LK-99 is science as people tend to imagine it working. Hypothesis -> experimentation -> replication -> theory. But that sort of science seems to be quite rare. Most science people are exposed in their daily lives is of the Francesca Gino variety, and that's not merely "a lot of noise with unknown variables", that's "nobody will care if we don't do real science so let's not bother".
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mieubrisse 3y ago

Agreed. It's felt like so many of the technological marvels have either happened quietly (e.g. the reductions in chip size) or in the past (e.g. all the physics breakthroughs of the 1900s). Like ChatGPT, this seems to have the characteristics of being both accessible and completely novel.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
I feel like the host of “in 30 years we would have X” made 40 years ago are suddenly manifesting.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  What is interesting is that assuming it all pans out these are all in entirely unrelated fields. That sets the stage for a whole raft of follow on inventions. Similar to how the telephone + basic electromagnetism led to radio, tv, radar, transistors and ultimately to computers small enough to be practical for businesses, the internet, cell phones and so on. My grandmother was born in a house without running water, no sanitation and no phone. That's just a bit over a century ago. The rate of change on an annual basis isn't all that large, a decade and you'll see big changes, our world can't be compared at all to 120 years ago in terms of luxury, communications, personal energy budget, food, travel options etc. Still, there are large areas of the planet where the last 120 didn't bring any progress and there are those where they actually went backwards, not rarely to our (the western world for me) benefit.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Yeah - I think the next 40 years are going to be absolutely stunning to witness. It’s an amazing time to be alive and be a nerd.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      The last 20 are already mindblowing to me, to the point that I am a bit overwhelmed. Just reading to keep up with all of the tech developments is basically impossible today.
      - javajosh 3y ago
        In terms of basic tech, other than CRISPR what are you thinking of? Smartphones + internet are important, but are more combinatorial. Early quantum computers are cool, but niche (and even if perfected, seem to have application for breaking PKI). Reusable rockets are great, but not fusion. The standard model is locked in, at least up to LHC energies modulo sensationalist PR.
        zarzavat 3y ago
        Fusion is progressing well, just look at MIT SPARC. Better (conventional) superconductors and better supercomputers are pushing the field forward. Back when ITER was the only game in town it looked like workable fusion was never going to happen, but things are looking more hopeful now.
        JohnBooty 3y ago
        mRNA vaccines would be on my list. I don't know if we'd consider that basic or more combinatorial tech.
        gibolt 3y ago
        GPUs have been huge, unlocking so much more compute than was possible with CPUs. Most of the burgeoning AI industry is thanks to that cost decline, which is only getting started.
        3y ago
- robotresearcher 3y ago
  Im posting this reply from my mainstream smartphone: a pocket supercomputer with a 4K 60Hz HDR video camera. I’m chock full of designer vaccines and can watch a catalog of almost all the movies ever made on demand tonight. I listened to an podcast in my EV on the way to work. And SpaceX probably launched 60 satellites this week on the 14th flight of a rocket that flew home afterwards. Things have been moving along. edit: comments are quibbling about the fraction of all movies ever I can see on a paid streaming service. This is like complaining about that the meals and elbow room are not wonderful on a $400 flight from LA to London. It's a goddam miracle and you're still grumbling. Please tell me now how your $12/mo Spotify account doesn't have the June 1972 Grateful Dead New Jersey show your mom was at, and is thus near worthless. I spent $12 in 1980s money on single album in my youth. Let me amend my grossly hyperbolic statement and say I could stream on demand more movies than I could ever watch even if I did nothing else the rest of my life, including many but not all of the good ones. Now the statement is strictly true, but did this make my contribution better?
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    And it’s only going to get faster… unless it all ends suddenly.
    - a_vanderbilt 3y ago
      I feel we will eventually outpace our own means of destruction. The next big step is getting self-sustaining colonies off Earth, which will do wonders for our ability to survive as a species. The biggest threat is perhaps nuclear weapons and climate change, in my opinion.
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        I actually feel like the biggest threat we face is a collapse of world order and another world war, even conventional coupled with a degradation of humanism. These lead to a global decay of basically everything, including our ability to outpace our own means of destruction and an entire inability to address climate change. The global environment becoming increasing toxic to our age’s life, including humans is I think ultimately the end of our line.

xbmcuser 3y ago

For me from how the saga of 1st paper and 2nd paper started I had a feeling that something really unique has been found and the drama and politics is because of trying to claim the glory of it not because it was fake.

SubiculumCode 3y ago

You know, most of that stuff you hear about are bad takes on science. Science has moved into the realm of trying to understand complex systems with a lot of noise and with unknown variables. There will be a lot of misses; but that is how sausage gets made.

jacquesm 3y ago
Exactly, it's like sifting a mountain of ore looking for diamonds. The original Korean team has essentially been doing a slightly guided brute force search in a domain that they thought was promising doing 100's or even 1000's of experiments. It's a clever approach: you have a real problem because the parameter space is so large but if you get 'close enough' to pick up an anomaly that might help you home in on something that is really promising. I'd love to see their notebooks and everything they tried. This is pretty much how we first got electric light: endless failures and then one success.
mike_hearn 3y ago
Well steady on there. The problem people have with bad science is not that there are misses, it's that there's no way for them to reliable decide when they've had a hit and so they end up inventing fraudulent pseudo-science. What's happening with LK-99 is science as people tend to imagine it working. Hypothesis -> experimentation -> replication -> theory. But that sort of science seems to be quite rare. Most science people are exposed in their daily lives is of the Francesca Gino variety, and that's not merely "a lot of noise with unknown variables", that's "nobody will care if we don't do real science so let's not bother".

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]