DennisP

29 ms·

481.
by DennisP 1y ago
Lots of people do have money and interest: https://archive.is/BCsf5
482.
by DennisP 1y ago
ITER/DEMO is an exceptionally slow fusion project and arguably obsolete since it uses older superconductors. CFS uses the same design, with modern superconductors that can support much stronger magnetic fields. Tokamak output scales wi
483.
by DennisP 1y ago
A lot of people think so, but the US government openly spends way more money on nuclear weapons than on fusion research. We'll spend almost a trillion dollars on nuclear weapons over the next decade.[1] The government's fusion f
484.
by DennisP 1y ago
It's an experimental facility. Yes, a power plant would need much more efficient lasers, but NIF's lasers date back to the 1990s, equivalent modern lasers are about 40X more efficient, and for an experiment it's easy enough t
485.
by DennisP 1y ago
Or you start bribing customs officials not to spot-check you, because when the policy's so chaotic it's the only way you can do business.
486.
by DennisP 2y ago
Not by much though, since "wait" and the tones still play. I suspect most visually impaired people will enjoy this as much as the rest of us.
487.
by DennisP 2y ago
They also didn't have the materials we use for springs, or some of the mechanisms we use. The fact that these devices are the same basic tech from the 1700s, while at the same time being much more advanced, is actually part of the appe
488.
by DennisP 2y ago
I don't think I'm connected to those people. I think it's a nifty device and I like how it looks. I learned about the Longitude Prize from a history book, and I doubt that it was commissioned by the watch industry. Not everyt
489.
by DennisP 2y ago
I agree that the marketing of some very expensive watch brands is over the top, and that some of the people wearing those might be rather smug. But you're overlooking a large market of watch enthusiasts who just like mechanical watches
490.
by DennisP 2y ago
Latitude is easier. Bring along a 5th-century astrolabe and you're all set.
491.
by DennisP 2y ago
Achieving the accuracy they do, with just mechanical parts powered by a spring, seems reasonably impressive to me. It's basically the same technology that John Harrison used to win the Longitude Prize in the 1700s, revolutionizing navi
492.
by DennisP 2y ago
If they are securities, then there should be a way to register them with the SEC and follow the law. As your link said, that's not the case. But BTC and ETH at least are not considered securities at this point, and in general, the SEC
493.
by DennisP 2y ago
Yes, but typically there are clear guidelines on what will be punished and what is allowed. That was not the case under Gensler. Crypto companies begged for clear regulations and the SEC steadfastly refused to publish any. Instead they just
494.
by DennisP 2y ago
And #3 implies that it's not going to cause inflation, any more than those other welfare programs do now. In general, as long as we're funding it with taxes instead of by printing money, it's not going to cause any extra infl
495.
by DennisP 2y ago
Imagine if Flatland were a very long string in a big circle. In one direction you go around the big circle and it's a long distance. At a right angle to that, you go around a tiny little circle.
496.
by DennisP 2y ago
Against your unforeseeable consequences, I'll balance the entirely foreseeable consequences of excess heat, plus the unforeseeable consequences of excess heat. It's not like our choices are between cloud seeding and a pristine p
497.
by DennisP 2y ago
> chemistry happening in the upper atmosphere That's not a concern for the idea I linked, which restricts itself to the lower atmosphere, using nothing more than seawater.
498.
by DennisP 2y ago
There's a serious proposal to do that with a fleet of wind-powered ships, seeding low-lying clouds with seawater. Wikipedia cites a cost of $5 billion/year for a large deployment, and a maximum potential of offsetting two-thirds o
499.
by DennisP 2y ago
But that means any AI that just talks to you can't be AI by definition. No matter how decisively the AI passes the Turing test, it doesn't matter. It could converse with the top expert in any field as an equal, solve any problem y
500.
by DennisP 2y ago
Assuming the task remains just generating tokens, what sort of reasoning or planning would say is the threshold, before it's no longer "just a form of next token prediction?"
501.
by DennisP 2y ago
From the Washington Post: > Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Thursday that he planned to support the Republicans’ funding bill; he needed at least seven other Democrats to overcome a filibuster and set the vote
502.
by DennisP 2y ago
I already mentioned the budget. If Republicans want to pass any actual tax cuts, that's another opportunity. I didn't claim Democrats have absolute power, but they do have some .
503.
by DennisP 2y ago
It's not just about what Trump wants. Most Republicans in Congress would like to get reelected. In the comment above you suggested there's nothing congressional Democrats can do. That is incorrect. Any time the Republicans don&#x2
504.
by DennisP 2y ago
Good thing we're deporting so many people then.
505.
by DennisP 2y ago
Since the GOP had its own dissenters on the budget, Democrats could have started by not voting for the budget without extracting concessions. When Democrats were in power, the Republicans found all sorts of ways to gum up the works.
506.
by DennisP 2y ago
This is a more interesting discussion than I expected at first. Anyway... If you can't find a rational argument that conscious experience is good, can you find one that says bad experiences are bad? If "the only argument one could
507.
by DennisP 2y ago
I think I already did but let me try a slightly different angle. If a conscious person has a bad experience, Benatar considers that Bad in some absolute sense. He thinks it's important that we reduce the number of bad experiences in th
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by DennisP 2y ago
So that would mean it's perfectly fine to sneak up behind a happy hermit and shoot them in the head. In fact, it's the best thing to do. They wouldn't suffer, they'd never know what they're missing, and they wouldn&
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by DennisP 2y ago
If we have a Kurzweil-style intelligence explosion, the next 200 years might actually be significant even to much older civilizations. If there's "no stealth in space" then a dark forest is impossible anyway. If a dark forest
510.
by DennisP 2y ago
That assumes the dark forest wouldn't kill us anyway, just to be safe. A large number of free-floating fusion-powered colonies, gradually expanding through the Oort cloud and then to other star systems, would be quite a bit more diffic

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