Posts by Paul Kinsler 1101 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Aug 2007
You might find it educational to read up on the subject: coupling light into an optical fibre is not necessarily trivial, and optical fibre will not usefully transmit any frequency of light you might wish to send (notably due to absorption, inconvenient dispersive properties, or indeed various other things).
I think it would best to *start* the project off with a small, visible, but nonetheless tasteful and polite request for donations (or even just noting that they might eventually be requested). That way everyone will just automatically have to get used to it by default, and so regular users will not be shocked and/or annoyed by one suddenly appearing a few years down the track. :-)
I also have my thesis on some old tape format, but it doesn't matter that I can't read it -- I have had the file in my work archive copied from machine to machine to machine as I moved around.
The problem is, in fact, not how its been stored, but that it was created by the then version of MS Word. Fortunately I still have the nicely bound hardcopy version ... not that I need to read it very often.
On the BBC page there is a link to a pdf. In it both OLED and LCD displays are mentioned, and the difference between OLED and LCD noted.
However, their single test device is in fact a Macbook Pro with an LCD display.
As a final remark, this seems to be a report which is really more about addressing user-expectations, rather than about technology differences. As in e.g. a user might have heard "dark mode saves power", but not twigged to the fact that it isn't true for their LCD display, especially once they perhaps have also put the brightness up a bit.
They are presumably not infallible, but many scientific journals now automatically check the citations in submitted papers, and raise a query if they cannot find an authoritative match.
Thus you might imagine a scheme where any "citation" detected and tokenised, could also be tagged as validated, or as unvalidated; and if used, reported as such.
Unlikely to be infallible, and only workable in specific cases, sure -- but still an improvement. But you probably wouldn't want an LLM to do the validating :-)
It seems to me the training process, at the very least, needs to treat each citation it finds as a single unique token, rather than just another miscellaneous collection of characters or words. Then it would at least only generate actual citations, rather than merely some text that resembles a citation. And it might even manage to put them - sometimes - in a correct context, but I don't think you could rely on it - the reasoning behind why authors cite a thing is not always clear - it can range from some-generic-backgound, all the way down to a-specific-result-on-page-something.
Hmm. Recently Google used raw GNSS data to run a study on android phones without explicit permission:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08072-x
If they can yank raw code phases and pseudodistances, what makes you think a position spoofing app is a bulletproof solution?
For these kinds of order-of-magnitude estimates it doesn't matter very much whether you count a neutron as one particle or its three constituent quarks (or, for the old school types, a proton plus an electron). The number is to get an idea of the scale, not to get a value which is supposed to "correct".
Since the article says "Avcoat was developed in the 1960s and used on the Apollo missions to protect spacecraft as they re-entered Earth atmosphere", I'd probably guess they have had enough (other) experience of it to be able to have reasonable confidence in their judgement..?
Ah, so we should use the double hyphen, i.e. ....
rm -- *
... but then why create a "-rf" file in the first place?
[edit: I suppose you might do it by accident, with one of those misplaced/mangled pastes that create a load of files named after the commands you wanted to run. Or is that just me?]
I tend to put a trailing / on all my directories which can mitigate this sort of thing (unless already in /), thus (in bash) there would be the possibly missing
QATOOLS="/opt/qatools/"
and then
rm -rf ${QATOOLS}bin
Also, it just occurred to me that (again in bash) you could even try to remember to type (or script)
rm -rf ${QATOOLS:-QQQQ}bin
so that the rm shouldn't get anything ever, unless you really like directory names with Q in them:-)
But if the number of Mersenne primes is unbounded, then presumably for any fixed choice of "large", there will be more "large" Mersenne primes than small ones, and, further, infinitely more large than non-large. Which might make it at least more-or-less reasonable to say that Mersenne primes "are large". :-)
But perhaps what was meant that if considering all discovered "large" primes, you will notice that more of them are Mersenne than of any other type? (or some similar statement).
But shouldn't a law against the creation and/or enabling of bioweapons (whether by AI, by chemical precursors, or whatever) be the control in such a case; not us merely hoping that it will happen as a side-effect of generic AI controls?
It seems implausible to me that Generic AI law will ever cover all dangerous use-cases; so what they should attempt to control is AI-specific dangers, not those from any possible application.
But I suppose if you had to cope with user input, then an LLM might be handy for creating a large number of plausibly-human like responses (ie which might also be slightly mangled or confused), as a sort of weak fuzzing...
It's actually a density-of-states effect. However, assuming a ZPE does make for a nice simple derivation that happens to give the same answer as a proper calculation (ZPE is like that - often works brilliantly, except when it doesn't ... and so you are only really sure a ZPE-based derivation is right if you (also) do it rigorously).
I know this is at a tangent to your argument, but you can't exploit zero point energy, because it doesn't exist.
The idea only results from a simplistic approximation to quantum mechanics, being essentially a "hidden variable" sort of thing, and is very probably is more useful to SF writers than it is to physicists.
There is already a non-trivial amount of work trying to understand radicalization & social networks: notably, I just happened to see this, but there is older work out there.
Quantifying the vulnerabilities of the online public square to adversarial manipulation tactics
Truong et.al, PNAS Nexus 3(7), 258 (2024).
https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae258
Abstract: Social media, seen by some as the modern public square, is vulnerable to manipulation. By controlling inauthentic accounts impersonating humans, malicious actors can amplify disinformation within target communities. The consequences of such operations are difficult to evaluate due to the challenges posed by collecting data and carrying out ethical experiments that would influence online communities. Here we use a social media model that simulates information diffusion in an empirical network to quantify the impacts of adversarial manipulation tactics on the quality of content. We find that the presence of hub accounts, a hallmark of social media, exacerbates the vulnerabilities of online communities to manipulation. Among the explored tactics that bad actors can employ, infiltrating a community is the most likely to make low-quality content go viral. Such harm can be further compounded by inauthentic agents flooding the network with low-quality, yet appealing content, but is mitigated when bad actors focus on specific targets, such as influential or vulnerable individuals. These insights suggest countermeasures that platforms could employ to increase the resilience of social media users to manipulation.
Any life they will "detect" with this will be life of sufficient ongoing activity so as to substantially modify a planet's atmosphere, as on earth; it is unlikely to detect some minimal presence clinging on in some survival niche (as presumably might, at best, be the case on Mars).
This is indeed often true, but the distinction is nevertheless useful and important, and IMO should be made as a matter of course. But if you want a shorthand, it is probably better to use the name of the country's capital as a stand-in for the government, which seems to me less likely to be misunderstood or misrepresented. And I think it particularly important to make the distinction explicit when the government in question is doing something particularly reprehensible.
There are two separate issues here, which perhaps should be treated as separate:
(a) company equipment was carelessly damaged by an employee (perhaps indicating some disciplinary action might be applied)
And, notwithstanding (a), it might also be the case that:
(b) the employee still needed to get some work completed in a timely manner (in which case the IT support needs to assist, not just laugh).
You are right, I don't. But I'm paid - mostly - by research council funding. Even though I use data downloaded from NASA, as assembled from a large array of ground stations based in many countries and run by different organisations, and recording signals information from GNS, GLONASS, GALILEO and Beidou. Newsflash: all those infrastructure things cost money to run, but I can get and work with the data - all without paying for that infrastructure.
I'm not sure I agree - working on the data is the sort of thing scientists can work on (or get funding to work on ) from many places.
IMO it is likely to be the infrastructure costs -- the ground-control management & staffing (technical and otherwise), the on-going ground-based infrastructure costs, transmitter/receiver time (&etc) that could (or would) be the difficulty.
... look, to me, like the sort of "simplified clutter" you might generate when doing in-simulation tests.
I also note that the "Chinese researcher" listed on the research.qut.edu.au page is a PhD candidate, and the two academics listed appear to be entirely un-Chinese.
The .md link you give doesn't (any longer?) appear to work, but the eprint at https://eprints.qut.edu.au/204736/ seems unremarkable.
Whilst it is arguably true that a proportion of academics can be naive about defence/security aspects of their work, it is not clear to me that -- based on what I have just looked at -- there is much of concern here. The Chinese -- as a country -- are more than capable of doing this sort of thing without hand-holding from the rest of the world.
I generally prefer journals associated with professional societies over commercial publishers. Further, I'm not a fan of Nature (for quite range of reasons), but they are a business, and so like to make money. They are entitled to charge for access, if that is their business model.
Most likely you should complain to the authors (and/or whoever they work for), who declined to pay the "open access" fee, and so left it behind the "Nature paywall". And even if they were unable to pay the arguably substantial fee charged by Nature, then there were alternative avenues for open publication.
Of course, it is hard to say much more, since it is unclear which article is being referred to (I had a look, and there are several AlphaFold-themed articles in the Nature family of journals that might be considered "new"). See:
https://www.nature.com/search?q=alphafold&journal=
I think there is a difference in assumptions here we need to think about. As a fisrt pass, how about:
Entities A (here perhaps whales) are not trying to be understood by anything but the other entities it is communicating with.
Entities B (aliens having just arrived in UFOs :-)) are likely to be trying or hoping to be understood by those listening or seeing the communications.
Related to these points are whether the communication language has been constructed or managed to contain systematic meanings, or not; and whether the entities are self-conscious enough to even imagine communicating with different types of entities.
It might be that "A" cases are typically much harder to translate than "B" cases, even when B is extremely weird and - to us - counterintuitive. Note that I am taking no position on whether whales - or spacefaring aliens - might be in either A or B.
Or, perhaps, that new entrants to scientific fields are more likely to use the new and exciting words from the set considered; especially if they have had less contact with traditional researchers with a more traditional and less cutting-edge approach to adverbary and adjectivisation. It might be correlation, but causation? Even then, the wordage might just be a hangover from an initial, but later thoroughly reworked and checked LLM draft. Perhaps.
It's not necessarily a binary choice here: "didn't not know about it" also covers cases like "I had an idea he might try something of the sort", or "I thought he was joking when he told me", or "I knew he'd written that, but assumed he wasn't so stupid as to actually commit it", &etc.
IMO, there are many singularities, and some are already in the past.
Just try, for example, keeping up with the firehose of new results/papers in your preferred scientific field. Sometimes it seems like you just have to do the thing you want to do, and hope that it's not totally irrelevant (or scooped) by the time you write it up...
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