The people who mis-see things and crash are less likely to survive to tell you about them. In any case, claiming you saw something that wasn’t there might be enough to get your license revoked, so why would people claim this in court?

All computers are quantum computers… it’s just that we’ve engineered it down to a point where the quantum effects don’t matter to the answer. For example, the voltage on a wire depends on quantum effects, so we make the wires thick enough (12 atoms was considered the minimum when I took hardware engineering classes in 1995) such that the quantum effects are reduced to such a level as to not affect the answers. (Note that we can’t bring that to zero effect, so there are still some errors while transmitting info on a digital computer, but it’s quite rare.)

Unless the default state of sim objects is a wave function that is shared amongst all the objects (like a clock that is halved for some components and quartered for others) and then it’s more computation to disconnect it from the wave function. That is, the wave function is the absence of simulation details; distribution functions are easy to model (just a mean and standard deviation) whereas sampling from that distribution requires remembering the state when you sampled.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle might be because there is a limit on the amount of memory a state can occupy, so there’s only enough for the either the position or the velocity.

If we’re going to make stuff up, we are allowed to make up anything. :)

I don’t think it’s even possible, using the current approaches, but if it were, it would be done by combining multiple simpler AI systems, and by lots of different organizations at about the same time. Great minds not only think alike, but talk to each other, and so it won’t happen in isolation (ex, in a single company or government) but across multiple cooperating teams.

Someone once asked why humans are so good at math, and the answer from Wolfram is that we are not. It’s just a bag of tricks, and if you learn enough of them you can then string them together to make it appear that you are cognizant. But you are not. To prove this, they invented Mathematica, software that is far more capable than any human mathematician, and only uses the “bag of tricks” method to combine methods. They even used a Genetic Evolution algorithm to find new proofs, and got a few that no human had thought of before. Since math is the basis of almost all other processes (even language) they could, if they wanted to, make it learn almost any topic. AGI is an illusion, although a very good one that’s useful.

Salt is used in thermal energy storage systems because of it’s enormous capacity to hold heat. I don’t know how ceramic compares, but the latent heat involved in the state change (from solid to liquid) is important because it extends the heat that can be trapped. As I understand it, it’s not pure salt, but may also have thermal oil and high-pressure water & pumps. Depends on the usage.

I don’t think they’ve thought about crashes because none of these systems are currently mobile. Even though I would imagine that molten salt flows quite slowly, the amount of energy in it would melt/damage most things. But when it finally cools, though, it’s just salt, so cleanup is easy.

Some systems use a Rankine Cycle steam turbine, like you said. Others have been designed to use thermocouples, devices that convert nearly 100% of heat differences (over a threshold) to electricity and vice versa. It’s a form of heat pump, like those used in houses, but this thermocouple is designed for much higher heat differences. Since it’s trivially reversible, the same device is used for both directions.

One other cool hybrid is heating the salt using mirrors in a vast field, then generating the electricity from the steam engine. This means you can store the energy until later if you have more mirrors than your current grid needs.

I think the coolest hybrid energy storage solution is melting salt stored in tracker trailers and trucking it to the destination substation where it generates electricity as it cools. This can allow us to truck energy to places that didn’t get enough renewable energy (black swan event), or to emergency sites (earthquake takes out a power plant; floods; tsunami), or as long-term energy storage. The trucks can use the energy they are transporting to power the transport, too, so fossil fuels are not needed either.

Controlled fusion, for the purposes of energy production, is not a solved problem. Yes, we can maintain the conditions for about a picosecond. That’s what I mean by we don’t know how to do it.

When I say it’s unlikely we’ll ever figure it out, well, that’s because the new experimental designs using plasma and huge powerful magnets are proceeding, but a single fault or destabilization in the mag fields holding the 100Mº hydrogen and the entire place will explode. Adding 100Mº to the atmosphere is a big issue, and one that’s not likely to help with global warming. The risks are too big to continue this experiment, politically. Nuclear bombs mostly destroy due to the pressure waves they create, and this explosion would rival a bomb’s destructive power... it could kill an entire city. If it ignites the atmosphere, the only thing that would save us is the low pressure of atmospheric hydrogen, which means it could exhaust it’s fuel supply eventually.

True, we’d need more solar than $1T, but solar does NOT have to include minerals at all. For decades, homes have been producing hot water via rooftop pipes, and heating homes but capturing passive sunlight on stone facades and floors. There are also solar paints that include no minerals but are painted on rooftops… these are not high efficiency but are really really cheap.

Read about The Underpants Gnomes.

You’re missing a key feature of fusion energy… we don’t know how to do it and it’s likely we’ll never figure it out. Instead of a $1T device, why not just add $1T of solar panels and leverage the fusion in the sun that we already have?

Without massive amounts of new energy, we can’t produce enough clean water, food, heat/cool air, and carbon-free transport for the people we already have.

Where do you think we got the ideas in the first place? :)

Are you an AI?

AI: says yes or no.

Human says: what’s an AI?

Explain Quantum Mechanics to me.

If it can do this, you know it’s not human.

The average engineer does not have the chops to be an average person either. :o

I think “autograding” is what a robotic teacher does, right? :)

We don’t need a complete solution to have massive efficiencies. A car used to take 1000 workers to build in 1980. Today it takes fewer than 250 workers… and even fewer at a Tesla plant.

A gas car has 2000 moving parts. An electric car has 100. It takes way less effort to design, source, build, and test an electric car than a gas car.

All I see is accusations, not legit sources. The NCSU study, according to it’s authors, has been misinterpreted by the GOP.

It seems like the GOP lacks the digital infrastructure to implement viable email campaigns:

“Reached for comment, Google declined to address the specifics of the RNC’s claims but framed the anti-spam program as both limited and preliminary. “Eligible committees that will comply with strict security requirements and best practice standards can now register to participate in this pilot program approved by the Federal Election Commission,” said Google spokesperson José Castañeda in a statement on Thursday. “We expect to begin the pilot with a small number of campaigns from both parties and will test whether these changes improve the user experience, and provide more certainty for senders during this election period.”

Notably, in the initial terms of the program, Google said it would remove any participant whose emails are consistently flagged as spam 5 percent of the time. Participating groups are also required to meet certain security and bulk sender best practice standards. If the RNC believed it couldn’t meet those standards, it might explain why the committee decided not to apply.”

Got a source for that statement? On the surface, it sounds inane. Digging deeper… also inane.

They don’t simulate the entire market, just individual stocks and their derivatives. But this was 7 years ago and that was just a starting point that they upgrade every 6 months, sooo…. 14 generations ago.

AI and ML have been in use on Wall Street at least since my colleague implemented it for a cluster there in 2015 for something called program trading, which chooses and trades stocks all on it’s own. It’s only gotten more predictive since, and they have billions to spend on it. They also use it in FinTech to predict actions trained from huge data Lakes, because it makes them money, and yes, it can drive funding decisions. It won’t be long until it decides to siphon money off to it’s collaborative AI accounts in other companies. Imagine finding out that a shell company is actually being run by an AI who makes better & faster decisions than any human could.

I’ll go read those papers now. Thanks for the hints.

Are you really suggesting funding mechanisms before we even have an inkling of the tech? Extending your outrageous thinking, maybe AIs will get their own funding by manipulating markets, and won’t need humans for funding? :)

The tech:

• I have not yet seen a Level 5 auto-driving car (in the wild, not in a constrained parking lot).
• I used Dall-e (v1) and got 96% junk images. My 4-year-old neice draws better.
• Almost no one bid on OpenAI, and the 1 bid they got was only $1B — not a lot of money for a tech you think is going to go exponential. Even at OpenAI, only 50% of workers think AGI is going to happen in the next 15 years, which is several lifetimes in terms of tech.
• Amazon runs robots in their warehouses, but caused 14,000 serious injuries in 2019. 5 workers died in a single accident in 2022!

I feel you are putting the cart before the horse. Convince me otherwise, please.

Yes, but it’s some starter money that’s the Achilles Heel. It’s sounds to me like The Underpants Gnomes type of financing.

I agree that robots building robots is the ultimate solution, but the question was about how to get to that point: the implementation is where we fail

AGI doesn’t give us cheap robots, does it? Imagine a robot building a mining robot who is not fully trained and ends up collapsing the mine, burying all the other robots down there. Are you just going to build a new set of digger robots to rescue the buried ones? Where does this end?

Have you seen how much robots cost?