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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Your question:

    what things did the LHC discover that have real practical applications right now other than validating some hypothesis

    Is really multiple questions:

    1. Is doing fundamental research with no application in mind useful?

    2. Has the LHC led to practical applications usable today

    The answer to question 1 is yes.

    There’s different types of research programs made to target different goals. Some aim for short or medium term applications, and others are just pure fundamental research.

    Just because pure research doesn’t have an application in mind, doesn’t mean it’s not useful. The application isn’t the goal, the expansion of our knowledge base is. Everyone who ever thought up of an application for something did so based on their own knowledge base. If the knowledge base never expands, then we run out of applications to think up. This is why pure research is useful.

    And all of history supports this:

    • The discovers of rays shooting off cathode-ray-tubes in the 1800s were just doing pure research and had no idea it would lead to TVs
    • particle accelerator research lead to invention of cat scans
    • chemists trying to research heavier elements leading to the discovery of nuclear fission, leading to nuclear power
    • electrolysis research lead to the invention of lead (and rechargeable) batteries
    • etc…

    The answer to question 2 is also yes:

    The obvious ones are:

    • improved manufacturing processes
    • improved supercooled superconductors
    • improved large scale vacuum chambers
    • Improved data processing
    • Trained a new cohort of experienced scientists/engineers/workers/etc (who can now work on new projects outside of the LHC)

  • I have yet to be given an example of something a “general” intelligence would be able to do that an LLM can’t do.

    Presenting…

    Something a general intelligence can do that an LLM can’t do:

    Play chess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvTs_nbc8Eg

    Why can’t it play it? Because LLM’s don’t have memory, so they can’t work with logic. They are the same as the little “next word predictor” in your phone’s keyboard. It just says what it thinks is the most probable next word based on previous words, it’s not actually thinking or understanding anything. So instead, we get moves that don’t make sense or are completely invalid.








  • I wonder if they’re lying about this. Maybe the fans are super loud or something and they didn’t want the reporter to know.

    That’s far too conspiratorial for me. Loud fans in an engineering sample aren’t a reason to break a fan.

    A fast fan blade on a laptop would snap easily if it was handled, which is exactly what would be happening on both a laptop where assembling and disassembling it is a feature and a laptop being actively tested.

    If it was a blade that broke, that wouldn’t stop the fan from working, so it was probably the servo, power, or bearings which is exactly what you’d expect to find broken in an engineering sample. Why? Because engineering samples almost always have issues in them. That’s the whole point of the samples, to find out what the issues are so they can be fixed before mass manufacture.




  • E2E:

    As far as I understand, Google wants to treat RCS similar to how it treats web:

    1. Have a standard
    2. experiment with some extensions
    3. learn what works and what doesn’t
    4. build what works into the standard
    5. repeat

    In that case, e2e encryption is coming to RCS.

    I know Samsung is also experimenting with e2e encryption too.

    Other:

    iMessage itself also has more features than RCS. Built in e2ee would be a big one, and aome other more vain ones.

    What other notable features (besides e2e which is discussed above) does iMessage have?

    […] Signal or even WhatsApp would still be superior.

    (Besides e2e,) What features to Signal and/or WhatsApp provide?