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Comment Re:Programmed (Score 1) 121

The idea of "emergent behavior" is nothing new and AI really isn't programmed in the traditional sense. It is more like teaching a child.

I've been doing software development for decades and the impact it is having on my work is eye opening. Yan Lecun is pretty sure we won't get to AGI with just the existing LLMs and I'm sure many other scientists agree with this, However, that is not to say the existing LLMs are turning out to be a failure. It is more we have to advance in other vectors as we have pretty much used up adding more data and compute to it.

And we know it can be done with less data and compute because human brains can do it.

Submission + - SETI@Home Search For Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 Years (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: SETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and want to focus on completing their back-end analysis of the data. SETI@home is a distributed computing project where volunteers contribute their CPU resources to analyze radio data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

Run by the Berkeley SETI Research Center since 1999, SETI@home has been a popular project where people from all over the world have been donating their CPU resources to process small chunks of data, or "jobs," for interesting radio transmissions or anomalies. This data is then sent back to the researchers for analysis. In an announcement posted yesterday, the project stated that they will no longer send data to SETI@home clients starting on March 31st, 2020 as they have reached a "point of diminishing returns" and have analyzed all the data that they need for now. Instead, they want to focus on analyzing the back-end results in order to publish a scientific paper.

Comment Re:A problem with a potential hydrogen economy. (Score 2) 65

by burhop (#59586162) Attached to: H2Go Power Seeks To Power Drones With Hydrogen

I think you are mixing some unrelated information here

While it is the most common element in the universe - hydrogen is extremely rare in our atmosphere - because it escapes into space by floating to the top and being subject to solar winds.

Free Hydrogen is rare, sure. Some of this blows away but the real problem for free Hydrogen is that it just loves to bond with other elements. We have a lot of Hydrogen on earth simply because it is all bonded to other stuff.

Make hydrogen into a major growing aspect of our economy, and it WILL escape over time proportional to that.

The problem with that is that unless we're using something other than water to do that, then, well, we're losing water from the water cycle every time we do that. That's essentially how Mars died, by a very similar method of losing its water to solar winds.

We are not setting hydrogen free, Hydrogen is the fuel that generally combines with oxygen to give us energy and water. I guess there could be a leak in whatever you are storing the hydrogen in but having enough leaks that we have to worry about the Earth losing too much Hydrogen seems pretty implausible.

More than that even - we also free up oxygen with that process. You know the other half of the oxygen cycle, right? Carbon dioxide.

How did carbon get into this discussion? Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of burning carbon based fuels. You breath in oxygen, combine it with the (carbon) food you eat and breath out carbon dioxide. Now I guess you might be thinking, "We break water into hydrogen and oxygen, save the hydrogen for fuel, and let the oxygen go into the atmosphere. However, when you then burn the Hydrogen, you combine it with free oxygen. It all balances out. There is no net addition of oxygen to the atmosphere.

Every option has costs - we have to use resources to live, and entropy is in all directions - but some options can lead to much worse outcomes if we stop caring about the future.

Entropy only goes in one direction. I guess what you are saying is that net entropy will increase no matter what we do. I agree with that. However, unless your concern is about slowing down the ultimate heat death of the universe, I'm not sure why you would care about entropy in this context.

That's why basic research is crucially important, not just marketing and economic research. But again - that requires caring about the future, and that's also something that's been lost with the generations in power for recent decades.

The power of the economy means nothing without a future to expand into. That requires clear vision based on repeatable truths. Runaway destruction only requires ignoring those truths in favor of an illusion of infinite gain - an illusion
that robs us as a people of everything.

Ryan Fenton

It is great you are thinking about the future. More people should. But using excess energy to split water molecules so that we can combine the hydrogen and oxygen later to get that energy back seems like a good idea (if you can make the storing of hydrogen safe, of course).

Comment Re: 79% of all CPUs* (Score 1) 194

by burhop (#59039042) Attached to: AMD Sold 79% of All CPUs in July

What I found amusing is that a tech article found it necessary to explain what 79% is:

To put this in a plainer fashion, for every single processor sold by Intel, AMD sold four

I'm disappointed in the direction Slashdot comments have gone over the years but there is only so much the Slashdot editors can do working today's "high tech" articles.They have my sympathy.

Comment Giant Meteor Politics (Score 1) 127

The connections of this thread back to politics seemed to be the typical illogical jump in Slashdot comments. Then I remember those "Giant Meteor" bumper stickers from the US presidential election saying to "Just end it already".

It is clearly a political issue. Please carry on with the insightful commentary as I'm still undecided in this latest poll.

  https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FGiant-M...

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