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Comment Re:Something is not completely adding up (Score 1) 68

Yes, and this statement:

Russia's public health agency said Shipilova had "pneumonia of unknown etiology" and that further testing found no microorganisms linked to her work.

Which I assume was meant to be reassuring, is the exact opposite. It tells me that it is very probable that whatever was actually in the test tube is something they don't even have the ability to test for or identify.

Comment Starship booster? (Score 2) 50

This doesn't make sense on the surface for a number of reasons. The Starship second phase cannot launch most of the things that Falcon 9 launches. I'm assuming they are going to have two large shuttle-like doors on a Starship eventually that can release larger payloads?

The next thing that doesn't make sense is simply payload size. Certainly it is not more economical to use the Starship stack to put something into orbit that is only a small fraction of its cargo capacity? And yes, I know it could carry multiple satellites / spacecraft at once, but it is very rare those things all need to be in the exact same orbit at the same time. So it seems Falcon 9 would be more economical for launching a single smaller thing?

Maybe the economics of the Falcon 9 second stage not being usable totally makes the case for Starship? It's estimated a second stage costs between $7 and $10 million. So perhaps right there economically it makes more sense to fly a 100% reusable Starship even for a small payload. I guess the liquid methane Starship burns is a relatively cheap, being derived from natural gas that the USA already has in abundant supply.

Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 119

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 119

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

Comment Training (Score 1) 216

I live in a very rural area. We have no military bases within hundreds of miles, but we are on a military training flight route. We see all the fighter aircraft on a weekly basis flying over (very low), and a very small rural airport somehow got set up to refuel Osprey's on their flight routes. So we see Osprey's nearly every day flying over.

My point is that scheduling a plane to fly over a game at a specific time is pretty much inconsequential because these things are flying CONSTANTLY around the country for training. They have to rack up the hours one way or another.

Comment Why would an LLM know what humans want? (Score 2) 74

Why in the world would anyone think that an LLM would know what products humans would want to buy? To the LLM, all the products are merely words. Just descriptions. It cannot perceive anything about these products, but only knows of them indirectly via words. Further, all the LLM knows about what things are appealing to humans is also from words.

The whole thing is absurd really. It reminds me of something like Futurama where Bender is trying to cook food for humans. Or Star Trek and Data is trying to do something human but failing at it. Just not nearly as entertaining to watch this store fail though.

Comment Re:Its very puzzling, isn't it? (Score 1) 97

While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.

If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.

A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.

While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 2) 86

ToS is the strongest argument, but the distillers are not parties to the ToS. They get their data from data brokers. It is possible that data brokers are violating the ToS, but it would be hard to write ToS that precluded running queries for third parties without creating problems for consultancies and other businesses. Even presuming the ToS could be written to preclude the data brokers doing that, it doesn't affect the resulting model.

But the general shape of the argument brings us right back to unclean hands: we worked hard on this model and it's not fair for you to profit off our work in a way that doesn't have our permission.

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