Osmium

It’s actually a very reasonable approximation within a certain regime:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057

There’s a reason people without training in sciences sometimes have the intuition that heavier things fall faster. This intuition isn’t developed in a vacuum (hah).

Can you expand on this? I was only ever taught the "turn around" explanation.

Overall energy usage, from the perspective that energy usage is the primary immediate harm of AI. This is a thesis, not an opinion.

What would regulation look like if it was based on energy usage rather than capabilities?

A guardrail on mass deployment that is not linked to specific model size or aspects of model performance that are difficult to quantify.

Good, the ad was really disturbing. An ad is just an ad and not the biggest deal in the scheme of things but that was really unpleasant to watch. For me, it was the visual of needless destruction and waste as much as the meta-message.

“only creating 3 comics a week”

As if this is not an absolutely breathtaking creative accomplishment, especially so consistently and after so many years!

I agree with another commenter that it probably does get easier with experience, but nevertheless impressive.

Or better regulation.

Treating refined sugar as the addictive substance it is, and keeping those products in a separate part of the store rather than at the checkout line. Removing subsidies for unhealthy ingredients, subsidising healthier ones. More education in schools. Better funding and requiring school districts to meet certain quality standards for the food they provide to children. Ensuring all children have the right to a healthy meal. Where previous initiatives have fallen short, critically evaluate why and make them better. Thinking about social psychological factors for our collective mental health and thinking about how this influences our dietary and exercise choices.

There are lots of actions that could be taken that are not just pharmaceutical.

It's interesting that this analysis implies intentionality on behalf of TikTok, and does not allow for the case that its users genuinely enjoy the service and therefore do not want to see it banned.

It was profoundly different. This is all a matter of public record of course, Ars Technica had a very good write up on it at the time it happened.

HFS+ was the legacy file system, from 1998, itself based on HFS from 1985. APFS was a wholly new, modern filesystem and quite radically different.

Filesystem experts please correct me.

For all the reasons that this might not take off, what a thrill that people are trying something new--and it looks really nicely designed too.

I think this is easy to dismiss at first glance, but I genuinely believe they're trying to think about a new mode of interaction. The idea that "the computer will disappear" is probably accurate in the long term. Except for content delivery (reading, photos, movies), most tasks we achieve via computers and phones do not strictly require a screen. It's probably a good thing if computers did a better job of getting out of the way, and stop so loudly disrupting human interactions.

Whether this will be the solution is unclear; the privacy/creepiness angle is still real with an outwards-facing camera. Latency and battery life limitations might be too significant. The cost will be a non-starter for many (it is for me).

But I'm still impressed because there was a vision here. The conversational interface has never worked before for many reasons, but that does not mean it cannot work in principle, or that the ideal implementation would not be spellbinding. I'm glad they're trying. Also, the laser display is neat!

I am really glad arXiv is getting more funding. It is an essential resource.

For me personally, it’ll be really interesting to see if the frontend changes. No doubt there are some important improvements that can be made (a website can always be made more accessible, moderation tools, support for name changes as mentioned, etc.) However, to first approximation, arXiV’s website already seems almost like a platonic ideal. It reminds me of Craigslist. Simple HTML, loads fast, has the information and features you need but otherwise gets out of your way. I love it.

The arXiv team deserves a lot of credit for what they’ve done to get it this far. It’s difficult to overstate how useful and transformative preprint servers have been to science.

Scientists already have well-defined terminology for many of the crystal structures described, the LK-99 is just a shorthand for this synthesis product (and a convenient one at that, for anyone trying to keep up with the latest). I wouldn’t be too concerned!

Part of the reason we’re not using a full formula yet is that we don’t precisely know what it is (or, indeed, if it’s just one thing at all; the linked paper makes a good argument that this will necessarily be a mix of multiple phases if synthesized as-described). Once we know what it is, we can use one of several existing names.

calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait magazine"

Not far from the truth, talking as someone who is in the field. Unlike Science, which is published by AAAS, a non-profit, Nature is a for-profit publication. They have an incentive not to miss out on something huge so that they can retain their status as the place to go for big results, but this also means they have an incentive towards selecting more sensational research for publication. That doesn't mean that research published in Nature is bad--often it is excellent--and I'm sure their editorial staff sincerely try their best, but they often make quite bizarre editorial decisions (personal opinion).

That said, Nature attracts far more scrutiny than other journals because of their ability to make and break careers, so many people feel resentment towards them as a result. Not all criticism of Nature is entirely fair.

No comment on this particular story :)

I think it's important for discussions about this to distinguish between how things are and how things should be.

How things are is that grad student labor is critical to the running of the university: critical for teaching of undergraduates, critical for performing research to reach deliverables on grants. Indeed, very little research is performed directly by faculty. And grad students are hurting, often at or below the poverty line. Typically a grad school program in the UC takes 5+ years, during which time wages might stagnate around $30k, without raise or career movement that would be possible if they spent those years in industry, despite by all objective measures their day-to-day work being very similar to a research job. Sunk costs make it very difficult psychologically to leave early. Abuse is rampant.

How things should be is very much open to debate. Perhaps a grad program should be as some claim it currently is: a privileged learning role, where you can focus on learning from world-leading experts. Perhaps university institutions should not rely on grad labor as much as they do, and invest more in faculty. Perhaps individual grad students would be better off not in grad school. There are lots of good suggestions in this thread.

How we get from how things are to how things should be is also an open question, but I'd advocate we do it with the least amount of harm to the specific individuals already living within this system. This proposed contract is already weak. The grad students deserve and need a lot more. And increasing the stipend to, say, the $54k proposed would also place incentives on the institution for change.

Finally, without living wages and good contracts, there will always be diversity and inclusion issues in academia. Someone from a wealthy background may be able to slog through a few years with support from their parents, but people from a poorer background will not. It simply will not be an option for them. There is a deeper tragedy here, for everyone involved--the individual, and the institution--for what is lost when so many intelligent, driven souls are not able to participate.

For people who've been around longer, is it wise to take a new job with a company that's undergoing layoffs?

What is the distinction between adaptation and evolution here?

This is not entirely new; microwave synthesis has been used in lab settings for a while, even with off-the-shelf consumer microwaves.

Bystander impression from other comments I've read on DuckDuckGo posts recently: they have good intentions but behind-the-scenes are a bit less rigorous on privacy than would be ideal. Is this an accurate impression from anyone who knows more?

For example, see discussion in this thread[0]. Even though the article itself seemed misleading, many commenters raised some good points.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490515

1. Your mind is also part of the world. Changing your perceptions is changing part of the world.

2. All human minds are only capable of perceiving a small fraction of the total information content of the world, and most of our perceptions are based on constructed social realities (e.g., as this is a tech forum, you could say we live in a virtual machine where small rectangles of woven fiber are given a meaning far beyond the mere fact of their existence, purely based upon our collective perceptions of what those rectangles represent). Changing our perceptions can therefore change this social reality and, as a result, change the context in which we live.

Forgive me for the high-school philosophizing.

Regardless of exposure, you have to consider wavelength. There are some things JWST can see that are completely invisible to Hubble, or, similarly, there are objects that are opaque to Hubble that JWST can see right through. Just look at all the extra stars that appear in the image of the Carina Nebula for an example of that.

This infographic does a nice job showing which are from the struts and which from the mirrors: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01G529MX46J7...

Of course, the JWST without its struts and its mirrors wouldn't be much of a telescope! So the diffraction spikes are a part of doing business and also have the helpful side effect of allowing us to quickly know which objects are stars vs galaxies, since only the former have the really prominent spikes.

In fairness, some of the criticism isn't armchair: some of us work in science, may know what good science communication can look like, and can then be fairly critical of what is a wonderful opportunity for effective communication with a large audience being mishandled. These opportunities do not come every day, so it's important to make the most of them.

I imagine the NASA conference tomorrow may give more clarity, e.g. perhaps today's announcement was a last-minute press op that wasn't sufficiently planned? Maybe the full NASA briefing will be better.

With that said, I think it's fair to keep this discussion separate so as not to overshadow the very real and tremendous accomplishment we're witnessing today. Obviously the manner of the announcement is insignificant compared to the result itself, and I hope everyone involved is very rightly proud.

While you’re not wrong, in the sense that this wouldn’t hold up as a piece of journalism, anyone who’s been in academia will read it differently: this is an emotional, honest account of a problem common enough that even if this one case were not true, we know it is all too plausible.

I feel for this student. Both for what they’ve gone through, and also how this moment of catharsis has probably also caused additional strife for them in all the attention it’s seen. Honestly, I feel for the professor and the rest of the research group too, and all the perverse incentives that have lead otherwise smart people down these unfortunate paths.

TikTok has a very good algorithm for suggesting content for users, and this can end up with different users being exposed to radically different subsets of content offered through TikTok: in scientific terms, it’s very easy to get stuck in different local minima.

So for many users, TikTok will not involve “showing off to friends”, will not involve audio trends, and will not involve memes at all.

These users would describe it as containing short-form video content relevant to whatever their particular niche or interest may be.

I'm in my mid-40s: there's nothing deep or mysterious to "get" about TikTok. It's short-form video snips/vignettes, mainly of people showing off for their friends, trying to cash in on short-lived audio trends and meme pipelines, and sometimes both.

What this misses is that TikTok is a radically different experience for different people.

For some people, this description is very accurate. For other people, they would barely recognize TikTok on the basis of this description.

This is what has led to so many mis-representations of TikTok in the media, and the misunderstandings that result from that.

The biggest problem I have with the idea of student loan forgiveness is that it punishes people

First, I completely get how some people feel this way. It's valid.

However, as someone who's almost paid off their own student loan, I would not feel punished by student loan forgiveness. I would be glad to see it. The money I have repaid is already gone; yes, if I could turn back time knowing it would be forgiven, I needn't have repaid it, but if I could turn back time there are lots of investments or choices I would do differently. Student loan forgiveness would take a huge existential burden off an entire generation. It would do so much for mental wellbeing of so many of my peers. I can't think of something I'd rather see. And the truth is, I've almost paid off my loans because I'm doing alright. I'll be fine.

Now, the fact it got this bad to start with...doing student loan forgiveness without also making serious reforms is just promising it will happen again. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't help people who are suffering today.

Thanks so much for the comprehensive reply! Very interesting to read the process.

I wonder, could you talk about the process of getting this published? Was this your first book, did you have a pre-existing relationship with the publisher?

Looks like a beautiful book.

Maybe worth putting a prominent NSFW label on the link to the excerpt however? Was not what I was expecting to see when reading this!

His legacy is a deep stain on the design industry

This is a rather extreme statement. A person's career can be long and complex, involve many projects, not all of which will be successful. We all learn.

From the outside, it seems that Jony Ive was successful in a lot of endeavors, was successful in creating a disciplined design culture, and yes, sometimes, went too far (it seems) but even that kind of exploration can be useful for how it informs future work.