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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • decerian@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzProblem?
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    23 days ago

    I disagree there - peer review as a system isn’t designed to catch fraud at all, it’s designed to ensure that studies that get published meet a minimum standard for competence. Reviewers aren’t asked to look for fake data, and in most cases aren’t trained to spot it either.

    Whether we need to create a new system that is designed to catch fraud prior to publication is a whole different question.




  • Well, yes and no.

    Quantum computers will likely never beat classical computing on classical algorithms, for exactly the reasons you stated, classical just has too much of a head start.

    But there are certain problems with quantum algorithms that are exponentially faster than the classical algorithms. Quantum computers will be better on those problems very quickly, but we are still working on building reliable QCs. Also, we currently don’t know very many quantum algorithms with that degree of speedup, so as others have said there isn’t many use cases for QCs yet.


  • This isn’t a “comic book” universe, but the parahumans story universe (Worm and Ward) fits this pretty well.

    Without spoiling too much of the story, characters all get powers in response to traumatic events. The powers they get also tend to reflect the type of trauma that occurred, so if they lost an arm they might get a healing power, or if they were trapped in a burning building they might get the ability to phase through walls and a resistance to fire. All of the powers in the setting tend to follow this approach, and stay within the rules of the setting.








  • Gravity and vacuum are not mutually exclusive - you always have to deal with gravity forces, although they become negligible pretty quickly when you get into and then leave orbits.

    As to the specific claim, I suspect that the experiments they are currently doing (in vacuum chambers on earth) have gotten to the point that they are measuring the propulsion system producing more thrust than it’s own weight (T/W >1), which would technically be enough thrust to overcome gravity. Even if it wasn’t practically useful for actually getting to orbit, that amount of thrust on a reactionless motor would be incredible, and would totally unlock the solar system for us.


  • When you say “university staff”, do you mean professors, or some other technical support staff?

    If professors, then reaching out by email is probably a good way to start. They may get a lot of emails though, so your best chance to get a response might be timing the email right at the start of summer when they hopefully don’t have any ongoing classes.

    In terms of payment - most professors would happily talk about their areas of study with interested people for a short time (for free). If you needed a significant time investment from them though, then you might start having issues.


  • But intelligence is the capacity to solve problems. If you can solve problems quickly, you are by definition intelligent

    To solve any problems? Because when I run a computer simulation from a random initial state, that’s technically the computer solving a problem it’s never seen before, and it is trillions of times faster than me. Does that mean the computer is trillions of times more intelligent than me?

    the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)

    If we built a true super-genius AI but never let it leave a small container, is it not intelligent because WE never let it manipulate its environment? And regarding the tests in the Merriam Webster definition, I suspect it’s talking about “IQ tests”, which in practice are known to be at least partially not objective. Just as an example, it’s known that you can study for and improve your score on an IQ test. How does studying for a test increase your “ability to apply knowledge”? I can think of some potential pathways, but we’re basically back to it not being clearly defined.

    In essence, what I’m trying to say is that even though we can write down some definition for “intelligence”, it’s still not a concept that even humans have a fantastic understanding of, even for other humans. When we try to think of types of non-human intelligence, our current models for intelligence fall apart even more. Not that I think current LLMs are actually “intelligent” by however you would define the term.


  • If you’re mixing things up in the kitchen, typically you try to be somewhat precise with ratios.

    The difference in this case being that because the actual ratio of the blend is unknown, you don’t actually know how it would crystallize. Technically they could even change up the ratio week to week based on the price of high-fructose corn syrup so you wouldn’t even get consistency from it.