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LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

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Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#261

Post by oneshtein »

MayeulC wrote: post #218
oneshtein wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

35kK in this reactor is much closer to room temperature than 150MK in ITER, isn't?

Look, call 35K cold if you want. It's relatively easy to make some fusion at home [1] at even colder temperatures. However, the real issue here is __producing__ energy (edit: more than you put in). This has never been done in a sustained way (H-bombs produce net energy, there were some promising inertial confinement and tokamak results recently, but never for sustained periods of time). And in the chain, it's pointed…

I am old enough to remember "The Storm in a Glass". Back then, there was a discussion about excessive heat, because the scientific community doubted the possibility of nuclear fusion reactions at such low temperatures and energy costs. My own hypotheses were: a) the reaction is caused by cosmic radiation (muons), and the deuterium filled lattice only amplifies natural high-energy cosmic radiation; b) the reaction occurs through contamination of samples with radioactive materials, and the matrix only amplifies natural decay reactions; c) cracks in the material create resonance with alternating electric current, and as a result, a natural particle accelerator is formed.

In the video, researches use lattice to boosts fusor performance by few orders of magnitude. Why you think that they cannot boost it further?

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#262

Post by RedCondor »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #254
RedCondor wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All so-called "capital returns" are in reality produced by working people, and therefore people get to democratically decide what they do with them, through whatever decision-making forms they politically choose and consent to organize themselves under. Insofar as there are disagreements, because capitalist "geniuses" don't think their riches should be subject to democracy, we have a struggle between socialism and ca…

Except history shows us that in 100% of the cases that working people seize the production and allocate the gains they do a unbelievable bad job. Socialism is the single most failed idea in human history, yet we refuse to properly teach that in our education system. I suspect in the future it will be view a bit like refusing to teach other scientific subjects, like evolution. In reality a mob of people end up produci…

Cool joke.

I encourage anyone on the fence between this libertarian and I to read the "Concessions" essay I linked up above.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#264

Post by KingOfCoders »

guru4consulting wrote: post #225
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely and people might be interested that in this case the prediction market for LK-99 is reacting in real time to new tweets from people trying to replicate. The “yes” spike to 32c yesterday was in response to a twitter account posting an image of a levitating grain in a tube. The credibility of that replication attempt was then evaluated by many and the market backed off afterwards. There is always a subtle an…

Agreed. Stock markets are very similar to prediction markets. They are priced based on future projections, technical feasibility and probability of achieving certain milestone, ability to reach market first, internal and external factors, etc. I don't see much difference between a prediction market and a stock market. Theoretically, we could allow both of them and treat them similar. But one major risk I see is that…

"attempt to have the process replicated and buy options on the outcome once they confirm their findings in"

This is called insider trading in stock markets and illegal. So your analogy breaks.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#265

Post by adrianmonk »

rcme wrote: post #169
ot wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it theft? The original source is prominently cited, the author of the blog post is an active participant to the original discussion, the whole point of the post is to collect and summarize various sources in one place.

Usually copying someone else’s work without permission is considered (intellectual property) theft. Also, this person just copied the initial work but isn’t as committed to keeping things up to date. Much better to use the original source.

IANAL, but copying this table in the way they did seems OK under US copyright law.

In the US, some compilations cannot be copyrighted and some can.

Before a Supreme Court decision called Feist, copyright could be based on either "sweat of the brow" or creativity or both. Sweat of the brow is the work of taking data from original sources and putting it together. Creativity is something you add, like choosing what to include. (If I make a mere list of all restaurants at Disneyworld, that's sweat of the brow. If I make a list of the restaurants that are worth visiting, that's creative.)

The Supreme Court decision was about one company copying another company's white pages phone book. (White pages are the simple name/number listings.) The court said sweat of the brow isn't enough. There must be some amount of creativity. It's a low bar, but it has to be there. So they said the white pages cannot be copyrighted, and copying the entire thing is allowed.

About these LK-99 tables, the "Notes" and "Reliability of Claim" columns of the original table look creative to me. So I'd guess the table can be copyrighted. But the copy of the table didn't include those columns. It just included the factual data, and I think that's allowed.

Sources:

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation

(2) https://www.copyright.gov/reports/db4.pdf (Sections IA and IB give the basic idea.)

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#266

Post by hobofan »

ssijak wrote: post #112

This twitter handle contains some interesting back story investigation https://twitter.com/8teAPi

> interesting back story investigation

No! As stated in their reply to this, you should assume that everything that account writes is fiction.

They said that they were essentially trying to write a The Big Short-style screenplay in real time as the story unfolds. To do that, they link to actual newsworthy tweets and "fill it in with realistic stereotypes".

It's a shame that this account is one of the most responsive aggregators of new developments, as I find their real-time fictionalization incredibly irresponsible.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#268

Post by mschuster91 »

kakwa_ wrote: post #257
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t observe a frequent knee jerk like anti-markets reaction from comments across HN? What are good examples of their “disbenefits”?

Vast topic. Markets definitely have their issues. Here are a few: * The most obvious one is the fact it's an overhead, it doesn't produce goods or services by itself. That's not a major issue, but for example in the US ~5% (~7M of ~150M) of the workforce is dedicated to this overhead. * It's prone to internal instabilities. Too often, the markets disconnect from the underlying economic reality, sometimes with only mi…

> Markets definitely have their issues. But so far, the other systems we experimented with (planned economy) were even less able to cope with the incredibly difficult task of balancing an economy.

The worst issue that the Soviets and other attempts at central planning failed to account for was flexibility and buffer. Say a natural disaster hits and you need an extra amount of concrete for reconstruction, but all the concrete production was already allocated for something else and the plan is considered sacrosanct. Or some innovation (e.g. refrigerators, cars, washing machines) proves to be way more popular than expected, but there is no way to adapt the plan, and so you had to wait years for a Trabant car.

Ironically, Western-style "free markets" eventually converged towards the same issue with the unholy invention of "just in time" manufacturing. Both capitalism and communism sought to eradicate "inefficiencies" and destabilized their entire foundation doing so.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#269

Post by bhouston »

nmwnmw wrote: post #267

Isn't it sufficient to have another lab confirm that the existing sample is a super conductor? Then we can all sprint to replication.

Yeah, having another lab confirm the behavior and makeup of that sample would go a long way. I wonder why that isn’t happening?

Does anyone have an explanation on why no one is examining/validating the sample they already have?

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#270

Post by Workaccount2 »

stainablesteel wrote: post #221
asimpletune wrote: post #177

So, Russian anime cat girl seems to have cooked a sample and demonstrated some of the claimed properties, although she's explicit that it shouldn't be considered a "replication". https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685731177523449856

its always the people with an anime pfp that do the most godly shit

I think it's what happens when you just stack all of your character points in intelligence.

Smartest person I ever met is now some kind of non-binary fox person. An ivy league masters in math, does risk modeling for some mega insurance company, and lives in a kawaii fever dream while doing it.

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