391–400 of 659 posts
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welcome to the new world...It is fast, efficient and very interesting...
it's not fast or efficient - the authors appear to think they invented a very easy to make room temperature/pressure superconductor far over a year ago, and then announced it in a truly silly way with no clear data and no samples.
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I'm not saying it is 35K, I'm saying it is at least 35K and probably much higher. Whether it is closer to room temperature or not is not relevant, when someone says 'room temperature' they are talking about 21 degrees Celsius plus or minus a couple, not above the temperature where any kind of solid matter exists. Even tungsten, which melts at 3422 degrees C and boils at the magic number of 5555 C is just vapor at tha…
As you can see, the apparatus didn't evaporate while working, so, probably, temperature is much lower.
Stone Age Bronze Age Iron Age LK-99 Age (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36869209 )
Stone Age Bronze Age Iron Age I would add Steel Age here LK-99 Age
Stone Age
Bronze Age
Iron Age
Steel Age (1800 - 1940. The development of mass-produced steel of high quality, and its widespread adoption and use in construction and by industry.)
Aluminum Age (1940 - 1965. Tremendous growth in the aeronautical and space industries, enabled by the futuristic light alloy.)
Plastics Age (1965 - 1985. Ubiquitization of lightweight, durable plastics in all forms of consumer goods and media. The M-16 "plastic rifle" and the polycarbonate compact disc are symbolic of this era.)
Silicon Age (1985 - 2023. The age of computers in everything, the internet, "smart" devices, gig economy, etc.)
LK-99 Age (2023 - ??. Could end next week, could last a while. Nobody knows.)
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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…
Looking past your "rah rah financialization" partisanship, one question: Why is a prediction market for replication per se more interesting than the existing market of all the public companies who would be enriched / wiped out based on the result? (Note that "well, the effect would be too small" flips just as easily around to, the smaller markets are obviously way too noisy given what people are actually getting away…
If you knew precisely which companies would gain or lose, how much relative to their stock price, and all these companies were liquid and public, then maybe you could make this comparison. Even then, there'd be plenty of noise from unrelated factors. So, it's pretty clear why a prediction market is superior.
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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…
> Too often, the markets disconnect from the underlying economic reality, sometimes with only mild effects (for example, that time petroleum prices went negative) I may have misunderstood the situation at the time or am now misremembering it but I thought: Some crude futures were about to become deliverable, meaning people who had been speculating on the price and have no fundamental use for unrefined petroleum were…
I was using this example to illustrate the disconnect between the market (which was trading oil like some immaterial stuff) and reality (oil is definitely a product you need to store properly, plus oil storage is not infinite).
In fairness, because it occurred during COVID, i.e. a really abnormal situation, this is a bit of a weak example.
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This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided. Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy polic…
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…
That tells you all you need to know, but probably not in the way you think.
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This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided. Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy polic…
> Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy policy maker for instance. How? Would it not be better for the "savvy" policy maker to JUST WAIT until this discovery is confirmed, definitively, by multiple legit research institutions? And even better, wait until it shows some promise of practical application?…
Saw some people hyping up markets where people are betting on prediction markets whether or not LK-99 will replicate. Can't help but feel like that money would be better spent just paying off some labs to actually try to replicate the process. The response I got from a predictions market enthusiast was that having a sufficiently large market would motivate people to attempt to have the process replicated and buy opti…
This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided. Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy polic…
That's an extraordinary claim with zero evidence behind it. Do you have any evidence that "prediction markets" provide more accurate predictions than e.g. specialist surveys or other mechanisms? I don't see any empirical evidence nor any logical reason for that to be the case.
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You might be excited about ivo quantum drive that is going to be tested in space, NET October
That's a drive with which your exact position becomes uncertain so... you might be there already.
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As you can see, the apparatus didn't evaporate while working, so, probably, temperature is much lower.
It didn't evaporate because it is constructed carefully not to, but that doesn't mean it isn't blazing hot, just like the gas burner on your stove can be made out of aluminum which would be melted by the flame if it ever became mis-aligned. But that doesn't mean the flame has a temperature lower than the melting point of aluminum, it just means that whoever designed it knew enough to ensure that the aluminum is never…
I mean that it is time to stop stigmatizing Cold Nuclear Fusion because a reactor for isotope breeding could have been created 30 years ago, saving many thousands of lives. The hating of Cold Fusion has cost many people their lives. It would be better to allocate a small fraction of a budget for other nuclear power plants and direct them towards CF, because the cost of CF iteration is orders of magnitude lower, and a few million dollars or euros could significantly advance science.