391–400 of 821 posts
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People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.
We'll use them to build spacecraft that retrieve asteroids so rich in gold that it permanently crashes the price of gold? People don't seem to realize how radically society will change if this superconductor thing is legit.
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> it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world. This statement would have been viewed as absolutely obvious and ridiculous 2 decades ago. The fact that it even needs to be said now is indicating how fast they are advancing.
They were underachieving for 2 centuries, ceasing to kill their own citizens by millions and imprisoning anybody who tried to think for themselves is enough to grow if you did so for a long time. But it does not make you a new hegemon. I highly doubt they can preserve their pace of growth for next few decades without significant changes to the regime and liberalization. Once they return to the mean - they will very l…
"Demographics is destiny" also comes to mind.
Note how the era of "Japan Inc." during the 1980s was also the time when the post-war baby boom population were in their 30s-40s (i.e. peak productive worker population). As this cohort has aged and are now in retirement, Japan's economic performance has tailed off.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...
If you look at the Chinese population pyramid, we could already be at the point of maximum Chinese economic growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...
From the geopolitical standpoint, this may also explain why China and Russia have become more belligerent - they will lack sufficient numbers of young fighting aged men in the next few decades.
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You've fallen for the Fundamental Attribution Error. It's not HN; it's the world that's driving this. 1. GPT-4-grade AI is a genuine, holy-smokes innovation that is already driving massive changes in education (universities are having to redesign all their writing assignments,) entertainment (SAG-AFTRA strike,) and the tech industry (the sudden disappearance of thousands of jobs, and the concomitant socioeconomic dem…
I don't know, I haven't really seen the same level of interest from my "normie" friends that I've seen among the HN-adjacent crowd. None of them seem to be aware of LK-99, let alone care about it. Meanwhile, the GPT hype has worn off, and on that note, none of them seem to be aware that there's a difference between GPT-4 and ChatGPT. The former is this vague, nearly non-existent thing. They're aware of the actors/wri…
Implicit in this counterargument is the idea that judging what is of genuine importance is a matter of opinion, as though we could get a sense of what to pay attention to by polling a large enough sample set.
It is not. Expertise matters. Who is interested in the topic matters.
Put another way: from the Fundamental Attribution Error alone, it does not follow that identity is completely meaningless; it does, however imply that anyone with such-and-such a set of concerns and knowledge would behave in such-and-such a way under such-and-such conditions.
And those conditions obtain. And so, with a flourish: I give you, 2023 "Superconduct my clean-air-monitoring AI, please!" Hackernews
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People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.
Computer components already have gold in them, and they are already recycled for gold.
For example, paper recycling is profitable when centralized (barely), but even that's with most the pipeline subsidized, and it's not profitable to the degree that people are stealing paper to turn in because it's worth the effort.
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I want to believe. After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use—using it to create superconductors that can power energy weapons we can use to kill each other. ♫ It's the circle of life ♫
People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.
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I think them waiting until there’s more research is preferable to them coming out and making random claims which pan out not to be true.
I think it's more likely that the bulk of folks don't fully comprehend why this would be so important. I would imagine alot of reporters look at the things they could write about and the choices are politics, war, polarizing news, or nerds nerding hard trying to prove other nerds right or wrong, and it just doesn't make the cut.
They may want to cover it and just have a hard time explaining it to their editor, but I think "we can afford to wait until a peer reviewed paper comes out" is more likely.
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Now I'm imagining what history would have looked like if the alchemists had indeed stumbled upon a floating lead apatite sample a few centuries ago...
Good idea! They wouldn't have been able to do any applications without a voltaic cell, and it would have been a novelty. Like gunpowder in ancient China.
https://acoup.blog/2021/12/17/collections-fortification-part... Goes into this in more detail for a couple paragraphs.
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I think them waiting until there’s more research is preferable to them coming out and making random claims which pan out not to be true.
Genuinely a laugh-out-loud take on mainstream science reporting.
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People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.
I don't think the material is very ductile so I'm not sure that you'd be able to easily run a cable like copper/aluminum/steel transmission lines
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People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.
It would be sub-10%* gold content. We're talking about gold doping, specifically substitution in the Pb(1) site, not an alloy. ETA: I was off by an order of magnitude (originally I said sub-1%) because the doping is extensive, and the mass of the lead/gold is a dominant fraction of the total. The formula given in the paper is (subscripts in brackets): Pb[10−x]Cu[x](PO4)[6]O with 0.9 Similarly for Au we would have Pb[…
