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Discovery Loop

discoveryloop.com

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Re: Discovery Loop

#251

Post by jiveturkey »

guessmyname wrote: post #92
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the salary (on mobile). Isn't there a law stating it must be added?

Only California employers with 15 or more employees have to post a pay range (Senate Bill 1162 [1], effective Jan 1, 2023) [2][3]. Discovery Loop employs only four people (that we know of), so it isn’t required to disclose a salary range in its job posts, of which there is only one [4]. [1] https://hr.ucmerced.edu/hr-units/talent-acquisition/senate-b... [2] https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/2023/03/pay-transparency-…

It's too bad they would follow the letter of the law, and not state the salary anyway. I see that as a negative indicator, regardless of offer size.

Re: Discovery Loop

#252

Post by nwienert »

sejje wrote: post #247
beloch wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make many bold promises, but their core goal is neatly encapsulated on the website: "Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today." This is the same goal as every other AI company out there. Automate away the human employees and let a small number of "people" (no…

Why shouldn't they? Also, wouldn't anyone with half a brain use the human-free system to produce another human-free system that was no longer controlled by the "small number of 'people'"?

Life's unfair, avoiding power concentration is a decent principle.

If you grow up in the right place at the right time, how much should you be in control of everyone else's life?

Re: Discovery Loop

#253

Post by lovlar »

embedding-shape wrote: post #220
lovlar wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 9. Reverse Engineer the Brain For what purpose? To replace humans? To make social media more addictive? To master brain manipulation?

> For what purpose? To understand, same reason you reverse engineer anything. Doesn't have to have a further goal than that, understanding the brain better helps in so many ways. But like most technology, obviously can be used for bad too. Should we just skip researching some topics then?

I'm all for alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders, but yes, some topics are worth skipping research on. For example chemical/biological/nuclear weapons, human cloning, and unethical gene modification.

I just like to challenge myself, as an engineer, with the idea that not everything has to be engineered and optimized. What if we simply left some things unexplored and mysterious, and trusted nature and our own human capabilities?

A better way of alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders might just be to focus on societal factors.

Re: Discovery Loop

#254

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

woeirua wrote: post #248
vanviegen wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! But if science is bottlenecked by funding, making it cheaper might help?

Not really. Grad students are already essentially working for free.

How many lavishly-paid deans and bureaucrats and administrators are employed for each grad student?

Re: Discovery Loop

#256

Post by xnx »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #170
tbrownaw wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first. I would think the claim in the second sentence would only be relevant in case of the inverse of the claim in the first sentence.

> I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first. Point 1 on the list is "Make Solar Energy Economical". Solar is economical today - mostly due to China investing (and heavily subsidising) in solar for the past couple of decades; but compare to the US where certain particular big-businesses (oil companies, mostly) were instead cynically funding disinformation efforts and getting into bed with the Republi…

Improving panels or batteries (e.g. through automated material discovery) would make solar energy economical in a lot more regions.

Re: Discovery Loop

#257

Post by paganel »

tmoertel wrote: post #145
paganel wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this somewhere on that page: > securing cyberspace, which has clear military implications, at least in today's age.

Do you believe that securing cyberspace is problematic solely because it has military implications? I mean, everything has military implications. That fact doesn't imply, however, that those things are bad for society.

> I mean, everything has military implications

In essence I agree with that, it's just that cyber-security has particularly been the focus of recent military discourse.

Just yesterday I was reading an article here in the Romanian mainstream media about how Constanta Port's (our biggest port at the Black Sea) IT infrastructure has been under constant cyber attacks (presumably by the Russians) so as to hinder the export of Ukrainian grains through it. And this is just one of the many such (relatively) recent examples.

Re: Discovery Loop

#258

Post by xnx »

Arainach wrote: post #189
holmesworcester wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar is not (yet) economical for reliable, year-round electricity because of storage costs. China coal use is growing again this year.

Solar is profitable to install at both industrial and home scale in most areas. You're moving the goalposts.

It would be even better if it had ROI in 2 years instead of 10 for northern installs.

Re: Discovery Loop

#259

Post by blahblaher »

frollogaston wrote: post #238
jarpschope wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you have an updated view of energy production. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/20/how-globa... In the chart for section 3, how many countries have seen their share of electricity being generated by fossil fuels increase in the last 5 years? Only Canada. Take a look at the charts for Pakistan, Australia, Nigeria, and China for the last few years. Pretty dramatic drops for fossil fuels gen…

They cherrypicked 15 countries. And still, some of those still had renewables decrease since 2000 like Nigeria, others saw an increase but it's still way less than fossil, and others like China are heavily subsidizing solar. I don't doubt that it's economical for individuals when the govt is subsidizing it.

Look at Australia then. Millions of homes already using solar yo basically power their homes for free most of the time. Yes it was subsidized, like oil was and still is. Solar without subsidies is already miles better than oil and gas.

Re: Discovery Loop

#260

Post by xnx »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #85
cjbarber wrote: post #18

From Jeff's twitter post: > Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise…

Sandbox 2.0 But also, solar power is already economical.

In some regions, but it would be great if it was economical in cloudy Seattle and not just the sunbelt
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