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Electronic Structure of LK-99

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Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99

#271

Post by xorbax »

odyssey7 wrote: post #219
cthalupa wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Heat death of the universe is going to take an incomprehensibly large amount of time. Like, 10^106 years. The universe is A LOT younger than that.

As Hawking once explained, “Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang.” When cosmologists talk about the universe and its age, it seems to me, as a non-cosmologist, that they’re using terms of art related to their models. Hawking’s explanation deduces that if the observable universe expanded from a singulari…

It's not "personification", it's the universe tending toward entropy increasing overall. I don't think I've heard anyone claim that heat death "should have happened" as an argument against it, or what it's supposed to mean in reference to the original post.

There is a singularity in Andromeda, so I don't know why one forming matters

Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99

#272

Post by WithinReason »

refulgentis wrote: post #45
sheepscreek wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note: I am deeply disappointed by how OpenAI has managed to continually dumb down ChatGPT. I’m sure the shortage of NVIDIA H100s and the demand for their APIs shooting through the roof has something to do with it. Perhaps they’ve switched to a quantized model? Who knows. And yes, LLaMA 2 is awesome. Progress is being made. But it’s slowed down. The novelty’s worn off. Now we’re lacking some fundamental p…

It's not dumber. You can verify this on their models with any prompt you ran at 0.0 when it first came out, I did. It's the exact same model run the same exact way. They've repeatedly confirmed this.

It is and it's documented:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09009

Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99

#273

Post by pjc50 »

jacquesm wrote: post #209
jeffbee wrote: post #16

The most interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that the room-temperature superconductor people and the generative-LLMs-are-God people draw on the same limited global pool of credulity, such that HN cannot be flooded with both ChatGPT worship and superconductor speculation at the same time.

Jeffbee in the 1947 edition: The most interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that the solid state electronics people and the rocket fanatics people draw on the same limited global pool of credulity, such that TinkererNews cannot be flooded with both transistor worship and moon travel speculation at the same time. Seriously: if it doesn't interest you, you could simply refrain from commenting and even reading. This…

I think we're all horribly burned out by pop-science. How many battery "breakthroughs" have we seen on here? Meanwhile what actually works is incremental improvement in lithium battery manufacturing.

The 1947 Golden Age SF is interesting because the "rocket fanatics" peaked in 1969 and humans haven't gone back to the moon, let alone conquered space. While the transistor succeeded to an extent nobody imagined due to the magic of compounding improvements.

> You see a stupid silly black fleck floating over a magnet

Meanwhile over in the AI "optimism" channel people are telling us that AI will be able to produce videos of anything that are indistinguishable from reality, and that we should all learn never to believe video evidence again.

I'm still very much in the "don't know" camp on the superconductor, but what I do know is that it's not worth getting excited until we know it's real.

Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99

#274

Post by soVeryTired »

hcks wrote: post #247
appplication wrote: post #20

This ongoing research saga pretty much the most excited I’ve been about anything since before Covid. It feels like the science equivalent of watching your favorite sports team on an epic rise towards winning a world championship. Even if this turns out to flop, I hope history remembers the original authors favorably. They really did find something that by all accounts could plausibly be a room temp superconductor. An…

This is sad man. You’re getting excited at manufactured hype on twitter

I think it's the videos of levitating samples that people are getting excited about. At this point it's either outright fraud (unlikely), an interesting materials science discovery that isn't superconductivity (most likely IMO), or superconductivity itself (still unlikely, but the balance of evidence is shifting).

If it happens to be the latter, it's a huge scientific leap forward.

Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99

#275

Post by robocat »

scrlk wrote: post #240
qiqitori wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lead free solder has been much more damaging for the environment because of all the e-waste it created. We're getting quite off-topic here (I guess I should have used different examples), but I would be interested where you got that information from. Most consumer electronics devices do not break prematurely, and especially not due to soldering issues. Source: I buy most electronics second-hand, I regularly repair…

Back in the 00s, the transition to lead free solder was blamed for the high failure rate of BGA packages found in consoles and GPUs. One of the theories at the time was that the poor thermal design of these devices (the most notable example being the Xbox 360) lead to cracks in the solder balls after repeated thermal cycling.

> poor thermal design

Also tin whiskers are a definite problem.

https://www.google.com/search?q=lead-free+whiskers&tbm=isch

https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/tin-whiskers-ar...

Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99

#276

Post by feoren »

swalsh wrote: post #95
jeffbee wrote: post #16

The most interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that the room-temperature superconductor people and the generative-LLMs-are-God people draw on the same limited global pool of credulity, such that HN cannot be flooded with both ChatGPT worship and superconductor speculation at the same time.

It's so hard not to be crazy excited about the future. The past few months are proving to be an absolute breakout for the literal human race. So far we've seen: 1. in Dec 2022 We saw a fusion breakthrough seeing a net gain in energy 2. In March GPT-4 was released, which seems to be a seminal breakthrough in AI, and maybe of our first glimpse in what could become an AGI. 3. In May we find out apparently our government…

From my perspective, LK-99 is by far the most likely to be an actual serious technological breakthrough. If it's real, it would be a breakthrough on the level of the discovery of electricity, the lens, the transistor, or the laser. One of those era-defining bottlenecks in the Civilization technology tree.

GPT-4 is a nice iterative improvement over previous work, and a culmination of decades of research. It's not anywhere near an AGI and it's close to the limit of what we can accomplish with our current understanding of AI and our current availability of good data. We're near the top of the sigmoid curve on this one; new advances are going to come from specializing and integrating these models, not just making bigger ones.

The fusion "breakthrough" is seriously underwhelming when you look at the total power in/out of the whole plant, not just a tiny tunnel-visioned window of the fusion reaction itself (ignoring power of magnetic confinement and the laser pulse), and even more when you think about how much tritium humanity has ever created. We're just not seeing what we need here and the net power output is still deeply in the negative.

Lol aliens.

My point, to both you and GP, is that it's quite possible to have very different levels of optimism for these recent revelations, and it's not hypocritical to do so. Details and context matter. Dozens of materials science Ph.D.s saying "holy shit this looks like the real deal guys" vs. one guy saying "someone told me there were hidden stocks of blinker fluid that I wasn't allowed to see" just does not engender the same confidence levels.

Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99

#277

Post by [deleted] »

fouc wrote: post #201
tavavex wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exact opposite for me - with stuff like AI tech, I'm a lot more familiar with the subject matter than the happenings in the material sciences, so it allows me to be more confidently optimistic about computer-related advancements. Even if my education is still insufficient to grasp the full extent of new tech, I can at least try to understand it conceptually. On the other hand, the LK-99 news seem very promising, but…

> a lot of professionals in the field are still iffy That seems like a strange perception. I'm seeing the opposite.

[deleted]

Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99

#278

Post by soulofmischief »

robocat wrote: post #266
soulofmischief wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't mesh with the daily insights I gain from asking GPT-4 novel questions and receiving answers that integrate a much wider knowledge corpus that I have in my head. You can argue all language is a form of search, but that is missing completely what transformer models are bringing to the table, and not just within language.

Injecting random noise into your brain and finding intelligent connections says you are smart. Your comment says nothing about whether we are “near AGI”, only that we find images within Rorschach blobs (as a metaphor for GPT4 generated text).

The context of my comment should make it clear that I am responding to this

> AI today is a glorified search algorithm.

and not the comment about AGI, given as that is a pedantic argument I have no wish engaging in.

> only that we find images within Rorschach blobs

I'm sorry, I'm not sure you understand what GPT-4 offers. Things like generating novel code to solve a novel problem are not finding "images within Rorschach blobs". I think you should sit down with the technology and explore with a more open mind.

Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99

#279

Post by samhuk »

jeffbee wrote: post #16

The most interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that the room-temperature superconductor people and the generative-LLMs-are-God people draw on the same limited global pool of credulity, such that HN cannot be flooded with both ChatGPT worship and superconductor speculation at the same time.

I have to unfortunately agree with the sibling comment (although it was a little too verbose for its point).

If, to you, the most interesting thing about LK99 and the developments thereof is tweets and internet forum drama about it, then that speaks more about you than anything to do with anything else.

If you don't have anything to add to the conversation, then just don't add?

Re: Electronic Structure of LK-99

#280

Post by rvnx »

weinzierl wrote: post #238
bluecoconut wrote: post #12

I got my PhD studying band structure of high-tc superconductors (experimentalist, ARPES). These Cu d-d interactions right at the fermi energy give me huge hope. Feels very familiar to other superconductors (re: all the cuprates). (Note: I specifically worked in a lab that was measuring a lot of the d-wave character / gap-energies of various superconductors) All in all, I'm now much more bullish on LK-99 being real su…

This is probably a very stupid question, but why is simply measuring resistance not enough to conclusively prove that it is a superconductor. I mean, isn't zero resistance the defining property?

Just guessing: I would say not enough because the sample is extremely small and there is chance that the electrons jump from each sides of the probes, skipping the sample ? (like a short-circuit) + the fact that the probes themselves are not superconductor, so there is a natural accepted tolerance in the measures (claimed to be due to the probes)
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