281–290 of 293 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Provide with what money? Every major country is an ocean of debt
Actually tax the rich?
“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal. It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with. But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead. It’s quite something to stop and thin…
> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. > And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer…
This part I agree with, but is also very easy to fix (use a very old UI system, e.g. direct port of Apple's HyperCard).
On the hardware front, the only thing Trek Padds had that real life can't really do is that Trek's power cells had an energy density on par with "let's say an atomic battery had a way to dial the decay rate up and down at will and were not also a horrifying source of neutron radiation".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow. > What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. The writers were surpr…
> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that’s just asking for trouble. You’d never know where anything is or what iPad has what or if it’s the current version. Not to mention the charging situation and all the e-waste. > The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers Under appreciated by whom? It’s one of their defining fea…
A tree falling in a forest with nobody to hear it: if it makes a "sound", you think "sound" is the vibration of air; if it does not, you think "sound" is the qualia.
"Understanding" likewise.
> The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology.
1. "Execute self-diagnosis script" doesn't require self-reflection or anything else like that, just following a command. I'd be surprised if any of the big AI labs have failed to create some kind of internal LLM-model-diagnosis script, and I'd be surprised if zero of the staff in each of them has considered making the API to that script reachable from a development version of the model under training. No reason for normal people like thou and I to have access to such scripts.
2. Not that the absence says much. If humans could self-diagnose our minds reliably, we wouldn't need therapists. This is basically "computer, send yourself to the therapist and tell me what the therapist said about you".
> When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.
Those computers (and the ships themselves) went wrong on such a regular basis on the shows, that IRL they'd be the butts of more jokes than the Russian navy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. > And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer…
> They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow. > What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. The writers were surpr…
Depends which Star Trek series you are talking about; early TNG routinely had complex request for new research/analysis/hypothesis generation and evaluation; if it came out today we’d accuse Starfleet of being infected with vibe crewing...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that’s just asking for trouble. You’d never know where anything is or what iPad has what or if it’s the current version. Not to mention the charging situation and all the e-waste. > The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers Under appreciated by whom? It’s one of their defining fea…
> Would we? What for? Why would we need reams of iPads on our desks? To use like we'd use paper. > Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean That is very much up to debate at this point. But for practical purposes in context described here, they do. > and don’t know what the right answer is. They're not supposed to. This…
In fairness, half the time the Trek computer does something weird, it only makes sense if there's no memory/process isolation and it's all one uniform blob of compute. Made sense in the 60s where Spock's chess app losing to him was useful evidence that the CCTV recordings had been faked, not so sensible in 2025 when the ship stops being able to navigate due to the excess system demand from the experimental holodeck.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would we? What for? Why would we need reams of iPads on our desks? To use like we'd use paper. > Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean That is very much up to debate at this point. But for practical purposes in context described here, they do. > and don’t know what the right answer is. They're not supposed to. This…
> They're not supposed to. This is LLM use 101 > (…) > Obviously, Star Trek's computer isn't just one big LLM. That would be a stupid design. Or, in other words, we don’t have Star Trek’s computer like originally claimed, and our current closest solution isn’t the way to get it.
My computer can both run an LLM (albeit a bad one, only has 16 GB of RAM) and also run other things at the same time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Dialysis is hell. I've seen this sentiment before but I've been unable to find an explanation why. Searching around it's noted as relatively painless. Can anyone explain why it's so difficult?
I've a kidney transplant patient and also have been on dialysis previously. The pain can come from fluid removal and electrolyte imbalances during the dialysis. The fluid removal is important because if you kidney fails, at some point you stop urinating. The in-clinic dialysis process is also compressing the 24 hour a day function of your kidney into a 3-4 hour process typically every other day. So if you remove flui…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any time I haven’t heard about a tech for ten years I assume it didn’t work. I think I first heard of this stuff around ten years ago. At the time I think they were focused on kidneys. But those have a lot of complex plumbing. As an outsider, who is either missing a mountain of context, or not so close to the problem they can’t see it, I would assume a better tack would be growing ghost arteries for bypasses and aneu…
The article I cited is from 2022. At that time, the principal scientist had left the academia and was working to commercialize it. So I'm guessing it's still within your decade threshold? Besides, perhaps that threshold should be longer under the current circumstances. One of the greatest medical advancement of the recent times is the mRNA vaccine technology. But it's true origin is in the 1970s. They were solving nu…
It’s a big problem, but still seems like they’re swinging for the fences when they could save people in the short term while working on organs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article I cited is from 2022. At that time, the principal scientist had left the academia and was working to commercialize it. So I'm guessing it's still within your decade threshold? Besides, perhaps that threshold should be longer under the current circumstances. One of the greatest medical advancement of the recent times is the mRNA vaccine technology. But it's true origin is in the 1970s. They were solving nu…
Looking at bibliographies, it seems like a lot of the research for decellularization was 2011, 2013, and a handful after. So they were still working on getting a clean substrate while working on how to fill it back in. It’s a big problem, but still seems like they’re swinging for the fences when they could save people in the short term while working on organs.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/spinach-leaf-transfo...