Wish he’d elaborate on the tools model. Article basically amounts to „he does ai magic with his computer“
A Young Man Used AI to Build a Nuclear Fusor
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: A Young Man Used AI to Build a Nuclear Fusor
#62The elephant in the room is that this young man is indeed doing the right thing, he is just too poor to buy the right tools. How do you think the "real scientists(TM)" work : they use AI tools too. Do you really think you can design a tokamak Stellarator with pen and paper ? What good engineers do is click the "topological optimization" button on their physical simulator, and then they build the machine according to…
> Do you really think you can design a tokamak Stellarator with pen and paper ?
No, but you can draw a very nice strawman on pen an paper.
> The "topological optimization" button on their physical simulator,
A engineering tool for topological optimization is similar to "AI tools" only in the sense that a big amount of numbers are crunched together. Saying that they "are the same" is like saying that a shark is the same as a kangaroo.
Besides, for tokamak and others, I doubt that off-the-shelf tools were enough for them. I would bet that they had to build their own tools anyway.
> Do you really think deep-seek can't use your COMSOL or Ansys multiphysics tool
A monkey can "use" those tools, as long as they have bright buttons and he's conditioned to press them for food. That doesn't mean that I would trust the results it comes with.
> but let your local AI play for a day with a MHD simulator ... and the sky is not the limit.
The limit is still death, which can come much much faster than the sky.
Re: A Young Man Used AI to Build a Nuclear Fusor
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think we seek to credit the source for reasons that are not clear... We don’t really do this because there’s no concept of ownership of food to that degree. Cooking is not a great comparison, and it betrays your point more than anything. If you cook something particularly impressive or complex, people will almost universally ask about the recipe and where it came from. Origination is actually a pretty common topi…
Some fine restaurants here are very proud to tell you the meat comes from such and such farm, the vegetables from such farm by this people and the wine from this vineyard. That's even on the menu.
Here in Switzerland, even burger joints have this for all major ingredients (meat, potato, veggies, bun made by really local bakers etc.). Heck, even McDonald has it, which is the worst tasting & looking on the market, and not necessarily cheapest.
If population cares about it enough companies adapt, even if 50km down the road in another country they sell lower quality with same name (EU generally is less strict re food quality, but both tower high above what US FDA permits).
Re: A Young Man Used AI to Build a Nuclear Fusor
#64>HudZah was told that he could be killed by the high voltage, X-ray radiation and possibly other things. This only made him more excited. “My whole intention was, ‘If I fuck up, I’m dead, and this is why I should do it,’” he said. It sounds like he got exactly what he wanted to. >I must admit, though, that the thing that scared me most about HudZah was that he seemed to be living in a different technological universe…
Wow, I've never heard anything like this before. Is this really a thing? People disappearing because they're so deep down the rabbit hole with AI and don't need to talk to anyone?
I know a number of people who were building AI systems that either completely dropped off the face of the earth or show up once every few months with an update then disappear again. Granted the majority of them are perverts whose main use case is mixed reality wifus, but still.
I can't exactly blame them.
In the latest furor over deepseek r1 the conversation online was _substantially_ worse than what you'd get from feeding the original paper into r1 and talking to it.
This was the first time where I genuinely wondered what the point of reading groups, message boards and similar is. A model that you can run locally for $6,000 at 20tokens/s beat however many thousands of people because it actually spent the time to read what it talked about.
Re: A Young Man Used AI to Build a Nuclear Fusor
#65Why use AI to make good content, when you can take unremarkable content and add the string "AI" to pretend it's interesting. You could have just done an old-school web search for this! https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Build-a-Fusion-Reactor-... https://makezine.com/projects/nuclear-fusor/ https://fusor.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=3247 The "artificially intelligent" aspect is trivial.
He seems to be following the Instructable rather closely. Or the LLM was following the Instructable.
See fusor.net.[1] It's unlikely this rig is doing any fusion. It's just a plasma created by high voltage, like a neon lamp. He's not putting in deuterium gas. He's not detecting neutrons. Most of the people who try to do this get the blue glow, but not neutrons.
The main hazard is then the high voltage.
These things are not energy producers. It takes about a billion times as much energy input as comes out in neutrons. They can be useful neutron sources for imaging and research.
Re: A Young Man Used AI to Build a Nuclear Fusor
#66>HudZah was told that he could be killed by the high voltage, X-ray radiation and possibly other things. This only made him more excited. “My whole intention was, ‘If I fuck up, I’m dead, and this is why I should do it,’” he said. It sounds like he got exactly what he wanted to. >I must admit, though, that the thing that scared me most about HudZah was that he seemed to be living in a different technological universe…
Wow, I've never heard anything like this before. Is this really a thing? People disappearing because they're so deep down the rabbit hole with AI and don't need to talk to anyone?
Some people are... weirder for the lack of better word than one can imagine. We always project the world around us on our experiences and view of the world, and always (at least by default) project other people and their actions as those done by us, judge by our values etc.
Suffice to say, that's not how you will understand behavior of others, especially in non-trivial situations, other cultures and so on. Just accept people are different and you may very well never understand how they see rest of the world and others.
Re: A Young Man Used AI to Build a Nuclear Fusor
#67Re: A Young Man Used AI to Build a Nuclear Fusor
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s hyperbole. The way we use to dumpster dive through Google, SO, etc, now we’re just adding LLMs into the mix. Same shit, different browser tab.
I dont think its hyperbole. Im young and I have friends my age that also use these AI tools in ways that seem borderline nauseating to me. A friend of mine built a whole polished project page for his app with cursor, and when I watched him for a bit I was surprised how fast he interacted with cursor, claude and chatgpt. Of course it wasnt perfect and I cringe at the idea of creating a project with tons of AI generate…
Take it from someone’s who’s been around for a while - app templating, boilerplate generators, etc have been around since antiquity. It’s just an iteration on that. This isn’t Neo plugged into the matrix, don’t mistake evolution with revolution.
Re: A Young Man Used AI to Build a Nuclear Fusor
#69Why use AI to make good content, when you can take unremarkable content and add the string "AI" to pretend it's interesting. You could have just done an old-school web search for this! https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Build-a-Fusion-Reactor-... https://makezine.com/projects/nuclear-fusor/ https://fusor.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=3247 The "artificially intelligent" aspect is trivial.
This project seems complex enough that following a guide is not enough, and you will likely have to swap unavailable with equivalent ones, for which you need at least a basic understanding of what you are doing. HudZah is seemly using the AI as a search engine for the reference materials he collected for the project, which is a legit use of the technology.
his fusor actually looks much less scrappy than all of the ones linked, with proper vacuum fittings, etc., so I'm not sure I agree
Re: A Young Man Used AI to Build a Nuclear Fusor
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, I've never heard anything like this before. Is this really a thing? People disappearing because they're so deep down the rabbit hole with AI and don't need to talk to anyone?
I know a number of people who were building AI systems that either completely dropped off the face of the earth or show up once every few months with an update then disappear again. Granted the majority of them are perverts whose main use case is mixed reality wifus, but still. I can't exactly blame them. In the latest furor over deepseek r1 the conversation online was _substantially_ worse than what you'd get from f…
comment sections where no one read anything but the headline having the same shallow discussions over and over again are a real thing, but I would wager to say that feeding an AI the paper and then having a discussion with it is just a different kind of shallow. You might as well just read the paper, the AI won't have any insights. The solution isn't AI, the solution is not talking to people who are substantially less informed than you and not really interested in becoming more informed. Hacker news is sometimes good and sometimes not, it depends heavily on the topic