Wednesday, May 17
Daily News Stuff 17 May 2023
Hot And Cold Edition
Hot And Cold Edition
Top Story
- High-temperature superconductors are proving to be as elusive as cold fusion. After a paper was published in nominally reputable scientific journal Nature announcing the creation of room-temperature superconductors (though not STP), other researchers went to work to replicate the results. (Ars Technica)
Spoiler: The results failed to replicate.
Tech News
- Why are Gigabyte's Aorus models so much cheaper than their Aero models?
- The Framework Laptop 13 is good. (The Verge)
The 2023 Intel model is shipping and it delivers better performance and better battery life than the 2022 model. I'm still waiting for the AMD version which should deliver better performance, better battery life, and better graphics.
- The .zip domain is kind of shit. (Bleeping Computer)
Here's the problem:
1. Someone sends you an email telling you to download payroll.zip from the company website and open it.
2. Gmail sees that as a URL and automatically turns it into a link.
3. You click on the link and it downloads a zip file.
4. You open the zip file and your computer melts, because it actually got it from the malicious payroll.zip website.
Two innocuous ideas put together equals one disaster.
- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, appeared before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to ask the government to regulate his competitors out of existence. (Axios)
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called it "historic" that a company was coming to Congress pleading for regulation.
Oh, do get fucked, Senator. It's been happening at least as long as there was a Senate, back to ancient Rome.
- Australia isn't a real country anyway: The Australian government has asked Twitter how it plans to stifle free speech when the Stifling Team has all been fired. (The Register)
Twitter allegedly said, Australia who?
- Zoom plans to implement Anthropic's chatbot, Claude, to make meetings even more insufferable. (The Verge)
Could we not?
Disclaimer: I mean, it seems like it would all be much simpler if we would just... Not.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:04 PM
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Re: The superconductor research: I don't know this guy and his lab, so I don't know the whole backstory, but this seems like a strange bit of research to go into "burn-the-witch" mode over.
1. We know that other materials superconduct at higher than usual temperatures when under extreme pressures. (100s of GPa, momentarily produced in high-explosive experiements or in diamond anvil cells.)
2. These are hard to reach conditions. It's *extremely* hard to get an experiment right if the conditions are hard to reach, or the equipment is unreliable. Or the material is complicated.
3. Knowing 1, we should be *encouraging* people to stick weird things under extremely high pressures and look for signs of high-temperature superconductivity. *We know this is a thing*. If this guy is wrong about this material and these conditions, he's not violating the sanctity of the temple of The Science, he's just wrong.
Testing materials for properties we have reason to expect might be out there is not an adversarial process. This isn't Elizabeth Holmes falsifying people's medical test results (and even that - you have to wonder why they settled on the "one scapegoat" out of the entire rogue's gallery.) This isn't even cold fusion.
If people knew more about how science actually worked, they would know that most people have to work for years to get an experiment right, and a lot of people are wrong about a lot of things *all the time*.
1. We know that other materials superconduct at higher than usual temperatures when under extreme pressures. (100s of GPa, momentarily produced in high-explosive experiements or in diamond anvil cells.)
2. These are hard to reach conditions. It's *extremely* hard to get an experiment right if the conditions are hard to reach, or the equipment is unreliable. Or the material is complicated.
3. Knowing 1, we should be *encouraging* people to stick weird things under extremely high pressures and look for signs of high-temperature superconductivity. *We know this is a thing*. If this guy is wrong about this material and these conditions, he's not violating the sanctity of the temple of The Science, he's just wrong.
Testing materials for properties we have reason to expect might be out there is not an adversarial process. This isn't Elizabeth Holmes falsifying people's medical test results (and even that - you have to wonder why they settled on the "one scapegoat" out of the entire rogue's gallery.) This isn't even cold fusion.
If people knew more about how science actually worked, they would know that most people have to work for years to get an experiment right, and a lot of people are wrong about a lot of things *all the time*.
Posted by: madrocketsci at Friday, May 19 2023 05:16 AM (hRoyQ)
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