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No, I think the conjecture is more that people from the surrounding areas could be claiming residency in the affected area to receive the payouts, even though they normally live elsewhere.

Edison Motors is working on a system like this. They're looking to sell kits for retrofitting it onto pickup trucks, & a larger scale semi truck cab version for use with logging trucks. It looks great in their videos, although I'm not sure if they're selling to the public yet - probably a ways to go before it's really mass produced.

IMO both usages are correct, although yours is probably more common. 'Dubious' here means something like questionable/uncertain & it can apply either way: The distinction can be 'questionable' in terms of whether it's something to be proud of, or in terms of whether it's even true in the first place.

Nice article, although I think this must be a typo: "Despite the fact that a supernova has 1045 times as much energy as our tin blasts, the same math describes the evolution of both types of explosions."

Maybe they meant 10^45 times as much energy?

The carriers aren't sailing around alone - they're escorted by a whole fleet (plus air patrol) that will intercept the drone launching vehicle at multiple dozen nautical miles range. Smaller quadcopter drones won't even get close to catching the carrier (which can travel over 40 kts while evading) before their batteries die. And even if a few hundred got through, how much damage can they really do? I'd imagine the flight decks can be patched quickly, although some radar equipment & any jets parked at the time of the attack would probably be lost.

It's definitely a concern as part of a larger attack, but I don't think a quadcopter drone swarm alone is likely to sink a carrier or leave it combat ineffective in the long term.

Doesn't this vary for different cruising speed targets? I thought jets & ducted fans were more efficient above 400 kts or so, while (non ducted) propellers were more efficient below maybe 300 kts. But I'm mostly thinking in terms of turboprop vs. turbofan designs - not 100% sure if it applies the same way for electric types, although I assume it probably would.

A lot depends on the actual reactor design.

I was thinking more of large scale D-T fusion, e.g. the tokamak design, which requires breeding tritium & is expected to create a lot of neutron activated waste. The tritium is especially concerning, as it's roughly as deadly as polonium-210 & highly bioavailable in the form of super heavy water.

You're probably right for smaller aneutronic designs like Helion's. If they can actually be made to work, they'll be much safer.

Modern fission designs mitigate meltdown concerns well enough that I'm not sure the safety & security around a fusion plant would actually be any better/cheaper, although public sentiment may be enough of an advantage. Tritium & neutron activated metals are dangerous enough to require keeping the traditional nuclear plant safeguards IMO. As far as proliferation concerns go, I don't see any reason you couldn't breed plutonium in the neutron flux of a fusion reactor, & the tritium is clearly viable for boosted warheads.

Annual CO2 emissions are around 37 Gt, so making 81 Gt of conventional explosives would be an absurdly large undertaking & somewhat counterproductive due to associated GHG emissions.

Wouldn't the "surrounding materials" we're worried about here be the rock itself? The Tsar Bomba was proportionately the cleanest nuke ever, but I thought that also relied on it being an air burst. The Sedan test (creating the Sedan crater using a 70%+ clean fusion warhead) released more fallout than any other US test & I thought that was because it was done in the ground at a depth where reaction products could escape. But you're saying with a clean design & boron based neutron absorbing buffer layer, we could limit neutron activation of the surrounding rock? That does sound plausible, although I don't know what it would actually take & I'm doubtful their estimated $10B budget would hold.

I'm not convinced about their hand-waved explanation of radiation safety here:

> The long-term effects of global radiation will impact humans and will cause loss of life, but this increased global radiation is “just a drop in the bucket”. Every year, we emit more radiation from coal power plants and we have already detonated over 2000 nuclear devices. Adding one more bomb should have minimal impact on the world.

I don't think "eh, what's one more detonation?" is persuasive when you're talking about a device more than 10x the size of all previous ones put together, being set off in direct contact with the seabed. Most of the fallout from nuclear testing came from the handful of ground burst tests that weren't fully confined, so I'm skeptical that "try to make it a clean fusion design" would actually be enough here. It would be cool if that were solvable though.

Yes & two quail would be even easier

Trains don't need wings, so they're a lot easier to build tunnels for..

I was thinking we probably can't watch the whole sky in maximum detail all at once, so in practice we'll miss most possible detections.

It seems like they're calculating the farthest distances where it would be theoretically possible for aliens with Earth level tech to detect us, for various different ways of detection. I'm curious about a related question: At what distance would we likely have been able to detect 'ourselves' with current technology? Ie. if there was another Earth 100 or 1000 light years away, would we have seen it by now? (Assume they are x years ahead so the signals have had time to propagate).

I think it may be a relatively short distance, which could have implications for resolving the Fermi paradox, but I haven't seen any definitive estimates & I'm curious to learn more.

I think LLMs are getting us closer to AGI in the same way that Madame Tussauds wax museum got us closer to human cloning

The "calories in" part is usually understood to mean "metabolically available calories from food (& drink) in a human or other animal's diet". Calories from heat, electricity, gasoline, etc., wouldn't count.

There can be some edge cases around water retention, foods an individual happens to metabolize more/less effectively than average, & practical considerations like negative-satiety foods (things like candy or beer that contain calories but end up making you more hungry after a short while). Metabolic & activity level changes are another confounding variable one might need to track. But overall the CICO model gives accurate predictions for weight change in most cases as far as I know. I pay attention to my diet & weight & it's been perfectly reliable for me (although maybe that makes me biased to think it's a better model than it really is -- sorry if that's the case)

Anyway, you'll need to provide some evidence other than a straw-man/non-sequitur about drinking gasoline if you want to convince me CICO is a "myth"

Of course everyone should be allowed to use as large a truck with as bright of lights as they want[1] on their own land. Likewise, excessively bright or high-mounted lights should be illegal to use on public roads. High beams are fine if (& only if) there's no other traffic close enough to be harmed by the bright lights. These rules are not an onerous burden on anyone & we need them to maintain safety & civility on the roads!

[1] within reason, not to the point that it blinds aircraft, neighbors, etc.

I expect housing & behavioral adaptations would carry the most weight. E.g. you'd want to dig a basement in a moderate weather season, so you'll have somewhere survivable in the hot season. And of course have redundant backup power for A/C if you can afford it.

Some of the adaptations camels use could theoretically be useful, like dropping temperature at night & letting it rise throughout the day, tolerating higher temps overall, etc. But I doubt there's time for humans to naturally evolve those abilities very far in the next several thousand years.

- no way to access it if we develop technology to get clean energy from material that's currently seen as waste

- the sun is one of the most expensive destinations in the solar system, in terms of energy budget

- underground, on the moon, even Pluto or interstellar space, would be cheaper

- very extensive & well engineered shielding would be needed to protect against release in case of a launch mishap, but once you've encapsulated it that thoroughly, it's actually safe to keep basically anywhere, & there's little point actually launching it

I'm not surprised. I've read about similar behavior in deer & hippos. They're herbivores for the most part, but not always strict vegetarians.

"CA squirrels _filmed_ showing carnivorous behavior for the first time" would probably be a more accurate title

If you have the technological proficiency to synthesize mirror chemistry cells from scratch, I'm hoping that implies you also have the ability to engineer e.g. bacteria that feed on reverse chirality molecules & turn them back into standard form, or create other mitigations. Safer not to make them at all though.

The funny thing about this investigation is that I don't think you could actually recycle plastic cups with air tags stuck to them anyway. Plastic recycling is somewhat delicate & precise, so the electronics & non compatible plastics in air tags would probably foul things up.

I'm not convinced there's much benefit to trying to recycle single use plastic containers anyway. We should be reducing their use, but as long as they end up in landfills instead of waterways, it's not too bad - the carbon will remain sequestered there until either future generations reprocess it or the earth turns it into oil over millions of years. In theory you could recycle all types of plastic via pyrolysis (less so for PVC), but it's expensive & inefficient & you still end up losing material & likely releasing CO2. I did some reading on it a few months ago & came to the conclusion it's probably better to pyrolize organic material & just bury the waste plastic for now. (Pyrolysis of wood, organic waste, etc. can produce chemical feedstocks & fuels & still be carbon negative if it's run on solar/nuclear b/c of the bio char fraction).

The biggest harms around plastic pollution come from the fishing industry, mass dumping in 3rd world countries, & shady international "recyclers" who end up dumping the plastic or burning it in open air.

I don't think AGI is coming in 2025. I expect more incremental progress in AI/ML, but AGI is likely to remain vaporware & marketing hype for many years to come.

I'm not a geologist, but I do think earthquake prediction is going to get a lot better over the next century. However, this improvement will be mostly independent of AGI: The classic ML models & paradigms from a decade or 2 ago are probably adequate for the most part[1]. We just need more & better sensors & several decades to collect enough data.

[1] I'm not saying we won't develop better models & techniques that will help - I expect we will - but I predict the sensor suite & data collection period will end up carrying more weight

They were describing the 1930s situation, when the dollar was backed by gold & it didn't go well

So when I mix whey protein isolate into pineapple juice with plain Greek yogurt, is that considered an ultra-processed food? It seems like it would be, but I doubt the criticisms of UPFs really apply here. My understanding is that these are healthy ingredients, in a blend that's fairly optimal for strength training, despite one of them being highly processed.

Is there actually anything wrong with whey protein? Or can we find a better definition of the problematic UPFs?

> the most inefficient mode of transport you could imagine

Rockets, helicopters, trebuchet-and-parachute?

IMO the demon core incident resonates with people as kind of the ultimate case of "playing with fire". Humans have always played with fire, so we see the attraction, but also the dangers of it. It's a primitive behavior that's put us at risk, but also been the origin of most of our technology. The juxtaposition of a top nuclear weapons scientist taking such a "caveman" approach, playing with a new kind of "fire" that's millions of times more powerful, is poignant in the way it's absurd, but also relatable, sad & darkly funny.

There are devices that plug in to the OBD2 or cigarette lighter charging port & claim to boost power or MPG, but in reality only light up an LED. I think some people are fooled into thinking they work by wishful thinking, expected result bias, etc., so I'd expect we could find evidence for particular kinds of placebo effect among some people WRT cars

Many of the landers we've already put on Mars are heavier & less tolerant of G forces than a human, so it's clearly not an insurmountable hard limit. They use a combination of parachutes, retro rockets & airbags usually. But you're right that the lander stage has to be a small fraction of the size of the interplanetary stage, & the economics aren't very good. Maybe you'd need to send several Starships to Mars orbit to refuel & support a single one landing &/or returning to Earth -- at least until refueling facilities exist on the surface, & assuming Starship is actually capable of this mission.