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If some of these stories seem a little too fantastical to be true, it’s possible that they are.

Michael Finkel, the author of this article was fired from the Times in 2002 when he admitted that a character profile he had published was actually a “composite character” who didn’t really exist [0]. I wouldn’t be surprised if some embellishments has been added to this character sketch as well, at least in the book if not in this article.

[0]-https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/5740/

For those of us who would like a little more depth in the history and chemistry of automotive paints (and more images/videos too), there's a great video essay by New Mind on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_hgPinCZks

I was quite surprised at how important paint actually was to car production.

I graduated from MIT undergrad a few years ago. There were certainly no restrictions on cultural background in the fraternities, though certain fraternities (and some dorm floors) did have reputations for having disproportionate of people coming from a particular ethnicity (e.g. asian) or heading towards a particular career path (e.g. finance, or medicine). FWIW I almost joined a frat that I would've been a minority in, but I never felt excluded while rushing that or any of the other frats.

Funnily enough, there wouldn't be any "depletion from the ground" in the substrate either. If the charge in the substrate was removed and sent to ground, the charges in the gate would also disappear and be sent to ground simultaneously. In that case, the circuit has lost its stored valu. Ideally, this should never happen, and if it does the circuit is literally broken.

This article is completely wrong. For every electron you place in the floating gate of the transistor, an electron is removed from the bulk or substrate of the device. The net weight is exactly the same, you are only moving electrons within the device.

Is the heat transfer fluid for these nuclear plants considered radioactive? I honestly don’t know.

If so, then if a leak happens I’m guessing you have bigger problems than its chemical reactivity. Any leak is a major nuclear cleanup whether it’s water or sodium. Maybe the chemical hazard is just a drop in the bucket compared to the nuclear hazard, in which case why wouldn’t they use sodium?

It's sometimes amazing to see how history rhymes. At the dawn of the industrial age people had similar reservations and worries about thinking machines just like the AGI worries we see today.

Side note: This essay was inspiration for the destruction of the AGI that takes place in Frank Herbert's Dune series (the Butlerian Jihad).

The significance of the original image was in verifying that our laws and models of black holes truly reflected reality.

This AI enhanced image used simulations to guess at the missing data. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the black hole image in the first place?

This situation reminded me of when Samsung used AI and professional moon photos to insert details into blurry photos of the moon taken on their camera [0]. Isn’t that image no longer a current, true representation?

[0] - https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/15/23641069/samsung-fake-moo...

Glad to see someone who doesn't only care about the digital applications of transistors here =)

OP might be closer to "an ideal solid-state relay"

I totally agree- that's why I think we need better branding and marketing in stores. I personally like the Costco model of "do the research for the consumer and give them limited choices" but it's easy to see how this could go wrong too.

I'm sure early incandescent lightbulb manufacturers had a lot of shoddy products and consumers just had to figure out which brands to trust themselves. Eventually, it'll even out for LEDs too.

The irony of this article is that the author is suffering from “too much choice”. LEDs have so much more capability than fluorescent and halogen bulbs that the burden has fallen on the consumer to sort out what dimmability, temperature, and lumens they need. It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it.

Anyone who works in stage lighting or art knows that light is complicated. We should not fault the technology for now giving us too many options, but instead improve the branding and advertising.

The following UBlock Origin filter works for filtering shorts on my subscription page:

  www.youtube.com##yt-icon.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer.style-scope:not([hidden]):upward(6)

Medical student here. I’m impressed by ChatGPT’s ability to come close to passing Step 2/3. I tried plugging in my own question banks that I used for studying and it got many right. Even when it was wrong it was also “almost right” and its answer would not be disparaged on rounds.

However one thing to keep in mind: a bot passing these exams alone will not disrupt medicine. There are plenty of doctors today that could ace these exams. I don’t think that the ability to outsource medical decision making to a bot will change much, especially since 90% of medical decision making is already outsourced to a flowchart or an “expert attending” physician. Much of the value of doctors today comes from procedures, patient interaction, legal liability, and patient trust, which cannot yet be done by a bot.

Ben Krasnow (Applied Science on Youtube) actually did this with Fluorinert and tries eating the resulting potato chips. He claims it tastes and feels just like regular potato chips (on the way in at least).

https://youtu.be/a4gYv2BK-HQ

In addition to the problem of measly human power (mentioned in other comments), generators are only efficient when the magnets are quite close to the conductor so the metal pots/heating element would have to be held ~2mm from the rotating magnets. Generators succeed in this because they have a small metal housing that holds everything rigid. I don’t see how this could be practical for a large cooktop.

Also the material of the pot/heating element (Al vs Nichrome) only changes the optimal gearing ratio for the bike wheel.

I am a medical student and biotech researcher. My lab does cancer diagnostics.

In a certain sense, money can be used to solve all solvable problems since it buys people's time and expertise. In that sense, your question can be rephrased as "Will cancer ever eventually be cured?" The answer to that question is likely yes. Cancer is a group of diseases that one-by-one are indeed being "cured". The low-hanging fruits are exhausted, yes, but one day there is no reason to think that with enough research in gene editing we can't cure every cancer we detect. The time in years it will take to reach that point will be shortened monotonically with the amount of money spent on it. Although my personal guess is that the money required will be astronomical.

A more interesting question is whether large sums of money are best earmarked only for cancer or for general basic science. This was the fundamental debate between Sidney Farber (who wanted a "Manhattan Project" for cancer) and Vannevar Bush (who wanted more funding to basic science) [0]. There are whole books written about this debate, and from my experience I believe that true breakthroughs come when people are thinking multi-disciplinary and creatively, which means funding basic science not earmarked only for cancer. A good recent example of this is AlphaFold, which came from an unrelated field (deep learning) and is being used by my friends and lab-mates today for cancer research.

Refs [0] - https://erenow.net/common/the-emperor-of-all-maladies/3.php