qlte

There was one particular (like 10 tweet long) Twitter thread [1] that was repeatedly being linked from HN purporting to describe the sort of technologies that a room temp superconductor like LK-99 could enable. All sorts of awesome sci-fi stuff like quantum computers! Fusion reactors! Batteries that last forever!

One might think it was from some kind of materials scientist or at least some kind of engineer working in a related industry. But nope, it was actually from a guy whose title at the time was "Head of Coffee Product", formerly "Coffee Specialist" at a "technology-driven company, looking to revolutionize the $400+ billion global coffee market". (I checked his Linkedin to make sure I was remembering the details correctly and see his current position is "Growth" at Cognition, the makers of the Devin AI LLM coding tool, hype continuing apace...).

People on HN with relevant expertise would try to gently push back with specific criticisms like how superconductor batteries would likely underperform li-ion, fusion is far more complicated than just requiring more powerful magnets, quantum computing doesn't have any clear application for superconductors, etc. But they were overwhelmed by the exuberant futurist fantasies that people wanted to read about instead. A stock accusation was that critics were being stereotypical HN cynics who can only poke holes in other people's work. Or questioning why they felt the need to rain on the parade and that we should all be optimistic for humanity and root for LK-99 being real.

It peaked when the Nature editorial came out from a scientist in the field listing specific substantive criticisms which led him to believe the evidence for LK-99 superconductivity was weak to non-existent. There were many angry HN comments with stock complaints about self-interested Nature "gatekeepers" unhappy about science happening in the open, bitter scientists lashing out for being scooped, etc. But the vibes had shifted and it only took a few more days before the remaining hype finally evaporated and everyone quietly moved on like it never happened.

Overall, it seemed like a net negative for actual scientific understanding and produced a lot of vacuous hype.

[1] https://xxcancel.com/alexkaplan0/status/1684044616528453633

It comes across as smug and superior, conveniently dismissing any opposing arguments in advance by framing the interlocutor as emotional and irrational regardless of what they may say in response.

  > No image model, and no Friedrich images given to the painters. Every picture here is a program written by an AI model; all but one (a comparison, marked) run through a simulation of oil paint.

  ...

  > A physical oil-paint simulator in Rust, and an easel to paint with it.

  > Every mark is made the way a painter makes it: simulated bristles carry wet paint over a primed linen canvas, the paint levels and dries on a clock, and layers combine by Kubelka–Munk optics. Paint comes only from piles knifed together from named tubes.

  Vibe Gaming: Unlocking new gaming experience with agentic AI 

  Microsoft VEGA Team 
  Microsoft Research & XBOX

  What if, instead of controlling every move your game character made, you could tell them what you wanted and watch them live, act, and connect with others on their own in the changing game world?

I've lost count of how many times I've clicked into a bio from a flagged, obviously LLM written comment to find some variation of "Building new AI tools for agentic devops"...

It doesn't even link out to the Linkedin post from the screenshot as far as I can tell.

https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat

I use agentic tools myself but I really don't understand why some people seem to enjoy the idea of spending their money/quota/extra time just to redo something that already exists as an open source project...

They appreciate this sort of political nihilism where everyone seems to have collective amnesia about the current status quo vs. just a couple years ago and so lament "nothing ever changes, voting is pointless".

At the time the story blew up on HN drawing lots of outrage from the self-styled free speech maximalists. Now, of course, there's comparative silence from that crowd after regular stories about the FCC routinely weaponizing licenses to enforce preferred speech, lawsuit threats against Wikipedia, coercion of universities to suppress specific political views, etc. But at the time it was a big thing and a political gift to the Trump admin's public image.

Also .15% of the time the door just randomly opens or stays shut with no rhyme or reason. Bug previously filed with cloud door vendor but told it's within door SLA and sent previously signed copy of agreement that "all neural nets are a black box and inherently probabilistic so errors may occur at any time and not a product defect"

Automatic doors (as used in the real world) are pretty much always located in areas intended for actively moving foot traffic (not as interior doors for every room). So this feels like adding a lot of complexity and unwelcome probabilistic behavior to something that in most locations does the right thing 99% of the time already.

Say someone was building Murderbot™ in their backyard by training on simulated murder of dummies with a machine gun. Everything was going fine for weeks as kill rates steadily improved with each test. Then one day he left the gate on his picket fence open, so Murderbot™ walked out to the public sidewalk and promptly murdered someone.

He wouldn't be exonerated by saying "But my Murder™ algorithm was only intended to be used on dummies! I never imagined it could do something as vile as murdering a human being!" Because it was reckless to knowingly design an algorithm for killing human-shaped things using a robot armed with live ammo right next to a public road. On top of the gross negligence by starting a test while leaving the gate on the (already flimsy) fence wide open.

OpenAI knowingly decided to train for an exploit benchmark to improve the model's offensive capabilities, with full awareness it could be potentially dangerous if misdirected, and then failed at implementing even the most minimal security measures. It may not have been intentional but was reckless. It's a much different scenario than say, a user vibecoding a to-do app whose agent veered off to break into an FTP server to get a missing asset.

If SpaceX failed to deliver a working product after a receiving a bunch of incremental payments for the pre-delivery milestones (deliberately structured to prop up their early R&D), it might have ended up front and center as an example of government "picking winners and losers" gone wrong like how Solyndra was featured at the 2012 RNC.

What's missing in your claim is evidence that people in academia often mischaracterize this style of discussion from accumulated knowledge and shared context as "thinking from first principles". I don't see any plausible rationale for why they would.

Otherwise, using their typical mode of interaction from outside observations to infer they misunderstand first principles is not a standard anyone doing specialized work inside or outside academia would ever be able to meet.

The private sector would grind to a halt if discussing a specific IEEE 802.11 protocol implementation with a fellow SME required a lengthy preamble of networking first principles before answering in order to be epistemologically sound.

Similarly, using a conversation overheard at a conference to infer the experts lack first principles thinking would not be reasonable just because they appealed to IEEE documents instead of rearticulating the underlying decisions made by the standards committee.

US automobile safety ratings/improvements over time are largely driven by IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety). It's a private group but is the standard yardstick manufacturers expect to be tested against and fills in a lot of gaps in NHTSA official crash tests.

It wouldn't be strange to see IIIS plus NHTSA criteria used colloquially to describe "US crash standards" when talking about cars even if not fully defined by regulation.

"UL Listed" products or the International Building Code (the base model broadly followed with modifications by each state) are also "national standards" but not set by regulation.

  This is also a far cry from what Musk was saying last year. In January 2025, he said Tesla would build about 10,000 Optimus robots in 2025 and that “several thousand” would be doing useful work by year-end. A year later, he admitted that zero Optimus robots were doing useful work at Tesla. He also promised a V3 reveal by mid-2026. It’s late September, and that demo still hasn’t happened.