seewhydee · HackerTrans

le mois dernierdiscuss

That wouldn't explain why Deepseek is fast relative to other Chinese providers, especially considering that they're reportedly ahead of the curve among Chinese companies in moving off Nvidia. I think their quant fund background has more to do with it. Their models are clearly designed with performant inference clearly in mind.

seewhydee

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Had they wanted a good ML relevant physics Nobel, the committee had decades to award a prize to Marshall and Arianna Rosenbluth for the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. Would have been self-evidently important and relevant to both physics and ML. Too late now -- Arianna died in 2020.

seewhydee

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Reducing the levels of allergens in food very likely has the side effect of promoting food allergies in children, due to lack of exposure during development. That's a strong negative consequence.

seewhydee

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Not sure how this is "dishing it out and not taking it". They intend to "take it"; they will force Bytedance not to sell, and thereby lose its US business with no compensation.

seewhydee

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I am old enough to remember US internet companies spamming users to support net neutrality, even those who aren't American and can't do anything about it. And net neutrality was heck of a lot less of an existential issue for them.

seewhydee

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Beijing has a veto on the sale, and are likely to exercise it. From their point of view, allowing the US to force a Chinese company to sell itself off as soon as it achieves success would set a very bad precedent, and encourage a torrent of other blackmail efforts.

They'll be willing to let Bytedance take the L on this. Bytedance can console themselves that TikTok can still operate elsewhere on the world, just making less money.

seewhydee

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

The trouble with doing that for Freakonomics is that the work on abortions reducing crime, which has been proven wrong, is the first chapter and the centerpiece of the book. It's the thing that they use to exemplify the "freakonomics" approach in the rest of the book.

seewhydee

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

> Singapore operates at 15% but doesn't really try to field a military

Singapore is one of the most militarized countries on the planet. For example, they currently operate more jet fighters than Australia (100 vs 94).

seewhydee

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

It stands to reason that someone who can create his own file system can't possibly be guilty of murder.

seewhydee

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

That German lab should sell LK-99 crystals. I wouldn't mind buying a souvenir for this whole episode!

seewhydee

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

No, they were not careful about their claims. Putting aside the drama around the arxiv postings, they had previously explicitly made the "discovered a room temperature ambient pressure superconductor" claim in a Korean language journal, in a 2020 submission to Nature that was rejected, and on multiple patent applications.

There is no evidence of them doing interesting work, either. If reporting is to be believed, their company mostly does unrelated consulting odd-jobs for the chaebols, and this was a passion project for Lee and Kim. But you know what? I'm glad there are oddballs like this on the fringe of science. They're mostly harmless, occasionally entertaining, and maybe once in an epoch they might come up with something real.

seewhydee

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

I'd add that the 3-4 preprints that put the final nails in the coffin for LK-99 --- the ones that showed how ferromagnetic samples produce half-levitation, pointed out the Cu2S structural phase transition, explaining why the flat bands are not conducive to superconductivity, and the creation and characterization of a pure single crystal --- were all good showcases of scientific ingenuity.

It was particularly impressive to see some groups putting together high-quality, publication-ready preprints from scratch in the span of a month. Especially crazy when you think about the shoddy original papers that the Korean group spent years working on...

seewhydee

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Yes, I noticed that this article disproportionately quoted American scientists who played relatively minor roles in the replication efforts. I guess the reporter just found it more convenient to reach out to them for comments.

seewhydee

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

The thing is that there are now multiple independent lines of investigation pointing to LK-99 not being a superconductor, and explaining away the original "smoking guns" offered by the authors.

It's like we have a murder suspect, the murder weapon, and fingerprints lifted from the scene. At this point it could still be space aliens, but nobody in their right mind would treat that possibility seriously.

seewhydee

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

The video really rubbed me the wrong way. I guess it's a persona he's putting on for the YouTube channel, but that "tough minded skeptic" bit is way over the top. He spent all his time criticizing various problems with the LK-99 paper that were indeed problematic (and widely commented on elsewhere), but didn't necessarily falsify the claim (e.g. they might have come from having mixed phase samples).

And he did not talk at all about the scientifically most interesting part of the affair, which was the clever investigation from multiple angles that finally unearthed the explanation. It's as though he just ran his mouth without reading the literature... which is not a very scientific thing to do, is it?

seewhydee

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Yeah. I would argue that he displayed some bad science of his own. He kept harping on about how the LK-99 paper didn't show resistivity going down to exactly zero, but had a residual resistivity. But that is exactly what you would have seen with a mixed phase sample with some superconductor and some normal material. It took proper scientific detective work to distinguish the possibilities, not this kind of silly snark.