>> at answering research questions for astrophysics
I googled for "helium 3" yesterday. Google's AI answer said that helium 3 is "primarily sourced from the moon", as if we were actively mining it there already.
There are probably thousands of scifi books where the moon has some forms of helium 3 mining. Considering Google pirated and used them all for training it makes sense that it puts it in present tense.
Fishing is measured by weight. Catching 100 lbs of adult eels gets you 100 lbs of eels. Catch 100 lbs of babies, feed them up, and you have 10,000 lbs without violating the catch limit.
Also because everyone now carries a computer in thier pocket with a very intelligent microphone and Bluetooth card. Anyone looking at hearing aids afresh today would start with that tech as the backbone.
There are wifi-based systems (like Sennheiser MobileConnect or Williams WAVECast), and my experience has been universally awful. The latency is so high that if you have any ambient hearing you get an echo that makes sound impossible to understand.
If you're ever considering installing one of these systems, please think again. Or at least trial it with a real situation, so you know what the experience will be like for the users.
I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times. I swear i have woken up in the middle of 20+ minute ads. I thought it was a news article about china when it was an ad. Who knows when the skip button appeared. The few times i have seen these, it has always been a literal fake news show about china.
> I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times.
Interesting new opportunity for YouTube here. Detect your usage patterns and near bed time show you increasingly boring content until you fall asleep, then fill your head with subliminal messages in these long ads.
I fall asleep to YT sometimes watching speed runs when I have a hard time sleeping. When I wake up it is mostly running live streams of religious chants going in a loop. Hindu, muslim, orthodox christian. Or some strange genre of a Japanese anime girl making sounds.
One of the smarter product decisions they made was to tweak the algorithm to show different types of content based on time (and device). If it’s past 9:30pm and it’s the bedroom tv it suggests vastly different stuff than 6:30am on the living room tv. And for good reason! I’m not watching some slow “adventures through the milky way at light speed” video when I’m waking up!
I'm a heavy YouTube watcher (My rewind said I watched 4500 different channels last year) and agree too. The content I get recommended is different day vs night. It's also device dependent (even when logged into same account) - my TV and phone definitely have a slightly different algo.
I've seen these advertisements too, also only when my phone had been playing unattended for some time.
I have a (unsupported, unsubstantiated) theory that YT detects phones of "sleepers" and pushes more profitable content with the understanding it won't be skipped.
I've got a few spare phones, maybe I'll run an experiment.
With YT, it might be an account-specific metric. Ie: flagged as a frequent sleeper. This would not surprise me, since they track just about every other metric possible against your account.
You can have multiple YT accounts on a single gmail acct, but I don't think that'll fool them. They know where you initially logged in from. So you will likely need multiple gmail accounts to do this kind of experiment.
I'm not sure why it would specifically be targeting "sleepers"... there are a lot of reasons why someone might not skip ads... people who are sleeping are probably the least valuable of them.
It could just as well be something super valuable -- like an unattended kiosk device playing youtube to a crowd of people.
Regarding the kiosk, I wholly expect that an unattended device with YT on auto play will ratchet up the length/frequency of ads as long as they're never skipped.
Someone who falls asleep watching YouTube will skip ads, unless they're asleep.
The idea is that if YT can infer that someone is asleep (location, no movement, no sound, low light, night) that they can show the longest, most skip-inducing ads that they've got since they know they won't be skipped.
The difference between the kiosk and the sleeper is that if the sleeper gets a 20 minute ad at 2pm while they're eating lunch, they'll skip it. YT is incentivized to show the most profitable ad that someone won't skip.
The value in identifying sleepers isnt showing a long ad, it's showing a long ad with the certainty that it won't be skipped.
Sure, but why would I, as an entity buying advertising space, pay the same amount when YouTube is just going to try to show them to people who are asleep, that can't see the ads, and thus would have no effect anyway?
I don't think they specifically target people who tend to go to sleep. But, having worked in the ad engineering, I can imagine they do know how often specific users skip ads and target ads based on that property.
Shortly before I started paying for YouTube, I remember seeing one of those ultra-long ads. The ad seemed interesting, so at first I didn't want to skip it. As soon as I saw that it was a looooong ad I got into the habit of checking the length of an ad before I even considered if it's worth watching.
Now I just pay for Youtube. I'm a lot happier that way.
Time is money. Ten minutes of daily YouTube ads adds up to 5 hours a month. Premium costs $14, roughly an hour's work at minimum wage. Trade one hour of labor for four hours of free time. That's 48 hours back each year for $168. It's a no brainer. Even if your wage is half of 14 dollars, you would still gain 24 hours back and it would still be worth it.
I'm not making a moral judgement here. I'm talking about sending a signal that this type of content is valuable to make, leading to more content of that type being made.
They're on YouTube because it's the platform that gives them the greatest chance of success. What other popular video platforms do you know that give you 55% of the ad revenue?
They also do this with kid’s content on YT but they make it look like a show basically. Might not happen on YT Kids, I basically never use either, but the few times we pulled up YT proper I’ve seen it happen. Get a few videos deep and they slip them in
I've seen bands release music in those long ads, a complete movie, a 2 hour podcast, and tons of the fake news stuff. I think for some its a unique way to advertise and get exposure, others is just YT farming adtime.
And just because people are thowing money at an AI company doesnt mean they have or will ever have a marketable product.
The #1 product of nearly every AI company is hope, hope that one day they will replace the need to pay real employees. Hope like that allows a company to cut costs and fund dividends ... in the short term. The long term is some other person's problem. (Ill change my mind the day Bill Gates trusts MS copilot with his personal banking details.)
When did hacker news become laggard-adopter/consumer-news.
Cal is a consumer of AI - interesting article for this community, but not this community. I thought hacker news was for builders and innovators - people who see the potential of a technology for solving problems big and small and go and tinker and build and explore with it, and sometimes eventually change the world (hopefully for the better). Instead of sitting on the sidelines grumbling about that some particular tech that hasn’t yet changed the world / met some particular hype (yet).
Incredibly naive to think AI isn’t making real difference already (even without/before replacing labor en masse.)
Actually try to explore the impact a bit. It’s not AGI, but doesn’t have to be to transform. It’s everywhere and will do nothing but accelerate. Even better, be part of proving Cal wrong for 2026.
Small error. The pulse "rate" should be called pulse interval (more/right on the slider = fewer pulses per time, which would be a lower rare.)
If you want to see a supersonic boom, switch to moving target at just over mach 1, and turn the sound on. And you can see you can still get much of the effect from a non-supersonic flypast. So hearing a "boom" does not necessarily mean something is supersonic.
I am forced to use windows at work. Last week my web searches looked strange ... not getting the ussual results. Bing! Some windows update reset my default search from google to bing. Again! Microsoft's dirty tricks will never stop.
I am considering writing software specifically to feed random junk jnto Microsoft's telemetry cloud. I will call it "fusk-MS" and it will send random searches to Bing and fake screenshots of a linux desktop to copilot ten times a second until Microsoft stops acting like such a jerk.
Not yet. Once the anger metastasizes into a new wholly anti-american government, new targets will emerge.
Trump is far from universally loved, but just imagine what the US would become if an outside nation swooped in and captured him. 100% of the american people would be screaming for blood.
I'd be concerned about exactly what price would be asked. No one country spends their cash and soldiers to "liberate" for free. I've turned down free gifts before because I knew they came with strings attached.
People say that, but the sight of say Russian/Mexican/Chinese/Canadian troops parachuting onto the whitehouse lawn to abduct a sitting president, no doubt killing many in the process, would be such an afront that domestic politics wouldnt matter.
This already happened. Trump lead a Russia-backed coup against the United States in January, 2021 to overturn the 2020 election and illegally take the presidency. It failed, but he and every government employee who supported him after that is guilty of treason and is serving illegitimately.
Trump is president because he was elected by the American voter while the opposition was in power. I would not label that as illegitimate and I think it is dangerous to spread that narrative.
Trump lead a coup against the US, is guilty of treason, and is ineligible for public office. I agree it is dangerous to have a traitor to the US in the presidency.
A lack of prosecution does not imply innocence. There were several attempts to go after him for it, but the courts are intentionally set up to favor the wealthy and powerful, in this case via infinite delay tactics. I still think it could've been done and I'll never forgive the Biden DOJ for delaying forever and letting him skate. He should've been in jail by February, serving his sentence by summer.
There will always be enemies and corrupt people. We need to establish a system of government and culture that doesn't so easily give over the reigns of the nation to these bad actors. If we don't actively do this we will long for the good old days when the corrupt leaders just wanted to steal money for themselves and hurt trans people.
for what is Maduro an enemy of the US. He wasn't willing to sign over the oil reserves to US oil companies. wanting to keep what is theirs away from rapacious foreign invaders would make most of the planet an enemy of the US.
I doubt Vance is capable of getting the support from Congress and the maga voters that Trump has. Once Trump is gone, the Republican party is going to have a hard time putting itself back together.
Meanwhile, the individual upthread suggesting they’d support a foreign power invading the US and capturing Trump is the ridiculous, childish, and deeply unserious brand of self-loathing that we are voraciously (and necessarily, if our country is to survive) opposed to.
You, personally, might, but I think it's going to be a clusterfuck. You can't stick a different person in a cult of personality and expect it to act the same.
I would not be screaming for blood. It is the world order he wants, and perhaps the only possible lesson in why we shouldn’t give him that world order.
Capture might not be the aim. The coming decades will see anonymous effective asymmetric warfare with USA infrastructure and the USA political establishment as prime targets. That's the big concern.
Huh... they better build some readily-available hyper-powerful infrastructure, pronto, or that next election could hand power to folks that don't have the best interest of the country in mind:
Trump is Russia's guy. There is no way I'd be screaming for revenge over a horrifying complicated nightmare becoming even more toxic, even more complicated, and even more nightmarish. If anyone comes and gets Trump it ain't Russia: he is already theirs, and acting in such a way as to further all their aims and all their narratives.
Um... i see some red flags. This test to heat gasses in a furnace looks a little sus. It is basically a micowave oven ... in space!! My kitchen microwave can hit 1000c. Let styropyro at it and it could probably do 10,000c. Then i came across this gem on thier website.
>> Radiators facing cold space can freely produce temperatures near absolute zero for ultra-fast curing without the need for cryogenics.
I dont see a path to a product. I see a company farming investment and government programs with overhyped "experiments" that have been already done many times. They even talk about testing a heat shield for reentry as if that tech is somehow new. Want to bring samples back? Send your microwave to the space station and bring them back like everyone else.
I googled for "helium 3" yesterday. Google's AI answer said that helium 3 is "primarily sourced from the moon", as if we were actively mining it there already.
reply