I don’t think it’ll be LLMs (which is what a lot of people jump to when you mention “AI”), they have much higher latencies than microseconds. It will be AI of some sort, but probably won’t be considered AI due to the AI effect:

The AI effect is the discounting of the behavior of an artificial intelligence program as not “real” intelligence.

The author Pamela McCorduck writes: “It’s part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, ‘that’s not thinking’.”

Researcher Rodney Brooks stated: “Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, ‘Oh, that’s just a computation.’”

LLMs might be useful for researchers diving down a particular research/experiment rabbit hole.

I don’t have any useful speculation to contribute, but here’s a classic chart showing various funding levels towards that goal:

Coming from a slashdot thread from 2012 where some fusion researchers did an AMA type thing:

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions

Here’s also a recent HN thread about achieving more energy than we put in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971377

The crucial bit is this

Their total power draw from the grid was 300 megajoules and they got back about 3 megajoules, so don’t start celebrating yet

The critical ELI5 message that should have been presented is that they used a laser to create some tiny amount of fusion. But we have been able to do that for a while now. The important thing is that they were then able to use the heat and pressure of the laser generated fusion to create even more fusion. A tiny amount of fusion creates even more fusion, a positive feedback loop. The secondary fusion is still small, but it is more than the tiny amount of laser generated fusion. The gain is greater than one. That’s the important message. And for the future, the important takeaway is that the next step is to take the tiny amount of laser fusion to create a small amount of fusion, and that small amount of fusion to create a medium amount of fusion. And eventually scale it up enough that you have a large amount of fusion, but controlled, and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, or the ginormous fusion of the sun.

So it’s still really encouraging, but just a warning that headlines don’t capture the full picture. Bonus fun fact from that thread:

Theoretical models of the Sun’s interior indicate a maximum power density, or energy production, of approximately 276.5 watts per cubic metre at the center of the core, which is about the same power density inside a compost pile.

IMO free will is commonly misunderstood. It’s not an absolute property, it’s a relative statement. In other words, something doesn’t “have” free will, the term is merely shorthand for “behavior that can’t be predicted”. To me, a rock doesn’t have free will because I can use relatively simple physics to predict its behavior perfectly. Other humans have much more free will because it’s much harder to predict their behavior. A bug is somewhere in the middle. To a superhuman intelligence (supercomputer, aliens, deity, take your pick), humans don’t have free will, because our behavior can be perfectly predicted.

That squares with my opinion on QM in that even if deterministic interpretations of QM are eventually rigorously ruled out, I would still be of the opinion that if we could poke through the underlying substrate and query an intelligence there, our behavior would be perfectly predictable. Much like a video game character discovering the math behind the RNG that controls their universe. So they’re kind of orthogonal concepts, but somewhat related.

100%, I avoid using plastics as much as possible around anything that I ingest that involved heat somewhere in the production process. Not entirely possible, but I do what I can.

The universe is deterministic. Quantum Mechanics doesn’t really disagree with this, it’s just not as popular an interpretation as the other ones. Even if deterministic QM interpretations eventually end up being ruled out rigorously, maybe we could someday “poke through” to the underlying substrate, like a video game character figuring out the seed for the RNG that determines their universe.

Sounds like a bubble, which isn’t a bad thing but not very common in the US IME. I haven’t looked at housing prices in that area, but I’m guessing they would be obscenely expensive for most people. Even where real estate is much cheaper than that, I’ve only really known a few people that have done that sort of thing and they’re all well-off.

I’m also going to plug the community we’ve got over at !AskUSA@discuss.online, it’s great for casual US-focused questions like this.

Probably the best traction you’re going to get is in !asklemmy@lemmy.world. There exist more specific communities as listed in the other comments, but they tend to be much smaller, or defunct.

At a slightly lower level, I’m excited about Servo. Activity died off for a bit but it’s gaining steam again. Still behind Ladybird progress-wise, but it will make a very strong foundation for a new web browser.

This is probably the best explanation I’ve seen:

http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_monads_in_pictures.html

That definitely reads as AI generated. I don’t really get the point of making posts like that if you’re not even going to write them yourself.

Disable user-select: none; (and variants) on body to be able to select text again. I like the idea of a blog post that calls out something annoying and demonstrates the annoyance inline, though

Not sure what type of grass, it was there when we moved in. White clover

My lawn has grass, clover, and violets, with a few other random plants. The violets are great and look nice and don’t really need mowing. The clover and grass eventually require mowing, but not moreso than just pure grass.

If I search for “steam vs epic” I still see the AI-generated summary. It probably depends on when the page was scraped and when Reddit (I assume) started doing this.

This is a good commentary on it:

It’s good to want to improve the world around you, which can be given a label of patriotism. Going too far down that road leads to lots of unhappiness, though.

; and ; respectively, in case anyone wants to see how it renders on their machine and is also lazy.

That’s pretty much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol). You can explore it through an HTTP proxy like this: https://portal.mozz.us/

It was inevitable with inflation of course, but that’s why you don’t pick names like that. Wikipedia says they go up to $30:

Five Below, Inc. is an American chain of specialty discount gift shops that prices most of its products at $5 or less, plus a smaller assortment of products priced up to $30.

Thanks, that would be great! And even if you don’t post anything, comments are always appreciated

I’ve been posting things I find interesting to !discuss@discuss.online. I’m trying to grow it as a community that can have conversations about a broad range of interesting topics, without having to subscribe to a bunch of narrowly-focused communities. Think something like Hacker News or lobste.rs, but without the tech bro mindset.