In summary: You and me, we’re in the same tribe, and we hold the superior worldview. Those people over there in the out-group are wrong. They also do things the wrong way, because they aren’t in our tribe.

Hearing this sort of talk pulls some strings in the human mind. There’s this interesting default setting that says tribalism = TRUE.

It was the same thing with IE back in ancient times. A popular browser violates web standards so many sites were designed with that rogue browser in mind. If you use a browser that actually follows the standards, some sites just won’t work properly for you.

Is this one of those cases where you would need to make a parallel universe and let it run for billions of years to prove this idea?

It is absorbed by the mind of the listener, and stored for later use in the memory. As old memories fade away, you could also say that eventually it gets destroyed in the memory.

🌲👋 🪨/🌞/🌋🪵🐈/🐣

Less confusing date formats were invented much later, so this is all you get.

Yeah, but the future seems bright.

I’ve sometimes thought about that. Maybe in an alternate reality there’s a someone with my face who isn’t held back by any sort of morality whatsoever. Once you open that door, you can totally start spreading the stupidest ideas you can think of, and you’ll find someone who believes it and becomes your devout follower. I have a feeling that Scientology came about as a result of this sort of thinking.

So, is this based on the model where infinite coffee make you immortal?

It’s called research. You search for something, can’t find it, so you try again; hence the prefix.

Either way, NASA is already exploiting it. I guess, next they’ll find a way to glitch through the very fabric of the universe to teleport to a distant galaxy without moving at all or even using any energy.

TL:DR The batteries are based on Iron oxide chemistry. Form Energy is building a factory that is supposed to make the batteries for many grid energy storage facilities, such as the one mentioned in the headline.

Anyway, this sort of development sounds great. This is exactly the kind of thing we need if we are to switch to renewable energy. Li-ion batteries should be reserved for mobile applications, such as cars, laptops, phones and earbuds. There are lots of other battery chemistries available, that have a lower energy density, but they have other advantages to compensate. Those chemistries are much better suited for industrial scale applications like this.

More about the batteries

More about the factory

The idea of modern medicine is to sell chemical compounds that actually have an effect. It’s a philosophical and ethical thing. All products have a unique psychological effect that gets intertwined with their biochemical effect. If you can’t study them individually, it’s impossible to tell if the biochemical effect even exists at all. If your medicine relies heavily, or even entirely, on the psychological side, it’s no different than homeopathy. The idea of modern medicine is to be better than the old stuff that preceded it.

I prefer to think of this as an equation like this: Pm+Bm=Pp+Bp

Pm=psychological effect, medicine

Bm=biochemical effect, medicine

Pp=psychological effect, placebo = surprisingly big

Bp=biochemical effect, placebo = 0

If these sides are equivalent, the medicine is just as effective as placebo. If the medicine side is bigger, you’ll want to know how much of it comes from the P and B terms. In order to figure that out, you would need to know some values. Normally, you can just assume that Pm=Pp, but if you can’t assume that, it you’re left with two unknowns in that equation. In this case, you really can’t assume them to be equal, which means that your data won’t allow you to figure out how much of the total effect comes from psychological and biochemical effects. It could be 50/50, 10/90, who knows. That sort of uncertainty is a serious problem, because of the philosophical and ethical side of developing medicine.

Statistical tests are very picky. They have been designed by mathematicians in a mathematical ideal vacuum void of all reality. The method works in those ideal conditions, but when you take that method and apply it in messy reality where everything is flawed, you may run into some trouble. In simple cases, it’s easy to abide by the assumptions of the statistical test, but as your experiment gets more and more complicated, there are more and more potholes for you to dodge. Best case scenario is, your messy data is just barely clean enough that you can be reasonably sure the statistical test still works well enough and you can sort of trust the result up to a certain point.

However, when you know for a fact that some of the underlying assumptions of the statistical test are clearly being violated, all bets are off. Sure, you get a result, but who in their right mind would ever trust that result?

If the test says that the medicine is works, there’s clearly financial incentive to believe it and start selling those pills. If it says that the medicine is no better than placebo, there’s similar incentive to reject the test result and demand more experiments. Most of that debate goes out the window if you can be reasonably sure that the data is good enough and the result of your statistical test is reliable enough.

Yeah, that’s the thing with placebo. It’s surprisingly effective, and separating the psychological effect from actual chemistry can be very tricky. If most participants can correctly identify if they’re bing fed the real drug or a placebo, it makes it impossible to figure out how much each effect contributes to the end result. Ideally, you would only use effective medicine that does not need the placebo effect to actually work.

Imagine, if all medicine had lots of placebo effect in them. How would you treat patients who are in a coma or otherwise unconscious?

I’ve seen a bunch of Terminator style movies where an AI slices, dices, scorches and/or nukes humanity to oblivion long before climate change gets us. I have it on good authority that we don’t need worry about the temperature change.

Space is mostly empty anyway, so the chances of crashing into anything is pretty low. That’s why space travel is so safe.

If that gets implemented, it would help AI devs and common people hanging online.

A few years ago, people assumed that these AIs will continue to get better every year. Seems that we are already hitting some limits, and improving the models keeps getting harder and harder. It’s like the linewidth limits we have with CPU design.

We should have hired him to make a scifi movie about how humanity fixed the climate change.

LOL, I recall seeing HD sunglasses somewhere roughly 15 years ago. That was the period where everything had to have an HDMI port. I guess someone must have made an HDMI compatible toaster too.