The trouble with small nuclear reactors. I've been reading about this technology for years. There is so much to gain from the energy that this could produce, so I've been wondering what the hold up is. First of all, after reading so much about the advantages of thorium reactors, it is surprising that the industry is looking more at HALEU (5-20% enriched uranium) instead.
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...there is almost no commercial production of haleu outside China and Russia.There apparently is only one domestic source for HALEU, and others don't feel comfortable that there will be enough demand to expand. Then there are the regulatory roadblocks and getting commercial investment. There seemed to be no problems with windmills and solar panels, inefficient as they are in terms of energy density.
WSJ has this chart up: The Smartest People in AI Believe This Is the World’s Most Important Chart.
This is just Anthropic, but I suspect other frontier companies are adopting the same policies. The commenters say this is Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI). But I do believe that coding is something that coding assistants should handle. In my own experience, my manually coded projects were so primitive in retrospect and I've uncovered some security holes that I've been lucky have not been exploited yet. I learned tons of best practices just learning from coding assistants. Code is the language of computers so why not learn from a native speaker?
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Articles about Proton CEO's AI-related outburst are drawing a lot of attention to the company and Andy Yen. The company is now trying to defend itself against the negative publicity. Andy has apparently decided to cancel interviews grilling people about their AI use. A Proton employee says that things aren't all that bad. But in a Proton forum, some are calling for Andy to step down. Wow, I always thought this was just a boring tech company just trying to provide good privacy. But whatever, it's probably given good publicity to Tuta as an alternate email service.
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OpenAI's latest blow to mathematicians: 'They have annihilated my field of research'. A first person perspective of how OpenAI's math release has affect mathematics. The fallout:
"We grow by having open discussions with our elders, who do not hesitate to suggest ideas, for example," he said, adding that "the AIs themselves even benefited from this freedom, by quickly and easily collecting everything considered as good problems." His own, notably. Now, there is real concern that a company, upon hearing or "seeing" online that a particular question is gaining traction in the community, will unleash its agents on the problem to snatch up the credit. As a result, some mathematicians have already announced they will be restricting their communications. For Duminil-Copin, "this entire culture of open exchange is being shattered."
Very sad.
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Sumitomo Pharma's treatment involves transplanting millions of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which have the potential to develop into any cell in the body, into a patient's brain.
Japanese regulators approved the therapy in March, following a successful clinical trial.
"The first transplant was performed at Kyoto University Hospital in October," the company said on Friday...
Would be fantastic if this works. We need something better than just palliative therapies.
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Anthropic hacked by AI startup in less than 12 hours, report claims. Love this comment: “If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially the Chinese aren’t far behind.” Gee, ya think?
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Steve Jobs apparently told Tim Cook that he should never ask "What would Steve do?". Actually I think it would have been good if Tim asked that question after all. Apple has done well because of the momentum of excellence that Steve put in motion. But Apple doesn't do things quite Steve's way anymore.
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Neuroscientists reveal method to train people to have lucid dreams — and it involves virtual reality and meditation. I was hoping it was a supplement you could take.
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The Mystery of BenGay. How does the ointment work? I was told that the sensations of coolness and tingling provided a distraction, but actually researchers found something new:
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Looking at electrical data from nerve firings in these rats, they discovered that the TRPM8 neurons, when activated, released a neurotransmitter, glutamate, into the spinal cord. And they found that glutamate released from cooling neurons turned around and inhibited signals from pain neurons. “What’s clever about this system and what nobody understood is…the TRPM8 sensory nerves are acting as a sort of control gate so the painful inputs don’t reach the brain,” says Fleetwood-Walker.Glutamate? That's it? But it has to be released by these special TRPM8 neurons – that's the trick.
Students are getting dumber faster than they can dumb down the test. They've dumbed down the SAT so that today's students could actually take it. And scores are still declining.
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Daimler closes truck manufacturing plant in north Portland; Lays off 375 workers. Tick tock, Portland.
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