AlanSE

This is my personal version of AI solving an advanced math problem.

I'm into deep future concepts, and have always dreamed about this sci-fi kind of open question. I will tell you that it is categorically not possible until the Opus or Sol level.

It took a few tries, but it has now returned to me a result that gives fuel cycle closure for this problem. That's a big deal to me.

What the heck is this problem? Imagine that the year is 2150 AD, and you are running out of Deuterium you harvest from the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Options like Helium-3 from the moon are far too small in abundance. If you can directly get energy from proton fusion, you are master of the Milky Way. The mechanism to do that is well-know, you fuse protons into Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen isotopes like how a star does it. But can you do it outside of a star? This idea (original AFAIK), is to use Deuterium mixed with other fluids in the fuel cycle (15N) to compress the target in a multi-stage thermonuclear detonation. There are a lot of problems, but the main that makes this "not impossible" is: can you do this and still produce surplus isotopes for the pusher fuel? On the speculative level, answer is "yes". This comes with a specific scale, which is a fuel ball <500 meters, blast chamber size of Earth. Room for improvement, but a great start.

This is a ferocious problem. It's a pleasure to be able to run the numbers on it.

Can someone explain to me where the feeling_lucky variables comes from in the match example? I don't get it. The variable isn't defined anywhere in the relevant scope.

> For the same reason, the enthusiasm for the idea of installing solar plants in north africa and exporting power over interconnectors to Europe is gone. It's cheaper to install twice as many panels in a field in cloudy northern Europe (where capacity factors are half of what they would be in the Sahara) than deal with the costs and complexity of underwater interconnectors and transmission system upgrades.

I don't know about that, because long-range transmission significantly reduces the intermittency, even for the same longitude. It's not just about smoothing out the curve of solar production, demand patterns (due to weather, industry, behavior) will also have variations from place-to-place and these allow opportunities for power export.

Some places will have more dispatchable and expensive power plants than others, which also creates an export opportunity so that power is exported so that one country can burn less fuel. However, I admit this argument is slightly undercut by the question "can't we just build solar panels in the country with dispatchable dirty power?" True, but there's also a connection to wind power which is super local and random.

It's still not believed. It's just Twitter that I've seen the juicy stuff, like a (very sketchy) claimed replication from a Russian, and now another claim from a Chinese group.

I could still see this being something "new" but not a true superconductor. If you read the link, there seems to be some kind of discovery brewing, but the original discovers may not have understood what they found.

No no no, this eliminates the need for cryo, not crypto.

Fusion was already starting to heat up in recent years. The entire SPARC reactor concept is based on (low-temp) superconductor materials breakthroughs.

If these room-temp superconductors pan out, it will be dumping gasoline on the funding fire for new fusion attempts. Given less than a year from scientific verification, fusion will go red hot.

The ideal conditions to stimulate daydreaming seems pretty obvious to me - sit me down in any class lecture.

Imagine that my mind like a glider. Glider is connected to a Cessna by a tether, but it's a magical tether that can disappear. In fact, it takes me active work to keep it connected, like I'm holding on to the end of the rope with my hands. The plane takes off and I'm following in lockstep about the main subject matter... looking down at the landscape below, to the left, to the right. After a quick climb, and at velocity, I've forgotten about keeping tethered, holy crud, I'm in the air! I want to bank, dive, maybe loop! What's over here? I can catch a thermal and go on forever depending on the landscape, but still often see more appealing currents and need to switch over. Oh wait, where did the plane go?

Yeah, good to bring it back to the original point. Reading the article felt exciting, but in hindsight I am now missing a key detail.

The equations all seem to be matrix operations with a fixed number of rows / columns (you can take me as a real layman here). Unless you change that, I don't understand _how_ you can reduce memory needs. Granted, I'm probably putting my foot in my mouth not understanding transformers.

Yes, I should have Googled that before using the wrong word.

I am also operating on old information, perhaps the law changed and this it varies by state now.

As in, they use tax to avoid reporting the earnings? That works fine for the scale of a lemonade stand.

Higher cash prices are a violation of the card-holder agreement.

In fact, I have increasingly seen the pattern of adults who work from home but have a commute to drive their children in the morning / afternoon. That's 2-ways both times, for the record. It's often multi-destination.