superluserdo

>can the unknown that's being collapsed not be a pre-determined value that therefore is not traveling faster than the speed of light?

This is known as a "hidden variable theory". People will tell you that a local (things can only affect their immediate surroundings) version of the theory is impossible because it would be a violation of Bell's inequality, but there is a loophole that requires accepting the idea of "superdeterminism". This is the idea that where what measurement a scientist chooses to measure is predetermined and correlated with what the particle being measured is going to do.

So if a particle lands on a screen according to distribution p when going through a double slit, but with distribution p' when one of the slits is measured at, conventional QM says that the measurement "collapses the wave function". But a superdeterministic local hidden variable theory would imply that the choice of whether to measure at the slit or not was already set in stone at the same time that the particle "decided" which path to take to land on the screen, more or less.

>Factor in pipe losses on the return leg and you're back at the data centre with maybe 35°C inlet rather than 45°C

Surely having the input fluid being colder is a benefit, not a problem? Just run the fluid more slowly through the system?

The real answer is it's completely domain-specific. If you're trying to search for something that you'll instantly know when you see it, then something that can instantly give you 5 wrong answers and 1 right answer is a godsend and barely worse than something that is right 100% of the time. If the task is to be an authoritative designer of a new aeroplane, it's a different story.

I wish I could go back to the days of doing almost anything at all without having to tell a server what a motorbike or traffic light is.

You're mixing up years and days there. It would be about $1 a day, not 400.

It is and has been for a while, but most of the more flashy and exciting developments in ML and AI don't have very much applicability to LHC event processing. To be able to state any kind of finding about some aspect of physics based on the scattering of particles in the accelerator and their decays in the detector, you need to take the background of all events and make multivariate discriminants on the data in order to enrich your signal as much as possible while throwing as little as possible away. This requires you to have a rigorous and verifiable statistical "paper trail" from start to finish, so you can say with confidence intervals how much signal and background you ought to have, vs how much you measure in your data after processing it. An overly broad black box doesn't really work for this kind of introspection.

I wouldn't write it off as a bubble, since that usually implies little to no underlying worth. Even if no future technical progress is made, it has still taken a permanent and growing chunk of the use case for conventional web search, which is an $X00bn business.

Clicking the link to the comments on that post takes you to this comment section, so I think there's some by-hand deduping/merging going on

Both situations involve a huge amount of water flowing downstream. That needs to be replenished either through rainfall or through pumping.

Speaking of mathematical missteps relating to bases, I've always been baffled by why we refer to a base system by the number above the highest representable single digit. Every base is "base 10" in that case! Why is binary referred to as "base 2", when the number 2 doesn't even appear? Wouldn't it make infinitely more sense to refer to our conventional number system as "base 9", binary as "base 1", unary as "base 0", and hexadecimal as "base F"? Or we could have used a more sensical word like "ceiling" or "roof" in that case, to convey that it's referring to the highest single-digit value in the system.

>But day after day, over decades, surely the minuscule amount of heat being generated by activity on the surface has SOME cumulative effect.

No it doesn't, because the heat escapes out into space, so the minuscule effect is only an immediate one, not a cumulative one. That's why the greenhouse effect, being cumulative, is much stronger. If I put on an extra coat every day, it's not the heat output from my muscles in putting the coats on that is making me feel hot, it's the increasing number of coats that I'm wearing. Likewise, if I burn a tonne of coal, then that heat will have essentially disappeared overnight, but the global warming-causing CO2 will stick around in the atmosphere for another [very big number] years.

This very confident sentiment comes up in every comment section about IPV4/6

- "Updating the standard" is making a new protocol

- "forced suppliers to patch updates" - how?

- "USB backwards compatability that shiz. The fact I can take a modern usb device and plug it in a 1.1 gen port and it still just works. Why the hell isn't ipv4 like that for upgrades?" - because you're changing the address space of the protocol. If the new standard can address more than 2^32 things, then it won't be backwards compatible with v4.

- "Seriously is there any real technical hurdle why we didn't do it this way?" - Assuming you're talking about having a variable-length address from the start in IPV4, because I assume having a non-fixed packet header size would be much more computationally expensive and violate a lot of assumptions that you can make when the header is fixed (having a fixed region of the buffer that is known to always be the full header). You'd be much better having a fixed-length address that is enough to cover all possible nodes in the network - exactly what IPV6 has done.

- "Astounding they baked it in just xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" - IPV4 was first deployed in 1982. Wikipedia tells me that the year before, there were just over 200 nodes on the ARPANET. I think you're doing a bit of a disservice to the people who designed this stuff by castigating them for not factoring a 20'000'000x increase in network size into their protocol.