The Sun consumes a mass equivalent of a mount Everest worth of hydrogen via fusion to shine for just an hour (or thereabouts, if I did my math right :)). For perspective, this amount of energy is more than enough to power the Earth's current electrical usage for over a billion years.
That's all before getting into how a containment failure doesn't imply "and then everything nearby just started a self sustaining fusion reaction". The confinement itself is a key part of what enables the conditions for the fusion to continue.
I am a plasma researcher, though not in the fusion field. Containment and stability are required on tokamaks to keep a plasma burning. Losing either of these will quench the reaction. The best way to control a plasma - magnetic fields, also causes significant instabilities, which is why fusion is so difficult.
Because the plasma itself is charged and moves within the field, generating eddy currents which self-interact in complex and unpredictable ways. At a much much larger scale, the twisting of magnetic fields from convection within the sun causes sunspots and other phenomena around the solar surface.
No. It just does not make sense from physical rules. Fusion only happens in a very high vacuum, at ridiculous temperatures, with very specific fuel, in the confined space. Just the cooling effect of having oxygen atoms there(in the plasma) stops the reaction, let alone touching anything so cold(millions of times colder and denser) as the walls or the outside gas.
Neutron radiation doesn't get contained, and leaves the reactor easily carrying heat with it. That heat has to go somewhere, and so that's what we take energy from.
You can extract heat, in fact you'd have to extract it or let it leak out somewhere. The whole point of it is that it generates more energy than you put in, so energy has to come out somewhere for it to maintain stability.
Gp is just saying that if you cracked it open like an egg (or just had a minor leak even) all that would happen is it would stop fusing. The room this happened in would be a bad place to be, but it's just going to start a fire or something, not destroy the world.
Seems implausible. The fusion presumably wouldn’t keep going if it breached the walls.
Also, to be bright enough that we would see it from here as a star, I imagine it would require enough material that one might as well just let gravity do the job rather that use a Tokamak?
Maybe there are efficiency gains that are large enough that it wouldn’t actually require as much material as a star? I wouldn’t guess so though.
> wonder if many of the stars in the sky are from groups that almost nailed containment and stability on their Tokamak
Different fusion systems. Stars fuse, in general, by statistically overloading the weak force. (The Sun is volumetrically about an order of magnitude less powerful than a human being. Like 200 to 1,110 W/m^3.)
In smaller volumes, e.g. on Earth, we have to break the strong force. This releases more energy, I think. But it also requires temperatures and energy densities far higher than that which stars produce.
Not sure if that strengthens or weakens your hypothesis...
Strong and weak force don't come into it in either case. Fusion requires overcoming electrostatic repulsion, that's about it. The problem is the Sun is gigantic but it's fusion process is actually very inefficient. To make it practical on Earth we need more particle interactions, and thus higher temperatures, to make it Q>1
> Strong and weak force don't come into it in either case. Fusion requires overcoming electrostatic repulsion, that's about it
You're wrong and right. Electrostatic repulsion is the barrier, and at its limit, defines electron degeneracy pressure. But the strong force is the ultimate source of energy of the reaction, and the weak force is important in stellar reactions.
The weak force initiates proton-proton fusion [1]. (We still struggle to empirically measure its cross section because it's so low. Weak force be weak.) DT fusion, on other hand, has to crack open the energy in those delicious gluons with raw temperature. This is why PP fusion occurs around 4 MK while DT fusion needs over 1,000 MK.
I think that it is inaccurate to say that weak force "initiates" fusion.
Fusion is initiated by bringing nuclei very close one of another, overcoming the electrostatic repulsion.
When fusion is successful, the output energy is a consequence of the strong forces, i.e. it is the difference between the binding energies caused by strong forces in the output and input reactants.
The role of the weak force is that it can determine the probability of success of the fusion.
When the input nuclei have enough neutrons, the nuclei that have collided may remain fused. Otherwise, even after being fused for an extremely short time, the compound nucleus will break again, regenerating the input nuclei which are repulsed, so fusion fails.
In cases when fusion would fail due to a bad proton/neutron ratio in the fused nucleus, e.g. for the case of proton-proton fusion, during the very short time when the input nuclei are fused, weak forces may transform a proton into a neutron, preventing the separation of the fused nuclei and allowing fusion to succeed.
So overcoming the electromagnetic forces initiates fusion, strong forces determine the amount of energy obtained per fusion event and weak forces can determine the probability for fusion to succeed when nuclei collide.
> Fusion is initiated by bringing nuclei very close one of another, overcoming the electrostatic repulsion
Protons overcoming their electrostatic repulsion doesn't mean fusion--formation of a deuteron does [1]. Protons overcoming their repulsion creates the initial conditions for fusion, but in most cases no fusion occurs. The weak force "chooses" whether fusion occurs or two protons come unusually close and fly apart.
This is a bit of a pedantic line. But nuclear physisist say the weak force initiates fusion because if we take something with as low a cross section as proton-proton interaction to be the starting point of fusion, we might as well extend it to protons being in a star at all. (A greater fraction of protons in a star will fuse than proton-proton interactions graduate to fusion.)
Without the weak force, we have no stellar fusion. Without the weak force, artificial fusion is still possible. That's both a blessing and a curse, since the weak force permits lower-temperature fusion.
That's a great advantage in theory. In practice, I've never found X integration to work great in practice. For eg., when I asked it to source X posts on Nix related complaints it was only able to find a single niche user,
This is a feature they've already built into Twitter.
I tried to extend it to work outside Twitter but still based on Twitter trends, basically allowing people to glance at Grok's summaries of global conversations. Unfortunately the new API pricing for Twitter is prohibitly expensive
Today I saw a twitter interaction between, of all people, Ross Douthat and Scott Alexander. Two very bright and interesting thinkers with wildly divergent points of view, discussing ideas with courtesy
As far as I can tell, Mastodon was briefly hyped on HN but nobody actually uses it. Bluesky seems to have a few people within a fairly narrow political range. Truth social is just for Trump. Reddit is pseudoanonymous as is HN. Instagram is for sharing photos not ideas or links. TikTok is a Skinner box.
I ask this as someone who genuinely doesn't know how to use the internet anymore. Reddit used to be useful but is now a cesspool. LinkedIn is a weird place where we all post like Stepford wives for our employers. The twitter-clones all feel a bit like using a paper straw to fight climate change.
I know there are semi-private slack groups and discord channels out there, but I don't know how to find or join them and it seems like a hassle to follow.
Basically, for me, no one I pay attention to posts anywhere any more.
Mastodon is great, but non-algorithmic, so it only gets good after you explore and follow more people who are interesting. Garbage in-garbage out. I find it very high signal to noise and full of interesting people. Bluesky is where people go to talk to an audience, mastodon or fediverse people tend to be more conversational.
BlueSky is the new up-and-comer. I am enjoying it, but I unfollow anyone that posts ragebait or political content (besides memes, some of those are pretty funny).
Jack even said so when Twitter originally took off. He was excited to see how 140 chars forced people to shape their thoughts.
Everyone is tired of it. That’s why the formerly popular social media sucks now.
The entire economy in the US is built around behavioral economics experimentation, A/B test, measuring retail behavior and putting options in front of retail shoppers.
You sound like an another exhausting American. Rather than find community through self guided journey you just want it handed to you, like a religion.
I built this with a pal years ago. Elasticsearch + realtime scraping of large swathes of Twitter, Discord, other chat networks and aggregators, comment systems, news articles, etc. LLM-augmented analysis engine and ontological recovery.
It was pretty cool, but we lacked funding to continue and then everyone closed the hatches after ChatGPT released.
I don't know when it was enabled, but on Desktop if you click on the Grok icon on a Tweet, it will tell you all the context. It's been quiet useful to keep up with obscure posts that pop up.
This is one of my quickest adopted AI features. Twitter is one of the most opaque social media because of the character limit and the way it mixes different in-crowds in verbal combat, so explaining the context really makes it more fun to use. They just need to improve the feature with even more training. I feel there is usually one main obscure item that needs explaining and it often explains everything else.
Yes. And Elon is also a free speech absolutist. It’s amazing how many people lose all critical thinking ability when someone like Elon promises them something despite decades of lies.
Look, I don't like Elon. I don't trust him at all, but your proof that he is going to do X is that he said he is going to do Y. I was expecting some actual evidence, not mind reading.
It is also amazing how many people lose all critical thinking ability coming to the conclusion Elon will never tell the truth.
He is living rent free in the minds of the people who love him and the people who have this visceral hatred of him. It is so sad that so many people are obsessed with him.
That is not proof that he is going to turn Grok into an ideological tool?
This is my problem with every conversation of Musk. Nobody can address the actual point because they either love him or hate him. Is there ANY proof of the claim? No? Then what is the purpose of your post other than to publicly express hatred?
Thanks for proving my point that people have lost all ability to hold a coherent conversation when it comes to Musk. I am asking for proof that Grok is being turned into an ideological tool and you are talking about Musk destroying the government. The two have nothing to do with each other.
Musk destroying the government isn't even the reason people can't stop thinking of him or they wouldn't have been non-stop talking about him during the Twitter purchase.
It's actually the opposite. I asked about some details in the current ukraine situation, and it stated mostly facts with a few words critical of Trump. This is about neutral. But it showed pretty strong Keynesian tendency when I asked it about some economic policy issues earlier.
I'm not sure if it's practically possible to corrupt the training data that much while still giving sensible answers. After all, reality has a well-known liberal bias.
TBF, I've found that most people who are trying to be fair or advocating for the devil instead of stating their opinion clearly are a good chunk of the low quality noise
Can you elaborate? What would you ask it about what people are saying on Twitter and what kind of response would be interesting and potentially valuable?
I like that Grok actually comes up with a ton of links when you ask it a question, but at the same time I think any ambitious LLM platform wouldn't have too much trouble scraping Twitter/X all the same.
I don't really understand this Twitter (or in general social media) censorship argument. If I call someone on the street a fckin idiot I probably get slapped or even shot in certain places, and everybody will say I called for it. And even without physical violence I can get slapped with a lawsuit and forced to pay damages. Now if I do the same on social media it's suddenly all "muh liberty of expression" if anyone reacts to it. Aren't we maybe having the wrong expectations online, that it would be somehow supporting all the shit we cannot do in real life? Okay I realize this ship already sailed and online people do online all shit not allowed offline, but I rather see the situation as a miserable failure of law enforcement, and not as a hard won right to be an ass to your fellow citizens.
What country do you live in? In the USA, you can say “I think person X is an idiot”. That’s protected speech. No one can sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL. If someone punches you in the face for calling them an idiot on the street, then they are likely going to get prosecuted for those actions. Yes you run the risk of getting punched in the face but you are not in any trouble with the law.
OTOH it’s a problem if you say “Person X is a rapist”. Then you might get sued for libel. You can’t make false statements to destroy someone’s reputation.
Censorship online on a social media platform is not subject to any freedom of speech laws. Freedom of speech only applies to the US Government not restricting your speech. The social media platform has the authority to regulate speech however they want to on their platform.
> You can’t make false statements to destroy someone’s reputation.
This is something that people seem to expect to be able to do on social media. I think maybe that's part of the point that was being made. People don't want social networks that are concerned with stopping libelous remarks from going viral. In fact, it seems like people would love a social network that consists exclusively of libelous remarks.
The weird thing is that social networks seem to actually be willing to deliver this content.
> No one can sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL
In the USA, you can absolutely be sued for this. The plaintiff is unlikely to win, and you could probably get the case dismissed if you convince a judge that's it's clearly an opinion, but you'd still have to pay a lawyer some fees.
People can sue you for anything.
The first amendment doesn't protect you from lawsuits. It protects you from the government putting you in jail for speech.
I don't really get why people point this out. Yes, you can be sued for anything. But what are you actually suggesting? That you do nothing, ever, because you could be sued for anything? Or are we just doing the same old nitpick?
Pointing out that the statement is false in the most uninteresting literal sense is just odd. Sure, you can be sued for that in the same sense that you can be sued for eating a croissant. Glad we got to the bottom of that.
Not really. See what Claude Shannon has to say about channel capacity of what your brain can digest if Grok finds 8 million things that are happening currently that might be interesting to you.
My company does AI Sales Lead Follow-up, and doing this ethically and effectively is a much more complicated problem than they suggest here.
Examples...
What time zone should we be following up in or offering times in
What salesperson should be assigned (aka whose calendar are we using)
Does the prospect ask a question in the form, do you trust an AI to answer that question?
Do you need to place a phone call?
Do you need to send a text (B2C)
How are you gonna do risk management (aka removing people who don't want more contact)
How does this interface with the existing systems
Are you going to let users change the prompts, how, what happens when they make a mistake
Many of these are messy sequential problems where solving each one reveals two more, and trial and error is the only way to get it right.
Which brings up the ultimate question, do you want someone to train their AI system on your sales leads?
Hi, not sure what happened with our email but should be working now.
The purpose of the model is to be used as a foundation to quickly build strategies through fine-tuning or as an additional feature to an existing model rather than be a standalone strategy itself.
I don't believe it was a cyber attack; I think it's just usage overload. If I'm right, the next steps will be for them to throttle usage by price increase or some other method. Or they will have to find another order of magnitude of efficiency, and then that will be gobbled up and maxed out days after they introduce it.
The theme here is the demand for AI is nearly limitless and the supply (for now) is constrained by Nvidia.
Or it is usual cycle of demand spiking when something is new and/or on news and then normalizing later. Usually if you over invest in capacity at these times you won't be using it long term. Often seen with games and servers there...
Sure, that may be true and is a good analogy, but what I find interesting here is that they have restrictions on increasing their capacity. So if this increased demand endures, what then?
Most people have little use for LLMs. The spike is curiosity plus the system being slammed by corporations and governments doing intelligence. Open AIs impact on their servers could easily overwhelm them.
They will recover and I am sure this is more than user interest. Look at how much is being claimed by competitors already. They are absolutely hammering them right now.
Let's put it that way; It's been days since its been in the public eyes and everyone is talking about it like it is the new ChatGPT. When your non techies friends and family members are coming to you with question about it, you know the reach is wide already. All those people have been primed by months of using ChatGPT or similar /ai/.
Why is it more plausible than the explanation provided by the company? That's what I'm asking. Especially when you consider the PR downsides of saying your company has been hacked.
Maybe there's a history of the company lying, or some other evidence that it's not an attack that I haven't seen, etc.
Or move the whole outfit to the US and get access to plentiful chips and electricity... unfortunately I think the CCP might have something to say about that
Carvana stock didn’t seem to react much at all to that Jan 2 report (higher today than on Jan 1, even)? I wonder if, and possibly how much, Hindenburg lost on that trade.
Taiwan and other nations are smart, ambitious, and not interested in being enslaved by China.
If China tries to enslave these other nations with a mechanized war, I think you can expect their opponents to play a different game.
For example, by crafting a virus that targets their opponent's families.
The concept that a war with China would just be about manufacturing capacity does not appropriately consider the creativity and viciousness of their potential opponents.
I just about fell out of my chair laughing at your cloud hosted tier with the tagline "We have to eat somehow™" aka "please pay us"
I signed up for the paid tier and I'm hopeful this can help us integrate legacy CRM's with our company's unified communication sales tool.
Either way good luck!