I didn't see this magical screw so I may be wrong here, but I would bet that I'm right: There is a cheap, common, standard screw which is almost like the one that caused the bottleneck. The design of the MacPro would have been just as good... except that somewhere in my apartment I already have a screwdriver which could have removed the screw. And that kind of thing is what Apple worked so hard to prevent. They needed some crazy pagan symbol in the head of the screw so that only Apple genius-priests could turn it. So if you're wondering why your MacPro cost you $3000, here's a part of the story.
I don't think that on reflection, anyone can think that the five paragraph essay, with all kinds of rigid "and then you next sentence must say x" instructions, exists for the benefit of student writers. Such essays are the product of a time when teachers have become too cowardly to assign grades according to quality of work. All the rules are there as little mini-quests that the obedient student ticks off, and the non-compliant student can be given clear, objective reasons for that B-. Real writing teachers, the ones who help actual writers, can still give clear reasons why a certain attempt at writing sucks. What they can't do is give a recipe that, if followed slavishly enough, will produce successful writing. But that recipe is exactly what public school students, parents and administrators demand. In every class, the teacher must lay out a path to grind out an A, one that requires nothing but careful adherence to explicit rules. That's how we got to today's insipid five paragraph essays. Insight, talent, a strong voice, and other qualities that make good writing good are either not addressed, or the value - sometimes the very existence - of such things is explicitly denied. If the rules are rigid enough, then all the essays suck equally by literary and aesthetic standards, which gives frightened teachers the freedom to grade essays by checklists alone. Nobody cares that this isn't helping the students learn to write. What they're actually learning is to submit and obey arbitrary rules, in preparation for - presumably - the future workplace where they will do more of the same. If I taught high school, I'd make students read and try to duplicate the effect of Michel de Montaigne's Essays, the 14th century work that invented and named the genre. They would actually have fun!
Procedural generation of game content is already eating everything else that used to be hand coded in games, and it won't be long before the writing of the quests will itself be done by some sort of neural net trained on the feedback of millions of gaming hours. First it will be the side quests, and they will suck, but I'm keeping an open mind about the potential that this might actually get good one day. It's not like the games I play have a staff of JRR Tolkiens and GRR Martins doing the writing.
Is it really "incredibly unique"? Damn, that so much more unique than almost every other unique thing! I mean, most unique things are unique, but this thing is apparently incredibly more so.
I hate child sexual exploitation at least as much as the next guy, and I think that Facebook should not be a vehicle for it. But at some point Facebook clearly lost the thread, because they are now openly admitting that the pictures they're removing were not cases of child exploitation. That's why they're not reporting the millions of users affected: they did nothing wrong. So why are they taking down the photos? Because the photos offend people. That's really it. Specifically, it offends some people that a small subset of dirty old men will collect these photos and become sexually aroused. We are on top of a slippery slope, and we need to draw the line right here, because if we allow this as a legitimate reason for censorship, we are also signing off on the removal everything else that turns on dirty old men, like exercise videos, figure skating, swimsuit photos, olympic gymnastics, pictures of feet, balloons, ASMR, and I don't even want to know what else. We've completely shifted from the noble goal of protecting children from exploitation to the dubious goal of making sure that certain usavory people have nothing to masturbate to. And yet Facebook acts like the latter is the same thing as the former. It's just not. And yes, I think we should protest this now, even if we don't care about child bathing pictures. Because next they will come for some other stupid content that offends some people, and we'll again say nothing, because we don't care about that either. And then they eventually come to censor the expressions that we do care about, and nobody will be left to protest, because protest against censorship will by then also be censored.
There are likely to be builds of ChromiumOS that you can install on the computer, and it produces the effect of ChromeOS running on hardware which will almost certainly be much better than some Chromebook.
If we could teach AI to quarry, transport, shape and stack rocks at least as well as humans did in the 17th century, we could literally build castles (and bridges and aquaducts) with very little energy input. Rocks are everywhere, and an army of AI powered instruments could be programmed to improve on the work of even the best stonemasons: If they scanned each available stone that comes from a quarry, algorithms could design the optimal stacking arrangements to minimize gaps and maximize structure stability. They could "solve" a construction project like it's a giant 3D puzzle, thus minimizing the number of stones that would need to be chiseled. But even chiseling stone with machines uses very little energy. The pace of construction would only be limited by the number of autonomous tools brought to bear, and they themselves could turn out to be cheap and mass-producible. Sure, you can't build skyscrapers from rocks, but I would happily live in a city of six story rowhouse blocks built from stone. The neighborhoods in Europe that are actually built in this way are beautiful, functional and pleasant to live in. With AI building tools that sink the cost of labor to almost zero, I think we should explore returning to some of these old, well-tested building methods and architectural designs.
You need to think through what you're worried about. Do you have any doubt that these extra forensic techniques are going to make perpetrator identification more accurate? If you admit they will, you've admitted that you're significantly less likely to be falsely charged in this new forensic regime than you would be in the less accurate system we have now. Yes, misleading evidence can crop up in any system of crime solving, but the fewer and sloppier are our tools and techniques, the greater the likelihood of false convictions. (This reply does not address what you say about "public domain skin," where I think you have a good point about privacy.)
I think the huge leap forward was the 50's, with everybody finally getting vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators and penicillin. Those feel like era-defining upgrades. The way people lived their lives 30 years later was not fundamentally different. The music got better, but the tech behind way people lived, worked and entertained themselves did not. Moore's law and the internet finally changed everyone's lives, and that too feels pretty era-defining.
I don't think that UPS intends to actually implement drones or driverless trucks in routine delivery for at least another decade. They just need to concoct enough "trials" and proof-of-concept videos to spook some meatheads in the Teamsters union. Now it suddenly becomes a bargaining chip for UPS when it negotiates its next contract with the Teamsters. Sure, UPS will "grudgingly" agree to some humans-only clause, but in exchange the will get lower prices and better conditions in its delivery contracts. That's how negotiation works.
I think there are a lot of similarities between the exploration of Antarctica and of Mars. Sure, I'll get to some important differences, but I think it's the right starting point.
Once upon a time, Antarctica sounded like just about the most harsh, alien, abandoned and adventurous place one could go. The world's boldest men organized heroic expeditions to reach the ultimate bragging right: being the first to visit the South Pole. In time some succeeded, but not before others miserably died. The sheer adventure and alienness of Antarctica captured our fantasy. H. P. Lovecraft's best fantasy horror story takes place there.
But then, Antarctica was replaced in our imagination by Mars, the new go-to setting for our fantasy and horror. We got to the point where we knew just enough to fire up our imagination about what Mars is like, but we could still fill in the many gaps in knowledge with our fantasy. Just like "conquered" Antarctica with bold expeditions, we will eventually "conquer" Mars. Human footprints will get made, photographed, instagrammed, and gushed about. And then what?
Then Mars will start to seem a lot more like Antarctica: a place where we could survive and even build cities, with great effort and great expense, but... why? The reason why no settlements are being built on the Antarctic continent is not because of international laws. If those laws expired, it's not like villages would start springing up. We have some scientific stations in Antarctica, and will will have some on Mars. I think their governing principles will be almost identical. But we have no Antarctic immigrants, and I don't expect Martian immigrants, beyond a couple of very rich weirdos. Once the place is covered with footprints, the exoticism will have worn off, and we'll see it for what it is: a strangely beautiful but also profoundly inhospitable cold place that's hostile to human habitation, and that probably should be preserved rather than bulldozed for space condos. The scientists there will complain of terrible food, terrible ping, terrible odors, terrible crampedness, annoying cancers and terrible shipping charges on anything they want to buy. At that point, who will be signing up to live there? The same people now dying to live in Antarctica.
The only thing that bothers me about this is the personal identification in order to enter the store. Then again, stores like Costco have for years required you to submit your identity and made you pay for a uniquely-identifying card in order to use their store. It doesn't look like Amazon will charge you. And even I am willing to let a clerk scan my uniquely-identifying Safeway card at checkout so I can get 80 cents off seedless grapes or whatever. What's different about Amazon's store is that there isn't a staff of sad underpaid cashiers. I also won't miss the infernally slow checkout aisles that try to get me interested in buying magazines about Jennifer's latest battle with Angelina over Brad. Doesn't anyone else think the grocery store has always been a fairly shitty place? I see no need to protect it from extinction, just like I don't long for the pre-ATM days when people had to wait in line and talk to a bank teller in order to withdraw cash from their accounts.
I suspect that the history books will show Uber gambled on self-driving cars arriving soon enough to plug the financial hole from paying their drivers, and lost.
I think it's an insightful comment, but you might be wrong. Maybe they will ride it out and find themselves in the best position to be the unbeatable self-driving taxi network, because they can replace their old service with the new driverless service gradually and seamlessly.
The reason why Neflix leads in streaming sales is because the used to be a disc-by-mail company that trained its subscriber base to transition to streaming. Yeah, at first the streamable selection was crap, but when it felt like a bonus service, everyone was happy. It increased Netflix subscriptions because it added value to an existing service, but it didn't need to be independently marketable from day one. Then the streaming part could grow naturally until it actually became independently marketable, all while sucking up all the oxygen of any potential competitors.
Uber are clearly trying to do the same thing. Their driverless cars will at first just supplement the human drivers. Any competitor that has to start driverless on day one of their service will just not have enough coverage to make the service as convenient as Uber will be. If you think the money will be in Y, and the companies that first do X will be in the best position to dominate Y once Y-businesses become possible, then it's actually pretty rational to do X for ten years and make nothing but losses.
I know it probably says somewhere, and I'd be happy to be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the proposed solution to this is going to be some kind of treaty to ban it. Because that totally works and explains why banned things do not exist.
Will the future of our far descendants be better if we spend an ever growing amount of resources on keeping people alive?
And what makes you think that their interests are the objective standard for what's better? If you're really fucked up enough to not understand why it's better that people live rather than die, you deserve to have your asshat question turned back at you (and probably worse).
I think I'm still using Firefox only because I found the optimal cocktail of extensions to make it work right. Just now I looked at my extension manager and guess what: apart from uBlock Origin, every single one has a "LEGACY" warning next to it, which means that it won't work after the regime change. I've used Firefox as my primary browser since version 0.3, and I've put up with some nasty stuff over the years, but I've always had a strong enough computer to make it all bearable. But you know, Chrome is actually OK as a browser. Crucially, its extension catalogue will be much more mature that that of the rebooted Firefox. Hell, the way it looks now, come November, Microsoft Edge might have better extensions than Firefox. I have a feeling that I'll just refuse to upgrade and give my extensions a chance to adjust to the new regime. But if they don't, or if Firefox forces my upgrade before I'm ready, I'll just export my passwords and bookmarks and uninstall.
With these cheap adapters you can run 5.1 digital audio over the cables. Just plug in one end to the coax out on your sound card, and the other to the input on an amplifier anywhere in the house.
I'll give thing a screenshot of my program: a big button that says "Fix my problem," or maybe "Enhance". With that I guess I did the hard part, so now I'll just kick back and wait for the magic AI to generate the code to make it work..
I think it's fine to use devices in the atmosphere to relay our communications signals, but why planes? Wouldn't it be better to have some sort of a blimp with thin film solar cells on its upper surface? These could provide energy for maneuvering the various layers of moving air to maintain a reasonably constant position. Alternately, it could just be at the end of a long tether. I think that's a much more elegant way of keeping up altitude overnight.
Alnico magnets are awesome as pole pieces in pickups for electric guitars and basses. This year I started winding my own bass pickups, after testing many commercial pickups to get a sense of how the physical parameters affect tone. I can tell you that the kind of magnet you use makes an obvious difference to the sound of the instrument. It's not just about the net strength and geometry of the fields. Alnico magnets - but not ceramic, nor Nd - get eddy currents induced inside them from the vibrating strings, and this affects how they sound. I wonder whether Co2MnTi would also have these. I get the impression it's not a proper homogeneous alloy, so maybe not. Still, more info and a comparison field strengths would be useful. To a musician, a new type of magnet might be something like a newly discovered species of aromatic fruit: You immediately wonder what new aesthetic experiences it would allow for.
That plan is in motion and will not be affected by research at some Scottish genetics lab. What they're trying to do is to make sure that wild chickens don't truly go extinct no matter how much wildlife we destroy: They can always be unfrozen and their population can reboot at some unspecified future time when we decide to be better stewards of nature.
Yeah, this Musk guy sounds just like that idiot who was trying to push some online currency linked to your email - as if anyone would ever send money to other people online, just on the promise they mailed you something. And have you heard about that billionaire who thinks he can build a rocket that lands itself? What a fucking joke! He's probably watching too many geek movies, or trying to impress his geek friends. And then there's that rich dude who wanted to start a company that sells only electric cars, and actually make them in the US. Like, who's gonna make batteries for him? Geez! Oh well, if rich people want to throw away their money on geek-topia fantasy projects that could never work, I guess it's their right. Let's all just kick back and laugh at them as they inevitably fail.
It wasn't hubris, and yes, go is much more complex than chess. People didn't overestimate the game, they just underestimated how fast AI techniques would advance.They thought this would come in the 2020's not 2016.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't see this magical screw so I may be wrong here, but I would bet that I'm right: There is a cheap, common, standard screw which is almost like the one that caused the bottleneck. The design of the MacPro would have been just as good... except that somewhere in my apartment I already have a screwdriver which could have removed the screw. And that kind of thing is what Apple worked so hard to prevent. They needed some crazy pagan symbol in the head of the screw so that only Apple genius-priests could turn it. So if you're wondering why your MacPro cost you $3000, here's a part of the story.
I don't think that on reflection, anyone can think that the five paragraph essay, with all kinds of rigid "and then you next sentence must say x" instructions, exists for the benefit of student writers. Such essays are the product of a time when teachers have become too cowardly to assign grades according to quality of work. All the rules are there as little mini-quests that the obedient student ticks off, and the non-compliant student can be given clear, objective reasons for that B-. Real writing teachers, the ones who help actual writers, can still give clear reasons why a certain attempt at writing sucks. What they can't do is give a recipe that, if followed slavishly enough, will produce successful writing. But that recipe is exactly what public school students, parents and administrators demand. In every class, the teacher must lay out a path to grind out an A, one that requires nothing but careful adherence to explicit rules. That's how we got to today's insipid five paragraph essays. Insight, talent, a strong voice, and other qualities that make good writing good are either not addressed, or the value - sometimes the very existence - of such things is explicitly denied. If the rules are rigid enough, then all the essays suck equally by literary and aesthetic standards, which gives frightened teachers the freedom to grade essays by checklists alone. Nobody cares that this isn't helping the students learn to write. What they're actually learning is to submit and obey arbitrary rules, in preparation for - presumably - the future workplace where they will do more of the same. If I taught high school, I'd make students read and try to duplicate the effect of Michel de Montaigne's Essays, the 14th century work that invented and named the genre. They would actually have fun!
Procedural generation of game content is already eating everything else that used to be hand coded in games, and it won't be long before the writing of the quests will itself be done by some sort of neural net trained on the feedback of millions of gaming hours. First it will be the side quests, and they will suck, but I'm keeping an open mind about the potential that this might actually get good one day. It's not like the games I play have a staff of JRR Tolkiens and GRR Martins doing the writing.
Is it really "incredibly unique"? Damn, that so much more unique than almost every other unique thing! I mean, most unique things are unique, but this thing is apparently incredibly more so.
I hate child sexual exploitation at least as much as the next guy, and I think that Facebook should not be a vehicle for it. But at some point Facebook clearly lost the thread, because they are now openly admitting that the pictures they're removing were not cases of child exploitation. That's why they're not reporting the millions of users affected: they did nothing wrong. So why are they taking down the photos? Because the photos offend people. That's really it. Specifically, it offends some people that a small subset of dirty old men will collect these photos and become sexually aroused. We are on top of a slippery slope, and we need to draw the line right here, because if we allow this as a legitimate reason for censorship, we are also signing off on the removal everything else that turns on dirty old men, like exercise videos, figure skating, swimsuit photos, olympic gymnastics, pictures of feet, balloons, ASMR, and I don't even want to know what else. We've completely shifted from the noble goal of protecting children from exploitation to the dubious goal of making sure that certain usavory people have nothing to masturbate to. And yet Facebook acts like the latter is the same thing as the former. It's just not. And yes, I think we should protest this now, even if we don't care about child bathing pictures. Because next they will come for some other stupid content that offends some people, and we'll again say nothing, because we don't care about that either. And then they eventually come to censor the expressions that we do care about, and nobody will be left to protest, because protest against censorship will by then also be censored.
There are likely to be builds of ChromiumOS that you can install on the computer, and it produces the effect of ChromeOS running on hardware which will almost certainly be much better than some Chromebook.
If we could teach AI to quarry, transport, shape and stack rocks at least as well as humans did in the 17th century, we could literally build castles (and bridges and aquaducts) with very little energy input. Rocks are everywhere, and an army of AI powered instruments could be programmed to improve on the work of even the best stonemasons: If they scanned each available stone that comes from a quarry, algorithms could design the optimal stacking arrangements to minimize gaps and maximize structure stability. They could "solve" a construction project like it's a giant 3D puzzle, thus minimizing the number of stones that would need to be chiseled. But even chiseling stone with machines uses very little energy. The pace of construction would only be limited by the number of autonomous tools brought to bear, and they themselves could turn out to be cheap and mass-producible. Sure, you can't build skyscrapers from rocks, but I would happily live in a city of six story rowhouse blocks built from stone. The neighborhoods in Europe that are actually built in this way are beautiful, functional and pleasant to live in. With AI building tools that sink the cost of labor to almost zero, I think we should explore returning to some of these old, well-tested building methods and architectural designs.
You need to think through what you're worried about. Do you have any doubt that these extra forensic techniques are going to make perpetrator identification more accurate? If you admit they will, you've admitted that you're significantly less likely to be falsely charged in this new forensic regime than you would be in the less accurate system we have now. Yes, misleading evidence can crop up in any system of crime solving, but the fewer and sloppier are our tools and techniques, the greater the likelihood of false convictions. (This reply does not address what you say about "public domain skin," where I think you have a good point about privacy.)
I think the huge leap forward was the 50's, with everybody finally getting vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators and penicillin. Those feel like era-defining upgrades. The way people lived their lives 30 years later was not fundamentally different. The music got better, but the tech behind way people lived, worked and entertained themselves did not. Moore's law and the internet finally changed everyone's lives, and that too feels pretty era-defining.
I don't think that UPS intends to actually implement drones or driverless trucks in routine delivery for at least another decade. They just need to concoct enough "trials" and proof-of-concept videos to spook some meatheads in the Teamsters union. Now it suddenly becomes a bargaining chip for UPS when it negotiates its next contract with the Teamsters. Sure, UPS will "grudgingly" agree to some humans-only clause, but in exchange the will get lower prices and better conditions in its delivery contracts. That's how negotiation works.
I think there are a lot of similarities between the exploration of Antarctica and of Mars. Sure, I'll get to some important differences, but I think it's the right starting point.
Once upon a time, Antarctica sounded like just about the most harsh, alien, abandoned and adventurous place one could go. The world's boldest men organized heroic expeditions to reach the ultimate bragging right: being the first to visit the South Pole. In time some succeeded, but not before others miserably died. The sheer adventure and alienness of Antarctica captured our fantasy. H. P. Lovecraft's best fantasy horror story takes place there.
But then, Antarctica was replaced in our imagination by Mars, the new go-to setting for our fantasy and horror. We got to the point where we knew just enough to fire up our imagination about what Mars is like, but we could still fill in the many gaps in knowledge with our fantasy. Just like "conquered" Antarctica with bold expeditions, we will eventually "conquer" Mars. Human footprints will get made, photographed, instagrammed, and gushed about. And then what?
Then Mars will start to seem a lot more like Antarctica: a place where we could survive and even build cities, with great effort and great expense, but ... why? The reason why no settlements are being built on the Antarctic continent is not because of international laws. If those laws expired, it's not like villages would start springing up. We have some scientific stations in Antarctica, and will will have some on Mars. I think their governing principles will be almost identical. But we have no Antarctic immigrants, and I don't expect Martian immigrants, beyond a couple of very rich weirdos. Once the place is covered with footprints, the exoticism will have worn off, and we'll see it for what it is: a strangely beautiful but also profoundly inhospitable cold place that's hostile to human habitation, and that probably should be preserved rather than bulldozed for space condos. The scientists there will complain of terrible food, terrible ping, terrible odors, terrible crampedness, annoying cancers and terrible shipping charges on anything they want to buy. At that point, who will be signing up to live there? The same people now dying to live in Antarctica.
The only thing that bothers me about this is the personal identification in order to enter the store. Then again, stores like Costco have for years required you to submit your identity and made you pay for a uniquely-identifying card in order to use their store. It doesn't look like Amazon will charge you. And even I am willing to let a clerk scan my uniquely-identifying Safeway card at checkout so I can get 80 cents off seedless grapes or whatever. What's different about Amazon's store is that there isn't a staff of sad underpaid cashiers. I also won't miss the infernally slow checkout aisles that try to get me interested in buying magazines about Jennifer's latest battle with Angelina over Brad. Doesn't anyone else think the grocery store has always been a fairly shitty place? I see no need to protect it from extinction, just like I don't long for the pre-ATM days when people had to wait in line and talk to a bank teller in order to withdraw cash from their accounts.
>
I suspect that the history books will show Uber gambled on self-driving cars arriving soon enough to plug the financial hole from paying their drivers, and lost.
I think it's an insightful comment, but you might be wrong. Maybe they will ride it out and find themselves in the best position to be the unbeatable self-driving taxi network, because they can replace their old service with the new driverless service gradually and seamlessly.
The reason why Neflix leads in streaming sales is because the used to be a disc-by-mail company that trained its subscriber base to transition to streaming. Yeah, at first the streamable selection was crap, but when it felt like a bonus service, everyone was happy. It increased Netflix subscriptions because it added value to an existing service, but it didn't need to be independently marketable from day one. Then the streaming part could grow naturally until it actually became independently marketable, all while sucking up all the oxygen of any potential competitors.
Uber are clearly trying to do the same thing. Their driverless cars will at first just supplement the human drivers. Any competitor that has to start driverless on day one of their service will just not have enough coverage to make the service as convenient as Uber will be. If you think the money will be in Y, and the companies that first do X will be in the best position to dominate Y once Y-businesses become possible, then it's actually pretty rational to do X for ten years and make nothing but losses.
I know it probably says somewhere, and I'd be happy to be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the proposed solution to this is going to be some kind of treaty to ban it. Because that totally works and explains why banned things do not exist.
Will the future of our far descendants be better if we spend an ever growing amount of resources on keeping people alive?
And what makes you think that their interests are the objective standard for what's better? If you're really fucked up enough to not understand why it's better that people live rather than die, you deserve to have your asshat question turned back at you (and probably worse).
I think I'm still using Firefox only because I found the optimal cocktail of extensions to make it work right. Just now I looked at my extension manager and guess what: apart from uBlock Origin, every single one has a "LEGACY" warning next to it, which means that it won't work after the regime change. I've used Firefox as my primary browser since version 0.3, and I've put up with some nasty stuff over the years, but I've always had a strong enough computer to make it all bearable. But you know, Chrome is actually OK as a browser. Crucially, its extension catalogue will be much more mature that that of the rebooted Firefox. Hell, the way it looks now, come November, Microsoft Edge might have better extensions than Firefox. I have a feeling that I'll just refuse to upgrade and give my extensions a chance to adjust to the new regime. But if they don't, or if Firefox forces my upgrade before I'm ready, I'll just export my passwords and bookmarks and uninstall.
she is now guilty of workplace harassment.
Oh no, it looks like she's about to have a very tense meeting with Google's VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance. I heard she's a total bitch!
With these cheap adapters you can run 5.1 digital audio over the cables. Just plug in one end to the coax out on your sound card, and the other to the input on an amplifier anywhere in the house.
Your post was more interesting and informative than TFA. Thank you for explaining to us all why we should care.
I'll give thing a screenshot of my program: a big button that says "Fix my problem," or maybe "Enhance". With that I guess I did the hard part, so now I'll just kick back and wait for the magic AI to generate the code to make it work..
I think it's fine to use devices in the atmosphere to relay our communications signals, but why planes? Wouldn't it be better to have some sort of a blimp with thin film solar cells on its upper surface? These could provide energy for maneuvering the various layers of moving air to maintain a reasonably constant position. Alternately, it could just be at the end of a long tether. I think that's a much more elegant way of keeping up altitude overnight.
Alnico magnets are awesome as pole pieces in pickups for electric guitars and basses. This year I started winding my own bass pickups, after testing many commercial pickups to get a sense of how the physical parameters affect tone. I can tell you that the kind of magnet you use makes an obvious difference to the sound of the instrument. It's not just about the net strength and geometry of the fields. Alnico magnets - but not ceramic, nor Nd - get eddy currents induced inside them from the vibrating strings, and this affects how they sound. I wonder whether Co2MnTi would also have these. I get the impression it's not a proper homogeneous alloy, so maybe not. Still, more info and a comparison field strengths would be useful. To a musician, a new type of magnet might be something like a newly discovered species of aromatic fruit: You immediately wonder what new aesthetic experiences it would allow for.
That plan is in motion and will not be affected by research at some Scottish genetics lab. What they're trying to do is to make sure that wild chickens don't truly go extinct no matter how much wildlife we destroy: They can always be unfrozen and their population can reboot at some unspecified future time when we decide to be better stewards of nature.
Yeah, this Musk guy sounds just like that idiot who was trying to push some online currency linked to your email - as if anyone would ever send money to other people online, just on the promise they mailed you something. And have you heard about that billionaire who thinks he can build a rocket that lands itself? What a fucking joke! He's probably watching too many geek movies, or trying to impress his geek friends. And then there's that rich dude who wanted to start a company that sells only electric cars, and actually make them in the US. Like, who's gonna make batteries for him? Geez! Oh well, if rich people want to throw away their money on geek-topia fantasy projects that could never work, I guess it's their right. Let's all just kick back and laugh at them as they inevitably fail.
It wasn't hubris, and yes, go is much more complex than chess. People didn't overestimate the game, they just underestimated how fast AI techniques would advance.They thought this would come in the 2020's not 2016.