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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • No, that’s not a real problem either. Model search techniques are very mature, the first automated tools for this were released in the 90s, they’ve only gotten better.

    AI can’t ‘train itself’, there is no training required for an optimization problem. A system that queries the value of the objective function - “how good is this solution” - then tweaks parameters according to the optimization algorithm - traffic light timings - and queries the objective function again isn’t training itself, it isn’t learning, it is centuries-old mathematics.

    There’s a lot of intentional and unintentional misinformation around what “AI” is, what it can do, and what it can do that is actually novel. Beyond Generative AI - the new craze - most of what is packaged as AI are mature algorithms applied to an old problem in a stagnant field and then repackaged as a corporate press release.

    Take drug discovery. No “AI” didn’t just make 50 new antibiotics, they just hired a chemist who graduated in the last decade who understands commercial retrosynthetic search tools and who asked the biopharma guy what functional groups they think would work.









  • The form of silicon used in semiconductor manufacturing, specific formations of sand, is becoming harder to source from the environment. Silicon the element is incredibly abundant - the vast majority of all rocks on Earth are silicates - so there isn’t a risk that we run out of silicon itself any time soon.

    What may happen, in several decades, is an increase in price due to the need to process more abundant rocks to obtain pure silicon.


  • Gold is rare, compared to just about every other element, in accessible areas of earth. All the gold ever discovered on Earth would fit inside a 23 meter (75 foot) cube. This is about 244 thousand tons, in all of human history.

    Compare this to iron, where just the United States produces 46 Million tons in 2022 alone.

    There is plenty of gold deep within the Earth - it is very dense, so it sank towards the core when Earth was recently formed - but on the surface and the proximal crust, it is not found in abundance.