drosophila

So, keep in mind that single photon sensors have been around for awhile, in the form of avalanche photodiodes and photomultiplier tubes. And avalanche photodiodes are pretty commonly used in LiDAR systems already.

The ones talked about in the article I linked collect about 50 points per square meter at a horizontal resolution of about 23 cm. Obviously that's way worse than what's presented in the phys.org article, but that's also measuring from 3km away while covering an area of 700 square km per hour (because these systems are used for wide area terrain scanning from airplanes). With the way LiDAR works the system in the phys.org article could be scanning with a very narrow beam to get way more datapoints per square meter.

Now, this doesn't mean that the system is useless crap or whatever. It could be that the superconducting nanowire sensor they're using lets them measure the arrival time much more precisely than normal LiDAR systems, which would give them much better depth resolution. Or it could be that the sensor has much less noise (false photon detections) than the commonly used avalanche diodes. I didn't read the actual paper, and honestly I don't know enough about LiDAR and photon detectors to really be able to compare those stats.

But I do know enough to say that the range and single-photon capability of this system aren't really the special parts of it, if it's special at all.

The commercial version of practically everything is better than the consumer version (or at least bullshit-free).

The reason being that a large company has negotiating power far beyond that of an individual consumer.

Specifically they are completely incapable of unifying information into a self consistent model.

To use an analogy you see a shadow and know its being cast by some object with a definite shape, even if you can't be sure what that shape is. An LLM sees a shadow and its idea of what's casting it is as fuzzy and mutable as the shadow itself.

Funnily enough old school AI from the 70s, like logic engines, possessed a super-human ability for logical self consistancy. A human can hold contradictory beliefs without realizing it, a logic engine is incapable of self-contradiction once all of the facts in its database have been collated. (This is where the SciFi idea of robots like HAL-9000 and Data from Star Trek come from.) However this perfect reasoning ability left logic engines completely unable to deal with contradictory or ambiguous information, as well as logical paradoxes. They were also severely limited by the fact that practically everything they knew had to be explicitly programmed into them. So if you wanted one to be able to hold a conversion in plain English you would have to enter all kinds of information that we know implicitly, like the fact that water makes things wet or that most, but not all, people have two legs. A basically impossible task.

With the rise of machine learning and large artificial neural networks we solved the problem of dealing with implicit, ambiguous, and paradoxical information but in the process completely removed the ability to logically reason.

In some cases you can replace a pun with another pun that works in the target language.

In other cases, where you're translating a religious text, doing something for scholarly reasons, or you otherwise think your audience would really like to know what's going on in a text you have to add a translation note.

That sounds absolutely fine to me.

Compared to an NVME SSD, which is what I have my OS and software installed on, every spinning disk drive is glacially slow. So it really doesn't make much of a difference if my archive drive is a little bit slower at random R/W than it otherwise would be.

In fact I wish tape drives weren't so expensive because I'm pretty sure I'd rather have one of those.

If you need high R/W performance and huge capacity at the same time (like for editing gigantic high resolution videos) you probably want some kind of RAID array.

Baldur's Gate 3 supposedly has 1,365,000 words of dialogue while Disco Elysium supposedly has "a little more than a million".

I'm not talking about how the game feels, this is just raw stats.

EDIT: the Final Cut version of Disco Elysium is supposed to be completely voice acted, but for lines where the narration is mixed into the middle of a character's line, it's not. For example: "Yes," Kim adjusts his glasses "I think that would be prudent". The "Kim adjusts his glasses" part isn't voice acted, so that might cut down on the amount of voice acting a bit more.

Disco Elysium had about the same amount of voice acted dialogue as BG3.

Granted, it gets away with that because it's a point and click adventure game, but you don't necessarily have to have a sky high budget to have tons of dialogue and a highly branching storyline. If you don't have voice acting it's even cheaper. Fallen London has roughly 4x the amount of dialogue as those games, though it's basically a live service text adventure.

That was a different technique, using simulated evolution in an FPGA.

An algorithm would create a series of random circuit designs, program the FPGA with them, then evaluate how well each one accomplished a task. It would then take the best design, create a series of random variations on it, and select the best one. Rinse and repeat until the circuit is really good at performing the task.

A dark pattern would be some sort of underhanded but legal tactic to trick or coerce a user into agreeing to something they wouldn't otherwise.

But most websites aren't using dark patterns for this, instead they just blatantly and plainly violate the law.

I don't think I've heard any European say this about American junk/fast food even once.

About the only thing I think I've heard in regards to flavor is "sickeningly sweet" and "even stuff that's not supposed to be sweet is sweet".

I'm more excited about those Frore MEMS airjet chips.

That's actually in at least one consumer product right now.