I doubt they're serious but some wackos thought Oumuamua was an alien probe due to its unusual shape, and since this new interstellar object is arriving shortly after Oumuamua has left it must be the mothership.
I feel like it's more of a meme than a serious thing for most people.
I am getting bombarded with yt videos about this object being half the size of the sun passing our system with the planets aligned in a 0.01% chance perfect geometry etc etc. millions of views. It's incredible what people believe these days. Not a grain of skepticism.
I think the number of wacky believers hasn't changed that much. It's just that now the countless outlets and algorithms venting this nonsense have ballooned to galactic proportions! My dad used to buy these 70/80s UFO magazines back in the day and they were just as nutty.
Do all of the views necessarily translate 1:1 to the number of people that believe it? Some people watch just to see what kooky nonsense people are falling for.
There are many more rocks in our own solar system than there are interstellar spacecraft. Assuming similar proportions elsewhere makes us conclude it’s never aliens.
I didn't hate the rest. it gave me an interest in robots and nanotech. I even did a summer project on baking nanotubes and taking their pictures with an electron microscope as a result.
Sure but it's also not a pink elephant and not a flower pot. It's none of those things. We have just as much evidence of those objects flying through space as we have of alien spaceships so far. So it's odd asking "So is it a spaceship or not?" just like it's odd asking "so is it a flower pot?".
Is Musk's red car a spaceship btw? Because if we are able to send such stuff to space, other intelligent beings would most probably do the same. Or they are more intelligent?
That's my point! Anything could be in space, elephants, flower pots, EVs. But they picked a particular thing out of the possible universe of objects so was curious why they picked that. It's an asteroid emitting Ni atoms based on the paper. Do we have any evidence of alien spaceships doing that that?
It could also be some bias on what we read or hear around us. But I agree that it's unsettling because in French we almost never make puns as "jokes." French puns have always a component of "higher literacy" that is not what we want in a joke.
Most quick jokes in French are puns in some way, including the famous "blagues Carambar".
For those who don't know, Carambar is a brand of candy where the wrapper contains a joke. Always regarded a terrible, we love them anyways. Similar to dad jokes in English.
The longer the joke, the less it tends to rely on puns. You don't hear puns very often in stand up comedy for instance.
Ages ago, there was a land that was plagued by a terrible bear with a perchance for beating up various small animals that happened to be in the area. This wouldn't be too bad, except that this was in the area with lots of sheep. Now, the sheep themselves weren't in danger, it was the sheep dogs that were threatened.
... (several paragraphs later)
The shepherds, upon hearing the great roar and crash from the cave quickly ran to the place to see a knight sprawled against a tree and a bear underneath it. The dog the bear had been bringing back, however, was alive and well and quite happy to see people again. And so, feeling quite bad for the family of the knight, the shepherds went to the king and offered family of Sir Sufud the dog he had saved from the bear.
Nothing helps the mourning after a terrible knight like the dog of a bear that hit you.
I don't get the point. The article says that if you "somewhat" measure, then you lose "somewhat" from the wavelike nature. So the photon is a wave by X%, and a particle by 100-X%?
A quantum object is its own thing - it has both wavelike and particle-like properties.
Measurement here might be better understood to "filter out" any parts of the wave that don't agree with the measurement. So a precise measurement will project out a lot of the wave, giving you something more localized and particle-like. A fuzzy measurement will project out only a bit of the wave, giving you something that's still spread out and quantum and wave-like.
The article says "The fuzzier atom rustles more easily and records the path of the photon. In tuning up an atom’s fuzziness, researchers can increase the probability that a photon will exhibit particle-like behavior".
I think we're just seeing decoherence in action here. If the photon interacts with the atom, it becomes entangled with the environment (the atom). Giving the atom a higher temperature results in it having a higher probability of it interacting with the photon, and decohering.
And I think the individual photon doesn't have a mixture of a certain % of wave or particle like nature. It's just that there is a certain probability that it will decohere (interact with the atom), so if you turn up the temperature of the atoms, you'll just see a greater % of the photons decohering when they interact with those atoms.
That's just my amateur understanding of the situation, so I'm happy to be corrected by someone who knows better. Also, I don't have access to the paper itself (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/zwhd-1k2t) as it's paywalled and not on scihub.
This is the biggest misunderstanding. Light is always a wave. It is never a proton. Light becomes a proton when we measure it. Everything is a wave, and nothing is a particle ever.
Waves are just probabilities and the human quantum computer brain collapses those probabilities in an orchestrated reductive capacity to create a certainty out of a probability.
I had a similar feeling.
But I think this is indeed a glimpse to the intrinsic structure of reality itself, not just a promise of seeing reality. Like we can have a blink of turning around in Plato's cave.
I think the patterns of the Mandelbrot set is a similar thing. And there are only a handful of other things that shows the very basic structure of reality. And the encouraging thing is that it seems the core of reality is not an infinite void.
Recording yourself is not a violation, only publishing on Youtube.
Content generated with LLMs are not a violation. Publishing the content you generated might be.
Quotation is fair use in all sensible copyright system.
An LLM will mostly be able to quote anything, and should be. Quotation is not derived work. LLMs are not stealing copyrighted work.
They just show that Harry Potter is in English and a mostly logical story. If someone is stabbed, they will die in most stories, that's not copyrightable.
If you have an engine that knows everything, it will be able to quote everything.
looks like quite bad / incoherent for me personally. For something that is competing in a "make your information easy to handle, read, and manage" market, it takes too much effort to try figure out where the creators want me to look, or where valuable information exists. This doesn't leave one feeling confident on what is being offered. For example I load in to a massive animation that flicks around at a fast pace. So the first impression is "fuck you, you don't need to know what is going on"
I then scroll down to try find something to read/look at that makes sense. I am met with two bits of information
"just download it to get started"
and
"it's a plain text editor that does stuff many tools you already have do"
So far, things aren't great. Lets look at the demo project, maybe that has some screenshots that really highight it's potential.
"Download the software and just import the demo project"
So, over all, the impression one is left me with is a "just trust me bro, please bro, it's really useful bro, just install it, I swear" kind of message. Personally, I am not just unconvinced by actively wary of this project.
