Top Gun

Image-recognition and manipulation algorithms are a very, very, very long way away from a true human-level consciousness.

I'm not defending Biden at all in this, like there's no reason that anything leaving the White House at the end of a term shouldn't be gone over with an absolute fine-toothed comb, but I guaran-fucking-tee you that prior administrations probably have classified documents sitting in some old musty box in a closet too.

Yeah, I couldn't really picture Hamill doing the role on his own. It wouldn't feel right.

That's honestly really cool shit. Far too many people die on transplant lists every year.

You can't make this shit up.

Yeah, but we've seen this episode before. Reruns are boring.

That would involve him having the necessary equipment for such a task.

I've been watching a lot of sim racing content over the past couple of years and I'd love to get into it. I just don't think my desk setup has the space for a wheel.

But I thought anime was teh s uck.

Everybody gets one.

It's pathetic how desperate he's getting.

I don't think they can try him as anything at age 6. You don't even have any real sense of consequences for actions at that age.

Sail the high seas and buy the BDs later like a good boomer.

Space Dandy kicked major ass.

I know almost nothing about the series other than its name but that looks pretty damn impressive all things considered.

I just barely skimmed his Wiki article and hoo boy.

Does Nabs think any of us give a single flying fuck about his opinion at this point? At all?

No one: Absolutely no one: Japan: "You know what really needs a sequel?"

No one watched old CN promos? "My ability to talk to fish is of no use to us here!"

I am filled with unironic glee. It's...it's so beautiful.

I mean there is some inherent value in saying, "Okay this is a thing that can actually be done," since researchers weren't 100% sure it was theoretically possible. That shifts it to more of an (absurdly complex) engineering problem than a scientific one. Oh, and while I'm being Buzz Killington, the raison d'etre for the National Ignition Facility is to provide data and experimentation for thermonuclear warheads, since it's kind of frowned upon to go blowing those up willy-nilly anymore. Granted, fission reactors had a similar original purpose, so y'know.

Ehh...this specific moment is not what I would qualify as a "massive leap forward," but instead a point along a gradual progression. Don't get me wrong, it's an important step along the way, but there wasn't some massive new technological leap forward that suddenly made this possible. It's more that the existing experimental setup has been refined to the point where it was able to achieve a net energy gain. Something else that's being glossed over in the general media coverage is that the net energy gain only applies to the ratio of output to supplied energy in the reaction itself. From what I've read, it took far more energy to charge the lasers used in the experiment than was actually produced by it, so this isn't exactly something that could generate net power. I don't mean to sound like a spoilsport here, but I think it's important to put announcements like this in perspective, which mass media coverage of science topics is generally horrible at doing. This is an important step, but even in the best-case scenario we are still literally decades away from a practical deployable commercial fusion reactor.

Viable nuclear fusion has been "40 years away" for at least the past 40 years and counting. I don't see how this announcement changes the arithmetic all that much.