That's not too surprising given that this was the planet around TRAPPIST-1 closest to the star and receives 4 times the solar irradiance than the Earth, which is twice what Venus gets.

It's actually the 4th planet from the star that astronomers have the highest hopes of finding an earth-like atmosphere.

Jesus did it in three days. This guy is just a slacker.

I don't think young Madonna would recognize old Madonna.

Germany doesn't have to send something very far for it to be technically an export.

>ChatGPT actually shows pretty good theory of mind.

Do you have a specific example of that I can try?

Doing brain surgery and designing computer chips might actually be easier for an AI than being a confidant. A confidant needs to understand the real world and human emotions, which are extremely difficult for AI systems.

ChatGPT is real AI, but it's not Artificial General Intelligence. We'd need AGI for something to be a real confidant.

The truth is that over time generally things keep getting better and better. People are always thinking it's getting worse, but that's just not true. You'll be fine.

Yes radio does lose power when it travels long distances.

I think radio might be the most appropriate for this kind of communication because it should be the first method of communication that technological civilizations discover. That means everybody should be able to send and receive radio.

An earth-like planet with a similar technological civilization would have to be no more than 122 light years away to detect our signals because we've only been using radio for that long. Most likely they'd have to be much closer or the signals would just be too weak to pick out from the background noise.

122 light years sounds like a long distance, but keep in mind that our Milky Way galaxy is over 100,000 light years across. Any other galaxy would be hopelessly too far away to ever receive a radio signal. The closest major galaxy is Andromeda at over 2.5 million light years away.

It's entirely possible there are several radio signals from other planets traveling from planets in our galaxy but they either haven't reached us yet or are too weak to pick up by the time they've crossed that vast distance.

We don't need a controlled environment to get reliable statistics like that. You're talking about hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.

It's not hard to get statistics on how many people were saved by the vaccine. You just look at what percentage of people who die from the disease who didn't get the vaccine compared to the percentage of people who die from the disease who did get the vaccine and apply the difference to the people who got the disease with the vaccine.

Moving from assembly to compiled languages to managed languages didn't reduce the number of software developers needed even though it made them more productive. Using AI won't be much different.

That's true, but there will always be jobs for people with high levels of skill instead of people who watched a few YouTube tutorials.

Don't worry about AI. At most it will provide tools that will make Software Engineers more productive. It won't take their jobs.

Other than something Petroleum related, it's hard to go wrong with any Software or Engineering field in the future. What you go into should depend on your skills and passion.

I seem to remember a Christmas Story getting big before the mid-90's.

He and some other software devs are wringing their hands about how ChatGPT can write some code for you.

You're a SDE for a top tech company. You already have the best overall career.

I'm not sure why someone with your skills can't see that this AI stuff isn't going to have a negative effect on software development. It's like saying we weren't going to need programmers after going from assembly to high level languages. Like high level languages, AI tools are just going to make programmers more productive. They can't be replaced.

To be honest, you'd be crazy to give up being a SDE to ruin your knees or back doing a trade job.

If the world changes as much over just the next 300 years as it did over the previous 300 years we can't even imagine what that future might be like.

Helion's approach of getting electricity directly from the energy created by the fusion reaction seems intuitively to be the way to go. Other approaches rely on getting enough excess heat energy from the reaction to power steam turbines.

I don't know. We seem to be making more progress now than in the past, so it might not be 30 years away. I predict Helion will be the first to get a working fusion power plant going in less than 10 years.

https://www.youtube.com/@HelionEnergy

We might create greater than human intelligence in some ways without understanding how the human brain works.

Fast execution times.