this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Still, nice to see a positive counter to some of the early negative-nellies.
I'm really hoping that this stuff proves out in the end, because then I'll be able to say I Told You So to the doubting Thomases that immediately jumped on the "nothing ever happens" bandwagon when this was first announced.
Oh and I guess the total revolutionary advancement of human civilization will also be a nice secondary benefit.
As someone who works in power electronics... well, not sure how to feel about this lol. But it will certainly be a while before any products are brought to market.
As a programmer, I already went through the "woah, my whole career path is about to fundamentally change" moment when I first got to toy around with ChatGPT earlier this year. Maybe everyone's going to get a turn at that. :)
Back when the Em drive had its brush with reproducibility a few years ago I thought one of the most fun side effects would be that the crackpot garage tinkerers would have scored a major feather in their caps and everyone would be paying a lot more attention to their crackpottery going forward. These LK-99 developers are quite a few steps above garage-tinkerers, but they're still far from respected members of some major institution somewhere so perhaps we'll get a similar flourishing of interest in off-the-beaten-path theories should this turn out to be a real discovery.
So.... about that revolutionary advancement. Now that I know where this notion came from, it's all the more funny to me.
It's not a positive counter. That's the thing. Actually read these reports and threads because they aren't as glowing as headlines make them appear.
If the results were "does not support LK-99 as a room-temperature superconductor", that would be a negative result. If they hadn't done the work at all and there were no results, that would be a neutral result. So this is a positive result. It doesn't have to be a sweeping confirmation to still be positive.
Running the same simulation isn't a positive result, it's running the same simulation. Not running tests at all isn't neutral, it's nothing. I'm not saying this needs to be some sweeping confirmation, I'm saying that when you read these reports they aren't the results that headlines would have you believe.