Insane factoid (post from Feb 27, 2022) ... this was funded by a Chinese gaming company and built in 2 years for relative pennies??:
MiHoYo, the developer of Genshin Impact, has led a $65m funding round in Shanghai based Energy Singularity which is a company involved in nuclear fusion technology, tokamak devices and operational control systems.
The company plans to build its own Tokamak device by 2024.
Unrelated to what you are citing, but I believe a “factoid” is something that looks like a fact but is not. Like how a planetoid looks like a planet but isn’t one.
I only realized this myself decades after using the term factoid due to pages in highlights for kids.
This is a British vs American English thing. In British English a “factoid” is something that looks true but isn't. In American English “factoid” is a synonym for trivia--something that is true, but of minor importance.
> In British English a “factoid” is something that looks true but [ ... ]
may or may not be true.
Wikipedia has it as "an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact." after the original USofAmerica coinage by Norman Mailer.
In Commonwealth countries (Australia, Canada, UK) two decades past we used it on intelligence forums as the name for atomic snippets of information released by companies via stock exchanges, company reports, PR .. each nugget being an atomic fact like paragraph linked back to a source that asserted that fact to be true, but to be taken as potentially incorrect.
Literally the very next line: "Since the term's invention in 1973, it has become used to describe a brief or trivial item of news or information."
The intended meaning by Norman Mailer never took on in the states.
Literally you asserted:
> In British English a “factoid” is something that looks true but isn't.
I responded that
In British English a “factoid” is something that looks true but may or may not be true.
.. there's a difference.
So, a factoid being sometimes true, but not always... Is a factoid.
That’s arguable.
This sounds like a factoid to me.
Jokes aside, what do we actually do in this scenario, when the same word has opposite meanings?
In my opinion, it’s always best to err on caution and use another word if possible (“short fact” instead?).
Because I have seen this factoid discussion before…
A wonder how different people will interpret "a couple of factoids" then!
This is only true if “American English” means English spoken by people of low education or as a second language.
The other meaning is a small or trivial bit of (true) information.
I thought the second definition came about from continual misunderstanding of the word, like how literally no longer means literally.
BTW, what is the new word to use when one literally means literally?
There is none. The word has been misused to the point of ambiguity being an accepted part of its definition, and we are all worse off for it. The language is now less expressive, and you need to use more words to add context and remove ambiguity when you really do mean "literally" in the literal sense.
‘Actually’ is what I’ve heard most often.
Use literally. It still means literally. Language has all kinds of things like sarcasm, exaggeration, and metaphor that change the way a sentence should be interpreted, but the meaning of each word remains the same.
You add “quite” before “literally”.
Just prefix the sentence with “literally literally (not literally literally)”
Gen Z uses the very awkward "unironically".
that too, will often get used ironically
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Sure, but that’s how language works. Lots of words that we use in modern English have drifted away from their original meaning.
Language is the shared meaning between people, so if lots of people understand something the same way… then thats what the word means now
The curious thing is that Norman Mailer coined the term about 1970. Is drift accelerating, or do words so new lack the stability of the old?
I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s that new words are less stable than old ones.
In the same way that if you want to predict which authors will be well known in 400 years, your best bet is on authors that we currently know from 400 years ago. Better to bet on Shakespeare and Aristotle, than e.e.cummings and T.S. Eliot
A word coined in the 1970s won’t be nearly as entrenched in its meaning with the public as an older word.
So, that’s my suspicion. New words are more prone to drift than old words
Quite that factoid. How do we know which it is? ;p
Guess it goes both ways... which is kinda worse.
I really like to call those factlets, but that's probably just me.
Other examples I like to trot out: Android is not really a man, Asteroid is not really a star, Meteoroid is not really a meteor.
Factoids (true or not) seem to have special appeal for people who like to socialize with others by knowing things - the Cliff Clavens of the world. It has an overtone of superficiality along with triviality.
“A factoid is either an invented or assumed statement presented as a fact, or a true but brief or trivial item of news or information.”
Literally a useless word on its own now that the definition evolved this way... many such cases unfortunately.
Funny that the word "literally" have evolved in a similar way
Until they've made a billion dollars I'd assume the situation is not that rosy. It is easy enough to do a cool science experiment for $65 million. That being said, I applaud anyone achieving any result when it comes to energy.
My first test for Chinese success is "would this have been legal in the US?". I'm not sure who regulates tokamaks but I assume they have a similar risk profile to nuclear reactors (nuclear process releases a vast amount of energy in a tiny space) and so it would be normal if building one commercially was prohibited.
But they don't have the stored energy density of fissile nuclear reactors; they have the stored energy density of a big particle accelerator. Shutting down a particle accelerator (either temporarily or permanently) is way easier than shutting down a fission pile, because a particle accelerator or fusion reactor would just dump the plasma into a graphite bed and dump the stored magnetic field energy into a bunch of large copper bars acting as big resistors.
EDIT: If you shot a hole in a fusion reactor, the cold air would immediately quench the plasma down to room temperature.
https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/nrc-decision-separ...
Supporting letter from Helion Energy: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2224/ML22243A083.pdf
Fission has a very different risk profile than fusion.
Additionally making a fusion plant isn't a stepping stone to making a nuclear bomb
> making a fusion plant isn't a stepping stone to making a nuclear bomb
In theory a fusion plant can use the neutrons to irradiate the right chemical element to produce Plutonium-239 or Uranium-233.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=proliferation+risk+fusion for more info> making a fusion plant isn't a stepping stone to making a nuclear bomb
What about a hydrogen bomb?
How would you make a bomb out of a tokamak? It is barely stable enough to generate the little heat required to generate energy, any disruption to that will just put out the reaction it wont explode.
Fusion bombs requires fission bombs as a fuse to have enough heat to explode, fusion reactors wont even come close to that.
Their risk profile is basically zero.
I doubt (nuclear) regulations are stifling much innovation here.
certainly not zero: fusion reactors still contain a decent amount of toxic materials, some of which radioactive, and when working make all kinds of highly radioactive elements inside the structure of the reactor. Probably less of a risk than fission, though (it's pretty unlikely a failure will result in an explosion or runaway reaction which spreads those radioisotopes far and wide).
Why would you assume fusion has the same risk profile as fission? They are opposite ends of the periodic table :)
China's best coding LLM, which beats GPT4 on coding benchmarks ( https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Coder-V2 ) was trained by a random Chinese hedge fund.
I doubt there's much in terms of brainpower, compute or financial resources to differentiate a hedge fund and an AI research lab.
I just see some great market politics from Chinese leadrs
The old saying about absolute power corrupting absolutely clearly has parallels in all other fields: Absolute money corrupts vision and focus.
Tesla: "We did it. We have become profitable and created a real product people want. Now we can laser focus on making it better and more reliable and cheaper for everyone!" "haha nope! lets put it all into crypto and humanoid robots and impregnating as many CEOs as possible, let that bet ride bayyybeeee!!!!"
I don't think this is a corruption of focus - MiHoYo has had "Tech Otakus Save The World" as their slogan long before Genshin made its first billion dollars.
Not to mention that they can make back $65M in just a few weeks from one of their two mobile games and they are about to launch a new one. This is basically pennies to them.
One of their three. HI3 and HSR aren't the same game.
Don't forget their best game tears of themis
I've always wondered what they meant with that slogan, but now it makes sense.
Also Tesla: drive the price of EVs down to parity with ICE cars while delivering a superior product, built out the nations charging infrastructure (and got everybody to switch to NACS), and oh yeah: made self driving available to everybody for next to nothing.
> Tesla: drive the price of EVs down to parity with ICE cars while delivering a superior product
Tesla was more than willing to jack up their prices and maximize profit when they could. What drove prices down on Teslas was real competition from the incumbent manufacturers. And inflation cooling people's willingness to blow a bunch of money on expensive cars. And CATL making batteries less expensive. And even then, their cars are only at parity right about now, with a $7500 tax credit. And also only if you are fairly loose about what features you need to consider 'parity' achieved.
Let’s just ignore that oil companies owning patents killed evs for years my gripe here is Tesla’s “self driving” isn’t actually self driving? It is basically advanced cruise control and requires supervision, Tesla is not liable for it running into things, and there is no indication of that changing anytime soon?
Basic Autopilot that is free on every model is advanced cruise control + lane keeping.
FSDS (Full Self Driving, Supervised [for now]) can handle the vast majority of driving scenarios, from A -> B. I currently intervene once per 10 drives, usually due to a routing issue (never safety critical). It is rapidly improving, and will drop the human requirement once it surpasses most drivers.
FSD still requires you to pay full attention. The name is still a lie and Elon has been claiming the human requirement will be dropped “soon” for what now? Almost a decade?
> for next to nothing
Their cars are certainly out of my price range. Plus, openpilot has been doing it for free for years.
you should try driving with openpilot and compare it with FSD to see if they're equal since you are making this comparison
So, most other new cars are as well?
OpenPilot works well in limited scenarios, but even the founder George Hotz openly admits Tesla is significantly ahead and has the right approach.
“Self driving”
Not sure where an unreliable, very expensive to fix, poorly QC'd cars are a "superior product" but it's not where I live. The charging infrastructure is a great feat though.
Even more reason to dislike Genshin Impact.
Sorry, how does contributing to an energy project cause dislike for a barely related video game?
Spending money in that casino-cum-game funds energy research in a foreign adversary nation.
Giving me “nobody can make the world a better place more than me/us” vibes. I’d be happy if my leisure spending went to causes that benefits humanity, no matter which country is making the contribution. That said, I agree that gacha/casino game mechanics should be made illegal
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