This reminded me of some earlier discussion on Hacker News about using LLMs trained on old texts to determine novelty and obviousness of a patent application: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43440273
The core simulator part works, but I don't yet have a user interface or documentation. Probably just going to be text input files to start, maybe a GUI later. Recently, I'm mostly working on testing.
The simulator is object-oriented and basically allows one to build up a blaster from separate control volumes and connections between control volumes. This is useful as it allows the same core simulator framework to handle different blaster configurations and even variants of them. For example, someone asked me to make the spring piston able to pull a vacuum on its back side due to not having sufficient flow. That's easy here as I just need to add another control volume and the appropriate connection onto the basic springer configuration.
I don't think crowdfunding is a good funding source for science in general. Crowdfunding's going to overemphasize already popular and easy to explain science at the expense of everything else. Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed.
I disagree. There's a guy that doesn't have much attention that's creating fuel from burning plastic. He got crowdfunded. I also recall finding a website way back when of a dude that explored the old railroad tunnels of downtown Chicago. I would have 100% funded that guy for content.
He gets $36K from about 800 donors for a project that seems pretty easy to explain ("creating fuel from burning plastic") and is something probably millions of people are interested in. Wikipedia says he has millions of followers!
The stuff I'd like to do would probably not have even 800 people interested in it after I carefully explained it. And $36K is not a lot when it comes to experimental research in the physical world.
In my view, working a day job and taking periodic sabbaticals would have better ROI for this guy and myself.
> "Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed."
"Boring sounding" to anyone who don't have a "passion" for that particular area of science as you must if you're wanting to research it. The (hard) trick is to get your crowdfunding request in front of the specific eyeballs that will understand (and be excited by) your motivations and interests enough to want to finance advancing that research.
Unfortunately, Fortran's implementation of this has some inconsistencies. Doing certain operations will convert from the custom indexing back to 1-based indexing.
Worse than the pitfalls that can arise with a correct compiler is the fact that most Fortran compilers have bugs with non-default lower bounds -- and they're not always the same bugs, so portability is a real problem. The feature is fine as it stood with Fortran '77 dummy arrays.
In practice, unit checking is almost never done on actual code, though it should be done. From what I recall, some Fortran folks have been trying to get unit checking into the Fortran standard itself since the 1970s without success.
An approach based on static analysis would not have the downsides I listed, but I personally would prefer being unable to compile the code at all if it had an error that could be detected.
I have found that many areas of human knowledge are massively disorganized. Everything is also siloed; knowledge that could easily apply to other domains is hidden by things like specialized terminology.
I think it is because science is systematic, or step-by-step, and not systemic - lacking a "whole system" point of view. Both perspectives are needed to understand a reality made of systems.
The headline is inaccurate. As far as I can tell, no patents have been granted yet. Intel filed patent applications. Failure to distinguish between applications and granted patents is far too common.
See the sidebar on the right? Look at "Application US18/401,460 events". Note that the status is "Pending" and not "Active" or "Expired". Google isn't always accurate here as their data could be out of date, but they're accurate enough for me to not look further. You can check the other countries as well to see all are pending.
Just like articles that say "xx research group publishes new article discovering ..." when it is a preprint on arxiv (especially in "traditional" physical sciences). I mean, they kind of published it, but I would be very careful about reporting work that has not gone through peer review yet.
Okay? This is not relevant. What matters here is that they have developed this technology. “Patents” in the title of the article is a way of saying that they have developed the technology.
I don't agree. I think most people would think that "patents" implies that a patent office has granted a patent.
For what it's worth, confusing patents and patent applications is a pet peeve of mine as a former patent examiner. I've seen people criticize the USPTO for apparently granting a patent on some nonsense, but when I look at it, the USPTO rejected the application. The problem is that people can't tell the difference between a patent application and patent. I saw an opportunity to clarify this issue and I took it.
> What matters here is that they have developed this technology.
Having a pending patent, or even a granted patent, does not mean the technology described has been invented. There are many many patents on all sorts of infinite energy devices for example. It should go without saying that none of those work.
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