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cameronfen

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Posts posted by cameronfen

  1. 44 minutes ago, lnofeisone said:

    You and I are interpreting the results differently. My interpretation is that LK 99 is not a superconductor at any temperature so the only frontier that's being pushed is the one that says don't do more testing with LK 99. 

    You are right it's looking more like a dud based on what has come out the last couple of days but there have been some replications that demonstrate partial success, Superconducting at 110K and ambient pressure. See Wikipedia's list of replications.  

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99

  2. Just now, lnofeisone said:

    https://interestingengineering.com/science/lk-99-replicated-material-no-superconductivity

     

    There was also a tweet (that I can't currently find) from UMD QMC - one of the top centers when it comes to superconductors and quantum in general - that the paper was basically sloppy and analysis lacking.

    Yea for sure.  I think most physicists agree with that.  It’s looking more likely than not that this is not a room temperature superconductor, but I think it seems like scientists are optimistic that this paper is not junk and pushes the frontier closer towards that goal. 

  3. 2 hours ago, throw123 said:

    added to DG

    3i a London-based P/E firm owns Action the DG of Europe.  Action has no dollar store competition or even much mass-market competition like Walmart or Costco.  Action is 60% of NAV and market cap.  Growing revenue at 33% (22% same-store sales), income maybe 60%.  I'll post a write-up at some point.  The thread is here though atm: 

     

  4. 5 minutes ago, Parsad said:

     

    If the 30 year bond is at 4.3% and rising, then how can stocks have a multiple of 25?  Should be at P/E of around 16.

     

    Cheers!

    As I’m sure you know, if you have robust enough growth this could change the fair value multiple. 

  5. From the wikipedia page of LK99, you do have two replication attempts that have been successful at replicating some aspects of superconductivity.  One at temperatures of below 110 Kelvin and then a sharp drop in resistance at 230-250K (as mentioned above) and one replication showing diagmagentism, but no word on resistance yet.  Two other labs show null results but this might not be surprising considering the success rate of the original LK99 paper was only 10%.  It's crazy all the labs are in China and India.  Maybe that's where the world is heading.  

  6. 1 hour ago, ValueArb said:

    If this is real it’s going to take years before we know. It’s such an audacious claim it will require really clear replication and much better demonstrations than the original authors have been able to do.

     

    But if true it’s the stuff of science fiction. There is so much energy loss in our transmission networks that it would reduce power demand and waste heat generation by incredible amounts. Would be the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions in history.

     

    And then there is the advances it would bring in all sorts of areas like integrated circuits, transportation, even space flight. 

     

    The material is actually pretty easy to make somewhat poorly, but the replications done seem somewhat promising.  But I agree that to make these things at the purity and quality that is necessary for mass production is difficult.  I think the LK99 paper even stated that they could only get superconducting on 10% of the samples they made.  

     

    I don't think it will take years to reproduce the findings though.  After all the betting markets contract for a no success is if no one can reproduce by 12/31/2023.  So I imagine the experts consider that reproduction shouldn't take close to that long.  

     

     

    2 minutes ago, lnofeisone said:

    I had a roommate in grad school was trying to defend his master's thesis and focused on simulation. His simulation didn't produce the expected results because gravity interfered with interactions. He set gravity to 0, the simulation worked, and he defended his thesis.  The last time someone tried to claim room temperature superconductor - corbaneceous sulfur hydride - had the veracity of their publication (and specifically "user-defined" data analysis) questioned. 

     

    Lastly, and Andrew Cote (despite using the term [sic] Material Science) correctly calls this out, this would need to be a single crystal. Single crystal metallurgy is extremely expensive. One of very few places where single crystal metallurgy is commercially viable is single crystal airplane blades. And metallurgy is a very mature field. In a nutshell, this is a simulation only that, if reproduced, will most likely have a niche commercial application. 

    It seems like you know the physics details better than me, but my guess is the simulations weren't as heavy handed as your friend.  a) because they don't have an interest in the result either way and b)because they probably have better skills and familiarity with this field that only comes with many years of research.  

  7. 18 minutes ago, Spekulatius said:

    Some strange stuff going on there - the drop in resistance at ~260K in that one chart isn’t superconductance because there is residual resistance at that temperature. Then the residence goes up again at 225K. Makes no sense to me. Anyhow, their sample becomes superconducting only at 110k, which isn’t that different from existing superconductors.

     

    I think a lot of the research looks shoddy and unconfirmed at this point as everyone races to publish. There could be something  to this , but after seeing this, I am even more skeptical. I am open to change my mind if a truly compelling research’s result get confirmed a few times at different reputable labs. I am getting cold fusion vibes here.

    Andrew was quick to point out, other superconductors also work at 110K but not at atmospheric pressure iirc.  Not a scientist. 

  8. This seems like the moderate position.  I don't know if it is correct: 

     

     

     

    It is a superconductor at atmospheric pressure and temperatures a good deal higher than current records, but not at room temperature yet.  Lots of opportunities for further analysis in related compounds.  (maybe this is the wrong tweet, will try to find the right one).  

  9. 55 minutes ago, Paarslaars said:

    Should be better ways to play this than based on commodities no? 

     

    The first application is likely to be something less sexy and more practical. Cables for instance, a way to play this could be ATKR?

    I’m sure there are but I don’t know enough to confidently say something like AMSC that’s popular with the retail crowd will win or lose. ATKR seems reasonable though. 

  10. Yea, I looked at Sun Communities.  Trailer parks have really good economics, as you have a captive customer where you can just raise rents over time.  There also is the role up angle too as the business used to be quite fragmented as once in a while you can buy trailer parks from mom-and-pop owners for good prices. However, a lot of that has played out. It's very hard to build trailer parks in the US as municipalities don't like them.  I bought some LIC.ASX and INA.ASX.  They are the Australian trailer parks (actually LIC.ASX is going more into retirement communities) much earlier in the development cycle, with more land to build properties and more room for pricing power.  SUI has invested in INA.ASX.  The problem is Australia's real estate looks shaky.  You can find information about the industry from podcasts: https://open.spotify.com/show/39m7rwaGmGyAfTfPtjwlh7 and related shows.  

     

    Looked at this a while ago so I forget, why do you think SUI is mismanaged?  Obviously haven't done as well as ELS.  

  11. Sure but from what I know, computer replications can indicate feasibility.  Looking at commodities, this is roughly the cost per mole of LK-99.  I'm not sure I want to buy miners to play this:

     

    Phosphurus  0.30 per gram 123.88 gram per mole 1 Mole per solution 37.16 Price
    Copper 0.01 per gram 63.5 gram per mole 3 Mole per solution 0.59 Price
    Lead oxide 0.10 per gram 223.2 gram per mole 1 Mole per solution 22.32 Price
    Lead sulfate 0.40 per gram 303 gram per mole 1 Mole per solution 122.29 Price

     

     

  12. Apparently, a room temperature superconductor has been proposed and initial replications seem to support the original paper:

     

     

     

     

    LK-99 requires lead and copper.  I'm in no way an expert but probably bullish on battery power: EVs and Renewable Energy (although maybe also bullish for fusion, which is probably long long-term bearish for wind/solar).  Could benefit quantum computing and maybe even regular semiconductors (but that I'm less sure about).  Goodness, I hate how this makes every meme stock idea better.  Bearish for fossil fuel companies as well.  Maybe considering investing in lead.  I probably can't access lead futures, but it might look at miners with large exposure to lead.  Anyway, I guess it's kind of cool to think about.  Anybody else have any thoughts?  

  13. 2 hours ago, ValueArb said:

     

    Its profitable without any marketing or R&D expenses! It is going to massively increase installed base on the back of ESP I think. Most amazing company I've seen in quite a while.

    I mean if you are at the intersection of the metaverse and helping people find their true love, that thing should sell itself!

  14. I don't have any idea what is this egg people are talking about, but I first thought it was about EGG.AU.  Trading at 3.5x FCF, 7% dividend, 10% buyback.  Management is on record saying it's cheap at $1.75 and cheap even at $3.  Insider buying.  Business is marketing consulting (and advertising arbitrage) so not really a growth business, but not going away soon.  Sorry for derailing this conversation to the topic of equities.  I'm sure @John Hjorth will give me a tongue-lashing for being off topic 🙂

  15. 2 hours ago, james22 said:

    In a paper published in the arXiv preprint server July 18, researchers said "performance and behavior of both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 vary significantly" and that responses on some tasks "have gotten substantially worse over time."

     

    https://techxplore.com/news/2023-07-pains-chatgpt-dumber.html

    This might be an opportunity for others to catch up, but doing this kind of research is essential for the profitability of GPT-4 etc, even if quality goes down, you can always bring it back up.  People expect LLM costs to be free per query (ad-supported or subscription-based).  If you can't find a way to reduce the costs of your LLM, you could have power users eating up significant profitability for each prompt.  For example, for state-of-the-art replies, you should use a technique like Chain of Thought prompting or its descendants.  This requires prompting the LLM multiple times, evaluating which prompt is the best (checked via an outside program like a compiler, calculator, knowledge graph etc.), and then using the best prompt as a basis for trying again and again. One prompt could query an LLM 20 or more times. If you just want to take share and you don't care about profitability you don't optimize LLM size, but LLMs are expensive so figuring out what the smallest LLM is that can satisfactorily answer your request is important.  Accuracy can go from 10% to close to 100%, but it's really expensive: https://www.promptengineering.org/tree-of-thought-prompting-walking-the-path-of-unique-approach-to-problem-solving/#:~:text=Tree of Thought Prompting%2C thus,and focusing on promising ones.

  16. ^ @SharperDingaan so when these models are trained, you have code that attempts to filter “bad” data. Keep in mind that attack, is really difficult as there a 100 billion to 1 trillion tokens in the training set after being filtered.  Additionally once the model is trained, you have to use reinforcement learning with human feedback.  This also helps to scrub bad “habits” the model has picked up.  Basically you have people rate model outputs, and you modify the model to produce outputs that humans rate highly as desirable (whatever desirable is defined as).  So long story short, there are multiple steps of training making this adversarial attack on training data very hard to pull off.  

  17. 2 hours ago, Spekulatius said:

    Awesome primer on this. That for sharing. I followed you on SA as well.

     

     

    Somewhat unrelated, I still struggle how to use both BARD and ChatGPT and get useful results. For once they are both absolutely terrible in math. I tried to do some history research using BARD/ChatGPT but things I know a bit about and thy can’t be found all that readily in history books. In my case, it was about the liberation of the Mosel valley in March 1945 by US forces in WW2.

     

    I don’t know where both get their info from but pretty much any detail is incorrect , some partly and much completely. Bard and ChatGPT both contradict each other and depending on how you ask questions, they are even contradicting themselves.

     

    The answers are not totally incorrect, so I think these Chatbots are making stuff up based on similar events that were playing out at about the same time a d/or extrapolation. So I think students who use this to write their paper as a short cut for real works are in for a rude awakening.

     

    (FWIW, the liberation in question occurred from March 14 to March 18, 1945).

    IMG_1034.jpeg

    IMG_1033.jpeg

    One thing you can use is plugins. For arithmetic use a calculator plugin that comes with GPT-4.  Basically the way this works is GPT produces a prompt and then runs the calculator to verify the prompt is correct. This is also how code interpreter works.  
     

    History is more difficult because there is no black box program that is evaluatIng a given historical output is correct.  You can try using a knowledge graph plugin, if one has been developed for GPT.  Knowledge graph basically scrapes Wikipedia etc to get a graph of relationships (ie this caused that, or this leader started that event etc.)

     

    You can also try chain or thought or more advanced multi step prompting.  

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