robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
@smeg @rabbit @BleepingComputer
Or in a world where there's no mechanism to authenticate the browser binary? (If there's no disk encryption, that's the case; if there is, it's arguable, because we ~never do actual partial-rollback-proof disk encryption.)
@ErrataRob You might be amused by a joke from the times of the People's Republic of Poland. The joke explained that the difference regarding freedom of speech between Poland and e.g. US is that Poland has freedom of speech, but US has freedom after speech.
@matthew_d_green What do you think about keybase's setup?
robryk
boosted
I figured out why the #fediverse clicks with so many GenXers. It's "yesterday's tomorrow!"
That is, it's the decentralized networked future we imagined as kids, complete with the billionaire baddies, evil corps, and environmental degradation plot lines all playing at the edge of the screen.
@bagder In which parts of the URL?
robryk
boosted
Speaking of Zener breakdown, here's a classic #electronics brainteaser. Find a generic small-signal bipolar transistor, e.g. 2N3904, 2N2222. Connect Emitter to +12 V via 1 kΩ, and ground Base. You can then find a negative voltage around -0.4 V relative to ground at Collector. Why can it be negative, when there's no negative voltage anywhere in this circuit?
When the base-emitter junction experiences Zener breakdown, it emits red light, which shines upon the base-collector junction. Photovoltaic effect creates this negative voltage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKlbO5mOZm4
@jeffgilchrist Out of pure curiosity: do you have estimates of rates of release at hand?
@jeffgilchrist Does this mean that simply exposure to air (as opposed to usage) degrades those masks? (In the same way electrets made from some waxes degrade by being covered by charged dust particles from the air.)
@dalias Huh. I thought this si a weird and fancy feature that got popular in the last ~5 years. E.g Chevrolet Aveo (started production in '02) has purely mechanical trunk lock (I'm positive because I used to have circuit diagrams for all of its electrics) and I don't remember cars that I'd used earlier than 5 years ago having even an ability to electrically trigger the trunk to open.
Is the state you're describing in the USA?
So they are actually doing something that vaguely resembles correct aberration? That's surprising; I would expect them to throw a few color filters composed with translations and mess with them until it looks nice, without regard for realism -- in that case I'd be very surprised if a realistic physical process could put those colors back together.
@kravietz @rysiek @aehnnek@universeodon.com
Nuclear weapons program needed reactors only for plutonium production. The culmination of that effort was Hanford B. Its construction was similar to Windscale: it was a cube with various rods stuck in it cooled with a large flow of water (as opposed to air in Windscale). This is not a design suited to power generation via steam production (if not for any other reason, due to inability to operate at higher internal pressures, due to its construction). Due to its low-pressure-water cooling, it operated at at most ~100degC (measured in outgoing cooling water; fuel elements and graphite core were naturally hotter), so it didn't allow exploration of higher temperatures. It also didn't have various feedback loops that power production plants would have due to e.g. the cooling being a loop (in Hanford B apparently the hot cooling water was discharged into the same river it was taken from).
The reactor research from Hanford B onwards didn't contribute to atomic weapons and IIUC it was clear at that time that no further research was necessary for production of more atomic weapons. And yet first reactors producing power appeared within a few years.
It seems that https://genders.wtf/gender/coniferous-and-deciduous-trees/ is caused by things such as https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2795997449, where someone used "gender" on a tree to indicate its species (eh?).
@kravietz @rysiek @aehnnek@universeodon.com
I completely agree that zero-power nuclear reactors were developed for urgent military reasons. Non-zero-power reactors seem to have been developed for non-urgent military reasons (originally they weren't even targeting submarines) in the US (Rickover and Naval Reactors); I am ignorant about the Soviet counterpart.
Do you think that there was a (perceived?) pressing military need for nuclear propulsion that sped things up, or that the post-war environment was friendly to even foibles entertained by the Navy, or something else?
> and when it works, both interest and funding should be much accelerated.
It seems to me that what should accelerate interest and funding is already _reliable prediction_ of it working. Do you expect that this could happen nontrivially earlier?
@lauren Have you thought about the comparison with animals that can't stand each other?
Also: disable any helper threads that do stuff in the background (things like tcmalloc's page releaser or GC in languages with GC). They usually can be missing for the duration of a testcase with no ill effects (obviously, some bugs may be triggered by interaction with these).
If you are debugging something concurrent, consider using shims/libraries that model the concurrency model explicitly (then they have the concept of a trace *and* have support for searching the space of traces). For Rust, take a look at loom (https://docs.rs/loom/latest/loom/). For C++, take a look at relacy race detector (https://www.1024cores.net/home/relacy-race-detector).
That said, using these requires some amount of adaptation of the code being tested, so it makes sense ~only if you have a well-separated concurrent data structure that you suspect misbehaves.
Ah, you expect different parts of timelines to scale in similar ways. I see, what you are saying indeed follows then.
My intuitive assumption would be to assume that different parts will be similar in terms of absolute time taken (or rather, that the additional difficulties in each are independent of additional difficulties in other stages), but I don't have evidence or even good intuitive reasons for that.
I totally agree with a lower estimate of, say, "<10% chance of practical powerplant within 7y", but am very surprised by the "decades" one (which I understand as ~30years).
> April 1932 - first time an atom was split by humans
For fusion something similar has happened decades ago. (You are pointing at the experiment that involved causing fission without a chain reaction. It wasn't understood for couple of years after it that fission actually happened.)
I would put "getting energy-positive[*] fusion" in the timeline roughly around CP-1's criticality.
> December 1946 - first nuclear reactor hosting a self-sustaining, controlled chain reaction
Wasn't that CP-1? It reached criticality in 1942.
It took 12 years between first sustained chain reaction in Chicago Pile-1 and the first grid-connected nuclear power plant becoming operational. It took further 3 years until the first NPP that produced tens of MW of electrical power (which today would on the smaller end of spectrum). That was under just-postwar conditions. Do you expect timelines to be longer now?
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
