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
No, I mean something that happened in Poland and it involved people being totally unaware of what they're doing. Sadly the materials from the probably-relevant radiological inspectors' conference aren't available online either.
Re the #emfcamp search for a missing device with Am-241 inside, I tried to look up an incident from mid-naughts I vaguely remember, where a group of disgruntled(?) cleaners(?) smashed up smoke detectors and released the Americium (I don't know whether they ended up smashing it into dust or "just" into macroscopic pieces). Sadly, I couldn't find any obvious reference (the easily accessible reports on radiation incidents in Poland go back to 2007, and the ones up to 2010 do not mention any smoke detector incident that required onsite investigation).
I've found though a curious sounding "contamination of a passenger (rail?)car with I-131" in the 2007 report and can't find anything more about it. I'm somewhat puzzled by the sequence of events that could cause that: if someone's getting I-131 orally they stay in the hospital well past the point when it's absorbed (in fact until the activity has dropped down significantly), so I wouldn't expect that to result from e.g. someone vomiting. If that didn't come from bodily fluid, then why would someone be transporting I-131 via passenger rail, in a form that can be easily dispersed?
Apparently someone dropped off three devices with Am-241(an alpha emitter) in the swap meet, and now the question is who picked up one of these devices. (https://meow.social/@tryst/112547040034336222)
(Am-241 is/was often used to ionize air, e.g. to allow smoke level measurements because smoke will reduce the "level of ionization". This was a repetitive headache when those smoke detectors were left alone, stolen, thrown out in trash, smashed open by disgruntled employees, etc.)
@koakuma The most ridiculous part of that is that they assume something about calcium in milk, which while reasonably accurate about milk, will be very off (in either direction, depending on fortification) for plant milk.
Another funny thing: cocoa powder: "serving (including milk)"
re: haircut
Because burnt ends aren't healthy ends, because figuring out where to cut each hair is too hard, because integration hell (esp. with a reasonably powered laser aimed in the general direction of someone's head), or something I'm missing?
haircut
I wondered at some point whether cutting hair with heat would be nonterrible. If so, one could imagine a setup where one spreads the hair on a surface so that hairs don't overlap (that much), uses a reasonably-high-res camera to figure out where each hair should be cut and vectors a laser around to do so.
I meant the difference between variability (i.e. noisy/oscillating changes) vs changes that have a trend. Developmental changes over significant fraction of lifespan are one example of the latter; the example I was thinking of was changes due to social environment one enters (that, I'd anecdotally estimate, happen on the scale of months to years). (BTW. I think that not all of the former -- variability -- kind of changes are quick: for example depression episodes -- if I understand their typical progression correctly -- are examples of slow variability).
I think I am such a person, so let me answer these questions about me. First, let me respond in a way that's topic-agnostic (I think it's helpful, because most of my learning experience was about subject that don't describe human behaviour). I hope that reading about a phenomenon will let me develop a model of it and lets me associate pieces of that model with evidence for their correctness, or will show me that the model I already have for it is incorrect (and will also help me create a correct, though often less predictive, model)[1]. That means for me that I can (at least for somewhat idealized situations) predict observations and have some handle of (at least relative) accuracy/certainty of such predictions.
Often (even in much less noisy areas than ones that study humans) having a reasonably complete model is infeasible. The second best thing then is having what physicists calls symmetries: sets of changes in the modelled phenomenon that, when applied together, do not change outcomes. (BTW. Even if we can have a ~complete model, such symmetries are often part of a nicely structured argument for its correctness.)
For some parts of the phenomenon, neither of the two is feasible. Then we often can still make "directional" statements: that changes in one parameter in some direction change some outcome in a particular direction.
[1] Most insightful things I consciously learned about human behaviour was from the model breaking bucket (e.g. that people ~never communicate the literal meaning of what they say, or that gender is not purely social).
Ich vermute, dass man Platz für ein Tram zwischen die Kreuzung und die Haltestelle schaffen möchte.
I would really like to read something on this topic, esp. if it was written in a way friendly to people who have a reductionist approach to reality.
I wonder where would you put within-individual variation that's a result of slow but consistent drift over time (it's within-individual, but is not "some days are xy and some are zy").
Where is the fuse on AC IN?
I've seen similar designs (in old oscilloscopes) that compare various voltages on the PSU output and if they seem to be out of whack wrt each other they latch up and disable switching PSU's oscillator.
@rq CRDTs do :)
I'm not quite in the middle of watching Sapolsky's lectures on biology of human behaviour, and a topic that repeats there is how reasons for interpersonal variances were gotten very obviously wrong (or less obviously, but still badly wrong), and how to recognize such problems.
(The lectures are altogether pretty long, available iiuc as audio only, and done at a "podcast pace" -- you can listen to them with nonfull attention and don't need to backtrack.)
Note that $NIX_BUILD_CORES is a thing.
I'm of two minds about this.
On one hand, clearly flouting the law is ~punished (even though the measure is not supposed to be punishment, but an acute way to prevent repeats of similar offenses).
On the other hand, "driving without a license" is part of a positive feedback loop is many states and often means "driving while being in debt". Some states:
a) refuse license renewal/suspend licenses as part of debt collection,
b) condition license reacquisition on relative lack of driving infractions, which include "driving without a license/with a suspended license" regardless of the reason for the license's suspension.
(I spent a week of evenings in 2020 or 2021 watching proceedings around misdemeanors from some random court in Michigan, and traffic cases seemed to mostly be parts of that or similar feedback loop.)
What's the range of digits on the presumed hundreds-of-degrees wheel, and what is on the hundreds wheel for the latitude at all?
I would guess it was timed, and the brush was always dipped after a long enough travel without painting (the only time in the video when a stroke doesn't start with dipping are those weird looking very short interrupted strokes, where interruptions do not involve redipping).
@grrrr_shark @Teri_Kanefield @dcm
Apparently the responses are not necessarily in writing: https://nitter.poast.org/KlasfeldReports/status/1795907160783589646 (no clue about veracity of source).
@grrrr_shark @Teri_Kanefield @dcm
I thought that those requests were made and responded to in writing.
Do you know how does requesting that the judge read them again work after the jury starts deliberations?
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
