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
But that only applies to things that are likely to be present at a jobsite, so people who don't work next to a workshop/lab/something like that will still have the same problem with stuff like assorted resistors.
An electronics parts store in Kraków that I frequented used to do that for stuff like connectors or resistors that would normally be packed in units of ~100.
Ah, you mean the wastewater plant?
@regehr I think there were many worse zoom catastrophes in courts (well, catastrophies for the person in question but often arguably better results for the society).
Seconded.
On a similar note, it should be easy to find pirated Kongsberg simulators of an engineering plant of a ship with Diesel main engine and steam TG paired with a shaft motor-generator.
If you don't mind me asking, I'd like to better understand how people think of special tableware. (I myself don't feel a need to use/have special tableware.)
My best approximation of why people like to have and use special tableware is similar to reasons for using makeup or aesthetically pleasing clothes. Is that a roughly reasonable comparison or very off?
I would expect that, given this is mostly about visual aesthetics, the desire to use special tableware would often cooccur with desire to make/serve visually aesthetically pleasing food. Am I roughly correct?
If they drop _codepoints_, then they amusingly will treat strings differently depending on whether they specify e.g. accented characters via individual codepoints or using combining codepoints for accents.
Sometimes the information isn't there. E.g. "I want to tell if this UTF-8 string contains Japanese or Chinese pictographic characters" is sometimes unanswerable.
I think iPhones themselves contain barometers.
@johncarlosbaez I'm confused. The system as described only delays images of satellites by a few days, but at the same time tells everyone explicitly what was redacted those 3 days later (you can run the same comparison on the published images and compare the results with previously published alerts). So this only makes sense if what is protected are images of events, and only for a short time. Do I misunderstand?
@niconiconi any divisions present? If not it's really bizarre, because casting down to u32 could be pushed off to the very end.
@falsevacuum or rather the electron (if they aren't all the same one, why are they identical?) :)
@mcc this sounds similar to the reason why some types have an into_parts method and a corresponding from_parts "constructor".
@_dm starlink benefits greatly from being run by SpaceX. If since other company was foolish enough to try starting the same thing by contracting SpaceX to launch their stuff (iiuc everyone else combined would struggle to have capacity), SpaceX likely could extract ~all their future profit. This send to me like benefiting from being the only company capable of doing X by making it infeasible to compete in Y.
Granted, this is not where his profits not his valuation increases mostly come from.
I've found a bit more on how that works and it's amusingly simple (tl;dr with a good timing source one can very precisely integrate frequency over time by just counting): https://spie.org/publications/spie-publication-resources/optipedia-free-optics-information/tt61_541_laser_interferometer
The thing I'm still missing is how one gets two closeby frequencies _at orthogonal polarisations_ out of a laser.
Sadly, this transformation changes everything far enough that IMO beats do not map to much of anything interesting in the original configuration.
To see that this mapping changes things very significantly, notice that a base frequency and a few harmonics map to something that has no base frequency, but is rather a mixture of a few unrelated frequencies and their common harmonic. This IMO means that interesting relationships between frequencies are not preserved.
If we talk about beats specifically, then the frequency difference "on the audio side" here is a nonlinear function of the frequency difference "on the light side", so even if we were to consider some hypothetical creatures that have very short averaging timescales in vision (so that they can perceive beats at differences e.g. as small as a few MHz[1]), this map to something weird on the audio side (the minimal frequency difference will not be constant over the range we're considering).
[1] This does not necessitate them having awareness of such short time intervals btw.: a human, with help of an FM radio receiver, can do something equivalent to detecting beats with frequency differences of small hundreds of kHz. A creature could have sense organs that can do something similar without their conscious processing having to run at higher speeds.
(BTW. This sounds like a potential worldbuilding idea for a short story.)
> It doesn't - nor can it.
> The shape that is in my mind is unique to me, and will be different in many respects to the equivalent shape in yours -
I'm confused -- how is this related to how well the model (either the one you have or the one you managed to communicate to someone) matches _reality_?
When someone tries to describe a model they have and I don't fully trust it's correct, I desire more precision in what they're saying so that I can evaluate it better. I could try to understand it fully first and then evaluate it, but that might take a lot more time and effort than us both figuring out the model's wrong in some way by having me choose pieces to ask more precision about.
> Communication isn't about precision of words; it's about describing the shape you have in your mind in a way that allows others to create that shape for themselves -
Why would they believe this shape matches reality without precision (or at least ability to call up precision)?
@_thegeoff wait, but didn't this map frequencies to (some multiple) of their inverses?
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
