Pomfers

Depends on how you define LEO. I think the commenter was probably thinking of Very Low Earth Orbit, VLEO.

First graph is a list of deorbit times: https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/deorbit-syst...

As expected, higher altitudes, higher mass, and lower surface areas correlate to longer deorbit times. It looks like altitude has an extreme effect on deorbit times, as you can see the 100 KG satellite (solar min) deorbits in a little under 2 years at 400 KM, but over 15 years at 500 KM. So 1.25x the altitude results in 7.5x the deorbit time.

Stuff at 800-1000 KM can take centuries to deorbit, and that's within both NASA's (under 2000 KM) and the ESA's (under 1000 KM) definitions of LEO. There is a definition for VLEO of under 450 KM, which would have fairly short deorbit times, and therefore a relatively mild Kessler Syndrome.

No one understands everything here. When it comes to software development, everyone I know says they're only really knowledgeable about what they work on. Most other areas, they'll have at best some passing knowledge of. It's like how doctors become specialists in just one part of the human body. There's maybe 5 people in the world are are a qualified dermatologist, endocrinologist, neurologist, and cardiologist at the same time. It's the same thing with engineers.

Your impressions 1 and 2 can both be correct, and there still be an association between artificial sweeteners and type 2 diabetes.

It has been shown for decades that this association exists, it's establishing cause, and causal direction that's hard. Does consuming artificial sweeteners cause diabetes? Or does having diabetes cause the consuming of artificial sweeteners?

No, the "Potential for reverse causality cannot be eliminated" means that instead of artificial sweeteners causing diabetes, causality can be reversed: Diabetes causes the intake of artificial sweeteners.

All these studies just show an association, but can not prove the direction of causality. For whatever reason, the idea that diabetic and overweight people deliberately seek out zero sugar sweeteners so that they can enjoy sweetness without making their situation worse just doesn't seem like a plausible explanation to them.

Personally, if you can't definitively prove something is bad for you after 45+ years of research, I just don't care anymore. People can occasionally drink Coke regular without issue, I wouldn't be worried. Most of the time, diabetes is not caused by merely occasional consumption of sugars.

I've seen a lot of people getting Xiaomi air purifiers. Had no idea they put DRM on the filters, and they cost more. Really glad I went with Winix years ago, cheaper filters that last longer, and no DRM. I don't get why people can't just put a reminder in a calendar in the future to let them know to replace the filter instead of dealing with this stuff.

AMD consumer cards do compute, but do not have a developed or well supported ecosystem (ROCm is a mess).

Misguided segmentation or a high level architecture problem however, it is not. A specialized product will perform its specialty better than a general purpose product. There's minimal demand for a card that's good at both compute and gaming. These people exist, but are few compared to those who only care about one or the other.

The benefit of splitting GCN into RDNA and CDNA was immediate. Comparing the Radeon VII (GCN 5) vs RX 5700 XT (RDNA 1), you'll see that they're fairly evenly matched on gaming, trading blows with the Radeon VII slightly ahead when averaged. The RX 5700 XT takes a very heavy loss on compute benchmarks. Both are TSMC 7nm, but the RX 5700 XT has fewer shaders (2560 vs 3840), a smaller die (251 vs 311 mm2), and lower power consumption (225 vs 300 w) which shows how much more efficient it is at gaming. That much lower power consumption and noise, and a couple hundred dollars cheaper made it a much more compelling card for gamers.

CDNA cards are apparently missing components needed for gaming, like render output units. Hence, they have no official support for DirectX, OpenGL, or Vulkan. I've never seen anyone get one of these working for gaming. In exchange, their compute performance is so good that a number of companies are buying these cards over Nvidia's, despite the overwhelming CUDA ecosystem. In 2013, a GCN based supercomputer made the top 100. That is the one and only GCN based system to ever make the top 100. Compare to now, where 8 of the top 10 most energy efficient super computers use CDNA accelerators, as does the number 1 fastest supercomputer outright.

AMD's compute oriented cards used to come with displayport output, but I haven't seen one of those in a long time. These cards are definitely GPUs in that they can handle graphical workloads, but I don't think anyone is trying to make them work for video games or the like.

My choice as well. I like the colors my camera puts out mostly, so I only really need to make a few adjustments here and there. DarkTable doesn't even conform the RAW to the preview JPEG, so I end up wasting a bunch of time just getting the RAW to look normal in the first place. RawTherapee also seemed far more intuitive to figure out.

Yes, before editing. All the other RAW editors I've seen, including the other FOSS editor RawTherapee, will automatically adjust the sliders to match the embedded preview JPEG. DarkTable doesn't do this, all my RAWs load in looking really strange.

I think they'd agree with that example. If we take their quote and invert it:

apparent politeness of the language is inversely proportional to the potential violence of the culture

=> apparent politeness of language directly proportional to the peacefulness of the culture

The rabbit hole of knife sharpening goes incredibly deep. But if you're just looking to cut food in your own kitchen, the vast majority of it is overkill. Professionals seem to make a bit deal out of knives, but many professionals use their knife as much in one day as a home cook does in one year.

Most expensive knives are made out of difficult to work with metals. They keep their edge for longer, but:

1 They're harder to sharpen. The longer the knife can hold its edge, the longer it takes to grind out that edge. Higher end knives typically require diamond to sharpen at a reasonable pace, or at all.

2 They chip easier. Just like like glass used for smartphone screens, the better it resists scratches, the easier it shatters. High end knives, if they're not thick, need to be carefully handled, or you'll get a surprising number of nicks and chips in the edge. A sign someone doesn't handle their expensive knives properly is if the pointy tips are chipped off.

3 They rust easier. High end knives often use metals with higher carbon and/or lower chromium content. I learned this the hard way, as I air dry all my dishes, and knives with even 440C will rust if you don't towel dry them after washing. Ultra hard knives that use non-stainless steel need to be kept covered in oil to prevent rust.

If you're just getting into cooking, you don't need much. Mercer Culinary is the go to brand for culinary school students. Their Millennia line comes sharper, harder, and more durable than any grocery store knife, while still being highly rust resistant.

If you want to use a whetstone, avoid the soft "beginner friendly" stones. They need to be soaked in water for like half an hour before you can use them, and they wear out very quickly. The only reason they exist is because they provide more feel or feedback. Instead, I'd recommend a Shapton basic 1000 grit. It's a hard and durable stone that cuts fast, only needs a splash of water, and leaves you a very usable edge. Lower grits are for re-profiling the blade, such as if you've got nicks or chips. Higher grits are for polishing the edge, if you want to shave with it or something.

If using a whetstone seems too difficult, and you want an easier to use, but slower option, look into a Spydero Sharp Maker. I run my knife one pass through this thing before I use it, and it keeps the edge consistently sharp. I use my Shapton whetstones for when I'm sharpening my friends' knives.

Learn to slice instead of just ramming your knife straight down into the cutting board. Of course, some things require a chopping motion, but slicing is safer, and your knife edge will last longer.

I'd be happy if there were a law that every product's package or advertising must prominently display the highest level parent company. I think it would align with your suggestion of banning white labels and DBA.

I remember hearing of a story of one foods company that decided put their company name prominently on all their grocery brands, and people got mad because they saw how little choice they actually had. The company then redid their packaging, emphasizing the brand name, and shrinking the company name down to fine print, and the people were happy. I can not verify this story, tried searching for it, but found nothing other than that we have even more consolidation now than ever before.

The fingerprint scanner is just a scanner, it doesn't handle authorization, that's what the security chip does. The scanner has two ways of communicating with the security chip. It can authenticate itself with the chip, and it can send the chip images of fingerprints.

If a compromised scanner fails to authenticate, then the security chip can just ignore the scanner. Not much it can do if its only avenue of communication is cut off. A warning message telling users to not touch their compromised fingerprint scanner would have been sufficient.

When Apple introduced a fingerprint unlock in the home button, it wanted to keep the fingerprint scans secure. The security chip that stores the fingerprint scans needs to verify that the home button's fingerprint scanner is trustworthy, to prevent man in the middle attacks.

However, when an unauthorized or unofficial button is used as a replacement for repair, the phone will permanently brick itself. No warning is given that the fingerprint scanner's trustworthiness can not be verified, no ability to just use the phone with the fingerprint scanner disabled. Just straight to a permanent bricking.

Depends on the company. A small one where everyone knows everyone else, it actually seems kinda normal.

The way large companies do it is just jarring. When my coworkers find out it's my birthday, it's because a random lady from HR is asking them which one is me so they can deliver the card.

Low quality article. The only takeaway is that NSS does not result in long term weight loss by itself. That's it. NSS does not spike insulin response in humans. Stop reading studies involving rats when the same studies involving humans exist.

There is a correlation between NSS consumption and negative health outcomes, this is true. However, read how this article states this:

WHO also noted that “potential undesirable effects from long-term use” of NSS, such as an increased risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The results of the review also suggest that there may be other dangerous consequences such as the increased risk of premature death among adults.

A layman will obviously read this as a statement that NSS is a direct cause of harm, not as the correlation that it actually is.

The correlation is simply explained: NSS is heavily consumed by people who have diabetes and/or who are obese. These people are naturally going to have far more health issues than non-diabetics, and non-obese people. They even acknowledge this in the article:

the connection between consuming NSS and disease outcomes might be subjectively determined due to “baseline characteristics” of those taking part in the study

If you have a choice of drinking regular soda and diet, the diet is without a doubt leagues better for you. I think the most convincing evidence that NSS is safe is this: It's obvious that diabetics and obese people consume NSS significantly more than the general population. Diabetics and obese people are naturally prone to high levels of health issues. Yet why is it that they never just filter these people out to get a good baseline? What are the chances that these university educated people can't filter out obese/diabetics, or that they did not anticipate needing to do this and thus did not collect sufficient data? That they didn't read decades of prior studies who failed to do this, including the studies that specifically mentioned the dirty baseline issue? Is our higher education system this bad? Are researchers just this stupid? Not likely.

The more likely explanations are these: 1 The study was funded by corn growers that are threatened by NSS (a huge number of the studies I read through fall into this category). 2 The researchers have a bias for "natural" products. 3 The researchers dislike the taste of NSS and are afraid that NSS proliferation will reduce the supply of the flavors that they enjoy.

They've tried to prove NSS is harmful for way too long. Sure, that's not proof that NSS is completely safe, but if it is harmful, it must be so minimally harmful that 4+ decades of intense research can't definitively prove it.

Yes, there exist many devices that support multiple charging rates. My phone allows the selection of 3 different wired charging speeds, as well as two different wireless charging speeds, selected in software.

Unfortunately, due to cost or incompetent engineering, most devices only accept either a few charging configurations, often just one.

I didn't realize this as my first laptop with USB-C ports could be charged with any USB charger, even a dumb 5v 500mA phone charger would eventually get the job done over a couple days. I just assumed everything was like this, but unfortunately not. A lot of laptops and cameras will refuse to draw any power at all unless they can negotiate certain configurations.

Samsung's foundries have struggled for the past few years to achieve their targets, whereas TSMC has continued improving at their projected rates. TSMC's process is now significantly ahead of Samsung's, such that the same designs are better on TSMC. These improvements are along the lines of fewer defects, higher switching speeds, less leakage, etc.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was made on Samsung's fabs. The 8+ Gen 1 is the same design on TSMC.

To be clear, this is for Samsung's processor foundries. Their DRAM and flash memory still appear to be industry leaders.