dandelany

People used to do a lot of stupid stuff. If you live alone and are conscious of the risk, sure, this is not a terribly dangerous item if you're safe about it. If you live with pets or children, it's entirely sensible to be concerned about the risk. A mercury spill can seep between the floorboards and contaminate your house with volatile mercury vapors for years to come if not properly managed.

If you break the game in such a way that no one wants to play with you anymore, then you have in fact lost the metagame

Maybe in a pinch, doesn't seem very sustainable. A single decent 400 watt solar panel produces about the same continuous power as a horse, and doesn't consume 20 lbs of hay per day, or pee on your generator.

Sure, plenty of people also wear a 14 oz hard hat strapped to their head all day with no negative health impacts. Doesn't mean it's enjoyable or comfortable for everyone.

This was once common but is exceedingly rare these days. I'm sure exceptions exist, but nearly all Americans now treat this as a Very Secret Number.

The property you are talking about is generally called "deniability" in the literature, whereas the GP is talking "verifiability" ie. being able to verify your own vote is cast correctly. They are both valuable, sometimes mutually exclusive, but not necessarily, see eg. https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0021.pdf

Like most things, guessing and proving require vastly different efforts. In aviation, a few more orders of magnitude than most.

You’re overthinking it. “Country” is simply more ambiguous when used as an adjective. “F5 announces attack from country hackers” sounds silly and confusing.

I suspect they also empirically have less price-sensitivity on average, for a variety of reasons

As opposed to what we have now?

"Simple stochastic blob detection" is an abstraction. You write (or import) a function where the the gnarly logic lives and call `detectBlobs()`. "Use an abstraction" doesn't mean you should use the same abstraction for every task, you should use the right tool for the job.

He didn't "do it", he was one voice among many astronomers who have been calling for a reclassification for years, the IAU voted and made the decision. It's a little silly calling him out for "doing it" for ego reasons when you are the one implicitly giving him credit for it... He didn't write the definition, he didn't chair the committee, he wasn't even on the committee. All he did was leave it off the list of planets at the Hayden Planetarium, where he was director.

…you realize this happened nine years ago, right?

Is it still trespassing if the door was unlocked? Yes. Not sure why so many people have trouble applying the same principles of unauthorized access to computers.

Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard, moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing

Please be complete if you’re gonna translate to American units. That’s 117,000 football fields per football game, or 325 per commercial.

Guessing these are the folks that can’t get work done because GPT is down…

Could definitely be a Monty Python sketch.

"I looked inside the TV, there were NO quantum dots."

"Well there's your problem right there - you've gone and collapsed the wave function by looking!"

There is at least one area where ATtiny still outcompetes RP2040: low power consumption. Even in its lowest-power dormant state, 2040 still burns around 200uA, whereas the ATTiny can sleep on only a handful of uA or less. Even during active use, an ATtiny with low voltage supply and low frequency clock can often do what you need with an order of magnitude or two less power than a 2040. So for a hobbyist project to build a battery-powered device with long lifetime, it’s hard to beat the ATtiny. Otherwise I completely agree!

Also not that long ago electricity and clean drinking water weren't a thing. The fact that people can make a career as an artist now, and couldn't before, is something I'd consider an advancement! "Nothing wrong with that" is a conclusion that simply doesn't follow from the rest of your post.

Excitingly, the next version of Minecraft will have a single block (Copper Bulb) that effectively works as a redstone T-flip-flop! Previously it has always required a handful of other blocks to implement one.

Imagine scientists discovered colonies of ants that compose elaborate symphonies of music that they perform for each other. Two problems: they’re small, so the music is quiet. And for the same reason, it’s extremely high-pitched and just sounds like mouse squeaks. In fact, half of it is ultrasonic, above the range of human hearing.

Which device is more impressive and would garner more public support for the project: an amplifier which just makes the squeaks louder? Or one which also pitches down the squeaks into a range where we can actually perceive and appreciate the tune & dynamics of the underlying music?

Wow, Nuts and Volts Magazine! I’m impressed they’re still around. When I was a teenager I won a subscription at a combat robotics event and it was my favorite thing to read every month. Highly recommend checking out their back issues for some good electronics projects!

Unsurprisingly, the first 90% is a lot more fun than the "second 90%" (polishing)...

The “embodied energy” of a new tablet like a Steam Deck is estimated at roughly 1 GJ, which is ~275 kWh. Original Xbox draws around 100W, so you’d need to play for more than 2000 hours to get anywhere close to the energy cost of creating a new device.

https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Embodied_energy#:~:t....

Sure, lower Manhattan lost power & cell service during Hurricane Sandy back in 2012. People were split between lining up around the block for one of the few remaining payphones, and trying to find a spot with line of sight to Brooklyn

From experience, it may be minor or it may be quite major depending on the shape of your data. If you have a whole bunch of small items that, combined, only account for say 1% of the total, then adding borders and labels to all of them may significantly skew that proportion, and the proportions of its parent/ancestors

If I may take a layman stab:

Spin period: how long does it take the pulsar to fully rotate once, ie. how often does it “flash”?

Dispersion measure: from our perspective, how much is the flash “smeared” across time and frequency vs. just being a narrow-band sharp pulse? This is a function of how much stuff (electrons) exists between us and the pulsar.

Spin-down luminosity: how much of the pulsar’s kinetic energy is being lost as electromagnetic radiation? Pulsars spin more slowly over time due to this, so how hard are the brakes being pressed?

Surface magnetic field strength: what it says on the tin, how strong is the magnetic field on the surface of the pulsar? Refrigerator magnets are 10-100 gauss, a powerful MRI might be 30,000 gauss.

Characteristic age: estimated age of the pulsar calculated by assuming a very fast initial spin & applying the known spin-down rate to see how long it would take to slow down to its current rate. Makes some “spherical cow” assumptions but should be a good rough estimate of its age.

Fighting linguistic trends, insisting on tradition. Drake pushing aside, pain in his face. Embracing and extending, finding the new path forward. Drake with a knowing smile, pointing a finger in admiration.

So, what, if you make a bunch of money selling stolen goods you should be able to keep the proceeds? Surely there are plenty of cases where assets directly involved in the commission of a convicted crime may be justifiably confiscated? Seems like you’re assuming the same flimsy conditions defined in the US’s backwards civil forfeiture laws apply elsewhere in the world.