evo

I think there's a close linkage between "predictable" and "stationary". Ultimately, if you strip everything away, either there's a core where the future looks like the past (which is equivalent to being stationary), or there isn't. That core could be "the laws of physics and base conditions are stationary", and everything else is deterministic functions applied on top, but the fundamental process is trying to find that stationary core.

In the finance space, the stationary core is often some 'stylized fact' that you're hypothesizing will hold true. This could be e.g., the momentum factor, that if you strip away the noise, there's an underlying trend that will hold over an extended duration.

I wonder if there's also distortion or ring modulation stages where some of the energy above hearing range might spill into audible sidebands if they're not nyquist-limited first.

Yeah, I was oversimplifying a blit, the raw waveforms are usually okay, but I distinctly remember old-school VSTs where you couldn't achieve a nice saw lead at 44.1.

32-bit float has become popular in filmmaking/field recording equipment lately because, with a microphone preamp that supports it, you can capture the entire dynamic range of the microphone--there's no accidental clipping if you drive the gain stage too hard.

It's a bit redundant for a skilled technician, they're already used to setting the gain staging, inbound compression, and feathering the mics to avoid this in 24-bit, but if you're handing a boom mic to a novice and have a scene where e.g. someone's whispering and another person's screaming, it can be nice to not have to worry about it.

24/192 is also great for digital synthesizers--if you're generating a waveform like a sawtooth that has theoretically instantaneous transitions, they can eat as much frequency as you can give them. Running at 44khz loses noticeable high-end content.

Most modern digital synths have already caught onto this and run internally at much higher sampling rates even if their output gets downsampled, but sometimes you run across a vintage plugin that runs at the host audio rate and working in a higher sampling rate is audible.

Could be this (from the article): "Another scenario I can think of is that the financial model for the building requires spaces to be filled by “credit tenants,” meaning name-brand businesses of a certain caliber and creditworthiness."

Might not be available unless your name ends in 'tarbucks'.

Would it make sense to frame this as a Baumol's Cost Disease problem? E.g., the labor of child rearing has been historically offset by the inherent emotional surplus of the task, but the march of productivity in other sectors gradually increases that imputed loss until we reach a breaking point.

I wonder if this is a nuclear proliferation risk--could it be used for AVLIS/SILEX?

Can’t wait til someone makes a Gemini prompt to find these public keys and launch a copy of itself using them.

I wish them the best, but to my knowledge most metal laser sintering setups involve powders so fine as to be both a fairly serious health concern and (depending on the metal) a plausible fuel-air explosive if there's sufficient concentration in the air.

It's not something that instills me with confidence when they self-describe as "scrappy", I'd like to see extra vigilance into the safety concerns.

One of the big use cases for Genlock these days is when you're doing virtual production with LED walls; you want to make sure the screen refresh of the wall is locked to the shutter of the camera. It's almost like 'vsync' in video game video settings, without it you risk seeing tearing in the backdrops.

Another way I like to think about this is finding 'closeable' contexts to work in; that is, abstractions that are compact and logically consistent enough that you can close them out and take them on their external interface without always knowing the inner details. Metaphorically, your system can be a bunch of closed boxes that you can then treat as boxes, rather than a bunch of open boxes whose contents are spilling out and into each other. Think 'shipping containers' instead of longshoremen throwing loose cargo into your boat.

If you can do this regularly, you can keep the _effective_ cognitive size of the system small even as each closed box might be quite complex internally.

Yeah, I think that’s traditionally the route when you’re not running with near-real-time constraints. I’m out of practice with DSP/filter math but I think there’s a constraint such that any theoretical filter that doesn’t impact phase must be symmetrical around the time axis such that it requires “knowledge from the future” that’s not available in real time.

EDIT: And I think with the two-pass approach you need to calculate the filter such that you get the desired effect after two applications instead of one.

I imagine the lossy encoding process could use a bunch of stacked filters to cut away imperceptible frequencies, but filters in the general case are implemented by summing delayed copies of the input and can smear the output in the phase domain. (There’s a branch of filters that avoid this but require computing the introduced delay and shifting the output to compensate.)

It’s a noticeable problem in audio production if e.g. a filtered kick drum goes out of phase and sucks amplitude when mixed with the original.

I feel like the thrust-to-weight dynamics on multicopter drones don’t really lend themselves to heavy payloads like water bombing in the quantities needed. An additional issue is that, due to wanting to maximize power density for the high amperage motors, you often end up using lithium-polymer battery formulations that are less than adequately shielded for the possible impacts the drone might incur. I would be concerned that the risk of a drone failure itself igniting a new fire in a remote area would outweigh the potential.

My take is that this (and similar effects in other media) is the consequence of the rise of targeted advertising. Prior to the advent of surveillance capitalism, there was a vested interest in the development and refining of subcultures.

Someone in the media would identify a new nascent subculture, invest in catering to it, and in the process create a new demographic that advertisers could pump money into to address a specific audience. Ugly and capitalist, sure, but on the flip side, if you were a member of one of those subcultures, there'd be a steady flow of investment into the community you considered yourself a member of. If you listened to the Grateful Dead, someone would be there to sell you peace signs and tie-dye shirts. If you listened to emo punk, well, Hot Topic. The money the advertisers paid would go back into the magazines, critics, studios, etc. that would then further promote, develop, and refine the subculture--a virtuous cycle of sorts.

Google et al. negate the need for any of this. If you want to sell tie-dye shirts, you buy a slot on the "tie-die shirts" keyword. It's (arguably) more efficient for the advertiser, but, it eliminates the economic incentives for subcultures to exist. So they don't. Everyone is their own one-person-addressable subculture, which is essentially identical to one sprawling morass of culture.

What little money remains flowing into the media system chases the spontaneous flash-in-the-pan meme hits that broadly appeal, because that's all that's left.

I feel like the most novel aspect of this image is an implication of the shape of the reflective casing at the far rear of the device--it seems to suggest a parabolic "shaped charge" sort of focusing element that likely helps to boost the neutron flux and initiate the "spark plug" from the rear at the same time as from the front.

Perhaps it has to do with the relative densities of RP-1 versus methane?

I suspect that would fall under the rule that if two black holes’ respective event horizons ever cross, they merge and initiate the eventual merger of the two respective black holes.

Not only are these aircraft hangar sized buildings with soundproofing, they’re also likely wired for hundreds of amps of lighting, including truss and catwalk systems to he able to position and distribute that lighting.

I could see it adding up pretty fast.

I suspect if you're wary about fomite spread of disease (later shown to be airborne for COVID but initially assumed), then it's easy to pick up a phobia of grappling the handlebars of a scooter that a stranger has recently used.

Additionally, at least anecdotally here, as the city centers hollowed out of normal business/leisure traffic, a lot of the rental vehicles were visibly breached and used by homeless folks, which often tarnished the literal appearance and reliability of the rental units in addition to damaging the brand.

It’s less that this allows new unprecedented weapons, and more that this allows one to validate material properties in similar conditions to a nuclear bomb detonation without actually testing a full scale device. This lets one verify and refine the otherwise “magic number” constants in computer simulation code that were empirically derived 50-80 years ago.

Of course, if you’re a nascent nuclear power along the lines of NK, you just do full scale tests, treaties be damned.

This gave me a bunch of insight into the workings of those old survival tricks of using analog watch hands to find cardinal directions:

- Since the video starts at solar noon, the sun is always at 12:00 relative to the video.

- Swapping reference frames, if you had a clock face with 24 hours on it, and aligned the "12:00" to point at the equator, the "0:00-12:00" axis would define a longitudinal plane through the Earth, and the hour hand would define a second plane that would intersect with the sun--the hour hand would "follow" the sun.

- Conversely, if you pointed your clock's hour hand at the sun, you would know your "12:00" would be due north/south (depending on hemisphere).

- The same is true for conventional 12-hour watches and clocks, but you must find the "half-way" mark between your hour hand and noon, because the hour hand is moving at twice the speed relative to the hypothetical 24-hour clock.

Neat!

I suspect that they would, if for no other reason that if the direct action is indiscriminate in whom it harms, then the well-heeled will have the resources necessary to seek compensation via litigation while the marginalized will be out of luck.

Right! But that's talking about compressing a plutonium pit in atmospheric pressure--being an extremely dense metal, plutonium will preferentially "squirt out" in any direction rather than compress, if there's a direction it can go in. Therefore, you need to make a spherical shockwave via explosives.

But that's in 1 atm! The initial wavefront of a fission device is going to be conservatively about 4 inches a microsecond (based on early above-ground test photos, modern high-yield devices would probably be faster still). This could very well turn the entire physics package of the secondary weapon into a thin pancake on the blast front, the plutonium can't get out of the way fast enough to avoid compression. This is a totally different scenario than a one-point-safety fizzle. The HE explosives in the second bomb might as well not exist relative to the overpressures faced from the first bomb's detonation.

I disagree; under normal circumstances regarding the HE explosives you are 100% correct but I suspect a nuclear shockwave at near point blank range might be fast enough to push the near side of the primary pit to the far side in a time interval short enough to cause an additional criticality. Probably not to design yields, but plausible.

I suspect in reality the increasing compensation of the executive suite in stock, while intended to alleviate the principal agent problem, means that it's substantially more remunerative for leadership to try to goose their stock price by whatever means possible within their tenure than to steer the ship in a growth-agnostic fashion. Doubly so with modern big tech companies where RSU growth can fuel a big chunk of your salary costs for your tech department when your company is on the rise, but scare everyone off when the reverse is true.

Even the Medallion Fund only averages 20-40% gains a year and they've stacked the deck with every possible advantage of resources and the most brilliant folks they can find. If the risk management on this is geared to the point where it's seeing 300% account volatility in a month, even in a positive direction, it's easier assign higher likelihood to

"this algo is levered far higher than it ought to be and while you've dodged landmines this month, you won't in the long run,"

vs.

"your 'minimum viable stat arb' and competent implementation outperforms the best-of-the-best outlier."

I think skepticism is warranted as most people at this point end up blowing up, but hey, I guess there's some slim possibility that it's the latter?

I believe the Museum of Flight in Seattle has had the original production 747 for some time.

https://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/boeing-747-121

This feels like a refinement on the existing practice of 3D printing metallic powder mixed with a low-temp meltable binding agent, then sintering the resulting object in a kiln to burn off the binder and generate the final part. As far as I know, this also has shrinkage that must be accounted for, as well as a particularly rough finish. That's not that big of a deal if there's subsequent machining steps, but perhaps this direct precipitation of metal out of solution improves upon the precision or tolerances.