kragen

Your response comment saying "I have now read all of that" was posted 11 hours after I linked you to a bit over 120,000 words of notes on the topic you were asking about (according to 150 * [...document.body.innerText.matchAll(/(\d+)\s+minutes/g)].map(m => Number(m[1])).reduce((a, b) => a + b, 0) on a non-overlapping subset of the topic pages).

Some of that material is a little difficult. How did you manage to read it all so fast? I'd like to hear what you found most interesting.

As for what I'm working on right now, probably seeing the sunrise tomorrow, but see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48807996

Yeah, I do have some ideas: https://dernocua.github.io/topics/digital-fabrication.html https://dernocua.github.io/topics/self-replication.html https://dercuano.github.io/topics/self-replication.html https://derctuo.github.io/topics/self-replication.html https://dercuano.github.io/topics/digital-fabrication.html etc.

By "here" do you mean "the internet"? Are you trying to discourage people from sharing their calculations and observations with one another if they don't personally interest you?

If so, what is wrong with you?

I didn't post my notes on HN; in fact, I didn't even post them on dernocua.github.io.

I wasn't suggesting using it for shipping boxes, but rather for things like robot arms.

"Plastic" is not a material; it's a property or state of many unrelated materials. It doesn't make any more sense to say that plastic is a risk to health than to say that liquid is a risk to health or that crystals are a risk to health.

Only if you do it in an oxidizing atmosphere. Though aluminum is very liberal about its definition of "oxidizing atmosphere".

It's not that my argument is flawed so much as that it depends on some basic background knowledge about processes like corrosion and solvation. Lacking that knowledge, you're better off taking my word for it that humans are not exposed to aluminum in the environment in a different way since we started refining the metal.

That's SPIF ("single-point incremental forming"), which is mentioned in passing in my note:

These can presumably be removed, permitting traditional SPIF processing of raw foil by sliding the point over the foil; a better alternative might be...

I don't think it's closely related to 0-_-0's "folding" idea.

I'm not sure, but I think that normally it reacts with phosphate ions to form aluminum phosphate rather than leaving the body.

Also true of teflon, aluminum oxide, and Earth as a whole. Perfluorooctanoic acid, by contrast, is not mostly harmless.

You're welcome!

It's a pretty broad term, with a lot of possibilities, but generally I mean a machine which, given a design for a machine in the form of digital data, can build a working machine of that design without further human interaction. Some imperfect approximations of the idea already exist:

- living things such as bacteria, humans, and plants: DNA is digital, true, but it's an unsolved problem to design the DNA to make a plant grow into the shape of even a chair, much less a bicycle, a lathe, or a computer.

- 3-D printers such as RepRap: they generally can only produce very limited machines without further assembly, with only very limited palettes of materials, falling far short of being able to print a whole printer without human intervention.

- ordinary compilers such as GCC: though they have already had a significant economic impact, they require a feedstock of magnetic disks or erased Flash from which to manufacture their output program, which still leaves their users vulnerable to TSMC and Western Digital. Worse, the output program depends on a CPU to run, leaving the users vulnerable to Intel and Qualcomm.

I'm not sure, but I suspect cooling requirements also enter into consideration.

Oh, thanks! You are surely correct; I was puzzled about how something as relatively inert as pizza dough could corrode aluminum at multiple microns per hour, but electrolysis can definitely do that.

And today... I shall TAKE OVER THE WORLD, Igor!

Aluminum is a major component of all soils, and soluble aluminum salts have been used in medicine and dyeing since ancient Greece, probably since ancient Egypt. They have been used in food preparation for at least several centuries.

Well, "Dercuano" sounds like "Dirk One Oh" in English, so clearly the sequel should be "Dirk Two Oh". And "Dernocua" is the properly formed vesre of cuaderno, unlike "Dercuano", which unfortunately certain people were too polite to inform me was ill-formed until too late.

:-)

Mostly I wanted a name that was short, easy to remember, and unique.

My current notes are in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git/

It does not, but aluminum oxide is even more of a "forever chemical" than teflon is, though less so than, for example, the nitrogen that constitutes 78% of the atmosphere.

Let's see if this is a quantitatively plausible concern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_chloride says orl-rat LD₅₀ of AlCl₃ is 380mg/kg, which is 20.2% aluminum by weight, so that's 77mg/kg of soluble aluminum ions. If this toxicity is due to soluble aluminum ions (rather than, say, acidity), and rats and humans are about equally sensitive to aluminum toxicity, you'd need about 3.8g of aluminum to kill a 50kg human, the ionized equivalent of 1.42mℓ of aluminum metal (at 2.71g/cc). That's 1420cm² of 10μm aluminum foil completely dissolved in the food.

Presumably you would get significant toxic effects well before reaching the lethal dose, so it would be wise to avoid exposures larger than a few tens of cm² of aluminum foil completely dissolved in your food. So it seems like the concern at least passes the first smoke test of plausibility: the total amount of aluminum present in a "grilling packet" is at least sufficient to worry about.

(Fortunately, aluminum rapidly becomes inert in the body, so we don't have to be concerned about gradual poisoning the way we do with lead and arsenic.)

The crucial question, then, is how fast the foil corrodes under cooking conditions! If it corrodes (and migrates into the food) at a micron or more per hour, then this could be a serious concern. But, if the corrosion rate is more like microns per month or microns per year, the dose wouldn't be high enough to worry about.

The fact that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_toxicity redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_toxicity_in_people_o... suggests that this is at least not a recognized concern.

I do not currently have a sketch of a matter compiler, just a rough estimate that most of its parts count would probably be RAM, and that it probably needs several kilobytes of RAM.

This is very impressive!

Thanks! I keep unintentionally using https links to canonical.org since basically the whole web is https now. Fixed.

I had no idea about that!

Thank you.

I wasn't expecting to see Dernocua at the top of HN today with 53 comments. You can download Dernocua as a whole from http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua/ if you're interested.

I'm happy to answer any questions. (Well, almost any.)

Maybe not for everybody, but I recall hearing that certain military units, students, and government officials were required to get covid vaccinations already in '20. Maybe he heard the same thing?

I have the same problem in Argentina. Worse, I'm pretty sure that Google and other search engines decide that I don't deserve to receive good information because I live in a Spanish-speaking country, so they send me to terrible low-quality pages because often that's all that's available in Spanish.

I don't have any trouble zooming in and out on this website.

The tweet immediately before this one says:

There's a weird disconnect in this vaccine mandate debate: many are still pretending that Covid-19 is of natural origin, which gives such mandates a different feel than they otherwise have.

Contrary to your assertion, this is not clearly talking about vaccine mandates in any particular place. And the tweet I quoted previously is claiming (or hinting) that the same "state entity" had caused the pandemic and mandated the "experimental treatment". I'm not familiar with any versions of the lab-leak hypothesis that claimed that covid escaped from a US lab, so I don't think it's a reasonable inference that he's talking about the US vaccine mandate.

On the other hand, he seems to have worked pretty hard to avoid clearly stating any of his positions here, so who knows what he really thinks? Or thought?

It seems that the "covid trutherism" or "spreading covid misinformation" claim is unjustified. Here's Blow's original tweet:

If a state entity does an oopsie in a lab, then forces its citizens to undergo an experimental treatment because of the oopsie, while suppressing news of side effects, and also denying that the oopsie is anyone's fault ... that's just abusive?

Unfortunately Blow was unwilling to come out and state his position here, relying instead on innuendo, so we have to kind of guess what he was trying to say. I interpret him as making four claims here:

1. The COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak.

2. Some Chinese people were forced to accept experimental vaccinations.

3. The government of the PRC suppressed news of the side effects of the vaccines.

4. The government of the PRC worked to prevent investigations into the cause of the pandemic.

Claim #4 is plainly true; the WHO and several other countries have protested this at great length.

Claim #2 probably depends on your threshold for "experimental" and "forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sinopharm_BIBP_CO... explains that emergency vaccination was available in China in July 02020, and there are plausible claims that Chinese state employees and students traveling abroad were required to take it. This was before results were in from clinical trials, which I think qualifies for most people's definition of "experimental"; the WHO wouldn't add it to its list of authorized emergency vaccines until May of the next year.

Claim #3 seems almost guaranteed to be true, but I don't have direct evidence. The government of the PRC routinely suppresses news, and there are numerous well-documented instances of this happening in connection with COVID, and there are always some subjects in clinical trials of vaccines who have major health problems such as death which may or may not be caused by the vaccine. BBIBP-CorV seems to have been, in the end, pretty safe, but it seems inconceivable that there weren't at least some news of people dying or having terrible health problems after receiving it which were deleted from Weibo or other media ("suppressed"), and that these deletions were carried out because of state policy of the PRC.

Claim #1 seems like the most debatable one, but even that isn't an open-and-shut case. At the time, the lab-leak case was fairly weak, and it certainly hasn't been proven, but it hasn't been disproven either; see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... for an extensive summary of the debate. Because of the truth of Claim #4 it seems unlikely that it will ever be disproven.

More generally, I find deplorable the polarization on partisan political grounds of fields like puzzle games, genetics, and quantum physics. Artistic development, understanding the world, and extending technology are necessarily collaborative endeavors, and rejecting Blow's games because he criticizes the Chinese government seems akin to refusing to use the Schrödinger equation because Schrödinger sexually victimized teenage girls.

Linus Torvalds is effectively a full-time code reviewer, and so are most of his "lieutenants". It's not a new idea, as you say, but it works very well.