ladams

You can pay in the app on the Denver RTD system!

CPA is very very widely used in experimental physics, so I don’t really think it belongs on this list.

latexrun does a pretty reasonable job with LaTeX files, and only runs when needed, etc. Would be nice to have this integrated into a build system for plots, data generation, etc.

Do you have a link? Google just gives results about the US Navy detection of the implosion…

I don't think that 4o will actually be available for free. It seemed like they were quite careful in choosing their words. My guess is 3.5 is free without an account, and accessing 4o requires linking your OpenAI account.

Safer for the passengers, but increasingly dangerous for pedestrians.

Frequencies beyond the Nyquist limit alias back to resolved modes. So a combination of the camera plus a human eye to check that the flashing is “fast” (i.e. above the Nyquist limit) should be enough to verify the frequency.

A minor correction: anti-matter is actually regular matter. We understand it quite well, and are even able to create anti-atoms in the lab. On the other hand, dark matter is much more poorly understood: essentially the only evidence we have for its existence are observations of "weird" gravitational effects in the universe.

This has been my conclusion. I've spent the past few weeks polishing my yt-dlp scripts. Honestly, the experience of being able to watch any video I want offline and buffer-free is way better than the default YouTube experience. Sometimes I miss the comments section, but it is probably better for me that I don't have access to that.

I’m sure the faculty were thrilled with this tradition. Less pages for them to read!

Reminds me of Joey Hess (joeyh.name).

That said, I think this take has aged poorly in light of recent history. For instance, Google was started as a small collaboration, but has since grown into an enormous company. Presumably, this growth was (at least initially) the natural result of finding that a couple people can only do so much. For another example, Sublime Text (a for profit text editor written by a small group of developers) is massively less popular than VS Code, which is the bloated work of a small army.

Is it? Every large company has a well compensated CTO whose job it is to think through these sorts of hypotheticals. But “nobody gets fired for choosing Microsoft”, and so the monopoly continues…

The rise in student loan debt can alternatively be explained by increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people. In the past (e.g. 40 years ago corresponding to a graduation date ~20 years ago), more families were able to save enough to cover the true cost of 4 years of college. Now many families are living paycheck to paycheck, and cannot create an emergency fund, much less a college fund.

Stellarators in particular suffer from very long development cycles. It takes years and years of research to develop the algorithms used to optimize the coil geometries, and then the production of the coils and assembly of the vacuum vessel within the coils is much more challenging than for a tokamak. The coils are hard to produce because they have highly irregular shapes, and tight tolerances. Assembling the vacuum vessel is hard because the coils cover much more of the "toroidal-ish" surface area than in a tokamak.

The is a lot of interesting work going on in stellarator design optimization now, but it will likely be many years before that research is realized in another actual reactor.

Worth noting that a neutron decays into a proton, an electron, AND an electron anti-neutrino, so that lepton number is conserved (electron is +1 and anti-neutrino is -1). This interaction conserves charge and baryon number as well.

But you have to let the Turing machine run forever for this to work! Every number with a terminating decimal representation in rational.

Maybe it's not so easy to describe a transcendental number, at least in our lifetimes...

When I look at the link you provided, my conclusion is that US among the worst in deaths/capita, and about an order of magnitude above the median...

I'm a physics grad student, and this is completely wrong. The purpose of graduate classes (at least in physics) is to teach you how to navigate a the standard reference texts. For example, the main thing I learned in my grad E&M class was where to find information in Jackson (aka "Classical Electrodynamics"). Classical mechanics was a mix of Goldsmith and Landau and Lifshitz. Quantum mechanics used Sakauri. And statistical mechanics used Pathria. Also, referring to these classic texts by author is very common, much moreso than by title.