max51

omfg, I was replying to an LLM

It depends on the geometric stability of the column shape, which is why I said what I said.

What you said was like 99% completely false.

that compressive stress limits are much lower in steel than tensile

No they are not.

as you’re noting

I never acknowledge that. Your lack of understanding in what column buckling is doesn't change anything. Unironically, you should ask chatgpt, it can probably give you a high level explanation that is more compatible with your understanding of physics than what I can give you.

Buckling is a stability problem, not a resistance problem. The compressive stress resistance is literally not part of the formulas that we use to verify it. The column could have 100 MPa, 350 MPA, or 359918 MPa compressive resistance and it would change nothing when it comes to buckling. Only the elastic modulus and the physical shape of the column (length, inertia, etc.) is relevant for buckling verification.

And bucking within the column (and/or the resistance too it) is primarily resisted by tensile strength.

Than please explain to me why we don't need the tensile (or compressive) resistance of the material to know the buckling resistance of the column. I really want to hear that one.

I'm a structural engineer, and this is incorrect. For structural steel (e.g., A992, 350W, etc.), the tensile strength is the same as the compressive strength. That's why we only need one value for both.

And yes, when we design beams, we check the stresses in both tension and compression. For a symmetrical shape like an I-shaped beam, both verification will be the exact same formula so we don't need to calculate both explicitly.

For columns, we do check the compressive stress, and it is the controlling failure mode for short columns. Long, slender columns will buckle before the compressive stress exceeds the allowable limit.

It's a lot easier to have a functioning society without art majors than without civil engineers.

it would apply even if every data center built an entirely renewable dedicated solar farm to power it. After all, energy is fungible: the newly built solar farm could be going to help consumers transition to renewable.

No, because that solar farm would have never been built in the first place without the datacenter. You either get both or you get none of them. It's completely different than using an existing solar farm that was already there before anyone started planning for that datacenter

Bitcoin attempted to replace cash, but failed because the transaction costs are orders of magnitude too high.

The current fees are less than 0.40$. It may be too high for a starbuck coffee, but that's way lower than the fees charged by a credit card provider if you are purchasing something over 50$. On a 2%+0.10$ structure, you only need to transfer around 15$ before your credit card fee is higher than the current average BTC tx fee.

I use a TI nspire CX CAS.

honestly, I think it makes no sense to spend more than 30$ on a calculator if it can't do symbolic math.

The way you input things like division, integrals, matrix, etc. on newer calculators like the nspire is far superior than the older calculators (eg. ti-84, ti-89, etc.). They look like how you write them on a blackboard instead of relying on purely parentheses or "," and ";" to separate parameters. It's like going from Excel to Mathcad

And in the end, what's to stop someone from assembling an unlicensed 3D printer to make unlicensed prints?

You really don't have to go that far. A very high quality control board (eg. an original Prusa) is like 90$ and cheap ones go for 25$.

You could buy the licensed printer and swap the board. Or maybe even just flash the firmware on the licensed printer

The US has roughly 10x more population than Canada. The solution is really simple, just hire 10x more humans to manage the vote counting.

Paper voting worked for thousands of years and was at the core of the foundation of this country.

There is no need to compromise the results of the election just to scale in a slightly more efficient way. If you need 10x more people because the volume is 10x higher, just hire 10x more people.

I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database

If it's counted electronically from the database, the piece of paper is completely worthless. Unless you can get the entire voting population to give you their paper and then count them, you will never know if the count is right. If a hacker switched 15% of the vote from one party to another, how could you tell from a piece of paper that tells you who you voted for?

Then why did it happen 3 elections in a row?!

We had front-page news about how the election was "hacked by Russia" and trump cheated for over a year after his first win in 2016 (let's not pretend that keyword was chosen accidentally); They tried to put him in jail for it. In 2020, trump did the exact same thing and went even farther with it. And in 2024, the DNC tried again to claim cheating happened.

How many cycle of this BS do we need to go through before we accept that elections need to be done properly and safely?

The entire point of a democracy is that elected leaders get their legitimacy and their acting power from the certainty that it was voted by the population. Not everyone will agree with their ideas, but the majority do and we all agree to follow their lead because that's what the population want. If the vote is compromised, everything falls apart.

If the "will of the people" turn into the "will of an intern at Dominion who fucked with the code and rigged the election" or "the will of Pakistani hacker", it breaks the entire system.

And it turns out it works pretty well.

Does it?

This is the third election in a row where the losing party claim the election was not legitimate and/or hacked.

Yes, you can define your own named custom formulas in Excel.

I prefer to do it with VBA code because I find it easier to manage, but it's also possible without VBA using just the built-ins in the spreadsheet directly.

Can you name a single product that is comparable?

If it doesn't have something equivalent to Pivot Tables, it's not even worth talking about.

"I give you 30B$ worth of hardware that costs me <10B$ to make in exchange for 30B$ worth of shares in your company" would be a more accurate description.

The "circular investment" is mostly start up companies using their stocks instead of cash to pay for server hardware and cloud computing. There is a few extra steps in between that make things look weird and convoluted, but the end results is really just big companies giving hardware and getting shares of ai companies in exchange for it.

For a power user, There is nothing even remotely comparable to Excel that exists today.

There will always be bugs you can't fix, that doesn't mean we should embrace having orders of magnitude more of them. And it's not just about bugs, it's also about adding new features.

This is tech debt on steroid. You are building an entire code base that no can read or understand and pray that the LLM won't fuck up too much. And when it does, no one in the company knows how to deal with it other than by throwing more LLM tokens at it and pray it works.

As I said earlier, using pure AI agents will work for a while. But when it doesn't you are fucked.

I would argue that it's going to be the opposite. At re:Invent, one of the popular sessions was in creating a trio of SRE agents, one of which did nothing but read logs and report errors, one of which did analysis of the errors and triaged and proposed fixes, and one to do the work and submit PRs to your repo.

If you manage a code base this way at your company, sooner or later you will face a wall. What happens when the AI can't fix an important bug or is unable to add a very important feature? now you are stuck with a big fat dirty pile of code that no human can figure out because it wasn't coded by human and was never designed to be understood by a human in the first place.

If you think making sure only citizens can vote equals "suppressing liberal voters", that sound like a big self report. The voter lists don't tell you how people voted, it only tells you who did.

Generally speaking, trackers that require a ratio above 1.0 and don't have freeleech/point system are designed so that you pay the website to fix your ratio and/or rent a seedbox from one of their partner.

It's a 0 sum game; for every account with a >1.0 ratio, that implies other people will be <1.0.

And when you compete with 10gb/s seedboxes that have scripts to automatically grab all the new torrent the second they get posted, it's extremely difficult to improve your ratio. Even for super popular torrents, you have a few minutes to seed as much as you can before upload speed goes to 0 forever. You can't slowly accumulate upload over time the same way you would with a torrent from a public tracker.

Because the ones pushing it down your throats are trying to capture the entire market and get you to adopt their AI instead of a competitor.

LLMs don't do this

They did at the beginning. It used to be that if you wanted a full answer with an intro, bullet points, lists of pros/cons, etc., you had to explicitly ask for it in the prompt. The answers were also a lot more influenced by the tone of the prompt instead of being forced into answering with a specific format like it does right now.

While she was moving my legs using her upper body, it felt quite intimate and I admired her for being so professional while doing her work physically and giving psychological support as a bonus.

Have you considered that from her pov, there was nothing intimate about it? I wasn't there to watch it, but in my experience, these situations are only "intimate" or awkward AFTER you start talking about how intimate and awkward there are. For people who have to touch bodies regularly at work (eg. me when I was a gymnastic coach), there is nothing intimate about it. The only ones who think it's sexual/intimate/awkward/weird/etc. are those who have no experience with it.

It's the same thing when you get a medical procedure done. Believe it or not, the nurses and the surgeon do not give a single fuck about seeing your dick. Its not intimate or sexual for them.

I participated in that competition a decade ago. The best teams had a hull that was less than half an inch thick and it didn't leak. We put glass fibers and iirc latex in the concrete mix.

were too dangerous to handle

Too dangerous to handle or too dangerous for openai's reputation when "journalists" write articles about how they managed to force it to say things that are offensive to the twitter mob? When AI companies talk about ai safety, it's mostly safety for their reputation, not safety for the users.

Someone from your university tried to scrape data from Google.

Kinda wild that someone scraping google's data would prevent me from getting into my PAID (>90$/yr) Dropbox account. That experience is a big part of why I pay extra to host my host data on my own server now.

when I realised I never use the type-A, I glued it in place with epoxy. Now I don't have to worry about it breaking.

The best I have found so far with good specs is the "sandisk SanDisk ultra dual drive go". The spinny thing is super annoying but you can glue it in place if you don't need the type-A. It's a bit bigger than the yubikey, but it's smaller than the other alternatives.

That doesn't surprise me. I find it hard to believe it's a pure coincidence that I would get stuck in the loop regularly when I'm on the university wifi but it would never happen anywhere else ever. After a dozen try, I would remote connect to my home pc and it would magically work on the first try every single time.