morei

My work around for this is to take a walk without headphones. For me, it means that the only thing I can do is think (can't read, can't watch video, etc). And by the time I've finished a 30 mins walk, I've usually got a bunch of things that I'm enthused about working on.

For those that don't know: Concentrated sugar solutions are indeed hydroscopic.

So it will indeed absorb water out of the atmosphere. It's still doubtful that it will do it fast enough to create any significant pressure differential though :)

No, because glass isn't a crystal. This is part of why it was such a hard problem: Because the existing sub-molecule imaging techniques couldn't image it.

What's the difference between N and N+ ? As far as I can tell, N+ just means a higher doping concentration? But it seems very fuzzy as to what 'higher' means?

This is much harder than you're assuming.

With the increasing prevalence of TLS traffic (https et al), any cache almost certainly needs to be an explicitly configured proxy which is a user configuration issue with all it's associated support and compatibility problems.

Add to that the power consumption on a satellite is often a limiting factor, the security issues, the added latency, the ever decreasing fraction of traffic that is cache-able, etc etc ... it's very much not clear that this is a good idea.

Not quite: Truetime has guarantees about ordering, rather than accuracy.

If you ask for the time and get A, and then ask for the time again and get B, then Truetime guarantees that A is less than B.

Obviously, in a distributed setting this is much easier to do if you have accurately sync'ed clocks, but that accuracy goes to reducing the uncertainty in the time (and hence making truetime faster) rather than providing accuracy.

You're right. My bad. It's much less common than I'd thought. (Intel had it on a number of chips that included the Iron Pro Graphics across Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake etc)

L3 is almost never SRAM, it's usually eDRAM and clocked significantly lower than L1 or L2.

(SRAM is prohibitively expensive to do at scale due to die area required).

Edit: Nope, I'm wrong. It's pretty much only Power that has this.

There's a couple of key things here:

1. The sheer volume of fraud attempts. Economics often dictate that it needs to be cheap and fast to reject a fraud attempt.

2. Information leakage. It's normal to see people complain that '<insert service of choice> banned them and refused to say way'. There's a very good reason for that: They're trying to slow the rate at which fraudsters learn to exploit them. So they deliberately don't detail exactly what the issue was. Yes, it's super frustrating if you get innocently caught up it, but it's not arbitrary.

TL;DR: Like everything else in life, there are real and genuine trade-offs here.

It's never that simple. You're implicitly assuming that a fraudster wants the account long term, which is rarely true.

And identity is a VERY complex area, and nothing like as simple as "plenty of ways to verify identities". Particularly noting that fraud is often carried out by leveraging many partial opportunities: I use the (false/stolen) identity from over there to carry out of the fraud over here.

It's rare, but possible.

Known of v high level example that is just incredibly disciplined about how they spend their time (e.g. "I did this, but was slowed significantly by poor code over that. Estimate about 30% time loss. I'm going to spend N weeks more in this area, so it's worth me spending 3.5 days fixing that code, but no more. I think I can fix it in about 2 days, so I will fix it. If I can't see the end of the fix by the time I'm 4 hours in, then I'm probably wrong about the expected time, so will abandon the fix").

The result is ridiculous productivity. They don't work long hours (strictly 9-5), but just very, very focused on making certain that there will be meaningful results from those hours.

So they exist, but absolutely it's not going to be common!

Google has an office in Frankfurt, and SWEs there get paid far more than 30k - 100k/yr. The comp delta between google SF SWE and google Frankfurt SWE is less than 30% (at same level obv).

I totally agree that the non-FAANG companies have terrible dev pay. But most of the FAANG companies have offices well beyond just SF/NYC, so the opportunities are definitely available.

This is a situation where automation has the advantage. With detailed position information and detailed maps, the fact that the lines on the street can't be seen is irrelevant. The car didn't need them anyway.

(noting that Waymo requires full detail maps to be able to drive an area, including all signage).

I had a quick read. The paper states in the conclusion "The more we increase the number of iterations k, the more proportion decreases, but the number of integers starting the different trajectories keeps increasing and tends towards infinity as k tends towards infinity."

This statement is not proven, and is not supported by the previous theorems. Thus the following statement "We therefore conclude that the 3x+ 1 conjecture is false" remains an unproven assertion.

Essentially the paper argues that the density F(k) of trajectories at least as long as 'k' gets ever smaller as k increases, without ever reaching zero, and thus there exists at least one value that has an infinity long trajectory.

But that's as false assertion. Just because F(k) is non-zero for every finite value of k does NOT imply that the lim as k tends to infinity of F(k) is non-zero, and consequently does not prove the existence of an infinity long trajectory.

TL;DR: paper applies intuition on finite sequences to infinite sequences and gets it wrong.

The F50 sailing class used in SailGP can remain foiling during jibes in winds as light as 8 knots. That is, the boat always sees an apparent headwind during the entire downwind run.

Amusingly, it's still referred to as jibing[1], even though the apparent wind remains a headwind.

This is important because sailing has right-of-way rules that are written in terms of the true wind, not the apparent wind.

[1] or gybing if you're using British spelling.

No, that's exactly the point. Knowing the center of mass and the moment of inertia is sufficient: You don't know need to know the exact shape, or the variations in density inside the object etc etc.

It's not quite true that advertising is a zero-sum game. There are economic benefits from increased competition, and from improvements in presented choice.

It is definitely true that the economic benefits don't accrue to the advertiser! And it's also true that the economic benefits decrease as advertising saturates. But it's still not zero.

Do you know what theory that might be?

The difficulty in producing a black hole is getting the energy density high enough. We have no known mechanism to get an energy density that's even close the right order of magnitude.

Maybe you meant that in theory quantum fluctuations might do it? Unfortunately, this is really a non-answer. The probability is so ridiculously low that it's not practicably distinguishable from zero. (It's _vastly_ more likely that every measurement ever taken and that _will_ be ever taken is wrong, than that the event actually happened).

What happened is what typically happens: Concentration of expertise. The lower expertise jobs (just mechanically play what someone else wrote/arranged) went away and there was increased demand for higher expertise (be an actual expert in beats _and_ drum machines).

So the winners were those that adapted earlier and the losers were those that didn't/couldn't adapt.

This translates to: If you're mindlessly doing the same thing over and over again, then it's a low value prop and is at risk. But if you're solving actual problems that require thought/expertise then the value prop is high and probably going to get higher.

That's not really how it's done.

RS is normally used as erasure code: It's used when writing (to compute code blocks), and when reading _only when data is missing_. Checksums are used to detect corrupt data, which is then treated as missing and RS used to reconstruct it. Using RS to detect/correct corrupt data is very inefficient.

Checksums are also normally free (CRC + memcpy on most modern CPUs runs in the same time that memcpy does: it's entirely memory bound).

The generation of code blocks is also fairly cheap: Certainly no large matrix multiplications! This is because the erasure code generally only spans a small number of blocks (e.g. 10 data blocks), so every code byte is only dependent on 10 data bytes. The math for this is reasonably simple, and further simplified with some reasonable sized look-up tables.

That's not to say that there is no CPU needed, but it's really not all that much, certainly nothing that needs acceleration support.

This point is that the periapsis is still subject to strong atmospheric drag.

And while secondary debris clouds at might higher altitude is theoretically possible, it's vanishingly unlikely due to the vastly lower density.

It's easy: Just make it illegal, and put make it incumbent on starlink to enforce it. Violations are met with (eg) sanctions on Tesla and other related parties.

This has played out many, many times in history and it's generally successful.

Yes, it's often not perfect. There are small numbers that slip through the cracks. But as soon as it's any significant number the crack will get closed. c.f. great firewall of china, north korea anything, various European data location requirements, russian internet payments and search, etc etc etc etc.

Yes. Fat is generally non-polar molecules so has a different solubility profile. This in turn may significantly change absorption, and the location of absorption (stomach v small intensive v large intestine etc).

Yes, they would spend it even if they were on the right side of the law.

This is an interesting example of a prisoners dilemma. If N companies are competing without lobbying, their lobbying costs are zero.

But if one company 'defects' and start lobbying to tilt the regulatory landscape, then every other company must also start lobbying to prevent it.

The end result is that every company lobbies against each other for no net benefit[1], despite large amounts of money spent on lobbying. Good for lobbyists, bad for the companies.

So a company spending money on lobbying doesn't really tell us anything. They may be a bad actor, a good actor, or anything in between. There are valid reason for every position in the spectrum to spent money on lobbying.

[1]. Obv the real world is far more complex than this. The lobbying may provide industry wide benefits, or may prevent the entry of new competitors, or there may be semi-random fluctuations in the regularly landscape, etc, etc, etc.

Best summary to date: https://lloydslist.maritimeintelligence.informa.com/LL113622...

TL;DR: Ship has not been refloated, "an initial investigation has ruled out any suggestion of mechanical or technical failure".

Amusingly enough, the tugs not uncommonly have more thrust.

Large ships are _heavily_ optimized for the common case, which is sailing at about 13.5 knots. They take a very long time to get up to speed because their propulsion is sized to be just enough to overcome resistance at their typical cruising speed.

Consequently, it would be difficult to get another ship up to any sort of speed in a short enough distance. Even if you could, the the momentum is absurdly high so it's much more likely that any sort of chain would snap, or the attachment point would break than that the aground ship would actually move.

(The aground ship has a deadweight of approx 200,000 tonnes)

The real world is more complicated than just 'overpriced to the military'.

To heavily paraphrase the story: The US military has a number of unusual requirements that are not cheap to meet (security, extra review, etc etc). SpaceX originally balked at a number of those requirements, but after a fair bit of back and forth, they eventually threw up their hands and said "Sure! Whatever you want, but you have to pay all the extra costs". And so the US military launches are significantly more expensive than the commercial launches, but the large part of that is because the costs are genuinely higher.

$50m is still a lot, and not every sat costs that much. How does a corporate bean counter justify spending $50m more than they have to?

That's seems pretty easy? The satellite easily has a 2 year lead time, and it's 100s of millions so you can't afford to build a spare 'just in case'. At that point, spending an extra $50M to reduce the (perceived?) chance of a 2-year project delay starts to look pretty cheap.

Of course, this is dependent on there being a material reduction in the probability of RUD. And as SpaceX has accumulated more data on reliability, it starts to get very hard to argue that there is indeed a material reduction.

That's a strange metric to pick. The Tour de France is a team race, with lots of strategy involved. It most definitely isn't about getting the lowest time, only a lower time than the competitors (very much not the same thing!).

e.g. It's common to see the entire peloton sit up and collectively agree to 'take it easy' for most of a stage to reserve energy for a sprint finish in the last 3 minutes. So the total race time is strongly affected by the mix of team strategies.

It's also very much not a standard race year-to-year, with differing numbers of mountain stages versus flat stages, so the year-to-year times are completely incomparable.

There may still be doping the sport of cycling, but the TdF total race times would be very weak evidence for it.