nick238

Oil, natural gas, corn (for fuel), soybeans (for cattle feed)

The length of a noon-to-noon day (synodic day) varies from +29.9 seconds near the winter solstice to −21.3 seconds near the autumnal equinox[1]. If you account for the seasonal changes, you get closer to the ideal solar day which only deviates by milliseconds from 86400 s, but that deviation does pile up and "forces" leap seconds. I say "forces" because it's a legal requirement that the time tracks the sun.

Going to leap hours I think is a sufficient kick of the can down the road, one is only needed every few centuries. Pretty sure something'll happen in the next 600 years that obviates the need for that though (nuclear war, asteroid, technological singularity, need for a unified solar system time...), so us hack programmers can assume all three of those things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synodic_day

From the bubble center plot, I'm guessing that the bubbles are separated on average about a few mm apart? Taking the other comment's guess at face value, you're going from about 2 mm to 20 um, so 2 orders of magnitude. Air (technically SF6 in the article) and water (RBC is close enough) have acoustic impedances that differ by 3.5 orders of magnitude.

My assumptions here are *extremely generous*, i.e. favorable to the "oh, we'll just make it work with natural contrast", and even then, they can't hand wave 5-6 orders of magnitude of improvement. Furthermore, because of the use of super resolution, I'm guessing there's some exponential factor in there, i.e. double the density of bubbles/tracking points past some critical limit, then you need 8x the data to reconstruct things.

This is old (2025).

Fortune links to a BBC article, which doesn't really provide any more detail about the testing conditions. I wonder if rubbing a bar of soap on your windows would reflect light and be easier to wash off. Also, were the windows tested low-E or not?

I still don't understand why programmers seemed to get off on this sort of shit. Doing `while((dest++ = src++));` is great and all (maybe fine because it's kinda idiomatic now, but should you really be using that over `strncpy`?), but being clever like that in real code makes it harder to review, and harder to understand months down the line. I've mentally cussed out 'whoever wrote this confusing shit' to only `git blame` myself.

Cocaine and its metabolite can help fish swim farther, but it could put them in danger, report finds

Isn't this true for people as well?

Why would this be any different from dropping a coin or other small metal object? If you're worried about ultrasonic noise pollution, nearly every SMPS operates there, and they're constantly running.

Don't know adding, but multiplication has diagram on the last page of the PDF.

xy = eml(eml(1, eml(eml(eml(eml(1, eml(eml(1, eml(1, x)), 1)), eml(1, eml(eml(1, eml(y, 1)), 1))), 1), 1)), 1)

From Table 4, I think addition is slightly more complicated?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST_Post-Quantum_Cryptography... and search for "published attacks".

Ever play Doom (2016)? It's about renewable energy.

Pesky little--very minor--side effect that it's extracted from Hell, and using it causes the denizens of Hell to spill over to our side. One would say they are "unleashed".

By raising the price of oil so much, our dear leader is trying his level best to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.

The US military is extremely good at doing specific objectives. All militaries are garbage at changing hearts and minds.

That's what diplomacy is for.

Nowadays it's about efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Sure, 99% of the time a Shahed-136 might "lose" against a Patriot, but a Patriot missile costs 200x what a Shahed does.

Laser and EWar approaches are going to be more successful long-term as the price per "shot" is dramatically less, but deployments are slow.

Money analogy could better be put as one of:

1. Store your money in a 0% interest account—leave RAM totally unused—or put it in an account that actually generates some interest—fill the RAM with something, anything that might be useful.

2. Store your money buried in your backyard or put it in a bank account? If you want to actually use your money, it's already loaded into the bank.

Imperfect analogies because money is fungible. In either case though, money getting spent day-to-day (e.g. the memory being used by running programs) is separate.

US healthcare is a leader in administration fees (e.g. paying health system executives) compared to other countries around the world. High US healthcare cost isn't because of increased usage, but because of the higher admin fees and higher prescription drug prices. Prices are fixed high because law prevents the government from negotiating prices (o.b.o. Medicare/aid), and those provisions were inserted on behalf of pharmaceutical companies so their executives could make more money.

Paying individual workers more may have some benefits, but I think the key issue is usually overworking and burnout because the incremental cost of adding a whole new employee is way higher than just pressuring workers to do more work in the same time.

Unlike the PS3 which the US Air Force bought 1,760 and clustered into the 33rd most powerful** at the time.

(**Distributed computing is very cheat-y compared to a "real" supercomputer which has insane RDMA capabilities)

Spotlight search is infinitely more useful than the Windows 10+ start menu. 99% of the time I'm just using it to open an app or a recent document/download.

In Windows, if I hit [Win], type "fusion" (to open Fusion 360, an app in the "Start Menu" folder, for what that's worth nowadays), there's a 70% chance it will do a Bing search for "fusion".

The LLM model and version should be included as an author so there's useful information about where the content came from.

While "The Liberator" (one of the first 3d printed guns) was interesting as a test of the technology and what it means for the law, I don't know if I'd trust using one to not blow up in my hands. Pretty sure you could assemble a zip gun in a Home Depot (they even sell cartridges for powder-actuated tools) that's less dangerous for you, more dangerous downrange.

It is a total mystery how the Washington bill's cited "blocking technology" is supposed to work. If you load a pipe-shaped object into your CAM software, how the hell is it supposed to know if it's an illegal firearm part or just a manifold? Maybe before each time it generates some G-code, you need to submit a signed affidavit to the government, and they'll conduct an investigation. Three months later you can print your fidget spinner.

Didn't know this. It kind reminds me of MIME multipart messages (used in email attachments, MMS, etc.) where the header includes a "boundary" tag which the parser will look for to terminate the part. It feels strange, like it could be some injection risk where if the file knew what the boundary was going to be, it could desync the bounds and turn one malicious, inactive file into one or more bad files.

I've noticed diskprices.com getting increasingly bad with filters, probably because the source data is garbage with Amazon sellers trying to jam all the keywords into titles or descriptions/features..."M.2 USB-C 3.2 PCIE NVME"

This kinda reminds me of error correction, and where at some level you can have detectable but not correctable error conditions. Adding Bob is just like adding a parity bit: can give you a good indication someone lied, but won't fix anything. Adding Charlie gives you the crudest ECC form, a repetition code (though for storing one bit, I don't think you can do better?)

I pulled out the data that I could see; strangely it seems to be the 16th question but the page shows "#736"

Data as JSON: https://gist.github.com/nicktimko/fb48810b448275a4d7817e2b65...

Or if you want to download it yourself (yay for Gemini giving me a Node one-liner to parse a JS object to get JSON. Beware it uses `eval`!!!)

    curl -sSL https://ripplegame.app/assets/index-B2aU9M_o.js | \
        grep -E -o -p "\[\{id:1\,.+\"}]}]" | \
        node -e "const vm=require('vm'); let b=''; process.stdin.on('data',d=>b+=d).on('end',()=> { try { const script=new vm.Script('('+b+')'); console.log(JSON.stringify(script.runInNewContext({}),null,2)) } catch(e) { console.error('Invalid JS') } })"

Decades ago, there was less competition for eyeballs, much more high-quality content (vs. slop), and investors were a bit willing to just build an audience without seeking immediate returns. Early social media was aspirin: a useful drug, but not addictive. Now it's super-cocaine and hyper-meth trying to keep the user high.

Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.

I get that Chernobyl is near the border of two countries at war, but why the everloving hell is anyone targeting anything within miles of the exclusion zone? Are there any military units anywhere near there, or is it intentionally being targeted as an oblique dirty-bomb threat?

Is launching an ffmpeg process so heavyweight that there's a reason to avoid it? If anything, it feels like it would trivialize parallelism, which is probably a feature, not a bug, if you have a bunch of videos to go through.

99.999% of the power put into compute turns into heat, so you're going to need to reject 8 MW of power into space with pure radiation. The ISS EATCS radiators reject 0.07 MW of power in 85 sq. m, so you're talking about 9700 sq. m of radiators, or bigger than a football field/pitch.

You're breezing past the labor cost quite deftly. I'm reasonably sure that developing the Voyager probes required a few more people and hours than your average microservice.

Am I having a stroke? Reading the title makes my head hurt.

It does, but every time you click on a new option it's a new URL. So if you poke around a bit, you may have generated dozens of entries in the history.

Feels like server developers should include turnkey configurations where you just give maybe a year/quarter and compatibility target (secure, medium, loose).

Needing to cha-cha your salsas, 128 to the 256 to the 1305...picking SSL ciphers is the biggest cargo-cult thing ever. I have no clue what I am doing.