piannucci

There’s a recent paper on the formation of such a “kugelblitz”; it’s argued to be unfeasible.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02389

How about rthym or some variation?

Someone call @keithw. He put a tremendous amount of brainpower into getting the Unicode side of this puzzle "right" (or, as "right" as it is possible to be) when he wrote mosh. I'm sure he and Hashimoto could have a grand old (but zero-width non-joining) conversation!

If the analogy to warped spacetime was exact, then there would be a “scale factor” for every point depending on the local transit speed. Then it would be possible to do as this page does and for the answer not to depend on starting point.

However in the real city the transit speed at any point is not isotropic, the space is 3-D, and some paths are forbidden (getting on-off the train between stops).

Does it still go rancid if it’s kept at boiling temperatures? I’m guessing that if it’s too hot for microbes, then you only have to deal with oxidation at the surface, which can maybe be fixed with periodic skimming. Maybe?

AIUI, there is a technical criterion for an ambient EM field to imbue circuits within it with broken time-reversal symmetry.

One example of a system that meets the criterion is a ferromagnet. Another is this altermagnet.

One example of a system that doesn’t meet the criterion is a diamagnet. Another is the anti-ferromagnet.

Roughly speaking, some systems are microscopically “asymmetric enough” to be useful in a certain way, and others are “too symmetrical.”

Ferromagnets have a downside that altermagnets avoid: their microscopic fields don’t average out to zero over macroscopic distances.

I think, but honestly don’t really understand, that the goal is to cause the material to treat currents of spin-up and spin-down charge carriers (think electrons or holes) dissimilarly. Constructing materials that distinguish between charge carriers of differing spin is a step towards spintronics. Again, I don’t know why that’s important, but it is what it is.

:shocked_pikachu:

Renegadry aside, for those who are more interested in the Information Theory perspective on this:

Kolmogorov complexity is a good teaching tool, but hardly used in engineering practice because it contains serious foot-guns.

One example of defining K complexity(S, M) is the length of the shortest initial tape contents P for a given abstract machine M such that, when M is started on this tape, the machine halts with final tape contents P+S. Obviously, one must be very careful to define things like “initial state”, “input”, “halt”, and “length”, since not all universal machines look like Turing machines at first glance, and the alphabet size must either be consistent for all strings or else appear as an explicit log factor.

Mike’s intuitive understanding was incorrect in two subtle ways:

1. Without specifying the abstract machine M, the K complexity of a string S is not meaningful. For instance, given any S, one may define an abstract machine with a single instruction that prints S, plus other instructions to make M Turing complete. That is, for any string S, there is an M_S such that complexity(S, M_S) = 1 bit. Alternatively, it would be possible to define an abstract machine M_FS that supports filesystem operations. Then the complexity using Patrick’s solution could be made well-defined by measuring the length of the concatenation of the decompressor P with a string describing the initial filesystem state.

2. Even without adversarial examples, and with a particular M specified, uniform random strings’ K complexity is only _tightly concentrated around_ the strings’ length plus a machine-dependent constant. As Patrick points out, for any given string length, some individual string exemplars may have much smaller K complexity; for instance, due to repetition.

I think you’re putting the right spin on this.

I love the drama of how the abstract is written, but TBH I don't think this is a surprise. I believe it's well-known among color theorists that large perceptual distances are inconsistent with sums of small differences. So maybe the most generous thing to say here is, good on them for bringing awareness of this subtlety to a broader audience.

I don’t see how the author’s arguments about impossibility results pertaining to “distributed sub-symbolic architectures” apply any more strongly to LLMs or DNNs than they do to human brains. Human programmers aren’t magically capable of solving the halting problem either, but we muddle through somehow.

Book golems

Wiki says they're incorporated in Netherlands.

So many footguns in this proposal! From the misleadingly symmetric symbols <= => >=, to the unintuitive behavior (for non-mathematicians) in the case of negative left argument, to the similarity to operators in other languages. Short-circuiting is already possible with the well-understood (!A || B) notation, which has the added bonus of allowing (B || !A) as an alternative with the same truth table but opposite short-circuiting. This proposal saves one “!” character at a very high cost. Just… why?

I haven't studied antitrust policy in ages, but IIRC one aspect of this in the past has been to forbid the monopolist from peeking at their competitors' prices.

In re = “in the matter of”, a legal term != “re:”, regarding/reply

Yes; however, because of the extreme kinetic energy and momentum of the cosmic ray inputs to these collision events, the output neutrinos will be emitted in a tightly focused cone parallel to the path of the original ray. You can be fairly confident that the original source is close to the line-of-sight.

Speculating: perhaps the training data was labeled using top-of-file and top-of-repo copyright notices.

If the name is a reference to Ogden Nash's poem then I am very tickled: https://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/engagement/poetry/poem-...

There are a number of red flags here.

The author puts a lot of breathless energy into airing grievances and lodging accusations. I find I don't much care: I want to know whether they have identified an experimental, quantitative, or pedagogical problem to be solved. The crypto-gnosticism of allegedly-suppressed history has everything to do with a perception of injustice and nothing to do with physics.

Another red flag is the parenthetical structure of the diatribe. Rather than picking one point at a time and making it well, the author runs into the metaphorical theory-space blasting wildly in all directions. What does thermodynamics have to do with any of this? It seems to be mentioned at the beginning and the end mostly to imply that Clausius and Helmholtz have been involved in some kind of conspiracy to suppress history: an argument which this margin is, apparently, too small to contain.

A third red flag is the absence of quantitative, minimal test cases: worked-out homework problems with testable predictions. Einstein's gedanken-experiments have become an irreplaceable part of the pedagogy of special relativity precisely because they are such an effective tool in focusing the learner's attention on one mystery at a time. A teacher who tells you "this is simple, really, anyone can understand it!" may be overly enthusiastic or even wrong. But a teacher who tells you "this is complicated, nobody can understand it! See, here's a Gordian knot of inseparable ideas! Don't let anyone tell you they can understand this!" bears the burden of proof that the indicated concepts cannot be developed individually.

If we set aside the emotional power of an appeal to our sense of injustice, the remaining content of this piece doesn't stand on its own. Yeah, sure, lots of things happened in the 19th century that I don't know about. Lots of wrongs have never been righted. Other than a half-hearted implication that gravity and electromagnetism can be unified (remarkably without any mention of Kaluza or Klein), or that something is rotten in the state of thermodynamics, this piece adds nothing substantial to my understanding of the universe.

...massive amounts...

The entire world production of neodymium was on the order of 80k ton/yr the last I checked (though that was quite a few years ago).

eHarmony's algo may be less extreme but they do this too.

Look up the OTCA metapixel.

I use it from time to time for work. It lacks some of Mathematica’s typographic flair (can’t ctrl-^ to get a superscript box or / to get a fraction) but IIRC has better undo support on desktop and satisfactory performance as long as your output expressions don’t get too big. The web layout engine chokes pretty badly for medium-to-large expressions, although there is an automatic transition to pre-rendered images at a certain level of complexity.

I use it when I want an industrial-grade CAS for some nasty integral or when I want to do something LISPy.

Um. I rely heavily on Apple products, and I subscribe to some of their services for a couple bucks a month because I genuinely get a lot of enjoyment out of them.

I find Apple's upsell mildly annoying, sure. But (a) the things they offer me are actually things I would seriously consider buying, (b) their ads appear when you actively seek out a feature you haven't subscribed to, (c) the buttons or headlines or whatever that lead to those ads have a marker so you know what'll happen when you tap. It's not like I'm getting blindsided by interstitials.

I have zero inclination to apologize for Apple doing stupid things. But I'm just not nearly so annoyed by their ads as I am by others'.

You don't get the entire wave-function as output; the wave-function is not observable. Different measurements might reveal information about certain components of the state, at least probabilistically, but those same measurements will always destroy some information. See the No-cloning Theorem.

What you describe with finding the closest TLE is pretty much what they did. We use a highly directional antenna (~1-2 degree beam) and some tracking software, so it’s not ambiguous.

I’ve been able to demodulate and reconstruct about 100 subcarriers’ worth of signal, but until recently I couldn’t record the entire bandwidth. Now we’ve got our hands on one of those awesome RFSoCs with 2 Gsps ADC, so it might be possible to decode more. But unknown error correction, bit interleaving, so it’s a tall order. We’d have to get lucky.

Their antenna was a CotS LNBF. Think just the bit on the end of the arm of a DirecTV dish, not the dish itself. Typical aperture maybe 10cm, full unit about hand-sized.

Can’t speak to the regulations, but essentially the answer is “yes”. Our publications can be found under the moniker “fused LEO GNSS”. Those of Zak Kassas and his students can be found on their website.

The particular signal they used can be captured with a $40 low-noise block w/ feedhorn (I’m using the Visiblewave Hybrid LNB), a 12-16 VDC biasing circuit, and a garden-variety SDR. I speculate, based on my own studies, that the signal they caught is the Starlink “Idle” tone. I don’t see that signal when the downlink is busy in my own experiments, but I can’t be certain yet. Different latitude, different equipment, different assumptions.

The broadband downlink signals I’m interested in require a bit more effort— I’m using a 75cm offset parabolic dish on an azimuth/elevation turret with some nice high-end servos w/ built-in 12-bit encoders. Up until yesterday, we could only capture 60 MHz of real-time bandwidth; but now we have the device we need to capture closer to the entire 2 GHz span of the 10.7-12.7 GHz downlink in one fell swoop.

With all that, I still only get about 11 dB of SNR. I’ve seen hints that I might be able to get closer to 20 dB, which I could trade off for a smaller dish.

Accuracy will depend on whether/to what degree SpaceX commits to providing a positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) service.

The technique used in the article is quite powerful and general, but it does have certain drawbacks too. One advantage is that it is relatively insensitive to errors in the ephemeris. The path we are exploring relies more heavily on the ephemeris, as you speculate; but these can be really quite excellent, even in the sub-meter range. Actually the bigger source of uncertainty for absolute positioning using non-Doppler techniques will probably be clock errors. For Doppler, integration time/time-to-first-fix is a sticking point, unless you have 8+ satellite signals, IIRC.

We think accuracy in the low single digit meters is not too much of a stretch (note that I am making a claim about a rather different technique than the one in the article... nothing worth doing is ever totally straightforward!).