Symmetry

24 ms·

391.
by Symmetry 3y ago
It was Helium-3. Potentially useful for certain types of fusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Candidate_fu... And maybe cooling certain types of quantum computer. https://en.wikipedia.org&
392.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Back in the day I had an app that downloaded my podcasts to my iPhone 3S every morning over wifi before I listened to them on my way into work. Then Apple added podcatcher support to iTunes, which at the time was a program you ran on your
393.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Decimal floating point is a standard that some people use and which even has hardware support in some IBM cores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point
394.
by Symmetry 3y ago
When the VisionPro first went public I wondered if I should regret pre-ordering a SimulaVR[1] but it seems like for productivity at least I probably made a good choice. We'll see when it actually arrives though. [1] https://
395.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Right. The Iridium network had communication between satellites in different orbital planes passing each other but that was a pretty unusual capability.
396.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Given how well Starlink has held up in Ukraine against Russian interference I expect they're doing better than most internet providers.
397.
by Symmetry 3y ago
> From the study of that single pebble you could see the laws of physics and all they imply. Thinking about those laws of physics, you can see that planets will form, and you can guess that the pebble came from such a planet. The interna
398.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Hopefully people are looking for productive ways to use intermittently free electricity.
399.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Yellow fever and malaria were brought to the New World by Europeans.
400.
by Symmetry 3y ago
That's what you get when you have a scientist try writing a book that's simultaneously popular science and popular history. And judged as a popular history GGS does get a lot of things wrong and isn't up to the standards his
401.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Plagues Upon the Earth is maybe even more on point to the plague bit in particular, with the co-evolution of human society and infectious disease over history taking the front stage.
402.
by Symmetry 3y ago
With a human brain you're got 1) A huge stream on sensory data only some of which gets promoted to conscious awareness. 2) Some of that raw data and other conscious outputs are persisted into working, short, and long term memory. 3) An
403.
Dan Wang's 2023 Letter(danwang.co)
5 points by Symmetry 3y ago|0 comments
404.
by Symmetry 3y ago
An engineer at Boeing wrote a detailed internal document about the problems it caused that's available at various places on the internet. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/BOEING-PROPRIETARY-BOE...
405.
by Symmetry 3y ago
It's not clear from the article but animals can generally live quite a bit longer than you'd expect if they continue to grow for their entire life, which is true for some types of fish. Gunk that builds up inside or between cells
406.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Mistakes if you want a high performance design but certainly the right approach for both academic projects and for the embedded systems where RISC-V has seen most of its commercial adoption.
407.
by Symmetry 3y ago
I very well balanced article. My biggest quibble would have been mentioning the self-synchronizing[1] nature of the variable length instructions that make RISC-V easier to decode in batches than x86. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org&
408.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Charles Mann had a really good book on the pre-Columbian Americas back in 2005 which covered this as well as a bunch of fascinating other things.
409.
by Symmetry 3y ago
If I had a lot more free time, I've been noodling with some designs for a text editor with modes. It would start up by default in the equivalent of vim's insert mode where all the normal CUA keybindings (e.g. ctrl-c for copy) wor
410.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Something I'm thinking about too (IPD 77).
411.
by Symmetry 3y ago
And scientific evidence is also a very different bar depending on what sort of science you're doing. In medicine the gold standard is a double blind RCT but a geologist can't reasonably conduct RCTs with volcanic eruptions so the
412.
by Symmetry 3y ago
Well, I'm certainly going to go into an Apple Store and see if I can test one out. I'm really excited about the potential for productivity focused VR and while this isn't that yet, hopefully it'll get there. In the me
413.
by Symmetry 3y ago
That would be a very efficient way of running things under a cost plus military contract. For a single contract win they're able to spend four times as much money on salaries and therefore earn four times as much profit.
414.
by Symmetry 3y ago
In a frictionless market it would make sense to do that. But as Coase pointed out nearly a century ago[1] forming and monitoring the relationships that allow specialization involves a certain amount of overhead. At a certain point going t
415.
by Symmetry 3y ago
No, in US law at least there can be no copyright of facts, only presentation. If you convey the same facts in different words that isn't a matter of fair use, it's never even a matter of copyright in the first place.
416.
by Symmetry 3y ago
In the screenshot for the article you can see that the LLM says it is "Searching for: carl zimmer article on the oldest DNA". That, and what I know about how LLMs work, suggest to me that rather than the article being stored insi
417.
by Symmetry 3y ago
The price of solar panels is likely to fall to ever lower levels but the labor involved in installing them and the land they use up are much more likely to be the binding constraints in the future. Though we do have the twin strategies of
418.
by Symmetry 3y ago
It's not that the agencies regulating nuclear are bloated but that they're given a mandate that nuclear must be as safe as possible rather than being held to some finite standard of safety.
419.
by Symmetry 3y ago
I believe it was a stand in for yᷤ instead of Þ, which is a much smaller leap.
420.
by Symmetry 3y ago
I'd argue that the Hexagon DSPs shipped with all Qualcomm's phone SoC which a large number of us have in our pockets right now are probably more prominent example. Itanium's problem wasn't so much divergent control flow

More ›