Symmetry

27 ms·

631.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Even for an experienced company losing a couple of flights in the first ten with a new rocket is par for the course. For a new company to get all the way through stage separation before anything went wrong is a sort of vaguely encouraging
632.
by Symmetry 4y ago
The Memory Palace episode on him was really good: https://thememorypalace.us/butterflies/ But, as a joke, on potential EA cause area would be banning everything Thomas Midgely invented, just to be sure.
633.
by Symmetry 4y ago
AMD seems to be focusing on traditional HPC, they've got a ton of 64 bit flops in their recent commercial model. I expect their server GPUs are mostly for chasing supercomputer contracts, which can be pretty lucrative, while they cede
634.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Countries that have low infrastructure costs, like Spain, do this.
635.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Ok, for an Ian M Banks fan specifically. Alistair Reynolds has a number of good books which can capture some of the same darkness you'd find in part's of Banks's work. The Revelation Space books are great in their gothic way
636.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Just the other day ChatGPT flubbed a question I asked because of spermaceti. My girlfriend and I were talking about the economics of whale oil so I asked it how much oil you'd get from a typical sperm whale, and it gave me how much sp
637.
by Symmetry 4y ago
One square meter of forest land, if any fallen trees are sequestered in a way so they never rot, will be enough to offset 1 watt of fossil fuel energy use. It's not enough to offset our current civilization by a long shot.
638.
by Symmetry 4y ago
On a year by year level they've been pretty bad but on a decade by decade basis they've been pretty much spot on. Why wasn't there any increase in the average temperature between 2004 and 2014? Nobody know, but in 2015 glob
639.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Well, .5 C degree increments in average temperature are big enough to be qualitatively different, so that's why we use them. Hitting 1.5 C includes some things things like "All the ice in the arctic melts in the summer which real
640.
by Symmetry 4y ago
The Monte Carlo analysis AlphaZero used functioned as a sort of multi-step reasoning for it. GPT can use its token buffer for some multi-step reasoning but that sort of interferes with providing a conversation with the user so it's mu
641.
by Symmetry 4y ago
There are real advantages to launching from higher up, not just in terms of reducing drag losses but in using larger engine bells with higher ISPs, saving on structural mass due to lower aerodynamic forces, and maybe launching from over the
642.
by Symmetry 4y ago
So, if we were to establish settlements on Venus we'd almost certainly make floating ones. At 50 km above the surface you've got 1 G of gravity, 1 atmosphere of pressure, and 25 C temperatures so you could do outside in just a br
643.
by Symmetry 4y ago
At MIT, at least, everybody in EECS (all one department) has to take 6.004 where you build a simple computer from the transistors up which at least gives you a framework for thinking about this stuff. The simple processor doesn't have
644.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Yes. BMI is your weight divided by height squared. Which is really weird when you consider that humans are 3D objects! So you should naturally expect that a taller person will have a higher BMI than a shorter person even with the exact s
645.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Like the Excel Spreadsheet that FTX was shopping around but accurate and with no "“Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account" entry. SVB may have screwed up badly but I don't think anyone is accusing them of bad reco
646.
by Symmetry 4y ago
The extent that people's thinking relies on inner monologue is something that varies wildly between different people. Likewise people's abilities to form mental images.
647.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Higher interest rates mean that investments in technologies that will pay off in the long run have to have a higher ROI than they did a year ago, hence less money going into them and layoffs at some places. I'd be super surprised if t
648.
by Symmetry 4y ago
In current commercially available cores SVE and SVE2 are comparable to AVX but not AVX512 specifically, because every SVE design out there that isn't in a Fujitsu supercomputer is limited to 256 bits. There might also be differences o
649.
by Symmetry 4y ago
If you're got a workload that isn't characterized by missing cache and waiting around for main memory fairly often then usually SMT is going to be pretty inefficient. As a crude rule of thumb, the single thread performance you ge
650.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Maybe, maybe not. This was a sudden impulse to one point on the asteroid but reentry would be a gradually increasing force across the whole leading edge.
651.
by Symmetry 4y ago
The aspects of x86 that mean an x86 chip necessarily has to be worse than an ARM chip are very minor and mostly just relate to using a bit more energy on decode. The difference in engineer years in designing and testing a complicated x86 ch
652.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Then NVidia re-used their design on ARM as Project Denver.
653.
by Symmetry 4y ago
I have vimium configured to just use f, F, and alt+j and k to move between tabs. That's all I really need and it doesn't tend to conflict with the web sites I use.
654.
by Symmetry 4y ago
A plant's ability to make sure of sunlight saturates at about half the brightness of full daylight and it only absorbs light in half the spectrum of sunlight so if you had magical 100% efficient solar panels and LEDs you could roughly
655.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Not quite. When you have a front end that spits an instruction into micro-ops that's a fixed mapping of 1 to 1-3 instruction and your decoder can handle many of those every clock. When you a micro-coded instruction you can have that
656.
by Symmetry 4y ago
"Concentration" could either mean ppm or p/m^2. When they go on to say "the volumes of material that need to be handled are much smaller" they're making it quite explicit that they mean the later.
657.
by Symmetry 4y ago
I really doubt it. Probably a Kalman filter for tracking its own position and some classic tree-search AI for path planning. Maybe neural networks for identifying sensor contacts though.
658.
by Symmetry 4y ago
I got to play around with one of these during my stint as a solder monkey for the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab back in the early 00s. Lots of fun, worth trying out. It was, of course, way more expensive than a setup in the ea
659.
by Symmetry 4y ago
I don't think I'd worry about that from a radiation standpoint. Natural uranium is only around 1000 times more radioactive than natural potassium, it's really not very bad in that sense and it wouldn't have survived fro
660.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Pretty good but one correction >To build a CPU, you need a few more elements than basic logic gates, namely memory and a way to synchronize everything to a clock, but this is a good starting point. You can actually make all that with log

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