Symmetry

65 ms·

841.
by Symmetry 4y ago
That's 5-9% of global electricity , not global energy. Electricity is only about 15% of global energy use making IT around 1% of total energy.
842.
by Symmetry 4y ago
2) It's actually a lot easier to speed something up enough to eject it from the solar system than it is to slow it down enough to let it fall into the Sun. the first is only 18 km/s but the later is 30 and with the tyranny of the
843.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Even when centrifuged and concentrated uranium isn't particularly dangerous compared to other heavy metals. it's when you add moderators and activate the reactor that you start to transmute the uranium into really dangerous stuff
844.
by Symmetry 4y ago
It's really hard to evaluate risks when people talk about "nuclear waste". Spent fuel rods are ferociously dangerous and their disposal as nuclear waste needs to be treated with utter seriousness. But "nuclear waste&qu
845.
by Symmetry 4y ago
And am I the only person who has been in a startup going through a "two people per desk" period when growing rapidly?
846.
by Symmetry 4y ago
The big difference is that back in the day we had the interstate commerce commission establishing a minimum ticket price so that airlines didn't have to engage in "ruinous" price competition. Everyone had to pay what would n
847.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Also, while NVidia has been adding extra AI acceleration to their chips AMD has been throwing in extra double precision resources that HPC generally requires. If you're training an AI rather than simulating the climate/a thermonu
848.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Sad that you can't run dragonflydb on DragonFlyBSD.
849.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Right. In a NTR the nuclear fuel has to be hotter than the hydrogen (or ammonia or methane or whatever) propellant so that the heat energy from the first conducts to the second. In a combustion energy the fuel and the propellant are the s
850.
by Symmetry 4y ago
For a trip to Mars the time it takes an ion drive rocket to reach cruising speed isn't negligable compared to the overall flight time. And missing out on the Oberth effect is fairly significant. If this were a flight to, say, Jupiter
851.
by Symmetry 4y ago
This is more the sort of engine you develop if you're going for an Apollo style mission where there's a mother craft that goes into orbit and a separate lander goes down to the surface. A NTR's poor TWR compared to convention
852.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Catherine the great tried creating a constituent body for Russia with 10,000 representatives. It didn't go well and soured her on the whole prospect of democracy. Keeping assemblies within at least shouting distance of Dunbar's
853.
by Symmetry 4y ago
In practice Congress was much more effective when things were more secret and currently it's much more effective on topics that don't get much media attention. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-and-importa
854.
by Symmetry 4y ago
For most of US history the parties were ideologically and geographically mixed and mostly competing over political patronage rather than ideology with one party typically having a northern conservative and southern liberal wing and the othe
855.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Oh, nice. Currently I just have myshell alias `fn` to `find -name $argv` but this looks cool.
856.
by Symmetry 4y ago
IBM had bleeding edge fabs not too long ago and is still involved in the research if not the mass production side.
857.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Word on the street is also that the 14nm death march resulted in a lot of engineers taking early retirement which left them in a worse position to pursue 10nm.
858.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Yes, if one of my friends called a Bradley a tank that's close enough and I wouldn't bother to correct them. But if a reporter calls a Bradley a tank that shows that they're missing some basic "military 101" knowle
859.
by Symmetry 4y ago
If you define them both yes, but you're still free to use them both. var my_var = 1 myVar += 1 echo(my_var) Will happily compile and give you 2. I'd prefer an error in that case because while I'm not liable to mak
860.
by Symmetry 4y ago
My ideal would be to simply not allow having my_variable and myVariable in the same namespace but given that you can do that in essentially every language I sort of prefer that they have to refer to the same thing.
861.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Fixed price contracts may cost the government a lot of time and money but they might still be good insurance against political risk. In WWI many companies that won armament fixed price contracts were able to make large profits, partially l
862.
by Symmetry 4y ago
In theory the regulating agency overseeing the cost plus contract is supposed to scrutinize the expenses of the overseen entity to prevent this. In practice just form a matter of program complexity this is hard to do. When you bring in po
863.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Honestly I think converging on the TSMC/Samsung definition of "4nm" is probably a good thing overall for reducing confusion. Now that we're not using planar transistors any more the whole thing is a bit arbitrary but at
864.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Between land that gets enough rain for intensive cultivation without draining aquifers and land that's a barren desert there's a wide range and you can still graze cows on most of it, though it takes more land per cow in drier are
865.
by Symmetry 5y ago
If you look closely enough the sunlight that powers solar panels also comes from the fusion of hydrogen that will be literally changed to another element. But I think it's still fair to call solar renewable because the sunlight hittin
866.
by Symmetry 5y ago
(2) really reminds me of that bit in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions about pedagogy. In some fields you can determine the truth of a statement without reference to who said it. Innovators are seldom the best explainers so you ha
867.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Twitter is a big place. I follow a lot of reporters, policy analysts, space entrepreneur, etc and don't get much toxicity. There are some people whose long form writing I really enjoy but who are just too negative on Twitter for me t
868.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Probably a bit more sophisticated than that involving patterns of frequency changing at certain intervals, but essentially.
869.
by Symmetry 5y ago
When Alon Levy was comparing transit construction costs in various places around the world they found that having in house experts was one of the biggest causes of low costs. Though see also this critique[1] of Boeing's massive outsou
870.
by Symmetry 5y ago
It's not just fish. Our hands naturally tend to conform to the objects we grasp without our needing to think about it. And robotic grasping with hands designed to do the same is much, much easier than the other way around.

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