Symmetry

6 ms·

61.
by Symmetry 8mo ago
Regarding 3, they're almost certainly thinking of putting these in SSO where the radiation environment isn't too much worse than you see on the ISS. If they were going to go outside the Van Allen belts it would be a different sto
62.
by Symmetry 8mo ago
Space is a vacuum and yet here we are on a rock floating in space warmed by the sun and the temperate is actually pretty comfortable. Indeed, without the greenhouse effect it would be positively chilly. An important part of a thermos is t
63.
by Symmetry 8mo ago
You take the amount of energy absorbed by the solar panels and subtract the amount they radiate. Most things in physics are linear systems that work like this.
64.
by Symmetry 9mo ago
It's not that each turn has a time limit but that each player has a time limit to spend across the entire game.
65.
by Symmetry 9mo ago
If you had a setup where the computer just did its thing and never waited for the human to provide input but the human still had an unused button they could press to get a chance to say something that might technically count as "centau
66.
by Symmetry 9mo ago
After Deep Blue Garry Kapsparav proposed "Centaur Chess"[1] where teams of humans and computers would complete with each other. For about a decade a team like that was superior to either an unaided computer or an unaided AI. The
67.
by Symmetry 9mo ago
I feel lucky that in 2008 I could go into the Military Industrial Complex and work in places where I could be confident the results wouldn't be things I'd find objectionable. That seems like a much tougher prospect in 2026.
68.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
I had been under the mistaken impression that the turbines in airplanes were more different from the turbines in power plants than they actually are.
69.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
I found Boom's pivot much less confusing after this article.
70.
How AI labs are solving the power problem(newsletter.semianalysis.com)
167 points by Symmetry 10mo ago|258 comments
71.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his stu
72.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
It's very important in this case to specify which orbit the satellite is going to be in. If you're in LEO like the international space station you spend all day inside the Van Allen Belt protected from all those charged particles
73.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
I'll be the first to cheer if we get rid of industrial agriculture but there's an awful lot of land in the world that doesn't receive enough rain for farming but which is still fine grazing land and when used for grazing stil
74.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
We certainly can't expect that with LLMs now but neither could compiler users back in the 1970s. I do agree that we probably won't ever have them generating code without more back and forth where the LLM complains that its instru
75.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
> Are you ok with having a codebase that is effectively a black box? When was the last time you looked at the machine code your compiler was giving you? For me, doing embedded development on an architecture without a mature compiler the
76.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
The rule of thumb I use is to only have one return after modifying state that will persist outside the function call.
77.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
For vaccines like the measles vaccine where it can entirely stop the spread in a vaccinated population this can be true until enough people think this way that measles starts spreading in your vicinity. But with Covid-19 vaccination wasn&#x
78.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
Specifically, C comes form a world where allowing for machines that didn't use 2's compliment (or 8 bit bytes) was an active concern.
79.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
There are many things to like about Nim, but it does benefit from adherence to a style guide more than most languages.
80.
AWS Trainium3 Deep Dive – A Potential Challenger Approaching(newsletter.semianalysis.com)
71 points by Symmetry 10mo ago|24 comments
81.
by Symmetry 10mo ago
A bunch of 128x128 systolic arrays at its heart. More details: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/amazons-ai-self-suffic...
82.
by Symmetry 11mo ago
Something that explodes with the force of 100 tons of TNT is still a bomb, even if it isn't a bomb as impressive as the one you were hoping for. And getting the reactor you're thinking of to the point that it worked without explo
83.
by Symmetry 11mo ago
You can even dissolve the uranium in the water and use the same substance for both fuel and propellant and so capable of reaching far higher temperatures than those that would cause any engine to melt. https://en.wikipedia.org&#x
84.
by Symmetry 11mo ago
It's way easier to make a fission bomb than a fission reactor. I reactor has to stay in the very narrow window where it's critical but not prompt critical. Even pure fission bombs can be marvels of engineering but the simplest g
85.
by Symmetry 11mo ago
On the encapsulation issue, I've come to think that the natural unit of encapsulation is the module rather than the object.
86.
by Symmetry 11mo ago
The bit about "The water tanks in the reactor were full, and the uranium fuel rods were at risk of melting through the water tanks, potentially releasing a force equivalent to a multi-megaton nuclear device and devastating much of Euro
87.
by Symmetry 11mo ago
The reason I switched to XMonad over a decade ago was actually so that I could have a tiling window manager but still have all the normal desktop environment conveniences. Obligatory dotfiles: https://github.com/aclough&#x2F
88.
by Symmetry 11mo ago
There was a Hot Chips presentation by them that also gave some good details. Unlike the original Transmeta design they first ran code natively and only recompiled the hot spots.
89.
by Symmetry 11mo ago
That's a good reason to have a subscription to some news organization that covers the world in general, not just to read whatever you see on social media. Certainly The Economist has had a lot of coverage on the situation in Sudan ove
90.
by Symmetry 11mo ago
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

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