mppm

14 ms·

151.
by mppm 2y ago
VR, if done right, has many fairly obvious use cases. In my opinion it only seems so useless because of botched market targeting. It would have been better to follow the natural technical learning curve from high-paying early adopters to pr
152.
by mppm 2y ago
Blast effect falls off approximately as distance cubed, because the overpressure wave deposits energy in the volume and disperses gradually. Thermal radiation, on the other hand, falls of as distance squared, more or less. This is why the
153.
by mppm 2y ago
> Maybe it is just me but I just fail to see the point of patents for anything else in the world of today, they are a net negative for society. It's not just you. Most people agree that the current patent system stifles innovation i
154.
by mppm 2y ago
Ah... NATO expansion? Alleged discrimination against the Russian majority in Eastern Ukraine? Alleged foreign interference in the Maidan revolution? Not that I'm trying to start a discussion here, but dismissing the other side's a
155.
by mppm 2y ago
I'm not sure why this got downvoted. The point is not to bow to Putin in all matters, but to treat the matter with extreme seriousness : Take time to do proper background research, evaluate your sources, give serious consideration to
156.
by mppm 2y ago
I know, but adaptive optics for large apertures also pose a progressively serious engineering challenge. I don't think we could build a 100m diffraction-limited telescope today (on the ground). It would still be useful for it's li
157.
by mppm 2y ago
From Earth, yes. It's called the diffraction limit [1]. With an ideal 1m diameter lens or mirror you cannot resolve features smaller than about 250m on the Moon. To capture a sharp 100 Mpx image, you would need a telescope of at least
158.
by mppm 2y ago
As an addition (and correction) to this, powerful thermonuclear weapons don't vaporize anyone either. They are targeted for high-altitude airbursts and kill through a combination of burns and building collapse, plus secondary fires, in
159.
by mppm 2y ago
This is indeed a very timely award. I sometimes feel like the world has forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist and are still on hair-trigger alert to obliterate major cities. Maybe the end of atmospheric testing and the success of (now
160.
by mppm 2y ago
For myself, the last 5 years have been a qualitative change. I don't think the unreasonableness of the world has increased that much per se, but since COVID it has started to intrude into my life in ways that it didn't before. S
161.
by mppm 2y ago
I can't explain it either, but maybe prophesies of impending collapse are a bit premature. The world has never been particularly rational, even in places that have near 100% literacy. Just look at the number of people who believe in as
162.
by mppm 2y ago
Same as with cookie banners. Much as I appreciate the intent of the law, any regulation based on disclosure / consent / name-and-shame is bound to fail or make things worse when enshittification is already the standard rather than
163.
by mppm 2y ago
For those interested, I highly recommend "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher, in which he describes how languages evolve over time, to the great annoyance of purists, but without either losing or gaining sophistication in
164.
by mppm 2y ago
I know I'm going out on a limb here, but is it possible that the prize has been awarded sarcastically? Like, let's survey what our PhD students plan to do next in their careers. Oh wow, 62% say they are going into... AI? Well damn
165.
by mppm 2y ago
> Even buying that premise, is there anything in the applied physics fields that is comparable in impact to the neural network? Why does it have to be? It's a different field. You would not expect the Nobel in chemistry to be award
166.
by mppm 2y ago
It will be awarded jointly to Anna and Alexandra. "For incalculable contributions to all sciences".
167.
by mppm 2y ago
I'm probably not the right person to ask, but off the top of my head: superconductivity of high-pressure hydrides; various quantum stuff like quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum photonics, quantum thermodynamics; topologic
168.
by mppm 2y ago
It really has not, though. There is more to physics than high-energy and cosmology, and there is no shortage of deserving contributions of smaller scope. It really is bizarre that deep learning would make it to the top of the list.
169.
by mppm 2y ago
Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber shifted my worldview quite significantly. In the fiction department, I've never encountered anything to match HPMOR, even though I disagree with half of what it says nowadays.
170.
by mppm 2y ago
Around the time of the board coup and Sam's 7-trillion media tour, there were multiple, at the time somewhat credible, rumors of major breakthroughs at Open AI -- GPT5, Q*, and possibly another unnamed project with wow-factor. However,
171.
by mppm 2y ago
In theory, yes. In practice, the safety that Tor provides is in numbers, and the numbers just don't look good any more. By using Tor, you are entering a fairly small pool that you share with legit criminals and will be blocked and targ
172.
by mppm 2y ago
Apart from this being pure speculation, where exactly would they build it? The archipelago has a tiny land area and the only atoll suitable for building a base is kinda already taken... Also, the primary strategic importance of Diego Garc
173.
by mppm 2y ago
Huh? I had the impression that the entire international community (sans UK, US & Israel) has been pushing for this for years, and quite insistently since the 2021 ITLOS judgement. Also, the US will keep it's base as part of the set
174.
by mppm 2y ago
Nothing in particular. European media work hard to paint the AfD as a fringe-right party, but its stated agenda is basically to prioritize national interests. This is something that the current government in Germany has failed at very badly
175.
by mppm 2y ago
Your math is a bit off. As per the article, estimated earnings for 2024 are about -5 billion, so P/E should be around -30. This is actually fairly typical for hot startups like WeWork.
176.
by mppm 2y ago
Yeah, every single example listed looks like gaming of bad metrics. Framing it as overfitting is unproductive, IMHO, and discounts the essentially adversarial context. I also discounts the stupidity of equating "efficiency" wi
177.
by mppm 2y ago
In my view, gambling should be a service provided directly by the government. And I'm not talking a "public-private partnership", but an actual DoG that will be taking bets, running gaming rooms in select cities etc. -- all w
178.
by mppm 2y ago
Maybe that's what the platform creators tell themselves for the sake of being able to sleep at night. From my view, social media systematically brings out bad habits that people have much less trouble suppressing in face-to-face conver
179.
by mppm 2y ago
It's always puzzled me why many tech companies seem so reluctant to give counter-offers to departing employees. Trying to pay as little as possible and not easily giving raises, even to their most productive employees, is at least some
180.
by mppm 2y ago
> Storage tanks for compressed hydrogen enjoy the square-cube law. Not really. Wall thickness is roughly proportional to diameter, and surface area to the square, so you don't gain anything in terms of storage mass ratio by building

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