mr_toad

13 ms·

331.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
> I recently got a smart sleep mask from Kickstarter. I was not expecting to end up with the ability to read strangers' brainwaves and send them electric impulses in their sleep. But here we are. One of the best opening paragraphs i
332.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
If it’s like the rest of YouTube it’ll quickly be buried in a pile of reaction videos, fan edits, Russian voiceovers and low-resolution re-uploads, with black borders on all sides.
333.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
> Is this the shadow of something natural that we just couldn't see In special relativity there are solutions that allow FTL if you use imaginary numbers. But evidence suggests that this doesn’t happen.
334.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
Surely it would have still been mostly nitrogen.
335.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
At the end of the day all colors are due to electrodynamics.
336.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
Our eyes have evolved to detect frequencies that can pass through air. There wouldn’t be much point detecting frequencies that are blocked by air.
337.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
If the universe was infinite and eternal you’d expect the night sky to be white - all the gaps between stars would be filled in with stars further away.
338.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
And biology. The amount of plankton in the water can tint the color noticeably .
339.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
> maybe in 100M years we'll get a 4th cone or rod. Probably from nuclear mutation... There’s a Greg Egan short story (I think it’s ‘Seventh Sight’) where a bunch of formerly blind kids with cybernetic eyes hack the receptors to resp
340.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
> The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla. That’s true now, but when they first debuted they would have doubled the cost of the car.
341.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
The layers themselves are basically perceptrons, not really any different to a generalized linear model. The ‘secret sauce’ in a deep network is the hidden layer with a non-linear activation function. Without that you could simplify all th
342.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
I feel like my last words could be ‘just one more turn’.
343.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
> Facts are not a thing the government is interested in now They’re not too keen on the world either. Or books.
344.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
Nobody talk about the dollar.
345.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
> Yes, and the made up words of kilo and kibi were given specific definitions by the people who made them up Kilo was generally understood to mean one thousand long before it was adopted by a standards committee. I know the French lov
346.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
Tridents can reach mach 19. Orbital velocity is more like mach 100. Not that the UK manufactures trident missiles anyway.
347.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
> It’s not necessarily cheaper energetically to get stuff from an asteroid than from Earth. You’d have to accelerate stuff from a wildly different orbit, and then steer it and slow it down. Delta V from just about anywhere in the solar s
348.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
Satellites can spin! You also need to deal with precession and other minor chances in the orbit, but they’re all solved problems.
349.
by mr_toad 8mo ago
The Sun masses so much more than the Earth that the Earth’s mass is effectively irrelevant to its orbit.
350.
by mr_toad 9mo ago
From an engineering perspective, with today’s costs, yes. But don’t forget the political complications of dealing with all those countries that own the Sahara, that’s going to come at it’s own cost.
351.
by mr_toad 9mo ago
You can make propellant on the Moon (aluminum based solid fuels), and the energy to get into orbit or into deep space is far, far less that from Earth’s surface.
352.
by mr_toad 9mo ago
> We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. Doubling every three years; at that rate it would take about 30 years for 1TW to become 1000TW. Whether on not the trend continues largely depends on demand, but
353.
by mr_toad 9mo ago
> Americans will be forced to bail this mess up because we need Falcon 9, Starship one, etc. Or they could just go with the competition. If it came down to propping up something, I don’t see much difference between propping up ULA, Blue
354.
by mr_toad 9mo ago
If it was written in turgid prose people would be frantically waggling their AI accusatory fingers.
355.
by mr_toad 9mo ago
> I have no earthly clue why people find it valuable to invest in other than it’s like bitcoin: it’s valuable because everyone else also thinks it’s valuable. Unlike bitcoin there is a price “floor” because of its use in jewelry and indu
356.
by mr_toad 9mo ago
> The value of the currency comes from the demand for it by the government to pay taxes, not the value of the metal in the coin. History has plenty of examples of governments debasing their coinage and resulting drops in those coins valu
357.
by mr_toad 9mo ago
Bullion has a pretty specific meaning, I doubt shares in gold derivatives could be construed as bullion.
358.
by mr_toad 9mo ago
That should be below the threshold for AWS’s free tier. I have more than that in S3 and I’m not being charged a cent.
359.
by mr_toad 9mo ago
Poverty is often defined as having an income less than 1/3 of the median. The median household income in the US is about $80,000 p/a, so poor would be about $26,000. You might well have a tough time seeing that from the outside.
360.
by mr_toad 9mo ago
> and improves GDP-per capita. This is amusing. If you think population numbers are fake you absolutely do not want to see how they come up with GDP estimates.

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