mr_toad

65 ms·

1411.
by mr_toad 2y ago
The trouble is you need to keep the elements of an optical telescope very very precisely aligned - a precision on the order of the wavelength of light, which is impractical in space. Or you could do computational interferometry, but only if
1412.
by mr_toad 2y ago
That makes me laugh. I remember when it was the cool thing to do on Usenet.
1413.
by mr_toad 2y ago
In particular Dicronaughts is quite mind-bending, with its two time dimensions.
1414.
by mr_toad 2y ago
That’s an oversimplification. Migration and intermarriage means that modern Egyptians will have ancestors from all over North Africa and the Middle East, and to a lesser extent from Europe. They’re not all descended from ancient Egyptians
1415.
by mr_toad 2y ago
GR implies a singularity, but there are other possible forms of black holes e.g. Hayward black holes. They would require a new theory of gravity.
1416.
by mr_toad 2y ago
One of the oldest is only 200 LY away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_140283
1417.
by mr_toad 2y ago
There are estimates that half the matter, including the older stars in our Galaxy came from other galaxies that were absorbed long ago (10B+ years) by the Milky Way. The younger stars have been formed here in the disk. So on average a larg
1418.
by mr_toad 2y ago
> The answer is that they never industrialized because if you force slaves to work expensive machines, then those machines will be sabotaged. Slavery cripples your ability to mechanize. I think this highlights some differences between Ro
1419.
by mr_toad 2y ago
> The Romans managed to accomplish very little in 1,000 years considering the extent of their empire. Yes, apart from the aqueducts, the sanitation, the roads, the wine, public health, public baths, public order, cheese, medication, law,
1420.
by mr_toad 2y ago
Claustro- comes from Latin Claustrum, which shares the same root as the Greek word. Claustrophobia wasn’t a word in Latin or Greek though, it’s a modern hybrid.
1421.
by mr_toad 2y ago
Set up a recovery code (in advance). https://support.apple.com/en-us/109345
1422.
by mr_toad 2y ago
Buy a cheap phone at the airport? Or just phone a cab? It’s been a while but back in the day we used to travel without any phone at all. There’s nothing interesting on my phone either - except keychain, which would give someone access to
1423.
by mr_toad 2y ago
I doubt it really takes that much brain power to move around complex environments, even using legs. Insects manage to do it.
1424.
by mr_toad 2y ago
People try lots of things like learning to play the guitar, or marathon running, only to discover it’s harder than they thought and drop out. You can tell when people are in it for the money because they keep doing it even when it makes the
1425.
by mr_toad 2y ago
To be pedantic the Holy Roman Emperors claimed that title before Constantinople fell to Mehmed, which makes the claim even less legitimate. The Byzantine emperors carried on many Roman traditions, including wearing purple. The imperial b
1426.
by mr_toad 2y ago
Tunnel boring machines often use electric motors, often in the thousands of kW range. The ones the boring company uses are battery powered (using containers full of batteries). The batteries are swapped out periodically and charged overnig
1427.
by mr_toad 2y ago
Attitude isn’t going to help when the thrust to weight ratio is less than one.
1428.
by mr_toad 2y ago
The rocket in question is a nuclear thermal rocket, not a nuclear electric rocket. The 10GW figure refers to waste heat. The reason for pulsing the engine, and the advantage over a normal nuclear thermal rocket is that the heat generated b
1429.
by mr_toad 2y ago
You’d have to train them individually. One advantage of ANNs is that you can train them and then ship the model to anyone with a GPU.
1430.
Scientists find 57,000 cells and 150M neural connections in tiny sample of brain(theguardian.com)
15 points by mr_toad 2y ago|2 comments
1431.
by mr_toad 2y ago
And the military, and for science, some parts of government. And wine bottles and soft drinks, but not milk or beer. It’s like Windows with its half-hearted efforts to modernise it’s interface.
1432.
by mr_toad 2y ago
I would guess it comes from contracts, being the date on which payment is due (owed). Due, or Dues has a historical meaning as a debt or obligation.
1433.
by mr_toad 2y ago
Gemini nano is 1.8B 4 bit parameters, so a little under a GB. And hopefully each app won’t include a full copy of their models.
1434.
by mr_toad 2y ago
Using RAG a smaller local LLM combined with local data (e.g. your emails, iMessages etc) can be useful than a large external LLM that doesn’t have your data. No point asking GPT4 “what time does John’s party start?”, but a local LLM can do
1435.
by mr_toad 2y ago
I doubt Apple would sell the chips, or even rent them. And they likely won’t even make the models directly available, even as a cloud service, they’ll be embedded in products like Xcode.
1436.
by mr_toad 2y ago
You can’t have free markets if you use Motte and Bailey arguments to justify rejecting all forms of free markets, instead of just market failures.
1437.
by mr_toad 2y ago
> A statistical model of orbits, without a theory of gravity You want a statistical model that produces a theory of gravity.
1438.
by mr_toad 2y ago
> You need to ingest the data you have, and you need to draw a picture. Works well for one chart from one dataset. But you want more than one chart, and pretty soon you find yourself repeating code, so you create functions, and you star
1439.
by mr_toad 2y ago
If you add together the expenditure (or revenue) of all companies the sum will greatly exceed GDP.
1440.
by mr_toad 2y ago
How much reasoning capability LLM’s have is up for debate. With a true AGI you could just tell it to keep people’s personal information confidential and expect that it would understand that instruction.

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