pfdietz

5 ms·

61.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
But one might also ask: is it actually bad to do beta testing on live vehicles? Self-driving cars might globally save many millions of lives. Consideration of statistical lives leads to counterintuitive consequences.
62.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
Waiting for the Mentour Pilot episode on this.
63.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
> In water photons travel at say 200,000km a second. It really depends on the energy of the photons. There is "dispersion". It's the same effect that causes a prism to split white light into different wavelengths.
64.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
I didn't say voting would work, only not ruling that out; I said those other approaches would not work. It's possible nothing works. Voting does work if enough voters feel strongly about something. Look at the policians scurry
65.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
One get can O(1) expected time on any set of keys if one uses "universal hashing": choosing the hash function at random from a universal set of hash functions. The expectation is now over this random choice, not over some random
66.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
"AI keeps stubbornly refusing to take our jobs" https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/ai-keeps-stubbornly-refusing-t...
67.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
R-454B contains HFO-1234yf, which has a trifluoromethyl group. Upon release to the atmosphere this ultimately forms trifluoroacetic acid, which has an extremely long residence time in the oceans (perhaps as much as millions of years, if I
68.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
It's quite amazing then how cities didn't exist until buses were invented.
69.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
> It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this. This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won&#
70.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
Sure, you could change all sorts of things. Doing it likely means changing so much that things end up looking just like they do now, just scaled somehow.
71.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
Only about 1 in 8 people globally lives in a large (> 10 million people) city. Most people who live in cities are in cities with < 250,000 people. Exactly how many live in cities at all is determined by where you drawn the cutoff at w
72.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
I hope the cops showed up at his house and confiscated his vehicle. One advantage of existence of self-driving cars is the state can permanently revoke someone's ability to own or operate manually driven motor vehicles, without the arg
73.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
The Schwarzschild radius is proportional to c^-2, so this would mean the Schwarzschild radius of the Earth would be about 400 billion km, and the Earth would be a black hole.
74.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
I can predict 100% of suicides. I just predict every day that the person will commit suicide. Bam! All suicides predicted.
75.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
Nominative determinism.
76.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
The analogy seems strained, since math is not (just) entertainment.
77.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
The advantage of vanadium batteries, as I understand it, is that leakage does not corrupt the system. The vanadium gets converted to the right chemical species on either side.
78.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
Goodhart's Law in operation.
79.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
I don't know about that; 100K is still a pretty big population.
80.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
Current North American beaver population is estimated to be in the range of 10 to 15 million.
81.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
There's a wetland near where I live where beavers have reached saturation, with a web of dams that has turned a valley into prime beaver habitat. (1:45 short video) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/k_OZqbrMJGY
82.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
They've convinced me. They've convinced me to never buy any of their products.
83.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
But then you could be like Greg the Garlic Farmer who had his wife patched out and no one but him remembers her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9BFGlCPS8I
84.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
Those double beta decays are also interesting because they can probe whether the neutrino is a Majorana particle.
85.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
That was a fiendish thing to debug; if I recall correctly it was a slightly and intermittently defective connector.
86.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
I see this so much. "This shouldn't work, therefore it won't work." It's like the world is imagined to run on a moral causal framework rather than uncaring quantum mechanics.
87.
by pfdietz 1mo ago
Gerrymandering is backfiring on the GOP now. It involves reducing GOP margin in supposed safe districts while concentrating DEM voters in others. But if they get the estimate on GOP voters wrong this ends up creating more DEM districts.
88.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
The polls are increasingly dire for the GOP. They're even losing the military vote.
89.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Yes, but it's also Trump and the GOP self-immolating. November is going to be a historic electoral wipeout. I expect the next administration will push through some laws limiting this sort of idiocy.
90.
by pfdietz 2mo ago
Verify/check something that is orders of magnitude smaller than the proof. It's like reading the abstract vs. reading the paper.

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