retrac

25 ms·

331.
by retrac 2y ago
The French do something similar, as do the Germans. They've had relatively little luck with substantial changes recently, though. The 1990 French reforms were rather trivial. For example. the placement of the diaeresis was shifted t
332.
by retrac 2y ago
That might be okay. Sand can be sifted and gravel and cigarette butts separate by density with shaking the container. Sand and pebbles can then be returned to beach. (Sand depletion is a concern in many areas.). Robo-dog could return to
333.
by retrac 2y ago
It would only need to be pulsed when a cigarette is located.
334.
by retrac 2y ago
He sold several of them to physicists and linguists. The application to studying sound and speech was pretty obvious. But, eh, I have a background in linguistics and you can squint at waveforms of speech all you want; you don't get t
335.
by retrac 2y ago
It would require Ma Bell. As the article correctly deduces (IMO), it was related to their quasi-monopoly. It was a partial and insecure monopoly; they did need to innovate or they would eventually be eaten. Telecoms was their business, i
336.
by retrac 2y ago
The most common type of amplifier at audio frequencies usually works the same way, these days. ADC -> DAC. It fully decouples (signal-wise) the input and output (no possibility of distortion). And component tolerance is less important
337.
by retrac 2y ago
There's a certain reluctance to translate when you almost-know the language. But here's a question: how many more centuries until we will have to translate? I figure less than the 400 years now separating us from Shakespeare.
338.
by retrac 2y ago
There is a story to go with that story. The colonel responsible for the negotiations with the Treasury would later recall: > He explained the procedure for transferring the silver and asked, "How much do you need?" I replied,
339.
by retrac 2y ago
Beyond about ~100 MB historically speaking the industry shifted towards magneto-optical systems. They do store data magnetically - but they're read with lasers, since tracking and physical wear and tear from a head in contact with the
340.
by retrac 2y ago
I find it misleading how so many of these articles talk about dial-up Internet at home, as if it was typically a person's first exposure to the Internet. For most people in the 90s, their first exposure to the Internet was on a public
341.
by retrac 2y ago
Selectric typewriters made something that looked more like print than the typical typewriter. The Selectric type ball mechanism made multiple rapid impressions, producing a crisp dark letter, and the high end models had proportional typefa
342.
by retrac 2y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton_Rover_for_Extreme_... there was a NASA design study that examined that question re: mechanical computers I rather like the idea of rotating retroreflectors read by laser from o
343.
by retrac 2y ago
Getting off topic here but, the Ancient Egyptian writing system was only marginally pictographic. The fully-developed system is essentially phonetic, using about ~40 symbols to represent sounds, and a couple hundred pictograms (often inter
344.
by retrac 2y ago
Babbage went down the wrong rabbit hole. The technology of the 1860s was sufficient to make an automatic programmable computer. If you can make (or salvage) wire, and make simple sheet metal parts (brass will do) then you can make electro
345.
by retrac 2y ago
Yes. I would extend that. An external hosted service - Google, Microsoft, whatever - wrong tool for the job. Great for easy access but not really a long-term repository. You can lose access to the account through so many ways. And ther
346.
by retrac 2y ago
You're right. I blithely assumed any drug with such a long half-life must have some sort of delayed dose mechanism. But it seems it's just extraordinarily stable and is very, very slowly absorbed. Remarkable.
347.
by retrac 2y ago
Just to be clear, this is not a vaccine. It is an antiviral drug delivered by a long-lasting subdermal delivery implant. It has been known that antiviral drugs effectively prevent HIV infection for some time now (about 20 years). Recent
348.
by retrac 2y ago
Some pesticides are short-lasting agents, which are acutely toxic, to the target pest, and also humans. But they dissipate or break down fairly quickly. Even just pure nitrogen or carbon dioxide gas can be used for pest control, and a min
349.
by retrac 2y ago
Latency and bandwidth are often in tension. (And guaranteeing low latency can eat up a big chunk of theoretically available bandwidth, due to overhead.) The canonical example is probably a dial-up modem or other slow link between two locat
350.
by retrac 2y ago
The reason for L is probably because of the rhythm of the usual way the song goes. l, m, n... are rushed together because "elemenopee" is easy and fun to say quickly. ... a b c d e f g h / i j / k l m n o
351.
by retrac 2y ago
Because the Bantu languages (most prominently: Swahili) and Japanese have similar sound systems. Finnish is also oddly similar-sounding, or Hawaiian. None of them are actually related. It's because the syllable is restricted in the
352.
by retrac 2y ago
Current LLMs are not aware of the letters in text. It's too expensive computationally to assign a token to each letter. They operate at the level of tokens, which tend to be word-level: each morph-em-e is broke-n down in-to seg-ment-
353.
by retrac 2y ago
Tangential, but one thing I recently learned about telegraphy was that it was one of the final tools, for establishing an accurate global map. Taking your longitude requires knowing what time it is. An hour's error is 15 degrees of r
354.
by retrac 2y ago
True. But it is pretty darn closely correlated: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-development-index-v...
355.
by retrac 2y ago
With historical childhood mortality rates, they started coming down before modern vaccination or antibiotics were invented. In the USA and UK, the great majority of the advance was actually made from about 1900 - 1930. Here in a wealthy p
356.
by retrac 2y ago
Resistors with worse tolerances may be made out of cheaper, less refined wire, which will vary resistance more by temperature. The tolerance and resistance is good over a temperature range. For more reading looking up "constantan&q
357.
by retrac 2y ago
There's another major factor. I suppose it falls under the encoding. Frequency stability. In a certain sense, having an extremely precise oscillator at both the receiver and the transmitter, is the same thing as just having a better
358.
by retrac 2y ago
It was not the worst for fatalities, but the one that disturbs me most I think, was the one in the 1980s in Ukraine where an intense radiation source that was lost, worked its way into gravel, that was used for concrete for an apartment bui
359.
by retrac 2y ago
Tangentially related - I hit my head last year and lost almost all low frequency hearing on my left side. (I had an existing loss, and had almost no high frequency hearing on the other side already.) Everyone sounded like a chipmunk for a
360.
by retrac 2y ago
Depends whether you're optimizing for program size or runtime speed.

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