scarmig

45 ms·

631.
by scarmig 3y ago
I'm excited about the ball bearings.
632.
by scarmig 3y ago
Most power loss in a computer comes from MOSFETs, not resistive loss. Which isn't to say that RTP superconductors wouldn't open up wild new possibilities. ETA: wrong
633.
by scarmig 3y ago
Yeah. BCS was proposed a half century after the first conventional superconductor was discovered, and even today we don't have a convincing mechanism for "regular" high-Tc superconductors. But if it superconducts, it supercon
634.
by scarmig 3y ago
Friday is more plausible than a couple months. If the radio silence ends up extending well-into next week, people are having trouble replicating and want to cross their ts before calling it out as fraud.
635.
by scarmig 3y ago
It's a reasonable enough paper, and replicating should be pretty easy (an undergrad could do it). Because the implications are so massive if true, people are going to jump on it. From the linked article: > You can bet that furnaces
636.
by scarmig 3y ago
One odd thing that I've not seen any discussion on: the reported heat capacity of LK-99 decreases above 250K, which is pretty atypical. Has there been any commentary on that?
637.
by scarmig 3y ago
It's a thermodynamic argument. Suppose you have a system of n bits each in an arbitrary state, so it has 2^n microstates. You set one bit to 0, regardless of what it was originally. It now has 2^(n-1) microstates. Finding entropy S for
638.
by scarmig 3y ago
Less than a week. It's a simple material to synthesize, and the tests conducted on it are pretty typical with effect sizes that don't require any sophisticated statistics to observe.
639.
by scarmig 3y ago
Their other data doesn't line up with ferromagnetism, though. It's either the real thing or a big fraud. Guess we'll find out soon enough. ETA: the video referenced is apparently available at https://www.youtube.co
640.
by scarmig 3y ago
In fairness, the paper isn't exactly humble about its claims. But I appreciate their candor, and if they believe they've found a RTP superconductor and sufficiently verified it is a RTP superconductor, a bit of arrogance isn'
641.
by scarmig 3y ago
Levitation is to be expected for any superconductor when it's in a superconducting state; that part is banal. The big question is whether it's actually a superconductor at RTP. Their results are strong enough that it's unlike
642.
by scarmig 3y ago
I mean, the paper has experimental results and it should be easily reproducible by pretty much any lab. Do you think they should be hopping on CNN to give a public demonstration with the announcement? If a material with the properties descr
643.
by scarmig 3y ago
For what it's worth, I've given serious thought to whether a rock or the wind have consciousness. I rejected the idea, but it's essential for us to consider it for reasons of ethics. Consciousness is something even now we hav
644.
by scarmig 3y ago
I think it's more that being terminally online has given him the brain worms when it comes to Twitter, and everything he does with Twitter has to be interpreted through the mass of brain worms.
645.
by scarmig 3y ago
Hard work, intelligence, and preexisting resources are typically prerequisites, and then a whole lot of luck comes into play. I suspect taking their wages in stock wasn't an option actually offered to janitors, and even if it had been,
646.
by scarmig 3y ago
I agree that comparing serfdom to market labor and housing isn't particularly enlightening. But there were reciprocal obligations involved that would be unheard of nowadays even in the most renter-friendly places. A lord would be expec
647.
by scarmig 3y ago
Wage income is nearly irrelevant in understanding wealth inequality. It's easy for the working class (which we are!) to see someone else working and making $10M a year and to think, wow, that's where inequality comes from! But tha
648.
by scarmig 3y ago
You're leaving out evaporation. A black hole with the mass of a mountain would evaporate on the order of a second. That would also release energy the equivalent of ~20M megatons of TNT, which is half a million times that of Tsar Bomba
649.
by scarmig 3y ago
They introduce their own problems. They're typically brittle ceramics, making them hard to work with. They're more expensive to manufacture. And they have a lower critical current density (i.e. there's less current they can c
650.
by scarmig 3y ago
Public schools as they exist today are already in a state of terminal disrepair and do a massive disservice to all their students. Note that the original article is about public schools banning the teaching of algebra for all students befor
651.
by scarmig 3y ago
There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents, the engaged parents will drive school districts to implement good educational policies. In reality, thou
652.
by scarmig 3y ago
Isn't that more to flip a bit than representing a bit, though? Another angle might be to look at the Bekenstein bound, i.e. that if you have a physical system of mass-energy m, there's a maximal number of bits B that it can contai
653.
by scarmig 3y ago
I'd be interested to know how Waymo/Cruise currently sense and respond to catastrophic failure. A blown tire? Brake failure? Broken timing belt? Which isn't to say that humans respond especially well to these things, but at s
654.
by scarmig 3y ago
> Cruise and Waymo refuse to release their safety records. This is not true. They monthly release accidents and disengagement reports to the state. SF officials, on the other hand, have been caught more or less fabricating a story and mi
655.
by scarmig 3y ago
It would be amusing to see how humans react if you run up to their cars while stopped, put a traffic cone on the hood, and run away. Would most people try to shake it off while driving away, or stop in the middle of traffic? What's act
656.
by scarmig 3y ago
About a month ago a human driver ran into me while I was riding a bike and sped away (luckily I was unharmed, aside from a scrape or two). How exactly would stricter driving tests or revocation of licenses have prevented that? If a Waymo ha
657.
by scarmig 3y ago
It doesn't even need to be at the mean. It just needs to drive more safely than the worst drivers who cause fatal crashes, and you're saving lives.
658.
by scarmig 3y ago
Mean is the relevant metric, though. If it's only the bottom 10% of human drivers who cause all crashes and driverless cars are as safe as the 20p human driver, you can replace all human drivers with autonomous ones and eliminate all c
659.
by scarmig 3y ago
No more complicated than usual, as there's separation of concerns. You'd have your IdP, which provides authentication and account management. The IdP then integrates with an application or service using some authentication protoco
660.
by scarmig 3y ago
In this case, the person doing it was an employee of Dean Preston, a city supervisor. Regardless, the traffic cone clowning and the falsifying data clowning both are born of the same shortsighted desire to get "progressive" points

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