SyzygyRhythm

5 ms·

1.
by SyzygyRhythm 28d ago
I love penny smashers. I have a paradoxical attitude toward souvenirs: on one hand, I like to have reminders of places I've visited as well as a physical token of "proof" that I've been there; on the other hand, I hate h
2.
by SyzygyRhythm 1mo ago
Always hard to be sure, but I think so, yes. The dispenser is only triggered when he runs either fast enough or long enough (I forget the thresholds, but it's something like 10 mph or 10 seconds). Sometimes he'll run and not quite
3.
by SyzygyRhythm 1mo ago
OneFastCat. Very pleased with it, though it can be somewhat loud when I'm trying to sleep and the house is otherwise silent!
4.
by SyzygyRhythm 1mo ago
Neat! Not to toot my own horn too much, but I put together a similar project for my cat's exercise wheel. Hackaday featured it a while back: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/02/spy-on-your-cat-to-make-sure.
5.
by SyzygyRhythm 2mo ago
This just plugs into an outlet and offsets whatever usage you have, though. No need for a battery or matching load. It just subtracts 180 watts from your household usage. These types of devices are fairly popular in Germany, and maybe other
6.
by SyzygyRhythm 2mo ago
Thanks, though I realize (thanks to tptacek) that I didn't properly emphasize that the determinant must be constant but non-zero. If the determinant were zero, then (for basically the same reason as why you can't divide by zero) t
7.
by SyzygyRhythm 2mo ago
Yeah, the only possible counterexamples would have a constant but non-zero determinant (in this case it was -2).
8.
by SyzygyRhythm 2mo ago
Are you at least a little familiar with linear algebra? If so, you've probably heard of the determinant. It's a certain way of "summarizing" a matrix with one value. The determinant in this case is of the Jacobian, which
9.
by SyzygyRhythm 2mo ago
As others said, you can run more than one at a time, but even singly, 24 GB can be very useful in a hybrid approach. For instance, I recently had to process hundreds of high-res blueprints. Used Fable for the main orchestration, but all of
10.
by SyzygyRhythm 2mo ago
Movie-Nedry struck me as a certain kind of hacker trope (but whom I've also met in real life!) where part of their "compensation" is access to unusual and high end computer hardware. It's irrelevant whether it's the
11.
by SyzygyRhythm 2mo ago
That's why 1 is not generally considered prime. If it was, 2 could be factored as 2, 2x1, 2x1x1, etc., which breaks the uniqueness property.
12.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
No. And in fact it annoys me greatly that our work IT department forces a reboot once a month. My desktop is like an actual desktop. I have my tools laid out exactly how I want them for the task I'm working on. I want to come back to t
13.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
To get speed from velocity, you need a square root, which is also awful (for the same reason that abs is awful).
14.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
Cheat answer: velocity is a vector, and can be negative, while KE is a scalar and has to be positive. Therefore you have to square v to get rid of the minus sign. Why not take the absolute value? Nature hates those, probably because the der
15.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
Why isn't the shifter built with a log2 arrangement, shifting 32-16-8-4-2-1 bits? Takes fewer sub-stages and doesn't require a separate decoder for the input. The article mentions it already has a two-stage design, shifting bits a
16.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
Sometimes you have to optimize other people's code. Also, sometimes code behaves unexpectedly depending on the data, say over a certain size threshold. And sometimes it behaves differently on different hardware. You don't always f
17.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
Doh! You are correct. I had been looking at a previous paper (which this new paper references). The previous paper showed that you can use any non-linearity in QM to solve NP-complete problems, and the new one shows that semi-classical grav
18.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
Yes, I think that was implied in my original post, that if you define |0> as logical 1 then it works as an AND. It just seems confusing and unnecessary when they could have framed it to be consistent with classical logic.
19.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
I was skimming the paper and came to this: > This transformation is like an AND gate - it ignores the index qubit and places the flag qubit in the state |1> if and only if either of the original components had the state |1> for the
20.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
We always try to inform game devs about correctness issues, but generally we can push out a driver fix before the devs can fix things on their side, so that pretty much always happens. Many things can be fixed quickly by app profile (detect
21.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
There are many, many, cases like this, including correctness fixes. One recent example I remember had a shader that computed: x = a / b * b The optimizer was allowed, but not obligated, to transform that into: x = a However, in this ca
22.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
The article mentions that thin-walled copper tube can be used, but then says a precision lathe is required. But you can easily buy off-the-shelf copper tube with 1.6 or 2.0 mm diameter and 0.5 mm wall thickness. Is that not thin enough? If
23.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
Numerous times now, using Tesla FSD, I've found the car seemingly drifting from the center of the lane, only to have motorcycles buzz by at high speed on the opposite side. It's very polite toward motorcyclists.
24.
by SyzygyRhythm 3mo ago
Boron always seemed like an under-studied element to me. Starting from the bottom, hydrogen of course is very well understood, helium not useful for much, lithium used for many things, and beryllium interesting but unfortunately toxic. Next
25.
by SyzygyRhythm 4mo ago
There are a number of ways of looking at this, which others have answered, but here's another: The kinetic and potential energy of a 1 kg mass in orbit is around 33 MJ. The chemical energy of 1 kg of methane+oxygen propellant is only a
26.
by SyzygyRhythm 4mo ago
That's already how civilization works. There's no one person that knows everything about (say) modern food production, from top to bottom. If it ever stopped working (because too much knowledge was lost somehow), most people would
27.
by SyzygyRhythm 5mo ago
The ship computers in the old game Privateer (and probably Wing Commander) had a pretty nice pixel font. Most of the characters were 3x4, but with a few niceties: descenders (j, p, q) could go below the normal outline, and wide glyphs like
28.
by SyzygyRhythm 5mo ago
Early versions of Unreal Engine had these animated procedural textures that would produce sparks, fire effects, etc. The odd part is that when you paused the game, the animated textures would still animate. Presumably, the game would pause
29.
by SyzygyRhythm 6mo ago
Starship "making LEO" is not a significant challenge--the existing flights have explicitly targeted a (very slightly) suborbital trajectory. They could have done otherwise at any point, but for now it's more important to guar
30.
by SyzygyRhythm 6mo ago
There were 19 successful unmanned Dragon 1 missions before Crew Dragon, and an unmanned Crew Dragon mission before the first crewed one (actually two missions, but one didn't reenter from orbit). The heat shield material and design was

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