elihu

5 ms·

1.
by elihu 26d ago
Having good technical tools won't fix a failing society, but they're still nice to have and they make state surveillance of its citizens just a little bit harder. I mean, where would we be without strong cryptography?
2.
by elihu 2mo ago
The way I look at it is that a manager can make decisions with wider scope, but the people under them exert greater control in day-to-day tasks over some narrower scope. In software development, for example, a manager might set goals for s
3.
by elihu 4mo ago
It's the most common unit for describing the explosive yield of a nuclear weapon. So, it's a lot smaller than the bombs dropped on Japan in WWII, but a lot bigger than a Davy Crockett. That's a sort-of-useful frame of refer
4.
by elihu 5mo ago
The Super Turcano is a prop-driven aircraft that's often suggested for this role.
5.
by elihu 6mo ago
Or, alternatively, you switch to DC to get more current capacity over existing wires. (At a given voltage, a wire can generally carry more DC current because it doesn't have the same "skin effect" that AC has.) Even if the
6.
by elihu 6mo ago
I've been wondering for awhile about the economics of the AC vs DC grid thing. Historically, AC made a lot more sense because transformers are simple and relatively straightforward to make. But now we have amazing capabilities to han
7.
by elihu 6mo ago
I really want the US to get on board with solar in general. Parking lot solar is a good thing generally, but I don't think it should be mandatory because it's an inefficient use of resources. We don't have any shortage of r
8.
by elihu 6mo ago
It can be either AC or DC. Aluminum TIG welding uses AC, whereas you'd use electrode-negative DC for steel or copper. As I understand it, with aluminum you need the electrode-negative part of the waveform to transfer heat to the work
9.
by elihu 6mo ago
It may be a boon to EV makers everywhere including in China, but I don't think it's a boon to China generally as they buy a lot of their oil from the Gulf states. Thus they're more directly affected by the Hormuz shutdown th
10.
by elihu 6mo ago
That's true enough at the level of individual households. If the whole neighborhood switches to EVs, the power grid in general might not be built to handle it. (Personally I don't expect this will be that big a deal, since switc
11.
by elihu 6mo ago
Sure, that's basically just intonation (JI). You pick what key you want to play in and a scale, and then you build an instrument around that scale. (Though something that happens in just intonation is that you often find out you need
12.
by elihu 7mo ago
> the irony it comes from the same people who blame Israel for not letting supplies into Gaza during war. Israel did in fact do that. In fact there were several months of Israel not allowing any food or supplies whatsoever into Gaza. T
13.
by elihu 7mo ago
Whether or not one would accept deaths of civilians to get rid of Khamenei, I don't think anyone should accept a school full of children being blown up for no obvious reason. If there was somehow a reason why Khameni could not have ki
14.
by elihu 7mo ago
Also worth mentioning Baldassare Forestiere, who spent about 40 years digging an extensive network of tunnels in Fresno, CA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Gardens
15.
by elihu 7mo ago
Maybe Claude is just a fan of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann? (Or influenced by the fandom thereof.)
16.
by elihu 7mo ago
If the fundamental is 100hz, then the 1st harmonic is the fundamental (100hz), the 2nd harmonic is 200hz, the 3rd harmonic is 300hz, and so on. Sometimes the harmonics aren't exact. On a piano, if the fundamental is 100hz then the 2nd
17.
by elihu 7mo ago
A minor terminology quibble: the video refers to the Nth harmonic as if it's the fundamental frequency times N+1, but it's usually fairly standard to refer to the frequency that's N times the fundamental as the Nth Harmonic.
18.
by elihu 7mo ago
The other side of this is that if you want your open source project to be useful to people, relevant, included by default in Linux distributions, highly regarded by the community, and so on then it's expected that you treat your users
19.
by elihu 7mo ago
Didn't realize she played Lwaxana Troi. Knowing that now I wonder, am I going to hear the ship's computer as Lwaxana?
20.
by elihu 7mo ago
That could be one reason they want to do it. Maybe by using data from Palantir or harvested from Elon's work with DOGE, along with twitter user data and whatever else they can get, they want their AI to be the all-seeing eye of Sauron
21.
by elihu 8mo ago
The main reason is that generating energy in space is very cheap and easy due to how ridiculously effective solar panels are. Someone mentioned in the comments on a similar article that sun synchronous orbits are a thing. This was a new on
22.
by elihu 8mo ago
Huh, I didn't know that that was possible without burning fuel. Kind of wild that it only works because the Earth has an equatorial bulge and isn't an exact sphere.
23.
by elihu 8mo ago
Communication is a well-understood problem, and SpaceX already has Starlink. They might need pretty high bandwidth, but that's not necessarily much of a problem in space. Latency could be a problem, except that AI training isn't
24.
by elihu 8mo ago
That's not a new problem that no one has dealt with before. The ISS for instance has its External Active Thermal Control System (EACTS). It's not so much a matter of whether it's an unsolvable problem but more like, how expe
25.
by elihu 8mo ago
Honestly, there's not a lot else I can think of if your goal is find some practical and profitable way to take advantage of relatively cheap access to near-Earth space. Communication is a big one, but Starlink is already doing that. O
26.
by elihu 8mo ago
Do they need to be maintained? If one compute node breaks, you just turn it off and don't worry about it. You just assume you'll have some amount of unrecoverable errors and build that into the cost/benefit analysis. As lo
27.
by elihu 10mo ago
3340s are great. I've also heard good things about the SSI2130 and 2131 chips as a more modern alternative to 3340. 3340s are more DIY-friendly though, as they're DIP packages.
28.
by elihu 11mo ago
Another form of tech industry Gaza atrocity denialism and gaslighting is satellite maps of Gaza. Bing maps seems to be entirely pre-war as far as I can tell. In a way, that's kind of useful, as it can serve as a reference for what Gaz
29.
by elihu 11mo ago
Small wimpy ones are widely available. I'd love to have an electric chainsaw that runs on 220v and has a respectably long bar, but those don't seem to be available in the US as far as I can tell. At 30 amps and 220 volts, that wo
30.
by elihu 11mo ago
Nah, the main thing is that electric motors are already far better than they need to be -- even assuming the claims are all true, it would only make a small difference. Shaving a couple percent off the total vehicle weight would still be a

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