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ekun

90 karma · joined January 21, 2016

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ekun··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
The classic story of solving a problem that doesn't exist with an overly complicated solution.
ekun··on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
How is it with animations?

I have played around a little bit with fixing some rigging problems and was impressed, but Opus even warned me it was bad at animations cause it can only really grab screenshots to process static content.

ekun··on macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review
A functioning window system would drastically enhance OSX productivity.
ekun··on Göttingen was one of the most productive centers of mathematics (2019)
I worked with an older German man who was a consultant on a research project that I was working on in graduate school. He was born in Gottingen and told stories how as a kid he got to test his paper airplanes in their wind tunnels with these famous scientists.
ekun··on Apple Vision Pro's components cost $1,542–but that's not the full story
No Apple logo.
ekun··on Flexbox Froggy
I printed out a nice 1-page guide to flexbox a few weeks ago and keep it on my desk, and it's a great reference.
ekun··on How the Kentucky Cave Wars Reshaped the State’s Tourism Industry
This story is in the article as well.
ekun··on Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
I haven't seen people mention it really, but isn't this all in response to ChatGPT deriving a lot of it's content from Reddit?

I know that Google search has gotten so bad in the last couple years that I normally have to add "reddit" to the search terms to get a good result.

ekun··on Researchers trick Tesla autopilot into driving into opposing traffic
Why did the first 2 replies to this comment use the phrasing that that is his 'MO'?
ekun··on The Matrix Code Came from Sushi Recipes
And then people used electric sheep in the later two-thousands which was a pretty interesting concept.
ekun··on Show HN: A Color Picker I Made
Just a heads up...on your homepage when hovering over the artist's name "Anastasiia Andriichuk" the highlight seems to add padding on each side which makes the line break in between their first and last name and the page gets jumpy. This is using chrome on my laptop.
ekun··on The periodic table is 150 years old this week
I went to a talk at Oak Ridge National Lab soon after the discovery of Ununseptium (element 117 that is now called Tennessine) and it was really interesting the international collaboration needed to make the discovery happen.

Basically, at Oak Ridge they produced radioactive isotopes with the appropriate number of neutrons and protons to match the theoretical ratio of the atom. Then, those isotopes needed to be shipped to Russia so they could be smashed together in a particle accelerator to briefly create the atom which we know existed from its specific decay and gamma ray emission.

But there was a lot of political hurdles in the way of shipping the isotopes to Russia in the first place, and it almost didn't happen because the isotopes were decaying while paperwork was floundering between state departments.

ekun··on The Gyllenhaal Experiment
Well, as fun as it is to mess up benadryl cucumber's name it's very easy to spell correctly.
ekun··on Conversations among German Nuclear Physicists at Farm Hall (1945) [pdf]
If you look more into it, Germany was very close to being able to build a reactor that would have been able to produce plutonium. Their graphite reactor research never went critical because they didn't know that the boron impurities in graphite was absorbing too many neutrons. I'm not saying if they knew that they would've had the resources to make enough plutonium for a bomb, but the German scientists wren't that far away. Having said all that, if you read through all of these documents it seems like they had no idea how the bomb was built and designed.
ekun··on Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in Income Taxes
Just go to duckduckgo.com and search for anything with the word stream on the end.
ekun··on How to write code in modern Fortran (2011) [pdf]
Keep in mind too that a lot of long scientific simulations are more complicated than vectorized loops or linear algebra. Monte Carlo algorithms were developed to simulate neutrons in the Manhattan project and programmed with the help of Von Neumman.
ekun··on How to write code in modern Fortran (2011) [pdf]
Any compiled language will be drastically faster than an interpretive scripting language like Python (although numpy/scipy is generally C or Fortran libraries compiled to be called by Python). Having said that I used Fortran for my PhD to do radiation simulations because I was implementing a new methodology into existing code.

In my opinion Fortran is easier and safer to use for scientists with little background in coding because it was built to do math/simulations really well AND it's readable almost like psuedocode (compared with C or C++). Also, modern Fortran is object-oriented which makes building reusable tools and large packages pretty easy.

Having said all of this I think a lot of the physics/nuclear/aerospace/finance community is probably transitioning into more modern languages and starting to employ people with actual CS backgrounds to build with more updated coding practices.

ekun··on Using the iPad Pro as my main computer
Funny you mention the mouse support because in the blog post here you cannot scroll through it using a mouse which is pretty annoying.
ekun··on The US spends more on healthcare for no gain says new report from Johns Hopkins
I think it wouldn't be explicitly included, but it goes into the bottom line of big pharma companies. There is a very lengthy process of getting drugs through the FDA which makes investment's return-on-investment difficult to justify without raising already available drug prices.

(edit: Having said that, our healthcare costs are out of control and it's not directly because of the R&D. It has more to do with wild overhead in insurance and HMOs where only a small fraction of what consumers pay goes to healthcare.)

ekun··on Some unexplained physical symptoms may be caused by unresolved emotional trauma
There's a lot of skeptics in here with myself included to a certain extent. But I really appreciate your story and am interested in pursuing a similar trajectory. I don't understand how anyone can be fully skeptical that bettering your mental health / previous traumas would be nothing but good for your overall health.
ekun··on Fortran is still a thing
This has been my experience. Although I know other languages, when I go to write a solver for CFD, radiation transport, heat transfer, etc I normally have gone with OpenMPI and Fortran. For me, Fortran is almost like writing psuedocode.
ekun··on It's Time to Change the Narrative About Clean Energy
"Renewable energy" is a perfect term, but I think that it has the same negative connotation for the people who have an aversion to the term "clean energy".
ekun··on The Future of Aging Just Might Be in Margaritaville
But you'll be fine on NA servers.
ekun··on The Source History of Cat
While I agree about productivity now (although rewriting a source for cat that is used decades later seems very productive), I think the above commenter has it correct that it was probably a side project that he worked on and released after 6 months and not so much the speed of the CPUs.
ekun··on Amazon expected to announce NYC and Northern Virginia as new headquarters
Which is exactly what professional sports teams do often even if they've been somewhere a while and have no intention of leaving.
ekun··on F.D.A. Plans to Seek a Ban on Menthol Cigarettes
Wait are you saying that smoking is really cool?
ekun··on Why We Need Innovative Nuclear Power
The US invests a lot of money into researching advanced reactors only so the money can be sprinkled around to different labs, companies, and universities to keep our knowledge/workforce updated until they shift focus every couple years to a new 'important' reactor concept. With all that money and time we could have prototyped advanced plants and gone through licensing so we'd be building them today. Unfortunately I don't think that's a priority.
ekun··on US Congress passes bill to help advanced nuclear power
This is exactly correct. The problem is solved by dozens of paper reactors or waste storage plans that do not exist. We can develop these things and we already invest tons of money into R&D which always gets allocated stopping short of fully developing the technology. We should either quit investing into the technology on a research level or start actually developing it.
ekun··on US Congress passes bill to help advanced nuclear power
Too be fair the article is discussing 2 separate bills. One is to support R&D for advanced reactors and one is to help subsidize current designs so some of this discussion is a little confusing from the different contexts.

I'm not sure subsidizing our current tech in the US will make a difference, but the amount of money in public and private sectors right now for advanced designs needs to be more collectively focused towards building demostration reactors such as the fast neutron reactor being proposed.

It is also difficult for American companies (despite having designed and built a majority of factors globally) to currently compete against state actors like China or the Russian government. That is another critical reason we should be developing leading technology because we don't necessarily have good reason to trust other countries to design and build these safely globally which could lead to more nuclear disasters. The best example is Chernobyl which was a wildly dangerous avoidable accident that should have never happened.

ekun··on US Congress passes bill to help advanced nuclear power
The fear is a real and large issue that leads to a lack of reasonable discourse when evaluating pros and cons of nuclear against other sources in terms of funding advanced technologies and building current designs. But the fear is not necessarily what drives a cumbersome regulatory infrastructure that hampers new construction and the poor management by Westinghouse of the recent projects that led to massive cost overruns.
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