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fsh

4,876 karma · joined February 23, 2019

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fsh··on I don't understand quantum physics (2018)
I disagree. The human brain is difficult to understand due to the extreme complexity. Quantum mechanics is weird even for simple arrangements of a few building blocks such as the double-slit experiment or Bell tests.
fsh··on Physicists trap a single antimatter particle for a month
Exciting results. The electron's magnetic moment is probably the most precise standard model prediction, and Gabrielse's group has measured it with 13 digits of accuracy. The positron is predicted to have exactly the same magnetic moment, but this has not been measured since 1987. With the new trap, they should be able to finally match the electron's precision.
fsh··on Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany
Taler is privacy-preserving for the payer, but not for the payee. This solves many legal issues such as tax evasion and money laundering.
fsh··on A death, a plagiarism scandal and a quest for revenge: the tale of Otto Z
The Oxford comma is optional according to the Guardian style guide: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-style-guide-o
fsh··on Source code of the Estonian online voting system
The lack of clear evidence for manipulation in Estonia is not a strong argument to introduce it in a more high-value target. Switzerland has been "trialing" e-voting for decades with very limited success.
fsh··on Source code of the Estonian online voting system
There is plenty of doubt about the Estonian voting system [1]. It would be an extremely bad idea to use it in a country with more international influence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia

fsh··on Teams in Vienna and Beijing have built the first thorium nuclear clocks
They measured the stability by comparing the nuclear clocks with more stable conventional atomic clocks. In Vienna, they used a commercial single-ion optical clock [1], and in Beijing they used a hydrogen maser (a type of microwave atomic clocks) that was calibrated to the International Atomic Time scale via GNSS satellites.

[1] https://www.toptica.com/products/optical-quantum-clocks/topt...

fsh··on Teams in Vienna and Beijing have built the first thorium nuclear clocks
The nuclear clock uses 229Th though which has an 8000 year half life and does not occur in nature at all.
fsh··on Powerless F1 drivers frustrated by Bahrain F1 software glitch
Banning teams like Ferrari or Mercedes from competing with their own cars (including the engines) would be the end of F1. The current regulations are extremely ambitious such that constructors can get a significant advantage from developing better tech. And it's working, the Mercedes powertrain is clearly dominating, even though the Ford V8 is more powerful.
fsh··on Powerless F1 drivers frustrated by Bahrain F1 software glitch
F1 is a constructors championship, and the constructors are interested in developing electric power trains. Nobody wants to spend 100 million to tweak the last 0.1% performance out of a turbo-charged V8.
fsh··on US Forces Exit Iraq
The article summarizes interviews with various interest groups in the region. Exactly what you would expect from a news agency like Reuters.
fsh··on Scientists build most accurate atomic clock
2.6% natural abundance is more than enough to load an ion trap. Photoionization is so selective that one can load 46Ca from a sample with natural abundance (0.004%).
fsh··on Apple M6 Pro Achieves the Highest Single-Core CPU Score in Geekbench 7
It is not quite twice the score of a 6 year old Apple M1 though. And this is with much higher clock speeds (4.8 GHz vs. 3.2 GHz).
fsh··on How good are frontier models at physics?
Half of the benchmarks don't have published answers. That's why training data providers have been hiring physicists to solve them.
fsh··on How good are frontier models at physics?
I would be very surprised if any of the frontier models wasn't trained on all public physics benchmarks. Training data providers have been hiring people for exactly this task.
fsh··on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
So after chasing AWS for two decades, they are still dwarved by them.
fsh··on Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil
You are still ~500 m/s short compared to launching on an equatorial orbit from the equator.
fsh··on Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil
Launching far off the equator makes it more difficult and is therefore a bigger technological achievement.
fsh··on RSA-260 Factorized
Photonic quantum interfaces typically operate at glacial speeds and with terrible fidelities. There is a lot more missing than good qubits.
fsh··on RSA-260 Factorized
Electrical engineers in the 1940s already had "infinitely stable" memory in the form of delay lines and Williams tubes. Quantum error correction is incomparably more difficult than using digital bits.
fsh··on Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
Google is one of many monopolies that are collectively bleeding society dry. Of course, the others should be broken up as well.

Waymo is currently financed by a monopolist and has negligible revenue itself, so it is not part of the free market.

fsh··on Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
Some cute tech projects do not justify a massive monopoly. Google is financing Waymo using the ~300 billion dollar it extracts annually from consumers via ad spending. I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
fsh··on Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
That's probably a lot more than their market share versus Claude Code and Codex.
fsh··on The A.I. In Google's New Pixel 11 Is Not Helpful
I'm glad that my 9a has little enough RAM to be spared the worst of Google's on-device LLM features.
fsh··on The Amazon tax
Shops used to curate their catalogs by in-house testing products from various suppliers. If a supplier comes up with a better toaster, they can send samples to the most relevant shops and convince them to stock it.
fsh··on RustDesk now supports true unattended remote access on Wayland
It's not VNC-based, so the performance is much better. It also supports multiple monitors.
fsh··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
This is blatantly untrue: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/Fig2_Gro...
fsh··on The Prospects for 128 Bit Processors ( John Mashey SGI 1995)
Doubles are precise to 1E-16, and the most precisely known fundamental constants have uncertainties on the 1E-12 level. This does not give a comfortable headroom, so the CODATA adjustment that determines the constants from measurements uses quadruple-precision numbers in FORTRAN.
fsh··on IMAX vs. IMAX 70mm: The difference between these two cinema formats
That's not true. Digital movie cameras have a few stops more dynamic range than any analog film or the human eye. Of course this doesn't really matter since analog projectors are astronomically worse than digital on that front. This shouldn't be too surprising considering that they are literally shining a lamp though a piece of plastic.
fsh··on IMAX vs. IMAX 70mm: The difference between these two cinema formats
IMHO, the only reasons for using 70 mm IMAX are nostalgia and marketing. Digital movie cameras have far better color reproduction, more dynamic range, zero frame jitter, and plenty of resolution without grain. They are also small and silent which allows far more interesting shots than what is possible with a 70 mm monster. Kubrick and Lean used 70 mm because it was the best technology available at the time. Today, the best technology is digital.
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