jdranczewski

Allowing mass machine translation of Wikipedia articles into other languages is a problem, because it floods smaller language wikis with low quality text. If a user wants machine translated pages, they can machine translate them themselves.

Interesting that the description mentions a year of training! Not something I immediately think of when I see one of these daredevil stunts, but it makes sense that he'd spend a while making sure he can reliably go through an opening of relevant dimensions

I've had to do this to my Windows laptop recently after it started completely draining the battery when going to normal sleep. Wakes up reasonably quickly still, and no power management problems!

In special relativity at least it's pretty clearly the case that communication outside the light cone (so faster than light) will result in events happening in the wrong order in some frames, violating causality. I will not speak of general relativity, as while I've taken a course in it, years later I have returned to considering it largely dark magic.

Long term, sure. Short term I think an unpleasant number of your parallel universe copies would observe themselves dying.

I've been writing a UI framework for experiment automation and small tools using Qt Widgets with Python bindings (https://puzzlepiece.readthedocs.io) and it still works pretty well! I like the API, and it being immediately cross-platform is very useful. It does lack looks on Windows a little imo, but to be honest I'm not opposed to the utilitarian way the apps end up looking.

I usually refer to https://pyformat.info/, which doesn't have all this detail, but most of the reasonable stuff is included

I will use any opportunity to say that I deeply dislike the Chinese Room argument - the assertion that since the man in the room doesn't detect an understanding emerging, no understanding can emerge always grates me.

PhD theses often have many figures, and these are often not optimised. My thesis is around 30MB, and that's after I optimised a couple of the most egregious figures. I'm planning to make it better in the corrections phase, but file size is really not something most people will be concerned in the writing phase, and so compile times are likely to suffer.

For further reference, a single-pass compilation of my thesis currently takes 25 seconds, and multiple passes are of course needed if the layout/bibliography changes. I ended up setting up TeXstudio to always compile only once for the preview, and then run the full N complications for the final build. That plus liberal use of \includeonly made compile times not that much of an issue

I use jupytext https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ for pretty much all of my Notebooks, which saves them as Python files.

The most immediate benefits for me are easier inspection and searching of the code in any text editor, and infinitely nicer version control. But it does also let you run and import the Notebook as if it was a Python script!

While writing my thesis I have also been experimenting with a Spyder-like workflow in VS Code, where you put in "# %%" to separate code blocks and get to run them in an IPython console. It had its perks, like the better Intellisense, and also resulted in this mix of interactivity and runnable file. Not as good on the markup front though.

Good point, piezos do also generate voltages when deformed, so this could conceivably be run in reverse... Microphone arrays are already used for directional sound detection, so this could have fun implications for that application given the claimed density of microphones.

I'm late to the thread, but Neal actually uses the embed API here, which is free with no limits. The website has two Street View iframes, and it fades between them when the new pano is loaded. Pretty funny way to avoid a hilariously large bill!

That is a very good point! Gravity is just such an ingrained intuition that people tend to be ok with saying things go into the spacetime wells, but it is a little tautological.

My understanding is that a more correct intuition is thinking of straight paths on the curved sheet. Say it's like a loosely woven tablecloth - objects in free fall will go along the threads of the weave, so if you stretch the fabric by placing a heavy object on it, the paths of smaller objects on the fabric will be stretched towards the heavy thing.

This metaphor falls apart for orbits though, as it requires "stretching" the fabric so much that the threads now somehow go in a circle around the mass heh. But the underlying principle is the same - an object in orbit is in free fall along a straight path in curved spacetime.

This was an invaluable resource 5 years ago when I was working on a summer research project making a ray tracing-based optical levitation simulator - initially it felt a bit insane to try to deeply understand this obscure bit of maths to implement rotations, but once it clicked it clicked. Quaternions ended up being a super neat formalism for writing and computing rotational equations of motion.

https://github.com/jdranczewski/optical-levitation-raytracin... for my repo, and https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/nme.5165 for the rotational dynamics with quaternions.

The material is very cool, but I'm almost more interested in the progress in 3D nanofabrication this shows - "printing" material in 3D by selective solidification tends to be pretty slow, as you need to move around like a 3D printer head instead of one-shotting an entire layer like in 2D lithography.

The fact that they have made a millimeter scale version of their design instead of a small demo that looks cool under an electron microscope is very impressive! The method is pretty clever too - 2 photon absorption works only where the light is focused (and therefore high intensity). They use a lens array to create 49 focus points, allowing them to parallelize the printing of the repeating grid!

Scalable 3D fab could have fun implications for materials like this, and for chip-scale photonics.

Very glad to hear the Pebble dream lives on! I only switched away from my Pebble Time two years ago when I started to need heart rate monitoring for health reasons. The Pixel Watch is good, but in many ways I still consider the Time the optimal smartwatch design in many departments!

The UX especially is something l look back fondly on, especially the timeline interface was such a natural way to use a timepiece for me.

Thank you very much for the tips!

I have been reading HN for a while and never commented, but the translation thing is very close to my heart, what with learning Physics both in Polish and English at different stages of my life.

So much so that I've made a dedicated tool for this: https://wikitranslator.github.io/

It uses Wikipedia's APIs to "click the language links" for you. It also displays short summaries of both languages' articles, so the translation can be verified. I know I'm a small sample, but I end up using it reasonably often.