lefra

Is "99% the same" good or catastrophic in this context?

> [if] the tests are reliable

Reading the tests is meant to check that.

I see no issue here.

Modifying a variable that is read by another thread needs special care in all multithreaded languages I know. If you don't use a synchronization primitive to tell the other thread "hey, this thing here may have changed, read it again from memory"; the other thread is free to use its old value for as long as it whishes.

> [the] spin is random and lives in a probability cloud that is probabilistic only until we observe it.

My mental model of it is kinda reversed. The maths assign a specific, deterministic state to each electron between each measurement. However, the "left" state is equal to "(up + down) / sqrt(2)". It then follows that when we measure an electron that is in the "left" state along the vertical direction, we get 50% up and 50% down: the probabilistic behavior happens when measuring, which "forces" an electron that was in the "left" state to become either "up" or "down".

I agree though that it would be less frustrating if there was some property of the electrons that would allow to predict in which state it'll collapse.

It's completely counterintuitive, but that's how it works experimentally. For example:

Measure the spin of electrons in direction X (that's done with a weirdly shaped magnet). You'll get either +1 or -1 in a conveniently chosen unit system. That's already weird, you'll never measure +0.5 for example. Keep only the +1 electrons. You can measure them again and again, you'll always get +1 in the X direction.

Now measure those electrons in the Y direction, you'll also get either +1 or -1.

But now, if you measure in the X direction again, you'll get +1 or -1 with 50% probability; although before measuring in the Y direction, these electrons always had spin +1 in the X direction.

Quantum physics is a theory, as in "as far as we can tell, this is an exact mathematical description of the world".

Models are simplifications/approximations made on purpose, as in "I know this is wrong on some level, but it's close enough for my use case", or "this makes the maths solvable".

Some countries solve that by just banning mail-in voting and moving paper ballots.

In France for example, voting happens on a specific day with transparent ballot boxes, with the counting happening in the polling station (you may stay for the whole day in your polling station if you want to oversee the whole process). Yes this is problematic for voters in foreign countries, because they need to go to the embassy to vote, but the voting protocols chose transparency over practicality.

IIRC, deployed military get a polling station in their military base. A voter may also designate someone in the same polling station as theirs to vote in their place.

I believe it's a spectrum, just like there is a whole spectrum between the Mona Lisa and a generic flyer for your local bowling alley.

Monthly revenue?

By adding up the uncertainties of all intermediate measurements they made.

As a parallel, for a regular clock, you'd measure and compute the uncertainties of:

- The distance between the axis of rotation and the center of mass of the pendulum,

- The local acceleration of gravity.

And deduce the pendulum period and its uncertainty by calculus.

In that case I'm not sure you can build (and measure) a pendulum that's more precise than a previous realization of the second (because the meter is defined from the speed of light and the second, and gravimeters probably depend on the definition of the second too).

That's why the definition of base units is carefully chosen to not depend on previous realization. IIRC time is the most fundamental of base units, because other base units depend on it.

In places where it's been living for hundreds of years, that's a legitimate concern.

In Europe though, where aedes aegypti didn't exist 20 years ago, it's probably the other way around: what did the introduction of this new species damage? (apart from making the summer unbearable outside if any of your neighbour isn't very strict with standing water elimination)

All the frequencies, in varying amounts. Next question, please.

I never used it in practice, so maybe the support isn't that good, but I was under the impression that it was possible to pass custom allocators basically everywhere in the STL. See for example the definition of a vector here:

https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/container/vector

Good idea, but it says that hiking in Spain in august is fine...

If a company wants to sell in the EU, they should comply with EU rules. The market and the regulations are closely linked, you won't get one without the other.

"Annexing neighbour" is clearly a non-goal of the EU. One of the reason of its existence is to put an end to european countries invading each others all the time.

Converting Sun to electricity to power a water heater is suboptimal. The water can be heated directly by the Sun. If you can put a water tank above the solar panel, you don't even need a pump.

Coming from an optics/electronics background, it's fascinating to see how much debate there is here around whether a design document is useful or not. I don't think any engineer outside software would start a project without writing at least a few paragraphs to make sure everyone agrees on what needs to be built, and that there's no major blocker.

I blame the low cost of iteration in the software world (even lower now with LLMs).

Most dimensions here look like a designer draw curves that looked good, and the person creating the drawing told their CAD software "put a reference point every 0.5mm of this curve".

The mold manufacturer will ignore this part of the drawing, and tell their machine "follow the curve that's in the production file, with tool X at speed Y etc".

Rates for human drivers are currently at the correct level for insurance companies to pay for damage and make some profit.

If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.

I should not have to install a browser plug-in to opt out of Google analytics (that's what's proposed as an opt-out option in the privacy policy).

Where's the "reject non-essential cookies" button?

> A lot of datasheets are inaccessible without signing an NDA

Only for very high-end stuff, where just designing the board around the chip needs a team of engineers.

Any company doing consultancy in electronics. You're going to have to pay for the time an electronics engineer spend on understanding what you want to do and reviewing your design, plus the consultancy's margin.

I discussed with people working on aircraft components, and my understanding is that weight is a constant obsession for them. Propose a new system to Airbus/Boeing, and the first question they'll ask is "how much does it weight?"

Every kg saved is a kg more of freight that can be transported (or a little less fuel used to keep the plane in the air); save 500g for each seat of a 200-seat plane, and you can put one more paying passenger in the cabin.

I tried three times on my 5-year-old phone. First time got stuck at 90% loading. Second time the tab crashed at 90% loading. Third time Chrome itself crashed once loading finished.

"Translating the datasheet into protocol <X>", is the essence of writing a hardware driver.

Also my experience with hardware is that the datasheet is often incomplete or misleading. Most of the time is spend fiddling with the hardware to understand exactly what needs to be done, in what order, and sometimes with what delay between commands, to make the damn thing work reliably in the way you want.

I've known several people on visas in my european country. They don't need to go out of the country to apply for renewal.

French would use "piratage [informatique]" (roughly "digital piracy"). However, "hacker" is used to name the person committing the crime.

Lots of comments here blaming the bad state of toilets on homeless people doing drugs.

They're not the only issue.

In France, toilets on highways are often disgusting. French highways have stupid-high tolls, so these toilets are used by people who have access to a car, and can spare a few tens of € to get to their destination faster. Not your typical drug-using homeless person. I'd say it's more that some people don't care to clean after themselves, and once the toilet is dirty, no one will touch it if they add up to the mess.

Now define exponentiation by a non-integer.