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nanomonkey

1,988 karma · joined March 15, 2016

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nanomonkey··on Aging muscle stem cells shift from rapid repair to long-term survival
Interesting, the Devonian also appears to be the period at which fish started sporting limb like appendages and muscle structures, and other animals started to explore land. Perhaps unlimited body growth doesn't work well for animals not entirely supported by water.
nanomonkey··on SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
some of us are anti-capitalist
nanomonkey··on Influencers and OnlyFans models are dominating U.S. O-1 visa requests
I believe they are implying that the US itself isn't in a healthy state. Economic disparity mostly, but also politically, socially, and likely physically. I think many would agree.
nanomonkey··on Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)
I can second this, Termux + Emacs turned my phone back into a personal computer.

It is helpful to add extra keys to your touch keyboard, which you can do by editing your termux properties file (see https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Touch_Keyboard). Helpful when you don't have a hardware keyboard available.

nanomonkey··on The last product to get cancelled
Thanks for the clarification. I got what they were going for it just didn't hit right.

I think supplements would have been a more effective word choice for the analogy for me, as vitamins reference something that is required for life.

nanomonkey··on The last product to get cancelled
This seems like a terrible analogy, as a vitamin is something you can't live without, while pain killers mask the problem. I'd think one would want to be a vitamin and not a pain killer, but the opposite suggestion is being made. Maybe that's why this hasn't stood the test of time.
nanomonkey··on CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
Correct, going from cold compressed liquid co2 though. For supercritical CO2 one would then heat up the gas and use it as a working fluid to turn the turbines further.

If you could reuse the same turbine, one could store excess solar/wind energy in the compressed gas form, and then fire up a natural gas or biomass gasification reactor and then feed the heat into the system to produce more electricity on demand.

nanomonkey··on CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
I'm curious if this method could be used along with super critical CO2 turbine generators. In other words after extracting the energy stored in compressed CO2, if you could then run it through a heat exchanger to bring it up to super critical temps and pressure and then utilize it as the working fluid in a turbine.
nanomonkey··on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
There are some contradictory claims here.

Boilerplate comes when your language doesn't have affordances, you get around this with /abstraction/ which leads to DSLs (Domain Specific Languages).

Matrix math is generally done on more than raw bits provided by digital circuits. Simple things like numbers require some amount of abstraction and indirection (pointers to memory addresses that begin arrays).

My point is yes, we've gotten ourselves in a complicated tar pit, but it's not because there wasn't a simpler solution lower in the stack.

nanomonkey··on Phreeli, no ID cell service provider
I haven't tried them, but they only require a zipcode and use ZKP (zero knowledge proofs) for payment authentication.
nanomonkey··on “Super secure” messaging app leaks everyone's phone number
I agree, but you can mitigate that to some extent by using a phone number that is not linked to your identity.

Phreeli [https://www.phreeli.com/] allows you to get a cell number with just a zip code. They use ZKP (Zero Knowledge Proofs) for payment tracking.

nanomonkey··on Using e-ink tablet as monitor for Linux
As much as I like e-ink, it has terrible refresh rates. I'd love a larger version of the Sharp Memory display technology that could support at least 80 characters wide, and perhaps 8 bit greyscale. The current ones support 60hz refresh and sip power but are limited to black and white only.
nanomonkey··on GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches
As a LineageOS user, I'd be interested in the disparity between GrapheneOS and LineageOS.
nanomonkey··on Functional Quadtrees
I've been looking for the same for scheme and clojure. Here are a few I've found:

Functional Data Structures and Algorithms, A Proof Assistant Approach by Tobias Nipkow (Ed.) [https://fdsa-book.net/functional_data_structures_algorithms....]

Purely Functional Data Structures thesis by Chris Okasaki [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/students/okasaki.pdf]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purely_functional_data_structu...

nanomonkey··on Novelty Automation: A collection of satirical home-made arcade machines
The videos of each "arcade" are quite entertaining:

https://novelty-automation.com/10_current-machines.htm

nanomonkey··on Novelty Automation: A collection of satirical home-made arcade machines
What a creative fellow. The illustrations on those shows are great.
nanomonkey··on True P2P Email on Top of Yggdrasil Network
Curious why you believe it was broken, and is now fixed. What new development are you referring to? I agree that Patchwork kinda took a dive, and functionality started to bitrot with each new maintainer...but it still replicates feeds.
nanomonkey··on Nearby peer discovery without GPS using environmental fingerprints
This could be useful for dynamic clique routing used in mesh networking in large crowds. Although I would think one would need to do the peer discover prior to any Internet shutdown events. It gets around the problem of GPS spoofing, and physical barriers that traditional GPS based groupings have.
nanomonkey··on The man who keeps predicting the web's death
Most of the "alternative webs" are fairly dark forest by design. Each exists at a different variation of the OSI model. And strangely enough most that I've experienced have had entirely better cultures due to their smaller size, or even due to the alternative methods of transmission and replication (no one has to listen or replicate your messages, so if you're an ass, your messages don't propagate).

Often the problem is that we have higher expectations from our technology. It's no longer okay to send a message over clear text on a network. We expect things to be fast, latency free and with security primitives. These additional elements are hard to implement without infrastructure, and hardware that is optimize for the particular task.

nanomonkey··on A 9KB (3KB gzip) single HTML notebook, perfect for minimalists
Or you can just put the following in the url bar of your browser (Ctr-s to save):

data:text/html, <html contenteditable>

nanomonkey··on Memorizing phone numbers
What are the other digit/noun combinations you use? This seems better thought out than the wikipedia page you linked.
nanomonkey··on Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets
One can still use simpler contact information like a phone number, email or QR code to transfer a user id.

While I love what Signal has done, the compromises are significant. I use Secure Scuttlebutt, Cabal, Spritely Goblins, Tor, email and a variety of other P2P software on whatever device I like, but Signal requires a phone with Android or Apple, and requires that I lock my id to my phone number.

nanomonkey··on Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets
Good luck brute force guessing an Ed25519 keys (32 bytes).

Honestly there are so many better options than phone numbers available. If you're already using QR-codes to transmit user ids, you might as well use something that is transferable and user generated.

nanomonkey··on Solar panels + cold = A potential problem
Microwaves were originally specifically invented to microwave frozen hamsters:

https://interestingengineering.com/videos/1950s-reanimating-...

nanomonkey··on ‘Robber bees’ invade apiarist’s shop in attempted honey heist
Not quite the same, but in anthropology this is known as Nacirema. "Body Rituals of the Nacirema" was the first example.
nanomonkey··on Coffeematic PC – A coffee maker computer that pumps hot coffee to the CPU
GPUs and alcohol distillation always seemed like a match:

I used to manage a scientific supercluster, heavily laden with GPUs. We were constantly consuming about 60kW of power. These GPUs were happy to run at 85C, which from other interests I knew to be the temperature where alcohol distillation occurred. I always wanted to install a heat exchanger and distill fuel with all of the waste heat.

nanomonkey··on Jank is C++
Ferret is another Clojure implementation in C, that has a decent C/C++ interface: https://nakkaya.com/2017/06/24/ferret-lisp-ffi-notes/

I'm curious if the author of jank was aware of Ferret, and what was found lacking.

nanomonkey··on Local-first software (2019)
Shamir's Secret sharing allows one to store secret keys within m of n number of your peer group (where m is less than n), thus you can hand out an encrypted secret with 5 of your friends and reproduce the secret by getting 3 of them to respond back to you with the secret at a later date. None of the peers will be able to reproduce the secret by themselves.

There are other options for key storage, revoking group privileges, etc. It's an extensive topic, but the foundation is there, it just depends on your network and use cases.

nanomonkey··on Harvest the sun twice: Agrivoltaics promises sustainable food, energy and water
Yes, like hydrolyzing vegetable oil, you can pack more hydrogen onto a carbon chain. You can also use the Fischer–Tropsch process to make longer chains out of smaller molecules like carbon monoxide and hydrogen.
nanomonkey··on Harvest the sun twice: Agrivoltaics promises sustainable food, energy and water
I'm not talking about growing plants directly for the production of biofuels, that is a silly proposition when there are mountains of unused organic waste being produced annually by nature and by agriculture. Utilizing the organic "waste streams" that already exist to produce fuel is quite sufficient for our storage needs. Agricultural waste, poop, dead trees and branches, dry grass or other "wildfire fuels" to produce methane, hydrogen and oil through gasification , fermentation and anaerobic digestion is simply low hanging fruit that is available to us right now. I've worked in this field, doing gasification, so I'm quite aware of what is possible.

Would you rather we burn grass and dead standing wood in natural environments to curtail wildfires, or would you rather it was used to make clean energy that is carbon negative? Yes carbon negative. You put carbon back into the ground through the use of biochar, where it is stable for thousands of years, and actually improves the soil.

Anaerobic digestion of all of your household waste (including feces) is also possible for production of all of your stove and heating gas.

Internal combustion engines aren't at their end of technology cycle. You should probably look into supercritical CO2 closed loop turbines if you think that we aren't still innovating. Regardless, by using an internal combustion engines, or an external combustion engine (Stirling engine, or modern steam engine) instead of a furnace, one can produce heat and power all in one unit from within your house or district (depending on how you want to scale things).

I love solar, I really do, as well as batteries. But you need to use everything at your disposal if you want to get away from petroleum.

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