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salamandars

19 karma · joined November 8, 2020

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salamandars··on Nvidia – open-source auto-ontology
The line follows: "...a revenue metric answered faster is worth nothing if the number is wrong.". Are you seriously suggesting a human wrote this?
salamandars··on "Boy Born on Tuesday" a Thornier Problem Than the Monte Hall Problem?
Thank you for sharing this problem - I find the Monty Hall one pretty intuitive but this one is much twistier!

I have to say, I found your restated problem impossible to understand - I had to google the original problem, which was much more precise and clear:

"I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?"

salamandars··on Tesla Roadster
Well spotted!
salamandars··on Tesla Roadster
The video goes against my intuition for how much performance you can get out of cold gas thrusters. I wonder if someone could do some back of the envelope maths on how much thrust and impulse you can get from a setup like this?

My primary scepticism is how much the prototype weighs, and whether it can still jump with 2 passengers + 1000kg of batteries inside.

salamandars··on Tesla's Robotaxis Blow Through School Zones, NHTSA Petition Alleges
How is it possible to drive 'dangerously slow'? Nobody should be driving at a speed (regardless of the limit) where they cannot react in time to a slow or stopped vehicle appearing ahead of them.
salamandars··on macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review
Is there anything you can point to that demonstrates how journalism has been improved by AI research?
salamandars··on 1% increase in immigration leads to a 1.78%-2.97% increase in Far-Right voting (2024)
Obviously inorganic, but watch them collect a tonne of votes anyway
salamandars··on Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
As a noob, how does the end user improve this? What's the best way to make the knowledge from the specialised wiki available to the LLM?
salamandars··on Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
If there are that many channels you watch regularly, what slice of the pie does each one get from your youtube subscription, a few cents?

You could possibly pick one channel you like each month and give it a one-time $5 donation, which would be equivalent to years of ad revenue from a single viewer.

salamandars··on I want to live like Costco people
This whole comment section reads of Costco astroturf haha
salamandars··on Dallas midair tragedy: New videos show startling change in flight path of p-63
Well, according to wikipedia, only between 11-15% of bird strikes result in damage to the aircraft. Apparently large birds like geese are the main danger.

I imagine a similar distribution with drone strikes, as most drones do not weigh as much as a goose, at least of those in the hands of a typical idiot (who would fly in the path of a plane).

That's why 'very high fatality chance' doesn't seem right to me, but I can't find any statistics on it.

salamandars··on Dallas midair tragedy: New videos show startling change in flight path of p-63
Can you source this? I can't find any information on fatalities due to aircraft-drone collisions, topic of this article notwithstanding.
salamandars··on Caterpillar offers phone with built-in FLIR camera
Rugged cases exist?
salamandars··on AI Homework
Who is going to write the content these AI are trained on?
salamandars··on Gimp development release 2.99.12 includes initial CMYK support
Agreed completely. It is annoying how this is constantly brushed off by some people, especially the project contributors. We should just 'get over it'. Well I can get over it, but how can I pitch this to my boss with a straight face? Or deploy it to 500 users on company managed devices?

When the new hire is offended by the icon on their desktop that says GIMP, I should just say to them, "get over it"?

salamandars··on Razer Co-Founder and Gaming Mouse Inventor Robert Krakoff Has Passed Away
Clearly experiences in this thread vary but I just had to throw my story in as it's the same as you. I've bought two Razer mice and quickly regretted it both times. It seems like their QA can burn you if you get unlucky!

Most recently the Viper Mini: After less than two years the main button clicks became spongier and spongier until they started erroneously reporting double-clicks. The razer utility is also a piece of junk! The logitech mouse I had between these two Razers lasted nearly 10 years and was only replaced due to cosmetic wear.

I got a higher-end logitech mouse this time and they now have this 'esports configurator' which lets you set up your keybinds, sensitivity, LEDs etc, and save it to the onboard memory - no need for an always-on utility app and your settings persist on different devices!

salamandars··on How green is blue hydrogen?
Could hydrogen electrolysis be viable as grid or building level energy storage? Round trip efficiency is bad of course, but I (naively) wonder if it wouldn't have a lot of the downsides fuel cells have for vehicles?

You could bury a huge volume of tanks beneath new buildings and store the gas at a lower pressure than we see in hydrogen car tanks - wouldn't that make the whole system simpler and more economical?

salamandars··on Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine
It's definitely rigged, and even allows the owner to choose how difficult it is just like the one in the article.

Where I grew up there was two places next door to each other which both happened to have stackers. One had junky prizes like cheap earbuds, and the other had great prizes like a gameboy or mp3 player. Sure enough the later was more popular, but no one ever won. Once you got good at the game the one with the junk would 'allow' you to win pretty reliably every dozen or so attempts.

salamandars··on Astronomer Avi Loeb Says Aliens Have Visited, and He’s Not Kidding
I find the idea plausible that theories regarding extraterrestrial life are unfairly dismissed within the profession. And it would be such a tragedy to miss out on real evidence of alien life just because, institutionally, scientists are not allowed to consider it.

But can we put any stock into Avi's opinion on it, given that committing to the 'Oumuamua solar sail idea has been very lucrative for him, in the way of media attention, book deals, podcast appearances etc.? It is a little ironic to talk about other scientist's egos while promoting your own book.

salamandars··on Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case over iPhone Slowdowns
How do these numbers work to be relevant in a phone?

Surely without throttling it never draws more than 1A, that's actually enough to cause significant sag like the 0.3V example?