techdragon

Must have gotten something worked out with Google then, or someone was wrong when reposting/combining info on Twitter… which was definitely a possible reason… but the iOS half seems to still be true at least for me in Australia…

The app is not X because Apple doesn’t allow single letter iOS application names on the App Store. It’s still Twitter on my phone and seems like they haven’t even bothered correctly rolling out the new icon around the world… I have automatic updates on and the icon is still the blue bird for me here in Australia.

Get legally drunk enough you can’t drive then bump into it by accident… “sorry officer, I was just trying to make my way home, I had a bit much and I had to leave my car behind….” Or pretend to be drunk and have fun with it… I’d be tempted to treat the Miami one like a soccer ball depending on how heavy it is.

Material science can be like that … you’re pretty sure your theory works and your results don’t wildly invalidate it, but they aren’t good enough or are missing a property or something… and it turns out you could very easily have made a bad batch, poorly aligned fibers, badly mixed epoxy, or any number of possible issues… so you try again and again to get it right… sometimes it’s for very little incremental progress in state of the art… other times it might be a Nobel prize winning superconductor.

An un-enforced felony is still a federal crime, you just know your not going to get in trouble for it… The thing is MasterCard and Visa as part of being allowed by various laws, are not allowed to facilitate people making money from committing federal crimes… which the businesses selling (state) legal cannabis are doing.

It’s pretty simple. They either need federal legislation to say it’s ok for them to be doing this, or it needs to stop being a federal crime, otherwise they are legally required to do exactly what they are doing.

By your right about it being government control stuff, psychological resistance to letting go of the War on Drugs is pretty high, and unless it changes it’s going to remain in the current status quo until enough of them get too old to hold their seats in the House/Senate and new people with less fossilised opinions get to vote on legislation regarding the topic.

Seriously… elemental phosphorus is controlled by the DEA? The ATF I could maybe understand but the DEA… that’s just whacky.

They have patents… this is the sensible approach to take with your intellectual property well defended. Between the patents and the published paper establishing his role and thus Nobel eligibility…

At this point assisting anybody who wants to help prove him correct (and I know that I’m making the assumption that he genuinely believes he has made what he claims in the paper with the mechanisms and methodology as outlined) will just help secure get rich faster and make his Nobel prize even more secure.

Polycrystaline materials are kinda finicky so more samples helps eliminate the error bars. So obviously why didn’t they do heaps of samples and have a longer paper? … Money! They got funding for quantum physics based sensor/detector research and this appears to have been a happy accident, so naturally they kept their heads down, got their patents (they have multiple patents each of which costs money) and did a little bit more work to be absolutely sure, then as soon as it was smart, they published their results and are now going to let the entire world excitedly double check their results… because the results if true, are fucking awesome…

Of course the world wants to replicate this, no one wants to be waiting for someone else to confirm a breakthrough this big… I bet there’s even some corporate labs doing a little work on replication too, so some smart managers in various industries can factor room temperature superconducting materials into their designs and future plans sooner, because otherwise their competitors might be! (Obviously there’s not going to be a lot of this since most companies don’t have internal science groups but the Lockheed-Martins of the world, the Daewoos, the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the Ratheons … I’d be surprised if they didn’t already have someone somewhere in the world who is still currently making batches and putting them into furnaces because the material is cheap and you can get a lot more certainty from additional samples if your are prepared to pay for the work. I’d be dammed sure someone at General Dynamics is making some because it would massively help them convince the US Navy to give them more funding to continue work on railguns!

Good luck with your samples and in the very least it should be good fun to play a small part in the replication of results. If documented well enough you might even wind up in a meta-study some day.

The bigger the impact the more of a splash it will make in social contexts consequently we see a lot of blatant and cautious naysayers with various explanations and individual explanations for the logic of their refutation.

But it’s If it’s shocking enough, groundbreaking enough, anyone with the expertise to try will do so either to see if it’s right instead of waiting around for someone else to do it and write it up and publish it, or to prove that it’s not and for something this big at least, give BobbyBrocolli a new possible video topic to consider.

I didn’t even for a moment think you were praising them, it’s just so easy for people to forget the percentage breakdowns behind the PR pieces these companies put out. I’m sure I’ve done it myself too often enough.

Corporations aren’t inherently an evil concept… the rubicon was corporate personhood. The idea that corporations have equivalent rights to people unless we legislate that they don’t… that’s the mind poison… the rot that has slowly eaten into society and for more than a hundred years has been backing up capitalism and corporatism and all the greed and corruption with the subtle backstop of thought terminating cliches like “people have rights and corporations are people so they have rights” and normal people don’t want to learn a mountain of history to unpack the lies and bullshit…

And companies have the money to hire the best PR… so they have done a pretty good job convincing everyone on the sorts of subjects that are in the corporations best interests… sadly.

Corporate profits soared, but not the profits that get paid to artists.

Wholehearted support for the efforts by the WGA, SAG, and the related unions, to stop “big corporate media” fucking over everyone in the arts even if it won’t help the average Spotify streamer today or tomorrow, but perhaps eventually it will further into the future…

Yeah I probably could have explained a bit more, I did find connections that could do it but it was never quite right in terms of a size pin count or cost trade off for this specific project. The standard absolutely has options for higher current but it comes with a smaller pool of available suppliers making those parts and thus they cost more. I wasn’t prepared to spend $50 Australian on a single pair of connectors for this project, especially since due to wiring limitations I’d have probably had to get two pairs.

They firmly entered my mental toolbox as a go to for a flexible circular connector when I don’t need to join existing physical interfaces like Ethernet or higher speed USB where the signal reliability is potentially worth just using a sealed socket with matching circular screw on connector, but for the sort of thing where I’d have made up a DB9 or DB25, I’m definitely going to be reaching for these again in future (I did get a few of them and used the solder cup versions to avoid needing the crimping tools and the associated extra costs)

I was tempted to include unicode when I enhanced the URL/Domain generating strategies in Hypothesis to correctly generate from the set of all valid TLDs a few years ago! But I decided against it since technically the canonical storage form doesn't contain the unicode characters as it should have had Punycode (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode ) conversion done by the "input" system be it a URL bar of your browser or whatever input handling is in play. Assuming all domain processors are able to correctly Punycode was a bit too much, so I kept it to the set of basic valid characters without needing Punycode conversion, and if someone wanted to fuzz test fully they could just add a layer that generates from full unicode.

I went down this road a bit too for a project where I wanted to minimise the enclosure complexity, keep everything in and out of the box to nice circular conectors... and yeah it was tempting to get into the MIL-DTL-38999 train, but I needed some high amperage low voltage DC stuff for power (it was a 3d printer project and I needed stuff like 8-14 Amps and 24-48V DC for various heaters, and a lot of these are nice for high density data, but its hard to find one that can do multiple higher power connections. I ended up giving up since I would find so many that got close but in the end the project form factor changed due to cooling issues (larger enclosure for more airflow due to insufficient fan static pressure)

They are definitely cool connectors though if you only need a bunch of data and don't need the higher power density I needed at the time.

I thought there was something out there like this but I wasn’t sure if it had actually built practical devices yet, cool to see where the state of the art has gone since I was last deeply involved in the ASIC & VLSI world. From what I read there I’d expect significant developments based on a number of the technologies outlined in that article if we do indeed have a room temperature superconductor we can build miniature circuits with…. But one issue I don’t think they mentioned will be grain sizes our transistors are getting very very small with current lithography technology. And it may be difficult to get equivalently small features (to use the industry term for the wires and bits we build silicon chip transistors out of) using superconducting materials where we have to control grain sizes and multi element mixtures, there will be lots of work on it so I’m sure it may change, but there will be a fundamental difference in how small we can make the conductor if it involves having multiple elements and crystal grains in specific structural arrangements, unlike a pure metallic wire which can be as thin as a few atoms (at this size your limits entirely depend on how tolerant you are of electrons accidentally tunnelling to other nearby conductors)

While a room temperature superconductor would potentially have some uses in building a CPU… it’s not as relevant as you might think due to the semiconductor being the operating physics at play to make the transistors and perform the electrical switching and everything stemming from that underlying electrical unit.

You could absolutely use superconductors for all the connecting wires, and with a little engineering it might also be good for conducting heat away from the chip die as part of the larger CPU package… it wouldn’t be a good interface material (pins for connecting to the motherboard) as you want oxidisation resistance and a level of ductility and malleability to help with making a very good electrical connection between the surfaces when they are mechanically pressed together. But overall it will have some uses, it’s just not an immediately applicable technology for the silicon chips themselves… lots of potential in circuit designs and I’m sure if someone invented a way to lay this material onto a PCB as easily as we can print copper traces on them today that inventor would get pretty rich… it’s just not likely to make much of a change to the silicon chip die itself due to the need for semiconductors to do the transistor switching …

Of course someone might have invented a superconducting transistor that I haven’t heard of and if that’s the case disregard most of what I’ve just written haha.

Yeah, it’s been a pretty solid trend line, new superconductor, first batch is usually kinda shitty, but proves the basics, refining the mix nails down its exact performance characteristics.

It’s spongy grainy crap indeed… but as long as their analysis holds up to scrutiny and replication… and whoa boy do I bet there are people already trying to replicate this result as I’m typing my reply and reading the rest of the comments…. As long as the results hold up and this isn’t an abnormally low performing superconductor… i have no doubt this is going to win a Nobel prize. This has been the prize for a long time in this whole discipline, and they may have finally nailed it.

We as a species may be on the bring of a revolutionary step forward in what we can achieve in engineering and science. Better instruments and more powerful or sophisticated motors and power systems. It’s heady stuff to think it may happen in my lifetime.

Oh god that just reminded me how often people ignore the question asking for posix shell or “/bin/sh” or other specific shell scripting language… and processed to answer the question using bash, zsh, Perl, python, or even the slightly less wrong (because it is kinda weird to be shell scripting without a moderately normal unix environment) of using a bunch of Unix binary programs to do the requested job without actually solving the core problem of the question, because the tools made it easier…

And then to ice the cake you find the question because your question has been marked as a duplicate of the older question where they answered using unix binary tools… and you specifically asked about doing something in “pure shell script” or something similar to that phrase.

Stack overflow is fundamentally a system design that breaks down at scale due to misalignment of incentives that are necessary for it to work well at smaller scales (as can be seen in the successful operation of various smaller Stack Exchange sites for various topics such as Law, Aviation, Physics, etc)

As mentioned by upon_drumhead (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36841141) there are much better devices for this job.

I'd recommend anyone looking for this sort of device to check out the devices on this list here (just the Energy Meters section) https://sigrok.org/wiki/Supported_hardware#Energy_meters

Sigrok support will ensure you have a well supported open specification device that already has alternative software available in case whatever software is bundled with the device turns out to be substandard or eventually unsupported.

Oh absolutely. It’s a fun detail that unlike a lot of other other governments, political parties aren’t actually codified in the US at the foundational documents level, when you find political parties backed into government somewhere (like bipartisanship mandates in review processes) it’s centuries of the bureaucratic sedimentation where it has built up rules to handle the changing of time and the changing world.

It’s easy to see the biased nature of media when you have a lifetime of exposure and get even a basic level of education on comparing sources and other media literacy techniques. I live in Australia where the newspapers are long known for bias.

A great example of bias at work is media coverage of the WGA (and now SAG, etc) strikes… all the big news organisations CNN, CBS, Fox, etc are owned by the companies the WGA are negotiating against … you’ve got a neat example of how these companies put their spin on an issue outside of the traditional US political fighting and where the left viewpoint/bias of most of them is now at odds with the corporate agenda and how painfully obvious the editorial biases are counter to that.

In a two party system it is often a “worse of two evils” …

But when you have people like some of the people put forth by the GOP as candidates… it can be hard to avoid a good vs evil comparison… Democrats aren’t automatically good people and a lot of them at various levels of politics are clearly just in it for the money and power… but some of these Republican candidates… I don’t even know how some of them get votes beyond hardcore republican voters who will vote republican because they believe, at a near religious level, that they are a republican voter be it earnest thought, parental indoctrination, or just outright propaganda, but they have been convinced and are now locked in and will remain “republican voters”.

George Washington had it right, political parties weaken the mind and rot society through the slow abrogation of decision making towards deference to a greater party loyalty when the first loyalty of an elected official should be to their office, and the second to those who elected them. He saw it coming and warned against it in his farewell address to congress after just 8 years as President he could see the seeds of what would become modern political polarisation growing…

Edit: I should mention I’m Australian so my perspective is that of studying history and viewing US politics from the outside and seeing how US foreign policy affects my own country.

Shame they don’t give you any extra certification or recognition for more than two years of learning about the care and maintenance of cryogenic high vacuum systems… that’s a whole persons job in some places!

I’m not looking forward to thermal vacuum testing for my robots… because I don’t think there’s a big enough chamber in Australia… option one is (assuming funding) building a thermal vacuum chamber that can get down to GEO level vacuum with all the fun a large volume vacuum system entails… option two is shipping the entire thing to a friendly country with larger chambers (ESA in EU or NASA in the USA) but then there’s the space technology export paperwork … and I don’t know which would be worse.

Because the correct minimum set of people is those who are in the channel when it was shared to the channel… and most people aren’t thinking of possible future information leaks when sharing documents directly into a channel with specific people the document is intended for…

The mismatch makes sense to programmers and IT types who have internalised the “computers are stupider than we make them look” way of thinking… but most normal non computer professionals are probably just thinking “I am sharing this with these people right now.

It will be the centrifuges, and the extra words are to help obscure the intended target of the promise in an effort to continue the wide scale obfuscation of nuclear technology as part of the whole “born secret” international non-proliferation effort thing.

The issue with nuclear weapons isn’t the weapon it’s the enrichment. The isotopic separation via centrifugal forces is the most efficient and technically challenging method of enrichment, and the hardware required involves extremely high RPMs and requires running them non stop round the clock in banks of hundreds of connected together so that the tiny fraction of a percentage each individual centrifuge can enrich the isotopes eventually ends up adding up to a significant enough to be useful for nuclear stuff.

As you can imagine building a 50 thousand RPM centrifuge to run 24/7 is quite challenging and involves a lot of high precision parts.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippe-type_centrifuge

Not sure where the dislike comes from, when all configuration management tools have issues with "orphaned nodes". I've even have small bugs/misconfigurations in fully push/declarative setups with Terraform packages where they stopped identifying updates correctly. If anything, with a push tool like Terraform reporting that it did what it planned on doing successfully, its arguably easier to not notice something has been orphaned since you won't have any signal back that something is "wrong", an orphaned configuration node has nothing to do and therefore is already "correct". Salt may have its flaws, but I find it hard to argue that "orphaned nodes" is any more of a flaw of salt than it is of cfEngine, Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, Helm Charts, Kubernetes Operators, or any other "configuration management tool".

Also... Salt does have High Availability options, https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/topics/highavailabilit... with Replication/Failover and Multi-Master modes, and there's also "Syndic" which break up how much each master is responsible for in order to create failure domains or separate responsibilities between stacks of infrastructure like having one per datacenter... oh and the underlying data stores that masters and syndic daemons rely on can be setup with highly configurations since you can keep the cached data in Redis, Consul, EtcD, or MySQL...

Salt is a bit complicated, but just can't understand where you're coming from here. I've never used a configuration management system that wasn't a bit complicated in one way or another, their job is to be the sin-eater of the complexity that is inherent in managing computers and software.

I can’t find the videos or channel because google search is so useless these days. But I have seen some DIY drone designs that used unusual configurations. One that comes to mind was a triangle/y shaped tri rotor drone that cut power to one “arm” and basically switched modes like a tilt rotor airplane. By using the upper two motor supports as wings to generate lift it was able to fly forward with lift at one third the power… and i think they used some clever torque balancing between the arms to get a similar effect as traditional counter rotating propellers.

There’s a lot of innovation going on in DIY drone design at the moment, the challenge is actually finding it and following it as it’s all distributed across random reddits, forums, social feeds, patreon updates, and YouTube channels… I’m sure someone dedicated to following the field can probably keep on top of it but I’m more of a space nerd than an airplane nerd so i get exposure to these neat designs mostly by random chance due to lots of the various social and search algorithms lumping everything under “aerospace”.

If I’m remembering it correctly he was experimenting with the drone not having a preference for which motor support arm was “down” and having the drone control software automatically transition based on the current attitude and velocity, so he could “drop” to forward flight mode and have one arm dip, or manually fly it “over” into the mode and have it switch automatically. Seemed very clever. But while it was in “tri-rotor” mode it had similar aerodynamic properties to the X shaped wing designs due to the Y shaped wing design also having symmetry around the roll axis.

Its aerodynamically simpler to have reliable control of a symmetrical system like this. Your pitch and yaw control are the same and your roll control becomes not “unnecessary” but definitely not as critical for controlling the flying craft as it is with “traditional” asymmetric combinations of wings, canards, tails, and other aerodynamic surfaces.

It’s actually pretty easy to experiment with if you have a copy of kerbal space program. Make a “wing tip sitter” with a single fuel tank, engine, and airplane cockpit, then use swept wings with landing legs to keep the engine off the ground and then fire it up and take it for a spin and see how it can “freely” manoeuvre in any pitch/yaw direction and you can remain stable in your flight regardless of roll,

This allows a tube launched system to just pop out the wings and immediately begin manoeuvring based on internal sensors with zero visual ground/sky needed. It’s ok to “level off” immediately at the desired altitude and then immediately turn towards the desired heading and proceed to target. It’s not as aerodynamically efficient (extra wings add mass and in the optimal lift orientation don’t add more lift) but it is more manoeuvrable and that’s valuable in a missile.

If it helps to understand the trade off… You see more traditional wing designs with longer ranged missiles (like Tomahawk cruise missiles), even tube launched ones, where the lift efficiency is desired they design two larger wings in the middle like a “normal airplane” to have the maximum possible lift for their desired speed/drag/weight/size and then have smaller fins at the back for stability with steering by some combination of manoeuvring surfaces and/or engine thrust. They trade the manoeuvring power of this “x” design for the more efficient long range performance of a more traditional wing design.

Mostly correct but with an important exception. Our two primary naval bases Fleet Base West and Fleet Base East, are located in proximity to populated areas. Fleet Base East is basically in Sydney and Fleet Base West is approximately 35km from Perth, somewhat offshore and to the south, but not that it’s the most accurate predictor but NukeMaps estimates for blast and fallout have moderate to significant effects on the city of Perth depending on the size of the nuke used, which depends a lot on how much an adversary wants to ensure that they destroy infrastructure the Australian and US navies can use to support, resupply, and maintain nuclear submarines in the Antarctic and Indian Oceans, the AUKUS treaty which will give Australia its first nuclear submarines also includes provisions for greater cooperation and interoperability with UK and US submarines, and will involve US nuclear submarines getting supply and basic maintenance at Fleet Base West even before we have our own nuclear attack submarines as part of the overall plan to train and upskill the Australian navy to support the new submarines.

So while a strike against communications infrastructure only would indeed be aimed at facilities in remote enough locations that the general population need not worry too much about the nuclear part of the war that just happened… if they expand the target list to include the Australian navy’s facilities, then Perth and Sydney are in for a pretty bad time.

I’d filter applications by their data collection if I had the power to… but that isn’t an option.

Just like how it’s not an option to filter free and free with in app purchases… or an option to filter for apps based on if their are universal apps I only pay once for …

Apple give me no means to efficiently empower myself. They expose the primitives needed to empower me, I can open up each entry and read the info perhaps keep a handwritten list of which ones I’ve actually looked at… but Apple systemically avoid giving power users the ability to efficiently use these primitives out of the box… preferring instead to craft a slick modernist minimalist vision where the unsightly extra options are hidden away or don’t exist to worry or confuse users…

Composing things creates permutations complexity which costs money to build and maintain, and Apple have become a very cheap company. The premium they command for hardware quality and global service and support only goes so far when they constantly undermine their software experience in the long term. I don’t care if they are a multi trillion dollar company, if they fucking spent some of that money on quality software for their computers.

Some countries literally have no plans for warning the public. Like Australia…

We have emergency warning systems that can do all the modern stuff like cell/tower area broadcast/push, websites, data feeds, and radio/tv station protocols for major enough events… which are all nationally coordinated, but actually activating them is delegated to state level control, so a national emergency is passed down to the state emergency management organisations… but while Australia would absolutely know we’ve got nukes incoming (5 Eyes intel, and our own massive over the horizon radar systems) and probably have some idea where they are headed… that’s a military matter with no publicly documented process.

We have a publicly documented process to handle a biological incident (weapon or accident doesn’t change how you deal with this much once it’s happened) and we’ve got a publicly document procedure for re-entering space debris (which we’ve actually used recently due to some random spaceX debris in a farmer’s paddock) …

But we have no plan for if we’re going to get nuked… which is only partly understandable.

We’re not exactly spread out enough that a dedicated nuclear attack couldn’t exterminate >90% of the entire population of Australia. Depending on the missile and it’s MIRV/Decoy ratio and the yield of the weapons, you could probably get above 90% with 3 or 4 ICBMs. There’s no infrastructure for sheltering, and we’re completely unprepared for the aftermath, having a plan that details how fucked the survivors might be is … not something I think a lot of government ministers want to sign their names to… bad optics…

However the counter argument is we’re a major US ally providing material support to US overseas military power projection by way of naval ports (which we just made more important as part of our sub deal making those ports more useful for US nuclear submarines) our significant regional radar coverage (JORN is quite the beast of a radar) and us hosting secure downlinks for the US orbital assets covering this hemisphere and us hosting a major communications facility which would likely play a role in ensuring the final communication of orders to submerged nuclear ballistic missile submarines in the event that a nuclear war actually happens. I find it hard to imagine Australia won’t have at least a couple of nukes headed out way somewhere early on the list of targets even if it’s not so much about Australia as it is about destroying and degrading the ability of the US armed forces to operate in the indo-pacific region.

So on the one hand… probably going to happen in the event the shit hits the fan so hard nuclear war starts… on the other hand there’s not a lot we can do to prepare or defend right now against the sudden outbreak of nuclear war. So why worry anyone with detailed plans for horrific doom. Sure if tensions rise we might get some US missile defence systems that could help make it less doomsday, but that kind of military planning is probably a classified bullet point on some future planning list based on one or more of the treaties Australia has with America already.

Oh and there’s the classic “On the Beach” if anyone is looking for more of this kind of horrible disaster scenario stuff.

I've looked into this!

The issue with python is dynamic typing... It could be a tractable problem for fully type hinted code, but when your object type can be meta-programmed from external data, something I've seen SOAP client libraries do (point client class object at WSDL -> call virtual method name on client class -> get arbitrary tree of data objects which have no code representation with specific class types as appropriate)... it can be nigh impossible to fully resolve this.

I'd love to have tools to scan what I could, but its remarkably challenging due to the level of meta-programming that Python provides.

I admit I'm clearly not as well versed on the topic as you are at this based on looking at your work, so its entirely possible I've missed some obvious tricks that make it easier, but I'm not sure I've got the time any more to tackle a fun new project.