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Comment Re: Physics Lesson (Score 1) 54

Weight is a vector quantity

Ehh, you *can* define it that way, but it's often defined as a scalar quantity W=mg, were m and g are both scalars, and *always* used that way in common parlance (and scientific parlance rarely considers weight). Even the most anal physicist, if asked their weight, would only give it in vector notation if they were trying to make a point.

Comment Re: I am for CO2 reduction but against credits.. (Score 1) 18

You mean this Climate Commitment Act? The one with a 248 page report detailing exactly where all the funds are going? Because that's the only Climate Commitment Act I could find. So if you don't know where the funds are going, well, maybe you just didn't bother looking it up?

Comment Re: Why are there four bright spots on the ring? (Score 1) 41

Because we're not perfectly along the line between the source(es) and the lens, so the light doesn't bend around in a complete circle, but just gets bent. It's nearly impossible to get a perfect ring, as that would require a perfect point source, spherical lens, and extremely lucky positioning. Instead, some spots of the source get bent but not smeared into a circle.

Comment Re: "Authentic, lag-free display capabilities" (Score 1) 119

Lol not, lag on a CRT isn't "measured in nanoseconds." CRTs have an input rate of maybe (at the high end) 200hz. That means every pixel is updated every 5 ms at the very fastest, which is (roughly) the actual input lag of an ideal monitor (the exact minimum number depends on how you define "lag"). Modern LCD displays can get up to 500+ hz with less than 2 ms of lag, which is faster than CRTs. Of course if you're talking only about *processing* lag, sure, CRTs are faster, because they don't *do* any processing. But the practical time between the source updating a pixel and the display actually changing the pixel is faster in a lot of modern monitors than it is with CRTs (note I'm talking mainly about computer monitors, most TVs are pretty bad about... well, everything, and for those input lag is going to be much worse than for a CRT).

Comment Re: Short-range radiation only? (Score 1) 89

Not quite, the short ranged radiation is already beta particles, not alphas (both are short ranged, albeit alphas are shorter). "Batteries" like this convert the beta radiation directly to electricity (beta radiation is, after all, already electricity, in a sense).

Comment Re: I think this was mentioned a few years ago... (Score 2) 89

The 15 joule number is already in terms of electricity. These batteries do direct nuclear-electric conversion through betavoltaic effects (note that such devices already exist commercially, but most use tritium which is very expensive and relatively short lived).

Comment Re: We do know how it works though (Score 3, Informative) 86

You're half right, they're not Markov chains. But OP isn't describing a Markov chain, he's talking about the transformers used in LLM, which use the output tokens from prior steps as an input to probabilistically generate the next token (based on what word is most likely next, given the entire context and training weights).

Comment Re: USB drives to blame (Score 2) 51

You generally wouldn't. Why would you need to upgrade it? The main reason for most systems is security vulnerabilities. That's not an issue if it's properly air gapped. You're certainly not going to trust something like Windows update or aptitude to update the system anyways (those are a *huge* security risk for state-level entities). If it really absolutely needs upgrades, you'd just pull the hard drive, or replace the entire system.

Comment Re: How is a stream of neutrinos generated? (Score 2) 112

These responses are a great example of why LLMs are absolutely godawful for producing factual information, because both are massively inaccurate or just plain wrong. 1) To produce neutrinos you use protons, not electrons (it might technically be possible to use electrons, idk I'm not that kind of physicist, but no one does). 2) you don't smash them together, you hit them against a target. 3) Neutrinos are neutral particles and can't be guided using electromagnetic fields. 4) Momentum conservation means the produced neutrinos have to travel in the *same* direction as the incoming protons, not the opposite.

Comment Re: Strange take (Score 1) 100

You're mistaking funding for income. The source of income is the end user, but funding mostly comes from investors. Income is (generally) what allow a company to sustain itself and keep running in an operating mode. Funding OTOH allows the company to setup and explore new avenues for income, which in this case means setting up mines/wells/etc, which is far more destructive (long term) for the environment than simply keeping existing projects running. Income can be used as a source of funding, in some cases, but it's a lot harder and scarcer, as investors usually demand the profits in return for their investment. The point of pushing for divestiture is mostly to limit the *expansion* of fossil fuel usage (which is sustained primarily by investors), and not to restrict or reduce current usage (which is sustained primarily by users, not investors). Obviously there are efforts to limit usage as well, but that's done through different means (like fuel efficiency, emissions standards, EV tax credits, etc ).

Comment Re:Was any existing encryption actually broken? (Score 1) 52

That said, one obvious concern in the other direction is that the encryption schemes which we are hoping to be resistant to quantum computing based attacks have had much less attention given to them (in part due to them simply being much younger), and thus we have less certainty that they are even classically good encryption. And we've had now multiple examples of supposedly quantum resistant algorithms being cracked by completely classical methods. See for example :https://cacm.acm.org/news/nist-post-quantum-cryptography-candidate-cracked/. So switching to these new algorithms may be creating new vulnerabilities to deal with a threat that has not yet substantially emerged.

Which is why no one is suggesting moving to a post-quantum algorithm alone. What Chrome is implementing is a hybrid key exchange, ML-KEM768+X25519 (the X25519 part is a standard elliptical curve cypher). Unless your implementation is absolutely terrible, you can't decrease security by layering on multiple encryption schemes, so even if ML-KEM is no more secure than ROT13, it still won't introduce any new vulnerability.

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