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Comment Re:Overheard (Score 1) 28

From a nominal flat-panel perspective, yes (gets as high as 6,5x in some parts of the desert southwest). But this isn't a flat panel, it's curved, so your 0-degree-angle values get depressed and your tangential-light numbers get boosted. 5 mi/h and 40mi/day are quite reasonable for the desert southwest.

Obviously you won't get that in, say, Reykjavík ;)

Comment Re:so long, it's been good to know ya (Score 1) 83

I do agree that for whatever use a simple left-right axis is (obviously politics is vastly multidimensional) "left vs. right" is a circle, not a horseshoe. You look at people like Greenwald, Assange, etc and it's easy to see how people loop around the back end.

Basically toward the centre you tend to have the attitude of "the fundamental system is not wrong, but we need to fix X and Y" (just with disagreements over what is right, what is wrong, and what the fixes are). Whereas the more polarized you get to the left and right, the more convinced you are that everything is wrong and it doesn't just need fixes, it needs to be torn down and rebuilt in some new glorious utopian form. So as you approach the backside, you have some unifying attitudes of hating the country and global systems, more prone to supporting demagogues, anti-democratic tendencies, militarism, demonization of the centre (usually under the mistaken belief that the centre actually supports them, whereas actual centrist views are represented only by oppressive minority), etc. The enemies of your country get treated as heroes (for example, the like of both the far-left and far-right of Russia), even when they not only want to see your country destroyed, but are actually ideologically quite different from you. Also, misogyny often starts to creep in through the backdoor of militarism and demogoguery.

Certain sides may be more prone to certain aspects - for example, the right, with its love of guns, is usually an easier slide into militancy, whereas the left, coming from having been in the opposition during the Cold War, usually has an easier route into hating the country, for example. But there gets to be enough unifying aspects on the backend between the far-left and the far-right that some people can swing all the way around.

Comment Re:Like a polarizer? (Score 1) 35

Sure, and we here on Slashdot are criticising the silly article. And I'm criticising your silly repeating of the silly claim that polarization is not a quantum phenomenon because you can "explain" it (in a very narrow energy range if you squint and don't look too close) using classical physics. I probably wouldn't have replied at all if you hadn't told one of your other replies "it's okay if you don't understand quantum mechanics."

The actual paper doesn't use "first quantum material" at all. It says "first class of room-temperature quantum materials that are intrinsically sensitive to the quantum statistical properties defining all forms of light". They actually write it all out twice, which suggests to me that they were aware that shortening it to "quantum material" would sound ridiculous.

In fact, on casual reading it appears to be a fancy polarizing filter that's also sensitive to coherence.

Comment Re:I learned on stick and never used it again (Score 1) 238

It's pretty straightforward. Instead of simple counting on your fingers you treat your right thumb as a 5, your left fingers as 10s and your left thumb as a 50, which lets you count to ten on one hand or a hundred on both. It's fairly obvious once you understand digital notation, but you could also teach the concept using it, just like an abacus.

If you really wanted to get carried away you could treat your fingers as binary digits and count to 1024.

Comment Re:That's nice (Score 1) 57

The systems aren't creative they're just really really fancy search engines that regurgitate what they have ingested.

Are we still saying this? These systems have solved a wide variety of open math problems some of which were borderline famous.

But what are the practical implications of that? Isn't it just as likely that those math problems haven't been solved because there was not any particularly good reason to solve them?

'Dem goal posts are a walking.

Comment Re:What we're all thinking (Score 1) 83

Meh, I knew of Fark back when all that was at the site was a single photo of a squirrel with large genitals.

I used to play on the mud Three Kingdoms in the mid '90s, and Drew was a Wizard (admin) there (named "Cletus"). When Fark became a link aggregator, I used to visit for the Photoshop contests (then ended up drifting off to Worth1000 when that became a thing). I'm not surprised that he ended up launching a porn site, because, well, Drew, but they launched a TV service that ended up getting gobbled up by Adult Swim? Weird.

Crazy to see all of the stuff that's happened with the site since I left; it entirely dropped off my radar.

Comment Re:Overheard (Score 4, Informative) 28

It adds up to 40 miles per day, not 5. 5 would be a cloudy day.

I used to be anti-solar-panels-on-cars back when solar panels were expensive, and ones of reasonable efficiency were even more expensive - the argument was, "put it on your roof where it belongs". But that's just not the case any more. Adding solar is just not that much of a cost to the car. It adds some complexities, but mainly in the design / early manufacturing phase.

Also:

The average American drives 37 miles per day.

1) So if you're in a sunny climate, it covers all of said average-driver's driving. Otherwise, said average-driver has to plug in occasionally, but not nearly as often.

2) Most people drive less than the average (the average is skewed by a long-tail - small numbers of people who drive very far every year). What you actually should be meaning is the median US driver; the median drives 23 miles per day. Most Europeans, even less.

3) Even for said "average american", their daily average is skewed by long drives (e.g. road trips and similar). Wheren of course you're plugging in, you'd be plugging in even if the car was adding 80 miles a day. But when not on road trips, their daily average is lower.

4) Surely you can see the appeal of the tangential benefits, such as being unstrandable - where even if you run out in the middle of the desert 20 miles from the nearest town, you're still going to get there, just delayed (remember that EV ranges, if you drive very slowly, increase like 2x, so 40 miles a day becomes 80, so a 20 mile shortfall is only a ~4h delay on a sunny day).

5) Nobody is saying, "One car for everybody". Of course appeal varies by person and by location. Here in Iceland for example we have three problems. One, very little sun at all for a good chunk of the year. Two, even in the summer, when the days are long, the sun is mainly low and circles around you. Solar power just kinda sucks here in general. And three, the three-wheel config would mean that the centre wheel wouldn't align with tracks in the snow from other cars (although there is a slight advantage, in that it also wouldn't align with road ruts from studded tyres, which often fill with water in the rain and become hazardous).

But somewhere in the southern US, it's a great option.

Comment Arrokoth is such a neat body. (Score 2) 12

For those who didn't follow it, it's not that it's a contact binary that is so neat in and of itself, it's that when they modeled it, they determined that, the collision that formed it was less than 5 meters per second (less than 11 mph / 18 kph). Like a parking lot fender bender, but with the cars being ~750 billion tonnes.

Comment Re:Like a polarizer? (Score 1) 35

Sure, and we are looking for thing that cannot.

We are? We're talking about somebody using the term "quantum material", not looking for evidence supporting quantum physics.

Even so, you should be able to pretty easily notice deviations from Maxwell. It's a pain in the ass with film but pretty well any modern CCD or CMOS sensor should be able to detect shot noise from a double slit, crossed polarizer or just plain old light source experiment at tabletop scale. If not, add an ND filter.

'd be very careful about interpreting QM as "how it works".

Yeah, I didn't say that. It's pretty easy to show that both quantum mechanics and Maxwell are not how it works. Your claim that a polarizer is not a "quantum material" because you can explain it's behaviour with a classical theory (in very limited circumstances) really is assuming "that's how it works" though.

Comment Re:This is getting to be ridiculous (Score 1) 158

Or Slashdot will tell you you need 10 terabytes of the fastest VRAM and a few dozen of the very latest processors from Nvidia.

There it is!

You don't need any RAM at all. You can read each weight from an SSD, a hard drive or a stone tablet. If it's an SSD it's not necessarily "incredibly slow" if you're just playing around and aren't ready to spend fifty thousand dollars on your chatbot. There are benchmarks for running big models on Raspberry Pis for example.

The 50 B generally means you're going to be able to do things like hold most or all of the matrices in memory while you multiply them, which is usually a pretty big performance increase.

Comment Re:They're obsolete. (Score 1) 238

Convenience comes before the rare occasions when it's actually pleasurable to drive a standard day to day. I do not miss a clutch crawling along in traffic or cruising on the highway. And for the in-between bits my car has both a shift by wire stick and paddle shifters if I want to make vroom vroom noises and pretend I'm in F1.

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