If a chemical reaction is sped up by sound waves, does it mean the chemicals have a special sense of sound? Or is it just the basic mechanics of increasing collisions between different atoms/ions/molecules?

So glad I switched from Fitbit to Garmin. Google has done everything possible to lose me as a customer.

If it's as effective against stovetop fires as the KMPH video indicates, some kitchen manufacturer should license this tech and build it into their vent hoods. Some sizable percentage of house fire start on stovetops, so killing them off early would be a good thing.

A lot of the audio production in individual videos is really bad. This isn't anything to do with YouTube per se, not their compression algorithms or other features. A lot of YouTubers have absolutely no concept of microphone placement, of using audio compression, of reducing background noise. All of which are things which will drastically affect audio quality and the ability of a speech-to-text model to create subtitles.

It would be nice if YouTube would normalize all the uploaded videos to one set standard. Note I'm not suggesting that they compress the videos as that might change the intended presentation of professional audio productions. I just mean peak-finding normalization which could be implemented losslessly and without breaking existing video links.

Having said that, when I look at my own channel - and I am not claiming to have great audio; I have a host which would destroy a lavalier microphone in mere seconds. YouTube's subtitling is really good. It automatically switches between English and French and Hebrew, and even with a fair bit of background noise (welding, grinding, cooking, crowd noise, music) it generally gets the text correct. So I don't know what the original complaint is, except that it's not perfect. Well, guess what, neither is human hearing. How about that famous Jimi Hendrix line, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy."

Speaking as a motorcycle rider, ebikes are dangerous. Not because of the bike but because of the riders. They often don't wear safety gear, they don't follow traffic laws, and many bikes top out at 70-80kph. It took considerable effort to get my Class M. A bike going that fast should require licensing and safety courses and helmet laws. Most people don't realize they can squid out on the road on an ebike just like you will on a motorcycle without proper gear.

I just installed Fedora 44 on my old Win10 laptop. Because Microsoft made sure this perfectly good laptop with 16gb RAM could not run Win11. And Affinity Suite runs great on wine now. And no obnoxious telemetry tracking. Oh yeah, for games: steam and lutris too.

Yeah yeah yeah, linux linux linux

still, Microsoft is in self-destruct mode.

And then they disappear. That's the "so long..." part. So if they're still here, they haven't said goodbye yet.

To me the hoops that smoothbrains will jump through to avoid IPv6 and stay on legacy IPv4, especially when hosting, is pathetic. NAT, port forwarding, tunnels, blah blah blah blah.

I have something like ~1.2 trillion times the number of routable addresses that the entire IPv4 space has. Not all are reachable, of course, just the services that need incoming access and they're each on their own isolated DMZ.

Forgot to add: if you enable IPv6, be sure to use the browser extension IPvFoo. It shows a small 4 or 6 in your URI bar to let you know what protocol you're connecting to. Once enabled, you'll see just how much stuff out there actually is IPv6.

Started the move about 18 months ago when I decided to get off my lazy ass. My ISP gives out a /56 prefix, so that lets me run 256 /64 subnets/VLANs in the house, currently there are ~10 in use. Everything get a GUA through SLAAC and I use RAs (Router Advertisements) to give ULAs to everything. Any external facing services get their own VLAN and /64 for the system(s) as needed. Firewall blocks all incoming as they usually do by default and I punch a hole for the external-facing systems. They can't reach back into the network, they only answer the phone. All the systems update DNS dynamically if the prefix or full address ever change.

I have an SSH bastion set up. In all this time there has not been a single SSH attempt from the internet. On IPv4 it was constant background noice.
For those legacy IPv4-only systems on the internet, I set up NAT64. I have an IoT VLAN and IoT 2.4 GHz wireless network that are only IPv4 because a lot of IoT network stacks are junk.

I'm still farting around with it, but man oh man, there's no way I'd go back to IPv4. It was one of the best moves I've done in ages.

They seem particularly unreliable when asked to tell the difference between a headmaster and a fundamental rule.

Translation: we don't currently have a quantum algorithm for reversing hashes. But there was a time, not that long ago, when we didn't have a quantum algo for factorization either. However, I don't expect to see a quantum algo for hash reversion any time soon, because the whole problem of reversing hashes is pretty complex.

Factorization as a classical problem is essentially trivial, in that there are very simple classical algorithms for it. They just take a lot of time to run. But coming up with an efficient quantum algorithm was not trivial, and the algorithm itself isn't so simple. So you can estimate that a quantum version of any algorithm is a lot more complex than the classical counterpart.

I've only taken fairly general master's level courses in quantum information and regular cryptography, but I agree with this overall sentiment. My math professors used to say that no asymmetric encryption scheme has been proved unbreakable; we only know if they haven't been broken so far. Assuming something is unbreakable is like saying Fermat's last theorem is unprovable — until one day it's proved. So to me "post quantum cryptography" is essentially a buzzword.

Interestingly, Finnish government was planning to move election systems to Amazon's cloud, but the plan was just recently cancelled due to public outcry. https://www.heise.de/en/news/F...