prime_number_314159

joined 10 months ago
[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 20 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

The sun itself is a medium that can propogate sound waves. Someone standing on the Moon could equally well make the case that there is no medium to propagate pressure waves from the Earth, so the Earth must not make a sound.

[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've heard this comparison so many times I ran some experiments. A number 8 1.5" coated decking screw inserted into two one by pine boards through the grain by a hammer holds about half as well as one inserted using a screwdriver. One hit to drive the screw is better than several, but a two hit approach (one to set the angle of the screw tip, the second to send it home) was most reliable. Drilling a pilot hole before hammering improves things pretty significantly, up towards 3/4 of the holding power of a driver driven screw.

On the other hand, even very slight misalignment between the hammer swing and the screw can result in failure, and the board was always more damaged by a hammer inserted screw.

[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 19 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I ran out of crtcs, but I wanted another monitor. I widened a virtual display, and drew the left portion of it on one monitor, like regular. Then I had a crown job that would copy chunks of it into the frame buffer of a USB to DVI-d adapter. It could do 5 fps redrawing the whole screen, but I chose things to put there where it wouldn't matter too much. The only painful thing was arranging the windows on that monitor, with the mouse updating very infrequently, and routinely being drawn 2 or more places in the frame buffer.

Have you tried turning them off, then turning them on again?

[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think we're still headed up the peak of inflated expectations. Quantum computing may be better at a category of problems that do a significant amount of math on a small amount of data. Traditional computing is likely to stay better at anything that requires a large amount of input data, or a large amount of output data, or only uses a small amount of math to transform the inputs to the outputs.

Anything you do with SQL, spreadsheets, images, music and video, and basically anything involved in rendering is pretty much untouchable. On the other hand, a limited number of use cases (cryptography, cryptocurrencies, maybe even AI/ML) might be much cheaper and fasrer with a quantum computer. There are possible military applications, so countries with big militaries are spending until they know whether that's a weakness or not. If it turns out they can't do any of the things that looked possible from the expectation peak, the whole industry will fizzle.

As for my opinion, comparing QC to early silicon computers is very misleading, because early computers improved by becoming way smaller. QC is far closer to the minimum possible size already, so there won't be a comparable, "then grow the circuit size by a factor of ten million" step. I think they probably can't do anything world shaking.

[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can just issue new certificates one per year, and otherwise keep your personal root CA encrypted. If someone is into your system to the point they can get the key as you use it, there are bigger things to worry about than them impersonating your own services to you.

A lot of businesses use the last 4 digits separately for some purposes, which means that even if it's salted, you are only getting 110,000 total options, which is trivial to run through.

[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Modern operating systems have made it take very little knowledge to connect to WiFi and browse the internet. If you want to use your computer for more than that, it can still take a longer learning process. I download 3D models for printing, and wanted an image for each model so I could find things more easily. In Linux, I can make such images with only about a hundred characters in the terminal. In Windows, I would either need to learn powershell, or make an image from each file by hand.

The way I understand "learning Linux" these days is reimagining what a computer can do for you to include the rich powers of open source software, so that when you have a problem that computers are very good at, you recognize that there's an obvious solution on Linux that Windows doesn't have.

Don't joke about this, the college professors will hear you.

[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There's a lot of space between a food that's dangerous to touch, and foods that require effort to eat safely.

A warning that the coffee is hot isn't enough to meaningfully disclose that the coffee will do severe damage if you touch it, while a disclaimer that boneless wings may contain bone fragments does enough to disclose that there may be bone fragments. Lots of other foods have bones and bone fragments, and are eaten in near perfect safety very frequently. There are no other foods routinely served so hot that they will cause burns, specifically because they are always unsafe.

[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (6 children)

I think this is a good decision, and you always have to chew food for it to be safe, boneless or otherwise. There is no processing method (human or machine) that can reliably remove every bone or bone fragment, so the practical effect of the opposite outcome will be restaurants putting disclaimers that boneless products might contain bone.

It will be no safer for consumers, and basically no different for restaurants, except this specific restaurant will be badly hurt by being the first one to have a customer incur significant medical expenses from this problem. It will just be the raw/undercooked warning part 2, and we will slowly work our way to a page of disclaimers in every menu.

[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Pronounced "Yes, Mate". It was named by Australians.

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