cynar
@cynar@lemmy.world
- Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech 8 hours ago:
True, but they weren’t really used much as flying cars till later. I might be wrong on exactly when they moved from military to “rich transport to the race track”, however.
- Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech 9 hours ago:
We’ve had flying cars since the 70s, they are called helicopters.
The issue with a flying car for general use, is one of maintenance and safety. If an older car breaks down, it causes a tailback. If a flying car breaks down, it could demolish a school. The higher standards required means higher costs. That means rich people only. The rich use helicopters in exactly that manner.
- Comment on Benefits of ADHD medication outweigh health risks, study finds 1 day ago:
It’s like smoking. A 20 year smoker will never be as healthy as they would have been without smoking. But someone who smoked for 20 years, then quit for 10 years will be far better off than a 30 year smoker.
ADHD treatment is effective in adults too. I wasn’t diagnosed until my 30s, and it’s something I’m (very mildly) bitter about not being treated sooner.
The big help is unpacking “maladaptations”. Most of ADHD’s problems aren’t direct, but a domino effect. We adapt to try and cope, but cause other problems. Coping with them cause yet more. The best solution is to nip it in the bus, during childhood. However, unpicking them as an adult is possible. The drugs help MASSIVELY with this, though significant personal effort is also required.
- Comment on China plans world’s first fusion-fission power plant 5 days ago:
This is one of the biggest frustrations with nuclear power. The first power plants had issues (mostly due to them being bomb factory designs). We learnt from that, and designed better ones. They never got built. They were swamped in red tape and delays until they died.
Decades later, China comes in and just asks nicely. The designs work fine. China now leads the way, built on research we left to rot.
It’s also worth noting that there is a big difference between a fusion power plant and a fission one. China is doing active research on it, as is the west. There’s quite a friendly rivalry going on. We have also basically cracked fusion now. We just need to scale it up. The only big problem left is the tokamakite issue. The neutron radiation put off by the reaction transmutes the walls. Using radioactive materials as a buffer is an idea I’ve not heard of. I’m curious about the end products. A big selling point of fusion is the lack of long term waste. Putting a fission reaction in there too might lose that benefit.
- Comment on Two Open Source Projects Combine to 3D Print a Working Replica Key Using a Flipper Zero 1 week ago:
Most locks don’t really keep people out. They just keep honest people honest. At best, they slow an attacker down and/or make it more obvious.
- Comment on Two Open Source Projects Combine to 3D Print a Working Replica Key Using a Flipper Zero 1 week ago:
I fully agree, but most locks aren’t in that state. 95% of the locks you might want to use this technique on would be in a reasonable condition.
- Comment on Two Open Source Projects Combine to 3D Print a Working Replica Key Using a Flipper Zero 1 week ago:
I personally think it would hold up, so long as it wasn’t abused. 3D prints are weak and prone to breaking with in the inter layer structure. Intra layer, they are quite strong. Also when they fail, intra layer, they tend to deform, rather than snap.
Material matters however. PLA is relatively prone to breaking. PETG or nylon are far tougher.
It’s also worth noting the use case here. It’s either nefarious (breaking in) or one-off (unlocking a door where you no longer have the key available). Neither requires long term survivability.
- Comment on Two Open Source Projects Combine to 3D Print a Working Replica Key Using a Flipper Zero 1 week ago:
It would work a couple of times. It’s just not a long term solution.
- Comment on Pets hate the vet clinic and groomer because they smell the combined terror/anger of a thousand other animals who've been poked and prodded in that room 2 weeks ago:
Dog particularly pick up on our emotions. If you’re always worried and stressed when you go to the vet, your dog will pick up on that.
My dog had a few checkups, not that long after we got him. None were stressful either to him, or us. Since then, he LOVES the vets. He has lots of new people paying attention to him and lots of new smells!
A fear of the vets is a learned response. If your vet is that frightening to them, I would consider looking at other vets.
A good excuse for a quick visit is to weigh them. Most vets I’ve seen have a dog scale in the reception. If you mention you also want to make sure they are not afraid of a vets visit, most will have zero issues with it. It also lets you check they are growing at an appropriate rate.
- Comment on You should know there's a font designed to make reading easier, especially for people with low vision. It's called Atkinson Hyperlegible Next. It's free for personal and commercial use. 2 weeks ago:
While dyslexia is actually a cluster of related issues, a common one seems to be with dimensionality. Basically, the reader’s brain assumes the objects are 3 dimensional. When the eyes make micro adjustments, the letters don’t rotate, since they are 2D. The brain misinterprets this as them rotating, or moving. This is perceived as them flickering or moving, in the corner of your eye.
There are several ways to break this effect. I suspect the shape is intended to mess with and slightly overload the depth sense. Strong colours can also disrupt it. E.g. via a coloured filter or glasses.
- Comment on Multiple Tesla vehicles were set on fire in Las Vegas and Kansas City 2 weeks ago:
It’s obviously the MAGA crowd. They’ve spent years complaining about electric vehicles. They’ve just escalated that to burning them out. The police need to go have a nice chat with the rolling coal types.
- Comment on Surprise! People don't want AI deciding who gets a kidney transplant and who dies or endures years of misery 4 weeks ago:
Do you have a link to that study? I’d be interested to see what the false positive/negative rates were. Those are the big danger of LLMs being used, and why a trained doctor would be needed.
- Comment on Surprise! People don't want AI deciding who gets a kidney transplant and who dies or endures years of misery 4 weeks ago:
I believe a good doctor, properly focused, will outperform an AI. AI are also still prone to hallucinations, which is extremely bad in medicine. Where they win is against a tired, overworked doctor with too much on his plate.
Where it is useful is as a supplement. An AI can put a lot of seemingly innocuous information together to spot more unusual problems. Rarer conditions can be missed, particularly if they share symptoms with more common problems. An AI that can flag possibilities for the doctor to investigate would be extremely useful.
An AI diagnostic system is a tool for doctors to use, not a replacement.
- Comment on Why most countries are struggling to shut down 2G. 4 weeks ago:
To an extent. You are still talking 20-40 degree windows, but triangulation is definitely possible. I’m not sure if it’s used like that however.
- Comment on Why most countries are struggling to shut down 2G. 4 weeks ago:
5g is a lot more capable and flexible compared to older generations. The main one is a massive increase in capacity, for the same frequency allocations. Compounding with this is that it can be directional. This allows several phones to use the exact same channel simultaneously, so long as they are positioned at different angles to the tower.
5g also uses more frequency bands, allowing even more data to be moved around. Unfortunately, 2g has most of the lower frequencies, higher frequencies carry more data, but have less penetration into buildings.
Finally, 5g allows for priority and context awareness. E.g. the police can have their phones prioritised, or VoIP calls given priority over video streaming. It can also trade bandwidth for range. This allows a tower to either reach further to cover a larger area, or focus down, to provide more bandwidth locally.
In theory 5g could have a similar range to 2g. However, that rarely happens. It requires it using the lower frequencies, that 2g currently uses, and well as dropping its data rate to improve range. Most of the time it’s optimised for shorter range, and more towers using higher frequencies. This gives impression of a far smaller range. But give a huge increase is available bandwidth.
- Comment on FuckYourHeadlights - A community for people to organise and vent about ridiculously bright lights 4 weeks ago:
The load varies, though I’ve found the suspension is hard enough that it doesn’t shift for a normal load up. I mostly do it because I’ve noticed that, when I hit a bump, my lights can sweep up over the windows of cars in front.
Also, I don’t mind them readjusting it. It’s calling it a fault that bugged me.
- Comment on FuckYourHeadlights - A community for people to organise and vent about ridiculously bright lights 4 weeks ago:
I drive a van, so I could easily be the culprit. I therefore make a habit of adjusting my beam dip appropriately. Apparently that is unusual enough for them to note they had been adjusted in the service. There’s literally a dial on the dashboard. You’re SUPPOSED to adjust them to the vehicle and road conditions! Apparently not having them set to max is now considered a “fault” to fix!
- Comment on Nobody Wants a Nazi Electric Car 4 weeks ago:
I would personally add a small amount of slack for bad taste satire (we were all young idiots at some point), but basically agree. Any signs of the other points, and that slack is gone, however.
I was mostly curious if the OP was acting in bad faith, or a useful idiot that could be reasoned with.
- Comment on Nobody Wants a Nazi Electric Car 4 weeks ago:
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Musk isn’t a member of the Nazi party. He does hold a lot of important views in common with them, however. He also associates with people who fit most of the rest.
What percentage do you think is needed before calling someone a Nazi?
- Comment on Women earn 78 cents for every $1 men paid on average. 4 weeks ago:
The Simpson’s Paradox also comes into play here.
It is perfectly possible for 1 group to be (apparently) discriminated in the bulk data, while the reverse is happening in individual data. E.g. a university showing a male bias overall, yet each department shows neutral, or even a female bias.
This makes bulk patterns particularly troublesome to work with. Men and women want different things from work. Men are disproportionately discouraged from having a work life balance, while it’s far more acceptable for women to not maximise their earning potential.
- Comment on Amazon Restricted Vaginal Health Products for Being ‘Potentially Embarrassing’ 5 weeks ago:
It works on frogs. The force is distributed over the whole body, so it’s no worse than gravity is on our bodies.
- Comment on Amazon Restricted Vaginal Health Products for Being ‘Potentially Embarrassing’ 5 weeks ago:
I disagree. The human body is mostly water. Water is slightly diamagnetic. Therefore, a sufficiently strong magnet is capable of levitating a human body off the ground.
Magnets can definitely have an effect, just not at puny neodymium magnet levels!
- Comment on A new study found adaptive traffic signals powered by big data reduced peak-hour travel times by 11% in China’s 100 most congested cities – saving 31.73 million tonnes of CO₂ annually. 5 weeks ago:
Interestingly, some lights are set up to deliberately slow down speeders. If you are above the speed limit, they turn red, just to slow things back down. Unfortunately, most of the people involved never put cause and effect together.
- Comment on Woke turned to CRT then turned into DEI. Anymore acronyms they'd be the government 5 weeks ago:
It’s always fun to try and get them to define “Woke”. When they can’t/won’t, you can default to deSantis courtroom definition. “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them”.
While cognitive dissonance doesn’t work on the core supporters, the ‘passive’ supporters are still susceptible to it. Many support aspects of being “woke”. If you can get them to realise that then “anti woke” becomes a lot more repellant to them. Anti woke is effectively anti empathy.
- Comment on Observer 1 month ago:
What is a particle, what is a wave? QM entities are neither. They are a 3rd thing. A quantised wave is the term my university professor used as a short hand. The nature of that wave is described by the Schroeder equation + its constraints. Certain interactions will bound it heavily, and so make it look particle like, others emphasise the wavelike properties.
You require the maths to actually do anything useful with it, but not to get the basic concepts. It’s no different to the rest of physics, in that. E.g. you can understand the concepts of orbital mechanics, without being able to calculate them.
- Comment on Observer 1 month ago:
While I’m rusty as hell, my physics degree was actually focused quite a lot into QM.
It’s perfectly possible to get a reasonable understanding of what’s going on without going head first into the maths. There are definitely areas however that we don’t have a good conceptual model of yet. For those, the maths definitely leads the way. 90% of QM is comprehendible with relatively little maths. You only need the maths when you start to get predictive.
- Comment on Observer 1 month ago:
QM entities are quantised waves. You can make a wave look very close to a particle quite easily, a particle can never behave like a wave.
Dumping the mental short hand of particle interactions is one of the main reasons most people can’t get their heads around it.
- Comment on Observer 1 month ago:
So why are you so upset with us trying to fix it?
I personally find the anti science, anti learning crowd has gone from amusing, to annoying, to terrifying.
- Comment on Observer 1 month ago:
I disagree with it being hard to comprehend. The maths is an absolute bitch, but the basic premise is fairly simple. Everything is (quantised) waves. The rest clicks, once you get your brain to accept this. Everything else is a consequence. Those consequences can lead you down deep dark tunnels, filled with evil maths and mind bending results, but the basic idea is simple.
I have a bit of an issue with memes that are actively misleading.
- Comment on Observer 1 month ago:
That is part of what bugs me.
Quantum mechanics isn’t magical or unknowable. It’s just an area of physics where some of our base assumptions/approximations break down. It’s not even that hard to wrap your head around, it just seems most people don’t want to try.
