mkwt
@mkwt@lemmy.world
- Comment on NASA and Boeing say Starliner astronauts ‘are not stranded,’ but will be on the ISS for a few more weeks 1 day ago:
Except the “emergency capsule” is all of them, including Starliner. Because Starliner is perfectly capable of returning to earth safely.
Because every thruster that has shut down has hot fired okay, and the known helium leaks still leave enough margin to cover several multiples of the 5 hours or so of RCS operation that you need to get to landing.
- Comment on Sci-fi racing platformer Distance gets a surprise update with Steam Deck improvements 3 days ago:
My understanding is that the second Distance campaign is mostly recycled Nitronic Rush levels.
- Comment on How does generative AI create convincing lighting in images? 1 week ago:
The deal with LLMs is that it’s very difficult to say which piece of training material went into which output. Everything gets chopped up and mixed, and it’s computationally difficult to run backwards.
My understanding of the image generators is that they operate one pixel at a time too, looking only at neighboring pixels. So in that sense, it’s not correct to say they understand the context of anything.
- Comment on Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed? 1 week ago:
Like, there’s lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn’t mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie
The conceit of the LOTR appendices is that Lord of the Rings, as published in English, is really just the Red Book that Bilbo writes at the end. Dr. Tolkien merely found the manuscript somewhere and has graciously translated it from Third Age common language into English for the benefit of us modern people.
- Comment on the truth 1 week ago:
T stands for “terminal count”.
- Comment on American Truck Simulator is heading to Iowa in a future DLC 1 week ago:
Dude, all the work is in the maps, and they generally sell them proportional to the amount of map content. There are two benefits:
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Studio doesn’t have to staff up to do all the content at once, but they still get paid periodically for what they do produce. This keeps the staff employed longer in a more stable position.
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You can pick and choose which areas you want to get. If you want a big bundle, those still show up on Steam too at various levels of discount. But you’re not locked into having to deal with Ohio too.
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- Comment on Boy Scouts of America changes name after bankruptcy and sexual abuse claims 1 month ago:
Boy scouts always traditionally had a strong component that was preparing boys to enter basic military training. The camping in the woods part was never just for fun-it’s getting a start on land navigation, and basic patrolling skills.
Of course, every troop emphasizes different things, but “off-putting quasi-military aspects” are not at all off-brand for the boy scouts.
- Comment on sweet dreams 1 month ago:
General relativity is famously difficult to understand, and I don’t claim to fully understand it, so I’m going to fall back to the famous rubber sheet model.
Imagine the Earth in empty space. The mass of the Earth causes spacetime curvature that extends outward away from the Earth. However, if you look a single little patch of spacetime at some distance, say, 1000 km away, that little patch doesn’t know that it has to be curved because the Earth is 1000 km away. It doesn’t know where the Earth is. It just knows that its neighboring patch is a little bit more curved in the direction that leads to Earth, and its other neighbor is a little bit less curved going away from Earth. This essentially restates the principle of locality: all physics is local physics, and there is no spooky action at a distance.
Now imagine that the Earth moves by some small distance dx in a small time dt. Going back to our little patch of spacetime, it doesn’t know that the Earth moved. So how does it change its curvature to match the new position of the Earth? It changes when its neighbors change. When the Earth moves, the spacetime immediately near the Earth stretches and bends first, then spacetime a little further away, and so on and so on. This process doesn’t happen instantaneously; it takes time for changes to propagate to longer distances. The theory predicts that disturbances and ripples will propagate via waves, called gravitational waves, and that these waves travel at the same speed of light as electromagnetic waves.
Notice I called these spacetime waves “gravitational waves.” It is common to use the term “gravity waves” for typical water waves, of the kind you might see at the beach. Those are not the same type of wave.
Now let’s talk about energy. The Earth in the solar system has some energy, including translational and rotational kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy as it sits in the Sun’s gravity well, and of course its own thermal energy and rest mass. Waves have the ability to transport energy from one location to another without transporting matter, mass, or electric charge. Spacetime waves are not any different. Because the Earth is moving in a periodic motion, it produces a periodic spacetime wave that propagates outward away from the solar system, and that spacetime wave carries some amount of energy away from the solar system. Where does that energy come from? It comes from the Earth, mainly from the Earth’s kinetic energy.
So the story is that the gravitational waves are very, very, very slightly causing the Earth to slow down in its orbit. And following the laws of orbital mechanics, this causes the Earth to fall closer to the Sun. The result is that over the long term, the radius of the Earth’s orbit gets smaller. Alternatively, the Earth’s circular orbit is an illusion, and it’s actually spiraling inward on a very, very, tightly packed spiral. That’s what I meant by “orbital decay.”
I find it hard to overstate just how small this gravitational radiation effect is for a typical solar system situation. We have an observatory called LIGO that can detect gravitational waves. It can measure a variation in distance of a tunnel of several kilometers down to well less than a single proton diameter. (Remember, this is trying to detect disturbances in space and time itself). Even still, it is only able to detect gravitational waves from the most powerful kinds of gravitational events–mergers of black holes and the like.
Essentially: Spacetime is very “stiff” and gravity is very weak.
- Comment on the ologies don't like to talk about theo 1 month ago:
Unitarians have entered the chat.
- Comment on sweet dreams 1 month ago:
If atoms were like the solar system, all of the electron orbits would lose energy and decay by emitting electromagnetic radiation.
The same type of decay does occur in the solar system as the planets emit gravitational radiation, but the decay rate is so miniscule we can’t really detect it.
- Comment on Refreshing 1 month ago:
You can buy “Pickle Juice” brand electrolyte sports drink in stores. Tastes exactly like you would expect. Somewhat popular with distance runners.
- Comment on The Eurobean Mind Cannot Comprehend 2 months ago:
There’s a blog/website about the logistics.
People have certainly done it. You can ship a vehicle around the Darien gap. Or potentially sell one car and buy another one (probably pay some customs duties).
- Comment on The Eurobean Mind Cannot Comprehend 2 months ago:
It’s weird that it’s not putting you on I-44 from St Louis to OKC.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
The thing is that in the presence of wealth taxes, wealth dis-accumulates exponentially in the same way that it accumulates exponentially without the tac.
So you end up needing much lower percentage rates on wealth to get the same effect as an 80% tax on marginal income. Wealth tax rates as low as single % would dramatically alter the distribution of wealth.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
Why is Bill Gates paying a smaller proportional share than the other two?
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
The deal with wealth is that it’s not income. Wealth is income accumulated over time.
So is your 80% top bracket rate a one time thing, or every year?
- Comment on Linux market share passes 4% for first time 3 months ago:
How reliable is this actually? There are a millions reasons for me to fake which is and web browser in using.
Shouldn’t this effect cause Linux use to be under reported? That is, the real percentage would be higher than 4%?
I would pretty strongly expect significant correlation between people who spoof their user agent and Linux users.
- Comment on Earth will be destroyed in 12 minutes... 5 months ago:
Oh yeah, I’m not sure I ever got past the first room or two with that one.
- Comment on Earth will be destroyed in 12 minutes... 5 months ago:
Unlike many video game adaptations, Douglas Adams was substantially involved in the game design and writing the text. I believe he shares the authorship credit with an Infocom programmer.
- Comment on Waffle Squarf 5 months ago:
There’s one state, I believe Indiana, where the big chain Waffle House operates under the name Waffle Shoppe. This is because there was already a preexisting mom and pop Waffle House in the area.
- Comment on Unity bans VLC from Unity Store. 5 months ago:
Even if they’re currently shipping some LGPL components, they may want to prevent new LGPL components from being added if they eventually want to be LGPL-free in the future.
- Comment on Prove you're not an android 6 months ago:
I think that “Balance of Terror” was the very first episode of Star Trek to feature ship to ship combat with a near peer adversary. The Romulans in that episode got cloaking technology because the screenplay was ripped straight from a WWII submarine movie.
I guess after that point the “submarine” tropes got established, because that style of combat was basically doctrine up until Star Trek (2009).
- Comment on The Dread Nausicaan Roberts did not kill him in the morning... 6 months ago:
Can somebody make a joke about “one of the classic blunders?”
- Comment on How Googlers cracked an SF rival's tech model with a single word | A research team from the tech giant got ChatGPT to spit out its private training data 6 months ago:
Well seizures and comas in real brains are associated with measurable whole-brain waves at well defined frequencies. Very different from any normal brain activity.
Maybe these mantras are inducing some kind of analogous state.
- Comment on Yet they immediately forgot again 6 months ago:
All I’m saying is, there’s no way this would pass a MIL-STD-882 safety assessment in the twenty first century. So I have no idea how they got their spaceworthiness certificate.
- Comment on Yet they immediately forgot again 6 months ago:
Once again I remind you all that these consoles are not powered by a substance as boring as regular electricity. Oh no. It has to be highly energetic tuned plasma…straight to the user interface consoles…for, uh, reasons.
- Comment on I mean when the option is Leeola Root *everything*... 8 months ago:
The replicator is not a straight energy to arbitrary matter machine. It uses a lot of energy to rearrange matter quickly. But there are still storage tanks of basic nutritional components that go into the process. At least that’s what the Star Trek Technical Manual says.
Also, the dilithium crystals are allegedly not fuel, but catalysts or moderators. The ships (at least in the TNG era) still fuel up on cryogenic deuterium slush, of which half is converted into anti-deuterium before entering the warp core.
Enterprise-d, at least, had some limited capability to gather fuel from space with the ram scoops. These were the red things on the front of the nacelles.
- Comment on I refuse to believe this show is this funny 8 months ago:
Holy cow yes. When Star Trek (2009) came out I calculated that there was, at that time, 28 plus days of Star Trek video content to watch. This guy covers all of that, plus the newer stuff, very adroitly.
- Comment on How do you get an executable from a GitHub link? 8 months ago:
From the main project page on GitHub there’s a button for “Releases”, which can be a source to get exe or zip archives.
- Comment on 🤔... 8 months ago:
This is the thing. You can’t use a circuit breaker if you’re powering your control console directly with “tuned plasma”.