knightly
@knightly@pawb.social
- Comment on Why can't a liquid move faster than the speed of sound in that medium? 23 hours ago:
Precisely. It’s those boundary areas where the jet and the medium interact where it gets complicated.
- Comment on Why can't a liquid move faster than the speed of sound in that medium? 1 day ago:
Sort of. The speed of light in a vacuum is the speed of causality, nothing can go faster than the maximum speed at which one part of the universe can effect another.
It is possible for fluids to move faster than the speed of sound in the fluid around it, such as the exhaust products of a supersonic jet engine, but in these cases not all of the fluid is operating like a wave. The core of the jet experiences a laminar flow where all of the water is moving in the same direction and at roughly the same speed, like a laser instead of a flashlight. At the boundaries of this laminar flow exists a turbulent region where the fluid interacts with the surrounding medium and is slowed to subsonic speeds.
- Comment on US passes Genius Act, first major national crypto legislation 3 days ago:
It’s not a scientific breakthrough. I’ve been using distributed hash tables since the early oughts, assigning monetary value to it wasn’t innovation.
Bitcoin was never going to be what it was claimed to be because it isn’t designed for anonymity. The blockchain doesn’t forget, every transaction goes into a permanent ledger and can’t be reversed or cancelled. That makes it a liability.
- Comment on US passes Genius Act, first major national crypto legislation 3 days ago:
Irreversability is a liability for a currency.
- Comment on US passes Genius Act, first major national crypto legislation 3 days ago:
As opposed to crypto, whose track record is barely over a decade old and filled to the brim with scams.
- Comment on US passes Genius Act, first major national crypto legislation 3 days ago:
You’re describing the concept of currency in general, “it only has value because people act like it does” applies to crypto too.
- Comment on US passes Genius Act, first major national crypto legislation 3 days ago:
Fiat doesn’t need banks and whales, it can operate just as well with centralized postal banking and wealth taxes. Their existence in our economy is a choice, not a necessity.
- Comment on US passes Genius Act, first major national crypto legislation 3 days ago:
Both, but currencies are dependent on the trustworthiness of a government that can at least theoretically be held accountable by its citizenry, while crypto is dependent on the banks and whales that own almost all the crypto.
- Comment on Twitter founder Jack Dorsey pumps $10 million into a nonprofit to build Nostr-based social media apps 4 days ago:
Me reading this with a hippie beard.
- Comment on Can you have an infinitely long wavelength of light? Or is there some maximum? 5 days ago:
What the two other replies have neglected to mention as the cool side-effect of light affecting the curvature of spacetime despite being massless is that it’s theoretically possible to make a black hole out of nothing but light. The concept is called a “Kugelblitz”, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelblitz_(astrophysics)
- Comment on Is it weird I don't typically answer how old I am anymore, because literally nobody besides my family believes me? 5 days ago:
I’m regularly mistaken for being more than a dozen years younger than I am. =D
- Comment on Musk’s Chatbot Started Spouting Nazi Propaganda. That’s Not the Scariest Part. 1 week ago:
LLMs are just massively-multidimensional maps of human language use. It is academically interesting to have developed both the map and a method for plotting a course through language-space using a prompt as an initial vector, but human intellience is not in language. Rather, language is part of human intelligence, and mapping it to ever more computationally-expensive distances is never going to chart a path to the digital mind that all the tech billionaires are all desperate to enslave.
- Comment on Microwave Intensifies 1 week ago:
Bothto some degree, realistically. I used an old collander as a signal reflector for a wifi dongle on the end of a USB extension cable and was able to boost the signal up to about 4x, or maybe half the range of the purpose-built and highly directional Yagi antenna I eventually bought to replace it.
- Comment on What would remain for a future species if humans were to vanish tomorrow? 1 week ago:
It’s still a matter of timescale, as in “how far future are we talking?”. On a stellar scale, they’d need to get here in the next billion years or so before the expansion of the sun boils off everything above the lithosphere. On a geological scale, it’s only a couple hundred million years 'til everything that isn’t already buried or washed into the sea is getting squashed into a new pangea. On a climatological scale, corrosion and decay/overgrowth will render almost all artifacts unrecognizable within a couple of thousand years, though it’d be a few tens of thousands before our impact on the atmosphere is nulled. On a human timescale, the inverse-square law means that our radio signals are only detectable without astronomically-sized antennas within a shell of a few dozen light years or so.
- Comment on I found a container filled with lolipops that I didn't touch for years. It smelled like hand sanitizer and the bottom of the container had this thick clear goo. WTF is it? 2 weeks ago:
How humid is the area where they were stored? Is it subject to significant swings in temperature like direct sunlight?
- Comment on Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027 3 weeks ago:
Not a 60% success rate, but a 60% rate of throwing good money after bad.
- Comment on Australian police beat an opposition politician so badly that she might lose an eye -- simply for being at an anti-genocide protest. 3 weeks ago:
Why?
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Likewise! I know the idea isn’t practical, I just love all the weirdness that comes with taking something that’s only technically feasible and pushing that thought to extremes. XD
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
You can shave off most of that 100 million years using variation breeding. No need to wait around for random chance to happen when a little radiation can trigger as many mutations as we want.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Yes you can, it just takes a lot more effort to get the right random mutation.
- Comment on Summer dad bod. 5 weeks ago:
All of them, lol~.
But for real, I’ve been working in web hosting and related fields for over 15 years and the enshittification is still accelerating. It’s long past time to stop relying on centrally hosted sites and start working on decentralized services.
- Comment on Summer dad bod. 5 weeks ago:
I’m one of those people! =D
- Comment on Australian reporter covering Los Angeles immigration protests hit by rubber bullet on live TV 1 month ago:
My middle school English teacher would have failed me for the overuse of passive voice like this.
- Comment on Wish I could get free drinks with my shirt off 1 month ago:
I’m enby, taking my shirt off is like flipping a coin.
- Comment on /ᐠ｡ꞈ｡ᐟ\ 1 month ago:
They’re hopeless, I can pad out my bra to C-cups but unless I swap my tee shirts and jeans for blouses and skirts they can never tell. XD
- Comment on The joy of quitting a shit job with an asshole boss 1 month ago:
If businesses wanted stability they wouldn’t make the working conditions so bad.
- Comment on The joy of quitting a shit job with an asshole boss 1 month ago:
You must live in a civilized country.
America is not a civilized country.
- Comment on What is something you like to tell people? 1 month ago:
They did that on purpose. “Cashless” just means giving a middleman the opportunity to take a cut.
- Comment on What is something you like to tell people? 1 month ago:
Buy local, use cash.