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Comment Brute force approach (Score 1) 154

It's clear the brute force approach works and is sometimes the best way to advance. Once you see the path to getting the job done, take it. I see projects like ITER and ChatGPT4 in this category. Can you learn to do these things more efficiently given a few extra years of R&D? Obviously. But you are also a few years behind, and you have probably spent a lot of effort prematurely optimizing.

Comment The color of LEDs (Score 5, Informative) 124

Gas tube signs have a very unique spectral emissions that makes them appear the way they do. Very little effort has been put into LED lighting to properly mimic the appealing spectral emission of incandescent filtered or gas tube colored lighting.

Almost exclusively phosphor coatings have been tuned to cause blue and near UV leds to emit (sort of) broad spectrum white light and nothing more, though it would certainly be possible to develop a phosphor that could more closely approxmiate neon, for instance.

As for direct emission, red green and blue LEDs are mostly now only available at certain wavelengths for tricolor mixing applications. Due to economies of scale, LEDs at other visible wavelengths are extremely underdeveloped technology.

Comment Re:Copper is good enough... really. (Score 1) 66

You are very enthusiastic, but you have forgotten about critical current. The more current you put down a superconductor, the higher the magnetic flux. At a certain level, the magnetism will disrupt the material's ability to form cooper pairs. In most superconducting materials the critical current is quite low, which is why things like MRI magnets and ITER magnets have historically needed to be very very big. Only very recent advancements in state of the art superconductors like REBCO tapes are finally achieving critical currents that touch the lower end of what is needed for grid-scale transmission. My point is this isn't so clear cut; the materials and systems still need lots of additional development to become broadly useful in these applications.

Comment Goldfish brain (Score 1) 278

If you have access to be able to call up Trump, you call him and tell him what you want. You call him as much as he will talk to you. You'd be absolutely stupid not to do it. The guy has the memory of a goldfish; if you have talked to him in the last day, you are his whole world. After a week, he doesn't even know who you are.

Comment Your payment processor is not a bank! Surprise! (Score 4, Insightful) 14

I cannot imagine a more business destroying move than to be a payment processor that collects money from the customer and stiffs the vendor.

It's not even possible to do this in the current us regulatory environment unless your business is doing some horribly shady shit like comingling customer funds with operating accounts.

Imagine if one day Visa just said, oh we are gonna keep the funds from these 750 million daily transactions to ourselves for 3+ months.

Comment Re:OpenAI was already a dubious idea (Score 1) 35

Bingo. Anybody can think of the obvious. If it's a good idea: a product or service people actually WANT, then a thousand, a million people will have also thought of it. By the time you get to me with your stupid napkin, I'll have a list together of all the other people who got to it first.

Back when I was a startup tech consultant, I wouldn't even meet with anyone who didn't have a proper written business plan. I didn't necessarily care to read it, but if you couldn't make the effort to understand your own path forward, you were gonna be a nightmare client. Despite this being an apparently low bar, it worked very well to weed out the people who overvalued their ideas/contributions.

Comment Phrasing (Score 1) 217

> higher propensity to share low-quality news

For anyone reading along, this is just a euphemism of people with low intelligence. It's not as if propensity to share low quality news is some kind of innate human trait that some people have and some people don't. The issue, depending on your perspective is either: 1) people who cannot tell that it is low quality in the first place or 2) a failure of the media's implicit social contract to report truthfully and without bias.

Comment Re:What are common applications for LoRa? (Score 1) 37

While true, Meshtastic is more or less lying in its own name. It's not actually a mesh. The "routing protocol" is a shouting match; there is no routing; it's even worse than ALOHA. It's simply not possible to build reliable networks with Meshtastic because of this as multi-hop paths will randomly diverge from one another. In an OSI analogy, it's got layer 4/7 running directly atop unreliable layer 2 domains; there is no layer 3.

LoRAWAN does proper mesh routing but is just a bureaucratic nightmare. It's very tiresome to even try to learn how it works. I gave up and consider it a useless waste of time to even talk about it.

Reticulum.+ LXMF via RNode IMO is where it's at with LoRA. I hope that Meshtastic will eventually adopt this for LoRA transport. If they don't do something the project will fail as users get tired of putting up with poor reliability.

Comment Re:Note to self. (Score 1) 106

Sage advice for the last 20 years! The company started on top of a hill and has been rolling down ever since.

Sonos have wasted so much potential fucking around with their customers; anyone who continues to put up with it is flat out crazy, or at the very least extremely susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy.

Comment Re:"linked to North Korea" (Score 1) 14

I dont think you are on the money here, Jerry. It's not as if this activity is tremendously demanding of resources, and it is de-facto revenue positive. Invoking China and Russia as enablers is the literal definition of a straw man argument. All NK needs is internet access and a potato to connect to a bigger system; they have remote systems in the US and other western countries to use as bastions, and they will send people out of country as needed to keep these enterprises operating.

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