alfiopuglisi

These guys: https://taalas.com/products/

Nope. It's basically forgotten. At least, I haven't heard anyone talking about it, either in my circles or in the media.

Thanks for the explanation, it was very clear. Especially the bit about never being able to see your own private key. Ok I get it, it's to prevent malware from doing the same, but it still vaguely distasteful.

In my limited understanding, they are similar to SSH public/private key pairs. But the details continue to elude me, no matter how much I read about them. Won't try them out until I get how they work.

It's quite difficult with current rocket technology: you have to counteract most of the Earth-given 30km/s speed around the Sun in order to get close (it's smaller than Mercury's orbit), and then brake again to circularize the orbit once you are there. I am not sure that it can be done with what we have now. That said, it's not that far off either.

7.2 grams a day is still a lot. Low-sodium diets aim for less than 3 grams a day, and it is not that difficult to go even lower. Whether a near-zero sodium intake is good or not, it's another can of worms, but a study looking at a huge-salt diet vs. a high-salt diet does not look very useful.

Well, at least they don't sell seed oil :)

The ring is not a product of the supernova. It's pre-existing material, that is being energized by impact of the supernova ejecta (it took a few months for it to start brightening).

There are actually three rings, a smaller one around the previous star's equator, and two larger ones above and below. The hourglass-like figure is actually quite common, produced by the star rotaton.

It's a limitation of the Falcon Heavy, the launcher used this time. A future, more powerful one could do it while being reusable.

It goes on until an Earth's day is as long as a month. Both will face each other in a fixed way. But it takes many billions of years and the Sun will burn both to a cinder much before that.

It's not so uncommon in science to come to a strange conclusion by excluding all "reasonable" alternatives. For example, black holes have a similar status: no one has conclusively seen one, but we know of no mechanism for matter to support itself beyond a certain density, so black hole it is.

I am in Italy as well and the link works fine.

The day your wish is fullfilled is the day I stop working with Python. I can't stand all those useless braces everywhere, why are they there at all since good practice mandates proper indentation anyway?

I am at the point where I prefer single quotes for strings, instead of double quotes, just because they feel cleaner. And unfortunately pep8 sometimes mandates double quotes for reasons unknown.

Not just the Netherlands, most of Europe counts floors like this: ground, first, second, etc.

Look for the Global Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum, it uses exactly that metric.

Depends. For example cupy (https://github.com/cupy/cupy) is developed by a Japanese company and I find it extremely effective.

Mmmhh, not sure about that. Most people, even if not reaching high speeds, can still go substantially faster on a bike than running. Even grandmas, it's all relative.

People like Bolt should be compared with bike sprinters, who top out at around 45mph.

Most people won't be able to even reach 27.8 mph on a bike, you need a decent road bike and some training.

If you own enough of these automated factories, you don't need to sell anything at all. Just produce whatever luxury item you want, in addition to mundane things like food and shelter (in the form of caviar and villas, because why not?).

That will mark the time when technology is advanced enough that humanity will fracture with small independent groups going out and fending for themselves, possibly in outer space. Some SF scenarios call them "great houses", because they somewhat resemble feudal kingdoms where a kind of extended family rules, except there are no peasants.

Please do share! Often those are the most interesting ones :)

People happy and proud of their work. What's wrong?

No current LLM understands words, nor letters. They all have input and output tokens, that roughly correspond to syllabes and letter groupings. Any kind of task involving counting letters or words is outside their realistic capabilities.

LLMs are a tool, and like any other tool, they have strengths and weaknesses. Know your tools.

> I wonder how much cheaper are land-based telescopes over the lifetime of instruments such as the Hubble or the Webb.

10-100 times cheaper. An LBT night is around $50k-100k, which over 10 years corresponds to $300 millions. JWST total budget is about $10 billions.

True, JWST can operate close to 24/7. On the other hand, land-based telescopes are under constant refurbishment and upgrades, and they become more powerful over time.

> I assume it's used as a mono and binoc platform, depending.

Correct, it depends on the observation. Both sides have adaptive optics correction, but they work independently. This particular instrument (SHARK-VIS) is mounted on the "right" side, while SHARK-NIR is on the "left" side.

It's a technological tour-de-force involving deformable mirrors that change shape every millisecond, cameras able to count every incoming photon, and special computers designed to calculate the next correction within microseconds. As usual wikipedia has an introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics

Or try: https://andor.oxinst.com/learning/view/article/introduction-...

A Tesla Megapack 2 can provide about 2MW of power, so you need 50 of them to replace the gas peaker. And since they have a 3.8MWh capacity, they only go for about two hours before being depleted, so if you want to cover the whole night when solar is not producing, you need 6x more, or 300 in total.

The are negative wholesale, not for the private end user unfortunately.

> the fast orbit of Proxima implies it is gravitationally unbound given the visible mass of A and B

Since when? For example these measurements from 2016 say the opposite: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2017/02/aa29930-...

> Woops. Yes, galaxies. Too late to edit.

Not even galaxies, but massive galaxy clusters. The spatial smoothing used for the ring image is a 2D gaussian with an equivalent width of 11 Mpc, or 37 million light years, big enough to contain all the 2000 galaxies in the nearby Virgo cluster with room to spare. That's for each point in the ring (and that's why they all look so nice and round. These astronomers are playing a statistical game where a pixel combines information from trillions of stars) It's called the Big Ring for a reason. Our own Laniakea supercluster [1], whose dimensions are bigger than anyone imagined up to a few years ago, can be tiled inside the ring several times over.

At that spatial scale, the Universe is supposed to be homogeneous. We do not have plausible mechanisms to generate structures on such a massive scale.

Regarding your analogy with a constellation, yes you can always draw arbitrary squares and triangles among bright stars. But if you had 20+ stars arranged in a circle like that ring, no one would think it was a chance projection, you would demand a physical explanation. We do in fact have such a ring around us: the Gould Belt [2], made of young stars all around the Sun. It is difficult to recognize precisely because we are inside it, and its stars are spread all around the sky. And, of course, some kind of physical explanation is invoked for this ring as well.

Moreover we do know it's an actual ring, and not some chance alignment, because we can derive the distance of each point from its redshift, and it turns out that they are all quite similar. The authors spend quite a few pages describing the 3D ring structure, showing that it's a ring only when seen from our direction, and how it would appear like an arc or a strange shape from other viewpoints. It would still be a kind of overdense structure, but maybe more difficult to recognize.

BTW the mechanism used to detect the ring is quite clever: it's not a sky image, but rather an absorption map: thousands of background quasars provide a sort of uniform illumination, and they look where this light is removed by clumps of matter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laniakea_Supercluster

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gould_Belt

You can still opt out, just fill out a declaration that you don't have a TV. It can be done online in two minutes (it must be repeated every year tho).

The difference is that before it was basically opt-in, with spotty enforcement, and as a result about 30% of the population was not paying anything. Today it requires lying on an official form, making it much more serious.