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chabska

288 karma · joined September 7, 2024

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chabska··on What happened to the Snowden archive
In another comment, you said that he should try to enter the US despite his passport being cancelled, which is also breaking the law.

Russia actually did the legally correct action, in giving refuge to a stateless person.

chabska··on Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar over 'Little Red Dots'
The radius is based on visual observation. We have good theories and models about what's happening inside the star. We are quite sure that it's mostly empty space inside the radius. But that's not a good enough reason to say that the star's radius is anything other than what we see through our telescope.
chabska··on Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023
There is zero evidence that deflation has any effect on spending.

At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?

At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.

chabska··on The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve
Please, literally every other country in the world store their petroleum reserve in surface tanks. We have fifty years of experience in designing the safety systems around oil tanks, and the only recent major incidents are from drone strikes in Russia and Saudi Arabia. Just because the US luck out in having the specific geological formation to store oil cheaply doesn't mean the alternative is untenable.

> It would be sufficient to store dry salt

Absolutely impractical. Storing and moving around solids in the megatons is very difficult compared to liquids that can be pumped. For comparison, the absolute largest solids moving operation in the world is a copper mine in Chile, it moves 300,000 metric tonne of mineral per day. The east-west pipeline in Saudi Arabia can move three times that in liquid, 1,000,000 metric tonne per day.

chabska··on The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve
If you're gonna build a bunch of tanks on the surface to store that saturated salt solutions, you might as well store the oil in those tanks. The point of this salt cavern system is how little infrastructure it needs to store the huge volume of liquid.
chabska··on Giving up on smart rings
These are problems with it being a smart ring RELATIVE to a smart watch.

- wrist size changes far less dramatically, and even if it do change, a strap swap for a smartwatch is far cheaper and easier than a whole-device change for a smart ring - wristwatch doesn't interfere with any hand activity - wristwatch far less likely to trap debris from your activities.

chabska··on Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil
Not for the Sami people who have to inhale the rocket exhaust blast.
chabska··on Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
Why would language matter?

Anyway, Frankfurt is the next biggest financial center after London, and it tend to get the business when a firm wants to move out of London .

chabska··on GPS glitched across the US by as much as 33 feet
Consider that, from the justice system's point of view, there's no distinction between between someone breaking house arrest for a drug fix versus due to GPS error. They don't have the resource to investigate every single violation, so they always just assume that the device is infallible and that the human is lying.

That's why there's no data for someone getting rearrested due to GPS, and why the few instances where someone do prove an error is concerning.

chabska··on Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting
The current set of planets, we are quite confident to be complete, there are no more planets out there. The set of known dwarf planets is likely to be incomplete, we think there are many more out there. I think that's a useful distinction.
chabska··on Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)
This is mathematics, the Alps is drivable like a manifold is smooth.
chabska··on US Military newspaper editor voices censorship fears after being fired
First they came for the niche news, and I didn't say anything because it's only 0.5% share of the viewership. Then they came for the regional news, and I didn't say anything because it's only 3.5% share of the viewership...

(How you respond to these little transgressions will determine whether your society will recover to normal or slide further into ruin)

chabska··on Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened
There's no term limit for the British Prime Minister and Germany Kanzler. What do you think about that?
chabska··on Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened
Why are we using British PM count like it means anything. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel served longer as Kanzler than Xi has served as President. Is Germany a dictatorship?

(Neither Britain nor Germany have term limits for their head of government, so China removing its term limit is just bringing it at par with the two most prominent European democracies)

chabska··on Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened
He was not elected by the general public to the position of Prime Minister. He was elected, by a small number of UK citizens in his constituency, to the Parliament seat.

British law doesn't even require the Prime Minister to be an MP, technically Parliament could elect any random bozo from the street to be PM.

chabska··on Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened
Democracy is when you drop a ballot every two/four years, and the elected officers ignore you while they take millions of donation from wealthy donors. Dictatorship is when the unelected representatives work their ass off to better the lives of the average citizens, because they're afraid of a revolution.

(P.S.: Xi Jin Ping is as unelected as the British Prime Minister, but I don't see people calling the UK a dictatorship.)

chabska··on Turns are Better than Radians (2022)
The problem is that trigonometric functions are used in many more fields beyond geometry. The input is not always an angle around a point in euclidean space, it could be phase angle of a periodic signal. You can make an alternative set of trig functions that take turns, but you will anger a lot of people if you mess with the vanilla trig functions.
chabska··on A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
It's weirdly phrased, but it just means that they don't have a tight control for battery capacity. Their device is designed to operate for at most ten hours (for example), but the battery that they use could have anywhere between 8-12 hours of supply, so the transmitter would be active anywhere between 8-10 hours.
chabska··on A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
You would think that the right to bear arms would extend to Iran developing a nuclear warhead though.
chabska··on Air Theremin – A browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam
I'd love if the people who put a tape over their laptop webcam could answer this.
chabska··on Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe
Most central banks in the world hold their USD reserve in the Federal Reserve. There's no need at all for a the currency to be exportable, for it to function as a reserve currency.

Do you actually believe that the Central Bank of India is hauling Benjamins in wheelbarrow through the Delhi international?

chabska··on Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe
We knew how to make synthetic hydrocarbon one hundred years ago. Nazi Germany used the Fischer Tropsch process to make synthetic fuel after the Royal Navy blockaded their oil import. The only reason we're still digging up fossil fuel is because it's cheap. According to some calculation, green hydrocarbon from atmospheric CO2 and electrolytic hydrogen could be commercially viable when fossil petroleum reaches $200/barrel , which is really not that far off.
chabska··on US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide
The South Korean government was a military dictatorship at the time. And the North was wealthier. Without the power of foresight, you couldn't justify the war as bringing democracy or economic prosperity, it was purely a geopolitical struggle. It took a lot of historical revisionism to erase that inconvenient little fact from western consciousness.
chabska··on Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
I didn't mean a literal tree that has leaves and bark. I meant the tree structure that you get when you trace the ancestry of all organisms. A tree coordinate system would assign a number to every node, so instead of saying Tectona grandis, you say 2.44.32.543.45.33 . If that looks like IP address to you, yes, an IP address is actually a tree coordinate system.
chabska··on Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
They spent a whole section glazing the Linnaeus system like it's a perfect thing, but as someone who has delved into taxonomy a lot (due to playing Metazooa and Metaflora), there are quite a few glaring issues with it.

1. political tussle. australian botanists managed to hijack the "acacia" name from the original African Acacia, to the totally unrelated australian plants that were also called acacia. I noticed that japanese botanists also have a habit of insular naming.

2. western bias. Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.

3. the eight rank taxonomy that only accidentally kinda work, but not really. The original ranks were domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Modern taxonomy only pays a glancing homage to this system, because the actual evolutionary path that we found out there doesn't care about this neat categorization system, and so we had to shoehorn in hacks in the form of sub-phylums, sub-classes, sub-sub-sub-families, and sub-species. We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.

chabska··on Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
There are a lot more to Criminal Botany. There's the chaotic evil variety, like planting an invasive species, planting bamboo near your enemy's house, and sprinkling mint on someone's garden plot. There's the chaotic good variety, like broadcasting native seeds on a grass lawn and releasing moles onto a golf field. There's chaotic neutral, like making air layering on trees that you don't own, or otherwise taking seeds, cuttings, or plantlets from them.
chabska··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
This Schroedinger's Freedom is getting tired now. They happily label themself as free-market democratic liberal progressive when you're justifying bombing a poor third-world country, but suddenly claim to be unfree undemocratic oligarchic whenever anyone asks them to act on that principle.
chabska··on Hybrid-Electric Aicraft Engine Targeting 30% Fuel Efficiency
One thing I really don't like about this video, is that he was specifically describing the advantages of that specific van and drivetrain, that being Toyota Sienna, and he's not wrong at that, but then he made grandiose general statement like "Hybrids are simple" and "minivans are great".

No, quite a few other hybrids are just an electrical motor tacked on to an existing ICE drivetrain, and they are actually more complicated than a regular ICE car, with horrible reliability and repair cost. And other non-hybrid minivans are either seriously underpowered, or require a seriously big engine that eats fuel.

The complaints that people have against hybrids and minivans are valid, if they're not talking about Toyota hybrids or this specific Toyota minivan.

chabska··on Does creatine make you smarter?
> By virtue of how hard it is to get any information on creatine

What exactly is hard about that? You can get all sorts of information about creatine, it is one of the most studied supplement ever.

chabska··on Does creatine make you smarter?
> Creatine breaks when cooked

Into what?

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