Hacker News Reader

changelinkon Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

For sure, but so does heavy post-covid. It's a trade-off that's well worth it for her. It improved her memory and brain clarity a fair bit to the point that it's doable to get through the days hoping for a cure (or at least a way to get back to a normal life).

changelinkon Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest

My girlfriend has pretty bad post-covid, the thing that helped her most was getting on Citalopram. There's suspicions that many SSRI's have a anti-inflammatory effect on the brain, which might be the mechanism.

She's currently in oxygen therapy, we're positive about the effects but since it's dominating her life (and energy) at the moment it's hard to say what the effect is.

changelinkon Running Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 in 298MB of RAM

I've built this a while back, using a previous version that runs Stable Diffusion on a raspberry pi zero 2 w:

https://hackaday.com/2023/09/19/e-paper-news-feed-illustrate...

https://github.com/rvdveen/epaper-slow-generative-art/

changelinkon Google assigns a CVE for libwebp and gives it a 10.0 score

I just checked, and in the last 30 minutes a update has become available for my Pixel 5.

The security bulletin doesn't reference this CVE specifically but does mention a critical vulnerability that could lead to RCE.

changelinkon Using the linear distance operator in Postgres 12 to find the closest match

Postgres has a extension called cube (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/cube.html) that can be used for up to 150 dimensions (which is a compile-time limit, you can have more if you compile Postgres yourself).

It's a pretty cool extension that does distance between points, intersections between n-dimensional cubes (hence the name), different distance metrics etc.

It'd be perfect for storing and searching through large amounts of n-dimensional embeddings, I'm guessing it's used for that already.

changelinkon SpinLaunch raises $40M to build a machine to catapult objects into space

It saves you about 6% of fuel, assuming the launch location is on the equator, is suitable for roads and can handle a lot of noise / avelanches. Getting into space is the easy bit (energy-wise). Getting up to orbital speed takes much more fuel and energy.

The problem is that now you have to transport everything near and up the mountain, which costs a ton in logistics (getting a road up a mountain that can handle a entire assembled rocket isn't cheap, nor easy). Most launches have delta-v to spare because satellites are usually nowhere near the rocket's maximum payload weight.

tl;dr it can save 6% in a ideal situation, but the extra cost and logistical problems aren't worth it.