5,264 karma · joined July 17, 2008
I submitted the reports anyway and, shortly thereafter, got an email from Youtube telling me "Unfortunately the information you provided in your report to YouTube does not meet our impersonation reporting guidelines." Seems they automatically ignore any reports without tagged videos/comments.
I would agree that the term is a bit of "shorthand" that doesn't perfectly map to the idea of big-O complexity - for exactly the reason you mention, build time still depends on the size of the file. But for me, it was shorthand that helped me understand the idea. They had two other options on how to write this - either leave out the big-O stuff entirely, or explain it more deeply eg. "most bundlers are O(lmn) where l is the number of files, m is the number of files changed, n is the number of JS tokens per file" or something. Both of these options may have been more "technically correct" but would've taken me longer to grok the idea than the way they have it written. Maybe they should just have a footnote for the pedants explaining that O(1) is more of an idiom than a technical claim in this case :P
Browserify, Webpack, Parcel, Rollup, Vite, Snowpack: people use all of these for different reasons & they all have their own advantages & drawbacks. It often doesn't make sense to abandon a stable solution for one which promises speed/magical features but may be full of bugs/untested (not saying this is true of Snowpack, but you can't just trust the claimed feature list as an accurate representation of the tool).
I mention this simply because I've been in so many situations where a dev casually denigrates someone else's work because it was built using an "old" solution, without engaging with the core functionality of the code. Like "oh, they're using Webpack, they must not have heard of Rollup." It's good to be re-evaluate the tools you use from time to time, but don't let the "new hotness" make you think the old tried-and-true ways are any less valid - many yaks have been shaved and bikes shedded this way.
Now I'm just waiting for his big announcement that he's putting together a crack team to develop a COVID-19 cure/vaccine, at which he'll throw a few million dollars and achieve nothing other than to stoke his ego and reputation. I hope I'm wrong.
As humans living in the classical world, we hear that and think "oh, that just means we don't know what's really going on, it either bounces or re-emits, it just looks the same to us." But no - reality is just an interaction of quantum fields and we're putting these human stories on top of it. It's like debating whether or not submarines swim.
Now imagine a spaceship that travels 100 light years. It's going to pass through roughly 10^15 1km "voxels" on its journey, which means the chances of it hitting one of those 1km rocks is ~(10^15/10^29) or 1 in 100 trillion. Space is biiiig.
The real danger, though, is the smaller stuff. It's hard to know the distribution of interstellar dust size, but there are a LOT more small things than big things, and it only takes a grain of sand at relativistic speeds to cause a really bad day. If sand-sized rocks turn out to be 100 trillion times more common than these big ones, well, that's going to be a problem...
This is not the same cone map, the shaded area represents "50 percent or higher chance of experiencing wind speeds of at least 39 miles per hour" - ie. a simplified version of the map you recommend.
In fact, in this case, the asteroid was detected independently by the SONEAR survey in Brazil and the ASAS-SN telescope network run by Ohio State University. Neither of these would fall under the "jurisdiction" of NASA or any governmental organization that would effectively be able to prevent them from talking about it. ASAS-SN tweeted the discovery, and I'm quite sure they didn't have to ask anyone permission to do so.
Secondly, the first few observations of a newly-discovered near-Earth object are generally not enough information to calculate the object's orbit accurately enough to know if it will hit Earth or not. So what do scientists do when they discover one? They immediately report it to the IAU and get the word out to as many other astronomers as possible, in order to obtain more observations & accurately determine the orbit.
As a result, it's hard to imagine how such a discovery could be kept secret.
"Do patients always die if wire removal causes bleeding? No — it is very rare, surgeons said. Patients should be rushed to the operating room ... But Mr. Armstrong was taken to a cardiac catheterization lab first, before he went to surgery. The cath lab, Dr. Haft said, 'is not the solution.' ... By the time Mr. Armstrong got to the operating room, his heart had stopped and he had brain damage from a lack of blood to his brain. He died without regaining consciousness."
"The expert reviews focus on the hospital’s decision to bring Mr. Armstrong to a catheterization lab rather than directly to an operating room when he began to experience complications. 'The decision to go to the cath lab was THE major error,' Dr. Joseph Bavaria, a vice-chair of cardiothoracic surgery at University of Pennsylvania wrote in a review conducted at the request of the Armstrong family."
I will say though that physics people I've spoken to about it are much more skeptical of the solar radiation hypothesis, simply because radiation pressure is so weak. I'd be surprised if it were a thin slate of rock as the dimensions are so outlandish compared to anything we've ever observed, plus I would think be there might be "structural integrity" problems with an asteroidal body that thin and sheetlike. The "solar sail" calculations done by the folks linked to above may also assume/require that the sail "turns" itself somehow to constantly face the sun, since the observed acceleration vector was entirely pointed radially away from the sun.
I have heard one radiation pressure idea that I liked, though, which is the "dust bunny hypothesis". If 'Oumuamua were, instead of a solid body, more like a very loose, fluffy agglomeration of dust, it might just have enough surface area for us to see it (and to be hit by enough sunlight to get a push), while also having a low enough mass to produce the observed acceleration. IIRC this may have other problems, though, eg. requiring the dust to be super-high albedo for it to be visible. Seems like there aren't any "nice" answers left, so sifting through the "least improbables" is pretty difficult :)
BTW, here's my favorite video - a compilation of the best results with some music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lPsA8J3U0Q
Another is the "YORP Effect". Sunlight falling on an asteroid produces a slight thermal radiation pressure (push). If, due to asymmetries in asteroid shape/albedo, the net radiation pressure force is not aligned with the asteroid's center of mass, it will produce a torquing force which will cause the asteroid to spin faster (or slower) over time. Applying the idea of YORP Effect to binary asteroids yields the "BYORP [Binary YORP] Effect", by which the orbital dynamics of the binary system are modified by this asymmetric radiation pressure over time, in a way that either pushes them together into a contact binary or apart into two unbound asteroids.
It's even hypothesized that some asteroids may be in a binary/contact-binary cycle on long timescales! There are solutions to the above in which the BYORP effect causes a loss of angular momentum in a binary pair, causing them to merge into a contact binary - but the contact binary may settle into a state where the YORP Effect actually causes the newly merged asteroid to spin faster, eventually flinging them apart due to centripetal forces... back into a binary state where the BYORP Effect may again cause them to merge someday.
Recommended reading: https://arxiv.org/abs/1010.2676