gattr

I have the same Dell (since 2016) and love it. But eventually I transitioned last year to a 27" 4K monitor. Still almost as sharp (KDE at 175% works fine for me).

I concur; just last month I started with `wgpu` (the Rust bindings for WebGPU) after exclusively using OpenGL (since 2000, I think? via Delphi 2). Feels a bit verbose at first (with all the pipelines/bindings setup), but once you have your first working example, it's smooth sailing from there. I kind of liked (discontinued) `glium`, but this is better.

I had such blocks as well. For a recent take on this, I can recommend Kapla, typically come in a large (a couple 100s) box of skinny rectangular cuboids. I had fun doing, ahem, preliminary testing, before gifting them to my niece.

Once we develop more efficient propulsion (fission, fusion, light sails, etc.), would you like for someone to catch the Voyagers and bring them back into a museum? I myself am not sure. (Perhaps a "live museum" instead, keep them on their trajectories, but surround with a big space habitat with visitor center and whatnot.)

I think it's a wrong way to look at it. In addition to DNA information content, one should count also the complexity of the proteins and higher-level structures in the gametes.

From the report:

> To conduct the CT scans, the large mass was evaluated by a third-party laboratory under NTSB supervision. This facility had a range of scanners with different power and energy levels and could scan large masses using a rotating table, avoiding the need to rotate the mass itself. Ultimately, the third-party laboratory attempted to image the large mass at a power as high as 320 kilovolts (kV). The scans conducted at 320 kV were not powerful enough to penetrate the object, and as a result, no internal structures or voids were visible, and no memory devices could be identified. The NTSB evaluated using another laboratory with higher power and energy CT scan devices, however, there was concern that increased CT scan energy could damage data stored on any surviving NVM chips. Consequently, higher-energy scans were not pursued.

I'm no expert, but remember reading about neutron imaging ([1]). I'm curious if that was deemed unfeasible, too expensive, or having little chance of success? From Wikipedia:

> X-rays are attenuated based on a material's density. Denser materials will stop more X-rays. With neutrons, a material's likelihood of attenuation of neutrons is not related to its density. Some light materials such as boron will absorb neutrons while hydrogen will generally scatter neutrons, and many commonly used metals allow most neutrons to pass through them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_imaging#Neutron_radiog...

Shameless plug: active region (and sunspot group) 4274 has already produced several X-class solar flares, alas, I didn't manage to catch one during my short weekend imaging session. Though there was a nice prominence; 38-min time lapse (Earth to scale):

https://app.astrobin.com/u/GreatAttractor?i=9tkxay#gallery

On a somewhat related note, I like the IO shield of my new MSI motherboard - the USB ports are tersely labeled "5G", "10G", "40G" (and a few lingering "USB 2.0").

> Stored on mobile phones, the ID would contain details including a name, date of birth, residency status and crucially a photo - which would distinguish it from National Insurance numbers.

Surely it will be possible to also store it on some government-issued, GCHQ-vetted digital device, and not rely on foreign companies (Google/Apple) and their locked-down mobile platforms?

I used to do it as well with a cheap second-hand IXUS 230 HS. It could run (at least) 48 h off a 7.2 Ah 12 V AGM battery, snapping a photo every 3 s (I used a fake-battery power adapter and a small DC-DC converter.)

Another interesting project might be capturing host star light curves for transiting exoplanets. For a number of closer ones, it can be done conveniently from a backyard with just a photographic lens. Here's one amateur using ASI178MM-c with a Canon FD 300 mm:

https://astropolis.pl/topic/60163-wasp-10-b-w-pegazie-1270-m...

To be nitpicky, our uranium and thorium were made via r-process (rapid neutron capture), which is not the kind of fusion occurring in the Sun at present.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-process

Earth's spin comes from the parent molecular cloud which formed the Solar System (including any impacts during the protoplanetary phase.) And that ultimately from density fluctuations after Big Bang, and the way they led to coalescence of galaxies and galaxy clusters.

You could always restore from incidental backups (hairbrush, etc.).

On a more positive note, LLMs (or their successors) could be used to create a perfect tutor. Taylored for every individual, automatically adjusting learning material difficulty, etc.

But yeah, first we'll go through a few (?) years of the self-defeating "ChatGPT does my homework" and the necessary adjustments of how schools/unis function.

You jest, but if you encountered towels with print of the logo of a programming language you detest?...

Indeed, cf. Tunguska event ([1]) from 1908.

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

Related: When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk [1];

TL;DR: VCRO is capable of imaging spy- and other classified US satellites. An automated filtering system (involves routing through some government processing facility) is in place to remove them from the freshly captured raw data used for the public transient phenomena alert service. 3 days later, unredacted data is made available (by then the elusive, variable-orbit assets are long gone.)

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...

It's also in his previous book "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics", along with a lot more. Strongly recommended (even though after reading a lot of Greg Egan, my views on consciousness somewhat shifted towards "classical computation can do it, too".)

I agree, but I'm a bit disappointed it will probably come to this, instead of having a mano a mano like in the movie "Robot Jox".

Here's a comparison of bad and good seeing (captured with a D = 90 mm telescope with a solar Hα filter):

https://app.astrobin.com/u/GreatAttractor?i=246828#gallery

Technically speaking, in the first half of the vid the incoming wavefronts are distorted (the Fried parameter r₀ is smaller than the telescope's diameter D) and do not focus to a clean, tight Airy pattern ([1]). In the second half, r₀ is above D and we're left with just some rubber-membrane distortion (the wavefronts are tilted this way and that, but remain mostly planar), which can be corrected in software.

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

I'd like to try this kind of setup (coding from a lounge chair with just a keyboard tray & trackball, yay!), "dumb monitor" would be sufficient - but since switching to high-DPI displays in 2016 I really need this to be 4K.

I'm not into Warhammer, but out of curiosity, how did they check that? Scrape a sample off each figurine and run it through a mass spectrometer or something?

I've experienced only three improvements in video games that felt ground-breaking & jaw-dropping:

1. Sprite-based -> 3D sandbox world (in my case: Stunts, F29 Retaliator, Gunship 2000, Wolfenstein 3D)

2. Hardware 3D rendering (I had the NVidia RIVA 128ZX)

3. Fast-paced real-time multiplayer (Delta Force: Black Hawk Down)

The 4th might be the usage of LLMs or similar technology for (mostly-)unattended content generation: NPC dialogue etc.

You can use superscript Unicode characters on HN: km·h⁻¹.

A few decades from now, in the biohacker/modder community: "Recap your noggin with our reinforced-glass-ceramic dome!".

On the one hand, I'm pretty sure Zelenskyy has had similar exchanges with Biden and the members of his administration in the past few years. And I understand (I think) the realities here: the US isn't doing anything out of the goodness of its heart; Putin's idiotic "short victorious war" blunder presented a nice opportunity to weaken Russia via a proxy war, no decisive military/materiel support was given, just enough to keep Ukraine going, etc.

But FOR GOODNESS' SAKE, these dealings and bickering are supposed to happen behind closed doors! You give the public just the bland courtesies and assurances! The US president and vice president have come across as impulsive 4-year-olds throwing toys out of a sandbox.

I used to think that the novel "The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States" ([1]), which ridicules Donald Trump quite a bit, was overdoing it for humor. Now I'm not so sure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2020_Commission_Report_on_...

On a related (?) note, I was taken aback by the scene from "Kill Bill 2" ([1]), where Bill makes a sandwich for Bibi and... cuts off the crust. And it was the soft "toast" bread anyway. Doing this was not a thing when I was a kid; actually, eating the crunchy heel of a (Central-European style) loaf was a pleasure.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXXXIokuYGM

Good point, we don't have to exactly follow the "astronauts in a small tin can, where everything must work flawlessly" way. With Starship (or its future iteration/successor) we can:

- assemble a quite large interplanetary craft in orbit, with plenty of redundancy in HW and supplies

- drop 50 tons of cargo on Mars beforehand: food (and/or food-growing necessities - packaged soil, hydroponic equipment?), medical supplies, etc.; so that in case of problems, astronauts can survive on Mars for years if need be

Perhaps the whole situation will finally convince the "I don't mind, I have nothing to hide" crowd about the need to scrutinize & limit as much as reasonably possible the personal data collection and retention by government and other entities. What good are rules, statutes, checks & balances, passwords and ACLs, if at some point someone you don't like or trust can just come in "as a root" and circumvent everything?