labcomputer

With a modern 4 GHz CPU, that means your budget is only 4000 clocks per interrupt. The context save alone can make it hard to hit 1MHz, and you really want to have your interrupt code pinned to the L1 cache because a few memory reads will blow your entire budget.

As nice as USB4 is, I’ve never heard anyone claim it has single-digit microsecond latency, to say nothing of sub-microsecond latency. The typically-quoted ~20 usec latency of USB4 limits it to around 50 kHz for an emulated ISA card.

If you restrict the domain to nighttime or exoatmospheric, a high-resolution wide-angle camera paired with an offline astrometry database has the makings of a strapdown astronav.

Widening the domain again, the natural motion of the vehicle is probably enough, when combined with inertial sensors to aid pixel-shift image stabilization, to achieve the same kind of processing gain as the older systems got with shutter-synchronous detection.

Literally 5 consecutive minutes of making 100s of wrong decisions snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

According to news reports, a magistrate judge at OSHA has been sandbagging an investigation into retaliatory firings by this airline (of pilots who reported unsafe practices with maintenance, CRM, training, scheduling, everything). I wonder if the NTSB will include that judge in the investigation. It seems like he or she has a lot to answer for.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/miami-plane-crash-21-air-safety...

In almost every state, you may post a bond in lieu of insurance, for an amount as low as $35,000!

You don’t even pay for the fraudulent credit card transactions in the first place! There’s no money for them to return!

I would guess the opposite. Many parts in a turbine engine are "lifetime limited" by number of engine starts. That is, you are required to tear down the engine and replace certain parts after a certain number of engine cycles.

That makes the economics of the turbine hybrid radically different if you need to start it every time you land vs. only the rare cases where you need to dip into fuel reserves.

For example, the PT6A (a common 500-1000hp turboprop) requires the turbine and compressor disks to be replaced every 16,000 cycles. That's about 5 years of commercial service at 4x round trips per day. But if you only start the engine once in every 10 flights, now those components (theoretically) last for 50 years of flying.

Yup. And to bring this point home:

"Only" doubling the battery capacity likely eats well over half of the payload capacity, in terms of mass. So your 38 seat plane is now a 19 seat (or fewer) plane.

But... given that turbine APUs already exist for ground power and are already engineered to be as light as practical, my naive guess would be that it's easier, simpler and faster to just use a COTS APU as a series hybrid rather than trying directly couple a turbine to the propeller.

On inspections and overhauls: I'd expect that not needing to start the turbine at all on a given flight massively helps the economics of the airplane. Turbines often have parts that must be replaced after a given number of (startup) cycles, and that's going to be especially important for a turbine that is only expected to run for a short time (if at all) at the end of a flight.

If you only start the turbine on, say, 5% of flights, that means you get 20x as many flights before overhaul/inspection. I could see that being incredibly attractive to airlines.

For private, yes. For airlines, the requirement boils down to basically enough fuel to "fly to the intended destination as scheduled, then loiter for XX minutes, then fly at normal speeds to a pre-designated alternate, land".

For short flights, that means the fuel loaded at departure can be more than twice what is actually needed to get from A to B...

Which is why the hybrid approach is fairly clever: You can use it for ~125 mile flights, and remain 100% electric on ~95% of flights. Whereas, without the reserve turbine the practical limit would be ~60 miles. On the ~5% of flights requiring more range, you're still mostly operating on electricity.

Bicycle frames are not fully symmetric left-right because you need things like a mount point for the derailleur hanger, and optionally affordances to keep the chain off the stays when the wheel is removed.

Those things have to be on the same side as the chain. Bikes designed for disc brakes additionally need a mount point for the brake caliper on the opposite side from the chain.

Additionally, rear wheels are not symmetric: the spokes on the chain side connect to the hub closer to the plane of the rim. That is, they are more perpendicular to the wheel’s rotational axis than spokes on the opposite side (which is why you should always mount a single pannier on the chain side). This asymmetry is to provide space for the gears.

So once the industry decided to put the chain on the ride, you can’t very well make a group set designed for a left chain if you want it to work on the vast majority of frames.

Another part of the problem is that a model not specifically fine-tuned to make a total loss determination won't know the relevant factors, nor how an insurance company's concept of a total loss differs from the public's.

And still another part of the problem is that most total loss claims aren't what you, dear reader, are imagining: They are very rarely "the car is a thin pancake after being crushed by a meteor".

The much, much more common scenario is: "50% of the body panels sustained at least paint damage, both headlight modules need replacement, and the front wheels look funny. Given that the vehicle has an MSRP of $FOO, $BAR miles, no prior collision history on carfax, and is a popular color, is it cheaper to repair or total the vehicle?"

Of course, the model can turn over the hard cases to a human adjuster... but then what are we doing here? It only takes 10 seconds for the human adjuster to handle the "crushed by a meteor" case also.

Source: Listening to my SIL rant about being asked to stop training bespoke total loss models and just send it by 1-shotting a commercial LLM.

Well, actually, no.

The EO changes the official name of the geographical feature as recognized by the US government.

All the large map providers ingest a data feed from the USG (and other governments for other localizations) which names various geographical and place entities. That data goes through a pipeline (basically a CI pipeline) to build the map artifact and tiles served to users.

Google just has a particularly good and low latency pipeline. Google got there in a couple days. Apple will get there in a week or two. The USGS will get there in god-knows-when. Mapquest has said they’re not going to update the name, which presumably means their pipeline is old and creaky.

The article itself even acknowledges that the USGS GNIS database has already been updated to reflect the change. Unless someone at Google manually edits the entity, it will be automatically renamed with no human input (although, for very large, highly visible entities the validation stage may block the build and flag it for manual review)

Why is this so difficult? We will try absolutely anything except to allow enough housing to be built, and then ask why there isn't enough housing. It's madness.

If there isn't enough housing, no amount of shenanigans can overcome that inconvenient fact, except to build more housing. That's it. That is the only thing which can alleviate a housing shortage.

James Pickard modified the Newcomen steam engine to deliver rotary motion using a crank (and patented it). So James Watt used the sun and planet for his steam engine to avoid infringing the patent.

The Picard patent specifies that the crank is fixed to the driveshaft, but it is free to rotate in the sun and planet setup

I'm not convinced that's an accident. I think politicians in Europe are just better than those in the US at hiding who they really work for.

There are numerous examples of regulations in many European countries that create a glass ceiling for anyone who strives to be more than just middle-middle-class, while creating effective loopholes for the wealthy to continue multiplying their wealth.

For example, the total (State + Federal) top tax rate for someone living in California or New York is not too different (maybe 2-3%) from someone living in France or Sweden. But the difference is that in California the top rate does not kick in until you earn north of $1M per year, while in Sweden or France the middle class is already paying those rates.

Likewise, in the US you cannot (legally) shelter your income by declaring it to be foreign income, as you can in most European countries. That is a tax dodge not applicable to the middle class.

And then we have the present discussion: The compliance costs are of course too high for any small business, so these regulations are just another form of regulatory capture to prevent anyone new from breaking into the upper class, while allowing those already there to have it easy.

The point of having a bundled photo app is to deliver a complete product, not to suppress competition. Imagine the reviews on for a digital camera if you couldn't view photos without downloading extra software.

Apple still makes a commission from app store sales, right? Doesn't bundling a photo app hurt their bottom line by reducing the number of people who feel the need to pay for a 3rd party app?

The built-in Photos app is just a basic built-in photo viewer. So the user is not allowed to view their own damn photos without clicking through a bunch of permission prompts like they're running Windows Vista.

The app even comes from the same developer as the operating system. If you don't trust that developer to make an app that views your photos, why did you buy a phone that runs that operating system in the first place?!?

Where's the common sense?

Given the importance of eye position, the standardization of Airbus cockpits, the near-universal use of EFBs and Airbus's penchant for automating absolutely everything... I'm kind of surprised that a reference seat position for each pilot isn't measured when pilots go in for sim time, saved in each pilot's EFB and then automatically applied when they sit down.

Airlines are always looking for ways to reduce ground time, and it seems like that would be an easy way to save a minute at every turn.

1. Your government clearly is dysfunctional

2. You have been brainwashed into thinking that government is bloated, corrupt and inefficient.

If I believe that government is dysfunctional... then surely that belief is informed by the observation that my government is bloated, corrupt and inefficient, not due to brainwashing?

It is still a mystery to me how recruiting "student athletes", with well below-average academic qualifications and superior athletic qualifications, giving them full-ride scholarships (which can be revoked if they fail to perform on the field) and allowing them to take the easiest courses (with dedicated tutoring staff looking over their shoulders), all while paying coaches the highest salaries on campus and using ticket sales to fund ever-bigger stadiums, has anything at all to do with education.

Perhaps the connection to education is that it is meant to be an object lesson (for the rest of the student body) in how to spot corruption and hypocrisy within power structures.

So I see two paths forward: Admit that the whole thing is a sham and just pay the football players their due; or turn legit and take the big money out of college sports by having actual student-athletes (who are students first).

Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.

The IRS can collect taxes from whichever business entity makes a profit, but, critically, actors cannot. They signed a deal with one entity, and are only payed a share of net profits if that one particular entity makes a profit.

Hollywood Accounting, then, is the process of shifting costs around so that the legal entity responsible for paying the actors never makes a profit.

The SPVs never own anything and never have any expertise in anything. So they have to pay the parent company for a wide range of services, from advertising and marketing to distribution to prop and equipment rental. That makes it easy to shift costs into the SPV as necessary.

You can get 10kWh of batteries and a 5kW MPPT chargeverter for a little over $2k these days (UL certified). A 30 kWh system with inverter can be had for around $4k. That’s well within the reach of most households.

The way I would see this working is that you charge the batteries when electricity is cheap (generally, midnight through early afternoon), and then run the house (not supply the grid) the rest of the time.

LFPs are cheap enough now that a strategy like this would pay back after about 2 years.

If they try to adapt with a “NEM 4.0”, the whole thing will collapse because solar and LFPs are so cheap that everyone will just pay their mandatory $50/month grid connection fee and not buy any electricity from the grid.

Property taxes increase at a rate legally-mandated to be less than inflation. Not just that, you can inherit your parents (or grandparents) property tax rate.

Didn’t have parents who owned property in 1978 (shortly after racial covenants were declared unconstitutional)? Well, why don’t you just go fuck yourself?

Everywhere you look are policies that are ostensibly progressive, but actually quite regressive.

It is illegal to discontinue your relationship with your local electrical utility. As in, completely disconnect from the grid, cut the wires and never look back.

As the previous poster said, charging for the “privilege” of connecting to the enormously-valuable grid would be a little bit defensible if having a connection were not legally required in most places.

A few things that help make these secure:

1. More rotors. SIGABA has 5 cipher rotors, while Fialka has 10.

2. Irregular stepping, instead of odometer-style stepping.

3. A letter can encrypt to itself.

4. Better operational protocols.

Another very important difference (and one that makes Heislers superior to Shays) is that the driveshaft is centered on the loco frame.

That means the driveshaft doesn't need expansion joints, which tended to get jammed under high torque and prevent the trucks from pivoting under the local (thus splitting the rails).