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lnauta

240 karma · joined July 17, 2020

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lnauta··on Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant
This is exactly what has been playing out in the Netherlands the past couple of months: the weather institute (KNMI) released their own weather app that is functionally the same (in some cases superior) as the commercial apps that want your consent to track and serve ads.

The commercial parties sued KNMI, even though they use the public data provided by KNMI. Luckily they lost: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/02/knmi-weathers-legal-app-sto...

And as a bonus, there was some Streisand Effect when this was in the news, and people have been moving to the KNMI app in droves.

lnauta··on CERN scientists find evidence of quantum entanglement in sheep
Even if something is well known, its important to measure it and set statistical limits. While the 4 sigma in the article is not enough to claim an observation, it opens the points towards some exciting new Beyond the Shearing Model physics.
lnauta··on Apple Loses Top Court Fight Over German Antitrust Crackdown
AFAIK the EU law has to be implemented on a local level, and the countries' agencies can uphold in their respective country. Once a single country has a precedent, this can be used by other member states.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

lnauta··on Reverse engineering OpenAI code execution to make it run C and JavaScript
Interesting idea to increase the scope until the LLM gives suggestions on how to 'hack' itself. Good read!
lnauta··on NASA Successfully Acquires GPS Signals on Moon
Super cool! This only works on the side facing the GNSS constellation, right? There is no signal to use on the other side.
lnauta··on Valve releases Team Fortress 2 game code
I'm still not quite sure how to take this, does this mean that:

We can not fix problematic netcode (this is a running joke in the TF2 comminity)

We can fix game balance issues (that could also be fixed through configs)?

lnauta··on Record-breaking neutrino is most energetic ever detected
The muon traverses a few hundred meters of detection volume very close to the speed of light, so in the order of one microsecond.
lnauta··on Record-breaking neutrino is most energetic ever detected
Ha, that made me laugh, thanks for the correction!
lnauta··on Record-breaking neutrino is most energetic ever detected
One of the lead researchers in KM3NeT mentioned that the particle was emitting 2 horse power in light during detector transit. A typical body builder expends about 1 horse power while performing, so its 2 body builders in a single particle.
lnauta··on Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe
I've been using mistral for most of January at the same rate as chatgpt before. I decided to pay for it as its per token (in and out) and the bill came yesterday... A whopping 1 cent. Thats probably rounded up.
lnauta··on LibreOffice 400M Downloads, and Counting
I've been using it for about a year now and for personal stuff its fine. Just some sheets and the occasional document and there haven't been any issues with formatting and such that tend to pop up when moving between MS and others. It runs with a single window too, where all docs and sheets are open, I like that.
lnauta··on Google Pixel 4a's old firmware is gone, trapping users on buggy battery update
My pixel 4a lasted about 3 hours before the update, now its about an hour. Even with the discount in the store, it was cheaper to get the pixel 8a and some cash from a local vendor. The ticket to get the reimbursement went surprisingly fast, still waiting on money though.

Yesterday I got my new 8a, installed grapheneos and it works very well! So far no massive issues. When I tried this on the 4a some years ago, netflix complained about general certificate stuff and casting was broken, microG et al was barely holding on. Now, no problems at all!

lnauta··on Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
I play one game at a time for about a month and then move to the next. When I first played Mario Odyssey on my switch I was over the moon with how much pure fun it was compared to all the good looking and serious RPGs I played in the decade before. I had forgotten games can be this enjoyable. Nowadays I try to do these super fun games in between my souls-like sessions.
lnauta··on Why is Ashburn the data center capital of the world?
I just have to point out - looking out an office window to the the data center we use here in Amsterdam - that Amsterdam is a city and not a country.

But it was a very funny mistake to me, and I assume the best.

lnauta··on HAM radio operators receive signals from Voyager 1 on Dwingeloo telescope
Indeed, it has been decommissioned for some 20 odd years now. But it's kept up and running by volunteers and became a national monument.
lnauta··on Ham radio operators receive signals from Voyager 1 on Dwingeloo telescope
You may be correct. In my head anything shot into space and still flying must be a satellite but that's a lazy shortcut.
lnauta··on Ham radio operators receive signals from Voyager 1 on Dwingeloo telescope
I got to visit the telescope earlier this year, its pretty cool. In a forest outside some small towns. For how well connected the Netherlands is, its pretty hard to reach.

We looked at the sun and some planets in radio frequencies (its all radio astronomy with LOFAR nearby).

That they can listen to Voyager with such an old instrument is incredible. It must help that the satellite is aimed at us.

lnauta··on Dumb TVs deserve a comeback
I bought a dumb tv some 2 years ago. 4k, 50ish inch and it has a chromecast v2 attached. Works great.

The funny part is when younger family members come over, they get frustrated there's no netflix button on the remote! Last time that lead to a drawing sessions instead of some paw patrol nonsense.

lnauta··on OpenWrt Community question: What do you want to see in OpenWrt?
About a month ago I would've said the automatic upgrades. But a few weeks ago I tried to upgrade, my custom setup couldnt be resolved by the image builder (probably old software installed). I decided to backup, export the uci commands too and do a clean install. Setting up was super easy from the uci commands and it turns out the rest of my setup was not essential.

Then I had to join a vlan for my new ISP. That was a tough one! Evenings of reading threads and going through documentation and there was no clear answer. In the end I asked an LLM and the instructions were so easy, it made me wonder how I missed it.

So I would join some other calls in here for common setups.

lnauta··on AI-Time Travel-Street View
I'd never seen generated dinos before, they are way messed up!
lnauta··on The deconstructed Standard Model equation
Indeed, you could fill a book with it.

I wrote this just before bed, my estimation skill was already asleep.

lnauta··on The deconstructed Standard Model equation
What they don't tell you is that if you write out all the indices (mu and nu represent 4 spacetime coordinates, antisymmetric components (f_abc = -f_bac, etc), the kappas and lambdas I don't even remember!), and their contractions [1], this giant equation becomes a few times larger than its current form.

Physicists like to contract and shorten everything, and while it is fun, you need a dictionary of rules and conventions to write out the full form.

Luckily there are many tricks to use in these shorter representations, but one tends to forget the incredible amount of information within them.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_notation

lnauta··on How CERN serves 1EB of data via FUSE [video]
At some tier 1 sites in the grid there is no backup for the tapes as its costly and you only lose some statistics when a tape is lost.
lnauta··on How CERN serves 1EB of data via FUSE [video]
Don't forget bandwidth costs at this scale are significant to say the least.
lnauta··on Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks
Oh my god I love the way they visualize the recipe steps. That's how I write them down (grouping ingredients and steps), but its a table merging rows instead!
lnauta··on Music Industry's 1990s Hard Drives Are Dying
Microsoft is working on storing in glass tiles, which should last up to 10.000 years [1]. Its not commercial yet though.

[1] https://unlocked.microsoft.com/sealed-in-glass/

lnauta··on DUNE scientists observe first neutrinos with prototype detector at Fermilab
I was just thinking about the distances used: in LIGO/VIRGO, the sizes of the chambers is 4 km, and the interferometric distance they look for is 10^{-18} m to detect a GW.

For the baseline of DUNE we have 1300km, so that would mean 10^{-15} m if we do a very simple comparison. (I am not that familiar with GW detection!).

Measuring neutrino events at such a resolution would seems not realistic currently, as most detector measure events at sizes of cm (reactor experiments)- to meters (atmospheric / galactic). However, don't discount someone coming up with a brilliant insight to actually do this measurement. Some things we measure today were thought impossible not that long ago, like GWs and the Event Horizon black hole image.

lnauta··on Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels
I love this! This is how I want to watch stuff sometimes, very relaxing to take away all the functionality and (mental) noise that comes with it. Thanks.
lnauta··on DUNE scientists observe first neutrinos with prototype detector at Fermilab
This is the dream of multi-messenger astronomy:

Simulations show that next generation gravitational wave detectors will be able to detect the initial part of the wave before the actual merger of objects (or collision?). If you can identify this signal in time, you could make the 'regular' telescopes look into that particular direction and look for a signal in light, and you could use a neutrino detector at the same time (think IceCube, KM3NeT, Baikal and others that look at large parts of the sky) to look in the neutrino channel.

This way you would have gravitational wave-, light- and neutrino-channels from a single object. This is still many years (decades?) away, but would be incredible for studying exotic objects.

If you mean, measuring the neutrino baseline difference when a GW passes through the Earth, perhaps. I never thought about it, but its definitely intriguing.

lnauta··on My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website
This is adorable and made me feel good! I learned something about cats too. Thank you for sharing.
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