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techdragon

4,897 karma · joined February 11, 2013

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techdragon··on 1,100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets
Depressed trajectory submarine launched ballistic missiles can drop that below ten minutes… depending on what they are aiming at and where they fire from .. it’s a technique that uses the unused propulsion power to hit closer targets faster than a full ballistic launch on the most efficient trajectory would use.

And it’s why the SSBN is such a deadly second strike platform. If you know the nukes flying at you, you send the global alert, the SSBNs stationed secretly close to enemy coastlines surface to get emergency orders, and then let their nukes fly potentially before the first strike wave has had time to hit their targets… I’ve even seen some war game scenarios where the second strike SSBN based nukes can hit the enemy before the first strike reaches the original targets (obviously this is theoretical war game scenario stuff so it must be taken with several grains of salt, but it’s a surprising realisation that submarines can in the best case scenarios, put nukes on your enemies faster than their first wave of nukes will get to you… )

techdragon··on Ask HN: Would we win in cyber warfare against humans from 30 years ago? 50?
If you chain your pet rock up outside you can at least use it to tell the weather.

( for anyone who doesn’t get this look up the Weather Rock )

techdragon··on eBay Still (Secretly) Supports Dorking
The euphemism treadmill strikes again.

It’s a linguistic process that has been academically studied and is surprisingly straightforward once you have it laid out in front of you it’s basically “once we acknowledge word as bad, people use new_word so they can be bad without other people knowing it yet”

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill

techdragon··on AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let's Make Sure It Benefits Humanity
In my albeit limited experience so far… ChatGPT4 is surprisingly good at “doing the MBA bullshit” as I call it. Vague thoughts go in from me the user, coherent business jargon comes out and I can even ask for an explanation if it tosses me a term I’ve never heard before so I can make sure I actually understand the suggested MBA bullshit that I loathe thinking/writing like and can then use it properly.

I wouldn’t be betting like the GP that an MBA will somehow help more than other skillsets… the fact that it already seems like ChatGPT4 is at least capable of MBA ish things at at a quality level that approximates at least basic levels of competency in the field of business management… should not really be a surprise when you think about how much gets written about management by managers to other people in business and management, lots of training data.

techdragon··on Peregrine moon lander suffers anomaly after launch
But don’t forget that the majority of low lunar orbits are not stable due to the sub surface mass concentrations which make the moon’s gravity “lumpy enough” that it pulls you off course unless you either use one of the few stable orbits or actively use fuel to maintain a desired orbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)

techdragon··on Why America hates its children
Yes…

but often it tells you how little time they have spent actually engaged with the real truth of the place or places they are about to compare the problems of wherever they live, instead of the idealistic view of someone who was visiting family or being a tourist … it is a shortcut to that emotional connection to the reader, but taking that can sometimes leave the writer clearly marked as not actually having any grounds upon which the rest of their arguments can stand…

This however doesn’t appear to suffer from that. It seems quite well considered.

techdragon··on Go: What we got right, what we got wrong
Because erlang is “weird” and not enough programmers learn it for it to have breached the cultural ramparts regarding what concurrency is in a programming language. I learned Erlang and Elixir and I’ve never been happy with any other languages’ concurrency mechanisms and primitives since then. Between multitasking features that let you avoid concurrent tasks causing CPU starvation, message passing allowing proper decoupling of concurrent tasks in both an asynchronous and synchronous ways and all the other little ways it does concurrent programming right… nothing holds a candle to it. There are some nice libraries in other languages but it’s not the same because it’s not built into the language at the same level.

Async/Await, asynchronous IO, none of this is really the same kind of “concurrency”… it’s why I wish I had more chance to use the Erlang/Elixir+Rust combo… low level safety and high level concurrency are a match made in heaven.

techdragon··on Go: What we got right, what we got wrong
When did go get abstractions? (Only half joking)

Isn’t the entire language designed explicitly to prevent programmers from building their own sophisticated abstractions that could confuse other programmers who don’t understand that other persons code… as I understand it, if you can read go and understand basic programming you should be competent with go, and if you know your algorithms you should be proficient.

I hated old Java but the modern language isn’t as bad now some people have added some better syntax shortcuts the libraries are nearly twenty years more polished, and the IDE can nearly half write my code for me so the boilerplate and mind numbing aspect isn’t so bad… I loathe go because using it feels like programming with my hands tied behind my back trying on a keyboard with sandpaper keycaps, despite that, I didn’t bother “learning” go, I could just read it based on my Python/C/Basic/Java/C# experience instead of needing any extra learning.

techdragon··on Denied OBS PR regarding Kick support lights up
Well that’s a bit surprising.

I’d never heard of Kick … and several actually explicit adult sites are in the service.json file…

This feels like it might be a bit of an overreaction… but I dunno. I’m not about to expose myself to any site like Twitxh/Kick/YouTube right before bed…. It’s not good for my sleep quality… so I’m not really in a position to judge anything about Kick.

techdragon··on PyPy has moved to Git, GitHub
The Sourceforge UI and overall experience is still a decade or more behind the experience on GitHub and most of the other modern and maintained equivalent sites/services like Fossil, GitLab, Gitea, etc

That ancient feeling UI doesn’t win them a lot of forgiveness, if the only notable change has been “we took away the malware” and the site continues to remain stagnant, SourceForge will continue to feel very inferior to more modern alternatives.

techdragon··on Steamboat Willie [video]
Other than the bullshit computerised systems behind the scenes that are the bane of creators on the platform… it’s hard to think of a more reliable website than YouTube…

I’ve heard Google employees/engineers make jokes (not entirely sure how much is a joke and how much is real) about how YouTube might be the first website back online after WW3 assuming it didn’t destroy the internet (seeing as the internet originally was designed to survive such a thing it’s not entirely far fetched to imagine global chaos and heavily degraded services but still operating in some capacity)

techdragon··on TSA introducing self-service screening technology in Las Vegas
See this was my first thought but then it occurred to me that they’re trying to bypass people who are meant to be inspecting your stuff, does part of the job become “sneak past with this bit of paper” or do they carry nothing official on them to make the test more authentic, having paper documents risks biases towards staff procedures that would catch people with the document and thus end any pen testing attempts with potentially only a perceived improvement to security when they could be failing to catch people with usb drives or whatever else they are meant to be on the lookout for…
techdragon··on TSA introducing self-service screening technology in Las Vegas
Internal DHS red team sounds like one hell of a job if they include physical security checks (aka “Airport Security”) in the list of things the red team is allowed to attempt to bypass/exploit … like this could be a boring government desk job … or… it could be professional heist movie LARPing with all the fun of sneaking past the real security stuff but none of the risk of getting thrown into a jail cell to rot… and the follow on question is how they monitor and supervise this, like if it is physical pen testing the airport security line, do they carry any sort of documentation to stop things getting out of hand or is it entirely up to their superiors up the chain to stop them winding up in jail for real…

I’m expecting it isn’t as exciting as it could be, but I really want to know more.

techdragon··on Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal
Oh that’s right… i completely forgot I read about that… I suppose it’s not surprising that I forgot they changed CEO what with the fact that… once the train rolling down hill without breaks is on fire… who exactly is driving the train stops being particularly relevant… the board have been responsible for letting the train get on fire so who was CEO didn’t matter much.
techdragon··on Okta admits hackers accessed data on all customers during recent breach
This is literally the only value add in my mind. When you know it’s not just one simple app. When you know you’ve going to have frontends and backends and server to server tokens and third party and SSO and all the other TLA soup… then it starts to be something where im going “how much time could this save, would this be a good idea”
techdragon··on Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal
Unity will either fire him or destroy themselves as a company… he’s not exactly a sharp and savvy businessman with the nuance to master the intricacies of where profits lie in a particular niche of a particular industry … he’s the replaceable cogs at desks make business widget units and if the profits per business widget don’t look good enough then you must do something… that kinda guy…
techdragon··on Higole GOLE 2 Pro is a mini PC with a 5.5 inch touchscreen display, 16GB of RAM
The tilted tablet PCs this company have are actually more interesting to me, but it’s a pretty anaemic amount of power, I’d take their 10” touchscreen tilted tabletop sorta thing in a heartbeat if it was using the new chipset that lets this unit have 16GB of RAM.
techdragon··on A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams
Nah, the thing is there’s different engineering demands on those locations, and a legal issue for Antarctica as well.

- shifting ice moving at different rates on a the ice cap and even more so on glaciers, and legally we consider it a protected environment we explicitly don’t want to colonise

- the oceans is corrosive, plant and animal life is everywhere from biofilms to barnacles your stuff is going to become covered and anything left open or closed for too long without extensive cleaning and maintenance will become a slightly different shape than you think it is… and that’s a problem due to the crushing pressure required to make use of all but the shallowest waters, so shallow there’s not even really that much of them… otherwise your past 100m and ten atmospheres of pressure and it’s not only challenging it’s make mistake and die instantly challenging, you go deeper to get more “land area” and those extra atmospheres will turn a pinhole leak into a knife made of water even if the structure remains intact while filling with water… it’s not a great place to be when things go wrong… short of insane over engineering things like giant thick steel spheres (thickness obviously depending on depth) we would be also dealing with breathing pressurised atmosphere to minimise the pressure differential between inside and out… it’s just all around a lot harder to utilise most of the earth’s ocean floor.

- the worst the moon can throw at us is radiation, a 1 atmosphere “pushing out” pressure differential and very nasty dust… all of which have simple enough engineering solutions that we routinely build equipment using on earth, clean room style “high” pressure (not really that high just enough to dislodge stuff) blowdown entry systems (which could be way more powerful if your in a spacesuit… would easily handle the dust and worst case use the decontamination shower approach, we found ice, there’s water, use it to avoid the bad dust getting in. As for the radiation we’re exposed to a bit of it normally, there’s a little less in the magnetotail and earth shields it a bit and between limiting surface time per week/month/year and digging habitats underground you get well below safe limits… the digging also simplifies the pressure differential and even without it, we’ve been making spaceships for decades and industrial pressure vessels that can take greater pressure differential for over a century…

- mars has less of a pressure differential, less solar radiation due to square cube law, and peroxide rich soils. Well chemistry is a pain but industrial chemicals get made and we know how to manage cleaning processes and decontamination for anything I’ve seen listed in the Martian regolith at least. The radiation can be solved just like on the moon the same thing goes for the pressure differential.

It’s not a matter of technology, it’s been a matter of cost per ton to low earth orbit since about the 1970s… or the 2000s when we finally got our heads around some of the non-biological “closed loop” O2/CO2/H20 life support technologies, capturing the CO2 , breaking it to CH4, getting back the O2, getting H2 and 2 O2s from the H2O and balancing all this with systems to vent or otherwise utilise excess H2 or CH4, did take us a bit longer… but with a low enough cost per ton it could have been done earlier, logistics are logistics, be it fresh fruit products on a train from Florida to NYC or the fleets of trucks that bring food into inner city London, we live in a world where a significant portion of the population are no where close to self sufficient and are reliant on the operation of logistical chains that bring them what they need to live without having to move closer to food producing regions. Space would be no different, 3-7 day transits for quite a lot of fresh produce to stores are tolerable if less than ideal (faster is always better) and that’s perfect doable to the moon, mars would need us to step up our agricultural game a bit but if we ship up soil by the ton and we have water, we can make a greenhouse in a box and the plans will be fine anywhere, and some fresh produce would even be able to make that sort of trip, and industry on the moon could build things like long magnetic track launchers that could get cargo up to velocities where the transit to mars is weeks if you built the launched cargo units so you could give them enough fuel to decelerate in time (at that speed your not aerobreaking in mars’ atmosphere that’s for sure)

techdragon··on Show HN: Numbat – A programming language with physical dimensions as types
Some people may think you’re tossing out a sarcastic joke here… but unambiguously fuck yes … because doing this kind of preemptive typing, the forward thinking to “frame of reference” is basically the next step after overhauling everything to disambiguate between calendrical and chronological timekeeping and units…

Because fundamentally you can’t correct for the reference frame if you can’t work out if your dealing with chronological or calendrical units. Calendrical units are in a weird liminal space outside of the earth reference frame. We measure the history of most deep space missions by earth reference frame mission elapsed time and do so by keeping a clock on earth and silently keeping records of the vehicle clock.. but on Mars we have a per mission Sol count that brings Mars time into the mix, and I know for a fact a lot of people neglect the barycentric gravity gradient difference between Earth and Mars because for literally 99.9% of things it doesn’t matter… but if you measure a transit of an Astronomical body from instruments on Mars and don’t deal with the relative reference frames your fractions of an arc second are basically pointless false precision.

techdragon··on Show HN: Numbat – A programming language with physical dimensions as types
Ok so I did some reading and I like what I see, its important however to properly disambiguate between the two kinds of time units.

Chronological Time units and Calendrical Time units... These are fundamentally different concepts that overlap a lot in day to day life but when you need to ensure technical accuracy, can be very different.

- Planck time, Stoney time, Second: Unambiguously valid for both chronological and calendrical usage. Since we define everything in terms of the second anyway it's basically the centre of the Venn diagram.

- Sidereal day: It isn't a fixed value over longer periods of time, getting longer at a rate on the order of 1.7 milliseconds per century [1], so a conversion of a short period like 7 sidereal days into seconds is going to be off by something like 3.26×10^-7 seconds which might be ok, particularly if you also track the precision of values to avoid introducing false precision in the output, since you can then truncate the precision to above the error margin for a calculation like this one and treat it unambiguously as valid for both calendrical and chronological purposes.

- It's also worth noting since you mentioned it, the slight difference between Tropical year (seconds the earth takes to do a complete orbit around the sun), and Sidereal Year (seconds for the sun to fully traverse the astronomical ecliptic), the sidereal year is longer due to the precession of the equinoxes.

- Minute, Hour: These can vary in length up to a second if a leap second is accounted for, so while conventionally fine for chronological calculations as fixed multiples, don't have precise chronological values when used with calendar calculations. The exact number of minutes between now and 2030 is fixed, but the number of seconds in those minutes is not.

- Day: In addition to leap seconds, the length of a calendar day also have to deal with the ambiguity of daylight savings time and are where the significant differences in calendrical calculations vs chronological calculations really start to kick in.

- Week, Fortnight: all the problems of days but magnified by 7 and fourteen respectively. Also, theres the concept of standard business weeks and ISO week calendars, where some years wind up with more weeks than others due to the ISO week related calendar rules.

- Month: Obvious problem... "which month?" theres quite a few less seconds in February than in October.

- Julian year, Gregorian year: These are conventionally defined by how many days they have and the leap day rules and then approximated to an average seconds value so you can "pave over" the problem here and a lot of people might not be as surprised as if you average the length of a day or a month.

- Decade, Century, Millennium: are all affected by leap day related rules, and over a given length of time you see the introduction of an unknown but sort of predictable number of leap seconds. So while you can average it down yet again, the problems of anything bigger than a day have reached the point where over a millennium you're dealing approximately 0.017 seconds of change in the rotation of the earth,

Doing this right is basically incompatible with doing this the easy way, I'd at least re-label the averaged time units to make the use of average approximations more obvious, and ideally I'd split the time types into calendrical and chronological, and use more sophisticated (and I'll be the first to admit, annoying to implement) calendar math for the chronological calculations.

[1] - Dennis D. McCarthy; Kenneth P. Seidelmann (18 September 2009). Time: From Earth Rotation to Atomic Physics. John Wiley & Sons. p. 232. ISBN 978-3-527-62795-0.

techdragon··on EU Official Hopes X Will Face "Peer Pressure" to Hire More Censors
Hahahahaha

The EU official in question clearly has no clue.

Elon wants the unique Twitter style of chaos… I’d argue he’s addicted to it if some of the anecdotes I’ve heard are true. Censorship only ruins that specific chaos…

You would have to make it hurt… be it financially or physically… I mean really hurt… before I would expect Elon would give a fraction of a furlong about giving up the chaos he clearly wants to be king of.

techdragon··on The book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake
I’m not trying to ascribe merit or judge either Finnegan’s Wake or Gravity’s Rainbow… I’m trying to highlight the fact that the line between good art and bad art is subjective, blurry, and sometimes pointless.

The fact an artist can be a bit of a troll sometimes adds to their work… just look at the partially shredded Banksy and how it was still worth lots of money since it was clearly the artist’s intention to have it shred… I’d argue that the shredded pieces would probably have retained just as much value if it had fully shredded since it would have been relatively easy to reassemble…as it’s a known artwork not unknown dense text.

techdragon··on The book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake
Why do people like Gravity’s Rainbow…

Sometimes art is hard to understand and sometimes it’s good art because it’s deliberately hard to understand to make you think…

And other times it’s just incomprehensible garbage that someone managed to sell and everyone is too embarrassed to admit it’s terrible.

techdragon··on Can't Think, Can't Remember: More Americans Say They're in a Cognitive Fog
/sarcasm… right?

This “one person disagrees therefore it’s not settled”… this needs to die. We collectively need to raise the bar of human discourse above this tiny hurdle and put an end to anyone who isn’t drunk accepting the argument of one single person against the global consensus…

And before anyone chimes in with arguments about examples of righteous crusades against genuine problems in the world sparked by a single person… the obvious counterpoint is that these people stop being “one single person” when they convince someone else in a one to one conversation… good arguments persuade people and gather people around them… one lone voice arguing against the consensus is a crank who should be ignored without guilt… not platformed under the guise of balancing some illusionary other side of an argument… Looking squarely at you BBC… the ABC in Australia aren’t particularly good at this either but the BBC are the absolute fucking worst at this.

techdragon··on Advertisers Don't Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist
Well that explains some of the reasons why pre-roll ads are so much higher value, that and “having” (lol Adblock) to watch them before you can see the content at all.
techdragon··on Iceland declares state of emergency over volcanic eruption threat
Preventative safety work? I can imagine there’s going to be less demand from offices and industry if a significant portion of the nearby population are making emergency plans and preparations, and even without a dip in demand from that there’s usually some oversupply with electricity generators to avoid ramp up time problems during peak demand, so possibly they decided to shut down unused capacity to reduce the risk of it being damaged? Hard to say without knowing more details…
techdragon··on Big Insurance Met Match When Turned Down a Lawyer's Request for Cancer Treatment
Exactly. Another one of the weirdest things in the “healthcare debate” is the idea that it’s public or nothing like a closed border dictatorship that will shoot you before they let you exercise any freedom of choice.

If I don’t want to pay I can have a GP appointment with a short trip and a little wait sometime in the next 1-3 days… if I’m happy paying $40 Australian … I’ve got a GP appointment within walking distance tomorrow, no issues no bullshit, and I’ll even get some of that back from the government if I can be bothered, because anything that urgent is probably worth the money lol.

If I want to pay I can get specialist treatment, I’ve got private healthcare to cover fancy shit like regular physiotherapist sessions due to having an office job which will slowly and stealthily destroy your body no matter how careful you are… and glasses if I eventually need them… and stupid levels of dental because that’s my personal preference, if someone ever smashed out all my teeth I’m just completely covered … and that’s all on top of basically being assured care for anything serious disease or critical injury related by public healthcare… it’s just obviously the better arrangement. The most general risks are shared by the biggest pool of people paying for it… everyone paying for that with their taxes. If you want more… your free to buy it, and a lot of people do! It works great.

techdragon··on Big Insurance Met Match When Turned Down a Lawyer's Request for Cancer Treatment
When Americans style healthcare promoters toss around arguments like “doctors in public healthcare are deciding if treating you is worth it”… I love replying with “at least in public healthcare the doctors get to decide, with only private health insurance paid for by insurance companies, it’s a faceless claims adjuster with zero medical experience who isn’t even deciding as much as they are just telling you that treating you properly would cost the company too much money… I’ll take my chances with a death panel of doctors over the death panel of accountants any day of my entire life”

I think American healthcare is insane… and the slow sliding in the American style healthcare direction I see in the UK and even slower slide here in Australia, this slide is largely borne out of American healthcare business having no more room to expand and trying to export their business model overseas to expand their addressable markets… it’s insane to allow non medical professionals… to allow armies of accountants and actuaries… to decide how to treat patients.

It should be criminal, but it won’t be because the healthcare industry in America is so broken it will lobby till it’s broke to continue to be allowed to remain broken otherwise it might not be as profitable.

techdragon··on Tractor Beams Are Real, and Could Solve a Major Space Junk Problem
There’s two fundamental issues with that sort of approach:

1st, is the deltaV difference between useful and desirable orbits that satellite operators want to be in and the selected “disposal orbit band”… with GEO it’s just a small deltaV Hohmann transfer “up” into the geo graveyard “band”… the graveyard starts just 300km further out from earth and the geostationary satellite typically use on the order of 11m/s… which is bugger all. The Manned Manoeuvring Unit “EVA jetpack” had approximately 25m/s.

2nd, is sometimes overlooked, but nonetheless quite important aspect. Any graveyard orbit intended for use by multiple objects should cross the orbits of as few active spacecraft as possible and have as low of a relative velocity between the objects in that graveyard orbit as possible… Geosynchronous satellites are basically above all but a small number of very specific satellites in places like lunar orbit or Lagrange points, and “in a ring” so, performing a gentle boost to the graveyard orbit gets them out of the way of almost everything and they are at least as far as satellites go, not moving particularly fast relative to each other, and they are so high up nothing else is going to regularly cross their obit, so it’s a relatively low risk environment for a satellite on satellite collision…

the majority of cycling orbits tend to have a LOT of relative velocity compared to the orbits they cross, tangential crossings leave high relative velocity, and the elongated orbits tend to end up crossing through a lot of space as the orbital precession moves along… on top of that the deltaV to go from most orbits to a cycling orbit tends to be relatively high, not as much as a full transfer to lunar orbit, but it’s basically in the same ballpark as using the moon to kick yourself into a solar orbit, which while potentially doable at considerable extra cost for a GEO satellite, is completely impossible for the sort of smaller LEO and MEO satellites without an entire kick stage, tug or other propulsion which would at least for LEO probably weigh more than the satellite does.

techdragon··on Tractor Beams Are Real, and Could Solve a Major Space Junk Problem
There sort of are some ejection disposals, but they are rarely used due to how specific the orbital parameters need to be in order for that to be the “cheaper” option.

You usually find it’s not exactly the sort of disposals your expecting though. Several space probes have used launch trajectories where their final booster stage will be placed into a heliocentric orbit, with the general trajectory placing it on an uncontrolled gravity assist and then the space probe will use a very small amount of fuel to precisely control the gravity assist it receives in order to get where it needs to be going… and the booster stage will have its already heliocentric orbit further changed by the gravity assist.

It’s all about the deltaV … it takes way less to deorbit LEO and even some of the MEO satellites than to perform a lunar orbit raising, and GEO would be too costly to do either when which is why the GEO graveyard orbit belt is quite well defined… as for boosting the ISS up towards the moon to perform a Salyut 7 style long duration equipment survival experiment…. That’s a lot of fuel, and we already have that experience since we’ve been monitoring the entire ISS since we launched it…

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