Spacecraft software engineer here:

They are and they aren’t. Radiation causes problems in terms of Single Event Upsets where a 0 turns to 1 and a 1 turns to 0 for a super tiny second. CPUs take some amount of time to let the transistor circuit stabilize before moving onto the next instruction so if an SEU happens in the beginning of this period it won’t have any downstream effects. Like a bump on the road.

Memory however is vulnerable to this tiny amount of time and can flip a bit to a different state than it’s supposed to be, but both are solvable problems with hardware and software based solutions, with ECC being the most common.

The other major problem is Total Ionizing Dose. Put silicon based semiconductors in radiation long enough and they will break down, and there’s no real hardware or software based solution to that. But it takes a long time

I hope this meme never dies, but I fear it’s already reaching obscurity

I thought that AMDs move with Ryzen being heavily multi core architecture was dumb, and that they’d fail like bulldozer

I think it’s that a large pool of stocks going up for sale with no context seems suspicious. Stocks are inherently a gamble on the future price will be higher than current price, so by selling you’re withdrawing your bet which could be interpreted as you knowing that the bet won’t pay off and that other gamblers owners paying attention might panic and try and sell too, which then could trigger a feedback loop. New buyers might see a bunch of people trying to sell and then think to themselves the bet isn’t a good one and won’t buy, making the current sellers reduce the price in the hopes of actually selling off and not left holding the bag

A lot of “could” and "might* in that scenario, and it does play out from time to time (see NFTs, 2008 housing market). It also won’t play out if the reason for the sale is known and isn’t based on lost faith of the bet

It’s because y’all lie about how many lakes you have, you dishonest bastards. 15k != 10k

• a former Minnesotan

Seems like this war is going to take longer than expected

In short: sometimes nothing at all, sometimes self survival

In practice, when a state becomes a part of the United States it concedes total independence, giving itself to the jurisdiction and control of the federal government. In exchange, a state is given representation in the federal government to influence what laws make up that control and because after a few different rounds of early government structures post colonial independence, the federal government was kneecapped in terms of the types of laws it can pass. If a law passes Congress and survives a legal review by the federal courts, strictly speaking a state has no choice but to agree and cooperate. At best a state could work with other states to repeal laws a single state doesn’t want/like.

The vast majority of the time states operate in relative good faith and follow federal law. When a state does openly defy the federal government, it depends on the exact law being ignored. Marijuana is illegal on the federal level where mere possession of it lands you in jail, but many states turn a blind eye to citizens using it and states like Colorado make bank off of taxing the sale of it. This kind of stuff happens a lot and the executive branch makes a judgement call on if it’s politically worth punishing a state in defiance.

This current administration has proven repeatedly to be very vindictive and retaliates against even the perception of defying their rule. The last time a state continued defiance against the federal executive branch this nation threw itself into civil war and lost 2% of its population in the process.

It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care

I don’t think the term AI has been used in a vague way, it’s that there’s a huge disconnect between how the technical fields use it vs general populace and marketing groups heavily abuse that disconnect.

Artificial has two meanings/use cases. One is to indicate something is fake (video game NPC, chess bots, vegan cheese). The end product looks close enough to the real thing that for its intended use case it works well enough. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, treat it like a duck even though we all know it’s a bunny with a costume on. LLMs on a technical level fit this definition.

The other definition is man made. Artificial diamonds are a great example of this, they’re still diamonds at the end of the day, they have all the same chemical makeups, same chemical and physical properties. The only difference is they came from a laboratory made by adult workers vs child slave labor.

My pet theory is science fiction got the general populace to think of artificial intelligence to be using the “man-made” definition instead of the “fake” definition that these companies are using. In the past the subtle nuance never caused a problem so we all just kinda ignored it

The conspiracy theory isn’t that the automotive industry makes them look bad, it’s the rail owners.

Real: Amtrak doesn’t own any rails, they lease them and legally are supposed to have right of way on tracks unless the owner/operators of the rail currently have their own train that’s too big for the bypasses.

Conspiracy: Rail owners make Amtrak experience so painful that it drives down usage so Amtrak runs fewer and fewer trains, so they can be less of a nuisance to them or outright get rid of the service line and they get to completely ignore Amtrak

I hadn’t thought of that before, and I can think of several characters who’ve said things I doubt the writers would want attributed to them. I just want to see quotes from fiction being clearly labeled as such, and not using the grandiose of a character’s title to add weight to the quote.

For example when I see people quote Admiral William Adama on how when the military becomes the police, the people become the enemy of the state. That was Ron Moore writing a character for a show set in a post apocalyptic universe where the only survivors are hanging out on military ships, not a real world seasoned officer’s opinion. Is it an interesting point worth discussing? Sure, but I’m not putting it in the same category of 5-Star General Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the military industrial complex

Props to you for actually attributing the quote to the writer and not the character. It’s a pet peeve of mine when people take profound sounding quotes and attribute it to a fictional character that never existed, never had real thoughts or opinions of their own

Lol yup, got the idea from a Technology Connections video on how one of the common humidifier designs are literally just large swamp coolers

I’ve taken to using an old cake pan, a desk fan, and a towel. Fill up the pan with water, stick one end of the towel in the water, drape and clip the other end to the fan and let it sit running for a few days. Before the towel gets gross, toss it in the laundry when it’s dry and grab another towel

It works so well I’m completely confused as to how/why there isn’t a commercialized product like that, it completely solves the cleaning/highschool biology experiments problem

It’s so incredibly annoying when people use smaller order of magnitude descriptors simply so they can then write more zeros. A good chunk of the time too it feels like it’s done to distract from a different point or to exaggerate without technically lying.

Doesn’t help that technical jargon is only best used when communicating with someone in that field or understands it. Big number + alphabet soup always seems scary 😞

I’m curious as to what the worst one is. GIMP is pretty bad, KiCAD has pronunciation problems, nothing else is coming to mind

There’s a few threads over on Reddit and the LTT forum about how Linus has apparently handled this all wrong, they should have made a video years ago, Linus being dismissive of if on WAN show is him being detached from reality, you know, the usual bullshit

Edit: ITT https://lemmy.world/comment/14273487

In fairness to me (and maybe you) Sync didn’t load the comment initially so only after I kept reading I found it

Realistically no. The support needed to manage the devices we all use is just insane, and I think a lot of people take for granted how the x86 platform has evolved over the last few decades. The ARM landscape does not have the standards set that x86 does and that will always hold it back. Qualcomm learned long ago that it’s within their best interest to be constantly changing the SoCs and never really documenting/supporting them very well because it forces all of the downstream vendors to do constant refreshes. Toss in the development hellscape my fellow programmers created ourselves and we get the vicious cycle we’re in today where Google saying they’ll support a device for longer than a few years was the headline sales pitch

-typed on a Pixel 8 which was purchased due to that sales pitch

Why not Minot?

For me, I view Apollo as the highschool quarterback winning the homecoming game.

In the context, its a great achievement. A lot of time, effort, and luck all came together at just the right moment to create an entertaining spectacle. The school is all happy and celebrating, students will remember that moment for years to come. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that big of an achievement since everyone there will move on to bigger and greater things, except they won’t have a student body cheering them on.

I think saying the Apollo program is one of the greatest achievements of mankind falsely puts it on a pedestal and forever sets up all other achievements as being lesser. Makes us all feel like anything that isn’t chasing that glory isn’t worth it. It’s an achievement for sure, but not the biggest. If I had to give the greatest achievement in space technology to anything, I’d give it to either GPS or GOES.