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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • I’m a software dev as well.

    But I often layer multiple windows in the same tile of the screen. e.g. I may have the IDE with the software I’m working on in one tile, the IDE with the library source code I’m working with in the second tile, and a live build of the app in the third tile. But I’ve also got documentation, as a website, in the same tile as the IDE with the lib’s source.

    Now when I switch between the IDE with the lib’s source, and the browser with the lib’s documentation, I only want that tile to change. No problem, with KDEs taskbar and window switcher I can quickly do that.

    But when using the applications menu on Gnome I get a disrupting UI across all screens that immediately rips me out of whatever I was doing.




  • Unless you’re writing ruby on rails on a 13" macbook, you’ll run into Gnome’s limitations when working.

    Gnome is in many ways so focused that it makes a lot of productivity use impossible. You always have to open the menu to launch software, you’ve got no system tray, and worst of all, Gnome apps are so simplified that you constantly run into the limitations when using it productively.

    When working with dozens of windows open at the same time across multiple monitors, I’m a fan of KDE. And KDE apps tend to also have all the extra features I need to handle weird situations, files, and edge cases.




  • NIF can’t really ever reach Q>1. All the statements of having reached that only include the energy that reaches the capsule. The energy the lasers actually use is orders of magnitude larger.

    This theoretical Q>1, where the plasma emits more radiation than it receives, have been reached by other reactors before.

    But while tokamak or stellerator designs need a 2-3× improvement to produce more energy than the entire system needs, the NIF would need a 100-1000× improvement to reach that point, which is wholly unrealistic with our current understanding of physics.


  • Most fusion attempts try to keep a continuous reaction ongoing.

    Tokamak reactors, like JET or ITER do this through a changing magnetic field, which would allow a reaction to keep going for minutes, the goal is somewhere around 10-30min.

    Stellerator reactors try to do the same through a closed loop, basically a Möbius band of plasma encircled by magnets. The stellerator topology of Wendelstein 7-X was used as VFX for the closed time loop in Endgame. This complex topology allows the reaction to continue forever. Wendelstein 7-X has managed to keep its reaction for half an hour already.

    The NIF is different. It doesn’t try to create a long, ongoing, controlled reaction. It tries to create a nuclear chain reaction for a tiny fraction of a millisecond. Basically a fusion bomb the size of a grain of rice.

    The “promise” is that if one were to just repeat this explosion again and again and again, you’d also have something that would almost continually produce energy.

    But so far, the NIF has primarily focused on getting as much data as possible about how the first millisecond of a fusion reaction proceeds. The different ways to trigger it, and how it affects the reaction.

    The US hasn’t done large scale nuclear testing in decades. Almost everything is now happening in simulations. But the first few milliseconds of the ignition are still impossible to accurately model in a computer. To build a more reliable and stronger bomb, one would need to test the initial part of a fusion reaction in the real world repeatedly.

    And that’s where the NIF comes in.


  • If you actually calculate the maximum speed at which information can travel before causing paradoxes, in some situations it could safely exceed c.

    For two observers who are not in motion relative to each other, information could be transmitted instantly, regardless of the distance, without causing a paradox.

    The faster the observers are traveling relatively to each other, the slower information would have to travel to avoid causing paradoxes.

    More interestingly, this maximum paradox-free speed correlates with the time and space dilation caused by the observers’ motion.

    From your own reference frame, another person is moving at a speed of v*c. The maximum speed at which you could send a message to that observer, without causing a paradox, looks something like c/sqrt(v) (very simplified).



  • Sure, it’d be a solution for five minutes until someone delids the secure enclave on the gaming card, extracts the keys, and builds their own open source hw alternative.

    High-performance FPGAs are actually relatively cheap if you take apart broken elgato/bmd capture cards, just a pain in the butt to reball and solder them. But possibly the cheapest way to be able to emulate any chip you could want.