Movie-Nedry struck me as a certain kind of hacker trope (but whom I've also met in real life!) where part of their "compensation" is access to unusual and high end computer hardware. It's irrelevant whether it's the…
That's why 1 is not generally considered prime. If it was, 2 could be factored as 2, 2x1, 2x1x1, etc., which breaks the uniqueness property.
No. And in fact it annoys me greatly that our work IT department forces a reboot once a month. My desktop is like an actual desktop. I have my tools laid out exactly how I want them for the task I'm working on. I want…
To get speed from velocity, you need a square root, which is also awful (for the same reason that abs is awful).
Cheat answer: velocity is a vector, and can be negative, while KE is a scalar and has to be positive. Therefore you have to square v to get rid of the minus sign. Why not take the absolute value? Nature hates those,…
Why isn't the shifter built with a log2 arrangement, shifting 32-16-8-4-2-1 bits? Takes fewer sub-stages and doesn't require a separate decoder for the input. The article mentions it already has a two-stage design,…
Sometimes you have to optimize other people's code. Also, sometimes code behaves unexpectedly depending on the data, say over a certain size threshold. And sometimes it behaves differently on different hardware. You…
Doh! You are correct. I had been looking at a previous paper (which this new paper references). The previous paper showed that you can use any non-linearity in QM to solve NP-complete problems, and the new one shows…
Yes, I think that was implied in my original post, that if you define |0> as logical 1 then it works as an AND. It just seems confusing and unnecessary when they could have framed it to be consistent with classical…
I was skimming the paper and came to this: > This transformation is like an AND gate - it ignores the index qubit and places the flag qubit in the state |1> if and only if either of the original components had the state…
We always try to inform game devs about correctness issues, but generally we can push out a driver fix before the devs can fix things on their side, so that pretty much always happens. Many things can be fixed quickly…
There are many, many, cases like this, including correctness fixes. One recent example I remember had a shader that computed: x = a / b * b The optimizer was allowed, but not obligated, to transform that into: x = a…
The article mentions that thin-walled copper tube can be used, but then says a precision lathe is required. But you can easily buy off-the-shelf copper tube with 1.6 or 2.0 mm diameter and 0.5 mm wall thickness. Is that…
Numerous times now, using Tesla FSD, I've found the car seemingly drifting from the center of the lane, only to have motorcycles buzz by at high speed on the opposite side. It's very polite toward motorcyclists.
Boron always seemed like an under-studied element to me. Starting from the bottom, hydrogen of course is very well understood, helium not useful for much, lithium used for many things, and beryllium interesting but…
There are a number of ways of looking at this, which others have answered, but here's another: The kinetic and potential energy of a 1 kg mass in orbit is around 33 MJ. The chemical energy of 1 kg of methane+oxygen…
That's already how civilization works. There's no one person that knows everything about (say) modern food production, from top to bottom. If it ever stopped working (because too much knowledge was lost somehow), most…
The ship computers in the old game Privateer (and probably Wing Commander) had a pretty nice pixel font. Most of the characters were 3x4, but with a few niceties: descenders (j, p, q) could go below the normal outline,…
Early versions of Unreal Engine had these animated procedural textures that would produce sparks, fire effects, etc. The odd part is that when you paused the game, the animated textures would still animate. Presumably,…
Starship "making LEO" is not a significant challenge--the existing flights have explicitly targeted a (very slightly) suborbital trajectory. They could have done otherwise at any point, but for now it's more important…
There were 19 successful unmanned Dragon 1 missions before Crew Dragon, and an unmanned Crew Dragon mission before the first crewed one (actually two missions, but one didn't reenter from orbit). The heat shield…
> that's why they were the color they were That doesn't seem right to me. Sodium (and mercury) vapor lamps are the color they are due to physics, and were chosen because they're very efficient (and long lasting).…
If running twice is good, then is running N times even better? I wonder if you could even loop until some kind of convergence, say hitting a fixed point (input equals output). I wonder if there's even a sort of…
Is it two, or is it infinite? The quaternions have three imaginary units, i, j, and k. They're distinct, and yet each of them could be used for the complex numbers and they'd work the same way. How would I know that…
Getting an EKG seems very prudent. I had one done for a non-heart related procedure, and afterwards was basically asked: - Ever have any heart events? Heart racing, palpitations, that kind of thing? - Yes, a few times a…
Movie-Nedry struck me as a certain kind of hacker trope (but whom I've also met in real life!) where part of their "compensation" is access to unusual and high end computer hardware. It's irrelevant whether it's the…
That's why 1 is not generally considered prime. If it was, 2 could be factored as 2, 2x1, 2x1x1, etc., which breaks the uniqueness property.
No. And in fact it annoys me greatly that our work IT department forces a reboot once a month. My desktop is like an actual desktop. I have my tools laid out exactly how I want them for the task I'm working on. I want…
To get speed from velocity, you need a square root, which is also awful (for the same reason that abs is awful).
Cheat answer: velocity is a vector, and can be negative, while KE is a scalar and has to be positive. Therefore you have to square v to get rid of the minus sign. Why not take the absolute value? Nature hates those,…
Why isn't the shifter built with a log2 arrangement, shifting 32-16-8-4-2-1 bits? Takes fewer sub-stages and doesn't require a separate decoder for the input. The article mentions it already has a two-stage design,…
Sometimes you have to optimize other people's code. Also, sometimes code behaves unexpectedly depending on the data, say over a certain size threshold. And sometimes it behaves differently on different hardware. You…
Doh! You are correct. I had been looking at a previous paper (which this new paper references). The previous paper showed that you can use any non-linearity in QM to solve NP-complete problems, and the new one shows…
Yes, I think that was implied in my original post, that if you define |0> as logical 1 then it works as an AND. It just seems confusing and unnecessary when they could have framed it to be consistent with classical…
I was skimming the paper and came to this: > This transformation is like an AND gate - it ignores the index qubit and places the flag qubit in the state |1> if and only if either of the original components had the state…
We always try to inform game devs about correctness issues, but generally we can push out a driver fix before the devs can fix things on their side, so that pretty much always happens. Many things can be fixed quickly…
There are many, many, cases like this, including correctness fixes. One recent example I remember had a shader that computed: x = a / b * b The optimizer was allowed, but not obligated, to transform that into: x = a…
The article mentions that thin-walled copper tube can be used, but then says a precision lathe is required. But you can easily buy off-the-shelf copper tube with 1.6 or 2.0 mm diameter and 0.5 mm wall thickness. Is that…
Numerous times now, using Tesla FSD, I've found the car seemingly drifting from the center of the lane, only to have motorcycles buzz by at high speed on the opposite side. It's very polite toward motorcyclists.
Boron always seemed like an under-studied element to me. Starting from the bottom, hydrogen of course is very well understood, helium not useful for much, lithium used for many things, and beryllium interesting but…
There are a number of ways of looking at this, which others have answered, but here's another: The kinetic and potential energy of a 1 kg mass in orbit is around 33 MJ. The chemical energy of 1 kg of methane+oxygen…
That's already how civilization works. There's no one person that knows everything about (say) modern food production, from top to bottom. If it ever stopped working (because too much knowledge was lost somehow), most…
The ship computers in the old game Privateer (and probably Wing Commander) had a pretty nice pixel font. Most of the characters were 3x4, but with a few niceties: descenders (j, p, q) could go below the normal outline,…
Early versions of Unreal Engine had these animated procedural textures that would produce sparks, fire effects, etc. The odd part is that when you paused the game, the animated textures would still animate. Presumably,…
Starship "making LEO" is not a significant challenge--the existing flights have explicitly targeted a (very slightly) suborbital trajectory. They could have done otherwise at any point, but for now it's more important…
There were 19 successful unmanned Dragon 1 missions before Crew Dragon, and an unmanned Crew Dragon mission before the first crewed one (actually two missions, but one didn't reenter from orbit). The heat shield…
> that's why they were the color they were That doesn't seem right to me. Sodium (and mercury) vapor lamps are the color they are due to physics, and were chosen because they're very efficient (and long lasting).…
If running twice is good, then is running N times even better? I wonder if you could even loop until some kind of convergence, say hitting a fixed point (input equals output). I wonder if there's even a sort of…
Is it two, or is it infinite? The quaternions have three imaginary units, i, j, and k. They're distinct, and yet each of them could be used for the complex numbers and they'd work the same way. How would I know that…
Getting an EKG seems very prudent. I had one done for a non-heart related procedure, and afterwards was basically asked: - Ever have any heart events? Heart racing, palpitations, that kind of thing? - Yes, a few times a…