TranquilTurbulence
@TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Why is the colour of sunlight different in every country? 18 hours ago:
Angle and atmospheric composition. Midday sun doesn’t always come at the same angle, because certain countries are closer to the equator. Also, pollution contributes to the color as well. Just look at some photos from China, and you’ll see what I mean. Natural phenomena like sand and ice can contribute as well.
- Comment on Does it damage my phone in any way it I use a faulty cable to charge it? 21 hours ago:
I’ve been observing the voltage and current of a bunch of chargers, cables and phones with a handy little power meter that plugs in between the charger and the cable. I still have no idea whether that hurts the battery or not, but fluctuations certainly do occur.
For example an iPhone just loves to crank up the current every few seconds. If the power supply or cable can’t handle it, the voltage will crash below some tolerable limits set by the phone. In response, the phone will lower the current back to a level where the voltage remains high enough and then the cycle repeats. Interestingly, an iPad or an Android phone I tested don’t do that sort of aggressive current ramping. Those two just figure out a sustainable current in the beginning, and let it be, whereas the iPhone is never satisfied if the current is a bit lower than you would normally get from a good power supply and cable. Either way, I suspect that’s just the BMS doing its thing, and every device seems to have a different BMS.
Will the BMS be able to provide a stable current and voltage to the cell even when the power draws is far from stable? Sounds unlikely to me, but ask an electrical engineer to make sure.
Will an unstable charging power hurt the cell in the long run? Ask a battery scientist. I just know that extreme temperatures definitely hurt it. Also high C-rates are harmful as well.
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 1 day ago:
Hmmm… The description certainly fits. Just by eye-balling the graphs, they look very different from what I got, but I guess that’s just the expected result of running rbinom about a 6 million times. With a smaller simulation, it might not have been so apparent. Also, that’s what you get for skipping the maths and vibing the code without thinking too much about the details. Well, at least i got this far with absolutely minimal effort. :D
It appears that I need to switch to a better distribution. Thanks for looking into this mystery!
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 1 day ago:
Well, at least I’m not worried about my job. Not even a little.
- Comment on What is the magic diet for no-wipe poops? 1 day ago:
Wait, can chili do that? I don’t think I’ve experienced that even though my mouth has been on fire numerous times.
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 1 day ago:
You’re right. I just ran rbinom 1E7 times and found that the probability of over drawing soup molecules is a bit too high for my taste.
When there’s only 1 left, you usually end up drawing 0 or 1 molecule. However, in rare cases, it can be higher, such as 2, 3, 4… molecules.
About 92% was 0, and 7.7% was 1, but the others were not negligible! There’s about 0.3% probability of over drawing, which is way too high for a simulation as serious as this one. In this quick test, there were 20 incidents where rbinom wanted to pull out 4 soup molecules when only 1 was available. We can’t have that, now can we!
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 2 days ago:
If you want, I can increase the sample size. Just need to figure out how to add a timer to the code and set it to run for a few hours, maybe even overnight. A histogram with 10^6 bins should look pretty smooth.
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 2 days ago:
I thought of making a vector with a length of about 1.671398e+25, but then I remembered what one time when when I tried to make a linear model with hundreds of dimensions. So yeah… We have gigabytes of RAM, and it’s still not enough. Not really a problem, as long as you don’t try to do anything completely ridiculous.
Instead, I just made a variable that simply contains the number of soup molecules and another one for the number of water molecules. Far simpler that way.
Here’s where the magic happens:
# Number of soup molecules drawn soup_molecules_replaced <- rbinom(1, replacement_count, prob_soup)
The rbinom function is used to generate random numbers from a binomial distribution. It’s a discrete probability distribution that models the number of successes, i.e. scooping out a soup molecule. Rest of the codes is just basic infrastructure like variables, loops, etc.
BTW the variable names look ugly, because I couldn’t be bothered to tidy everything up. I really prefer camelCase, whereas Mistral seems to prefer underscores. That’s what you get for vibing.
Side note: If you do this kind of stuff for private purposes, you have to rely on your own hardware. If you plan to publish your discoveries, universities and publicly funded supercomputers might be an option. If there exists a Journal Of Recreational Mathematics And Useless Simulations (JORMAUS), I could totally publish this stuff and maybe even run my code on a supercomputer.
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 2 days ago:
Ok, I couldn’t resist. Here are the results of running that simulation 6000 times.
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. NA's 1085 1126 1140 1144 1157 1292 0
This means that about half the time it’s somewhere between 1126 and 1157 spoons.
FYI: /u/protist@mander.xyz, /u/Sabin10@lemmy.world, /u/neo2478@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 2 days ago:
I’m tempted to run a full simulation that really picks those molecules randomly.
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 3 days ago:
Since excessive consumption of soup probably causes obesity, joint pain, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, depression and a long list of other conditions, we can unsafely say that the homeopathic soup should cure all of those.
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 3 days ago:
Wow, someone actually bothered to do it properly! I just wrote some horrible R code and ended up with 1146 spoons to get to 50% probability of having either 1 or 0 soup molecules. So good to see that the answers were so close.
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 3 days ago:
Ok, Now I’ve got some sort of estimate. Still didn’t do it “the proper way”, because writing a simulation was more fun and reading a few Wikipedia articles about mathematics would have taken… probably only a fraction of the time I spent on writing some horrible R code that produces suspicious results.
Anyway, here they are!
My simulation is based on keeping track of different kinds of molecules. First, I calculated how many water and soup molecules there are. I assumed that they both have the same molar mass. I also assumed that 500 ml = 500 g, which is close enough IRL. The number of each molecule type doesn’t have to be a whole number, so fractions are allowed. When the soup molecule count drops to 0.5, it means that there’s a 50% chance of 1 soup molecule being present. I’m not entirely satisfied with this implementation, but it felt reasonable at the time. Anyway, I set the threshold of a while loop to 0.5 soup molecules.
It took only 1146 spoons to scoop out the final molecule with 50% certainty. If you used a smaller 5 ml spoon, it would take 5848 spoons, which is still way smaller than I expected. I really thought it would be something totally absurd like the the number of atoms in the observable universe. I feel kinda skeptical about my code until I see a proper mathematical proof about this.
- Comment on Soup of Theseus 3 days ago:
If you ignore the fact that soup consists of discrete molecules, the answer is infinite.
In real life though, you have to get probabilities involved. Haven’t done the math yet, but I can already tell you that it’s going to take a very long time until you get to the 50/50 point of the last soup molecule being gone. Prepare for geologic time scales.
- Comment on How long would it take for a ball rolling across the room to bounce off the wall and get back to you - but the room has a time traveling portal halfway through? 3 days ago:
Oh ok, no problem. I can switch to a model that doesn’t shy away from paradoxes and contradictions.
Next, you would need to address what to do with those problems. Can we allow the same thing to exist in two places simultaneously? How about information and items without any origin? Does it matter if the model isn’t consistent or doesn’t make sense? If so, it’s going to be a very flexible tool when writing a scifi story.
- Comment on How long would it take for a ball rolling across the room to bounce off the wall and get back to you - but the room has a time traveling portal halfway through? 3 days ago:
Depends on the type of time travel you believe in. My favorite type involves infinitely forking universes, where every event happens and is equally real.
You start with universe A, kick the ball into universe B, and it stays there, which results in an “infinite delay”. If you’re lucky someone in universe C, D, E… etc. kicks their ball to you in universe A. Basically the perceived time delay could be anything. If they decide to kick the ball to your yesterday, the delay is -24 h. They could also choose to send it at the exact same time your ball went to universe B, so that the event would look just like as if there were no time travel portals. It’s up to them really. The delay could be anything they want it to be.
- Comment on Whatever happened to the blockchain/smart contract 'revolution' we were told about? 3 days ago:
When it comes to AI, I’m seeing a variety of different hype levels. As far as consumer products are concerned, it’s mostly just hype and vapor. However, on the B2B side, it can be a lot more grounded. Recently, I’ve been talking a a few AI companies, and they aren’t promising completely absurd things. Most of them know exactly how hard it can be to implement AI and squeeze some benefit out of it. IBM guys were the only ones who were still hyping it hard. Everyone else seems to have their feet on the ground. Those IBM guys were all like: “Just dump all of your data on the model, and it will work things out”. Yeah, sure… With those references, we’re not starting an expensive project just to see if it’s true.
- Comment on Whatever happened to the blockchain/smart contract 'revolution' we were told about? 4 days ago:
If I understood it correctly, the main problem it can solve is lack of trust. If the involved parties can’t find a single authority to trust, they can use a blockchain instead.
Finding cases like that is a bit tricky. For example, you trust your ISP, your bank, maybe even your government… to some extent… They’re not your best friend, nor do they have to be. You can still trust them enough to take care of certain jobs. You pay your ISP via bank transfer, and they provide the service you signed up for. As long as there’s just enough trust, the system still works and there’s no need to use a blockchain.
Same goes for banks. Most people trust that the bank isn’t going to run away with your money. As long as that trust exists, there’s no need to use a blockchain.
- Comment on If you had 1 dollar and 24 hours what would you do? 1 week ago:
Spend the euro on NFTs, sell them for cryptos, spend them on upvotes, likes and reviews. Alternatively, you could buy lootboxes and skins instead.
- Comment on How do you reconcile staying sane while keeping yourself up-to-date with the news? 1 week ago:
See also: stoicism
- Comment on Is the periodic table still getting new additions? 1 week ago:
See also: chart of nuclides
It contains the periodic table and all the unstable isotopes of every element. The island of stability would be somewhere in the top right corner, outside the chart.
When you look at the half-life data, it’s pretty clear that lead is the last fully stable element. Anything past that line (126 neutrons) is more or less unstable, but not necessarily useless. For example, uranium and thorium are pretty far away, but they can still have practical applications.
Between hydrogen and lead, stable isotopes are abundant, but after lead, finding anything you can reasonably do chemistry with gets a bit scarce. When you go past plutonium 244, you’ll find even less chemistry there.
- Comment on When will we have reached enough productivity? 1 week ago:
You’re talking about equality, which is a very different type of measure of urgency. Obviously, that is not being prioritized as all, because that’s how capitalism works. Quite the opposite actually. When it comes to matters related to equality, the rich people prioritize themselves over everyone else.
However, I was referring to a completely different type of urgency based prioritization that can be seen pretty much everywhere in society. We build machines that are just barely good enough for the job instead of being actually great for the job, good for the people who use them and good for the environment. That sort of long term thinking just doesn’t have a place in our current system, because making machines just barely good enough is hard enough as it is. If we could do all the basic things with zero effort, we would have left over resources that could be directed towards making everything actually better in a variety of ways. Currently, those left over resources don’t exist, because they’re tied up in making all the basic stuff happen in the society. That’s why we aren’t focusing on making things actually good.
- Comment on When will we have reached enough productivity? 1 week ago:
Well, there’s a bit of that in there as well. Maybe that example was too specific to serve its purpose.
The idea is that urgent tasks get prioritized, while everything else gets ignored. Currently, we are ignoring a variety of important tasks, because they aren’t important enough.
Once automation fixes all the urgent stuff, we’ll tackle all the less essential ones, and oh boy are there a lot of them. Some of them trivial, and some quite useful.
- Comment on When will we have reached enough productivity? 1 week ago:
Never. There’s always more to do. Once you can produce food, shelter and entertainment with zero effort, people will start working on less urgent stuff that got ignored because we were busy working on the essentials.
Currently, we’re ignoring preventative medical and psychological care, because we’re busy fixing everything that is broken. Well, not even all of it. Just some parts get fixed. Maybe, in the future fixing stuff is so cheap and easy, that we can shift our focus to prevention.
Once we’re there, we can start focusing on the next big thing, like building a Dyson sphere or whatever.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
IMO gaming is in the same category with art, music, racing, football, photography etc—fun things to do, only very few can make a living out of them.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Myke Hurley said in some episode of Cortex podcast, that he doesn’t want to turn his new mechanical keyboard hobby into a jobby. He wants to keep some things as just hobbies. He has enough jobbies as it is, and he doesn’t want to ruin something he enjoys.
Although, it sounds more like OP has no jobs or jobbies, so having at least one should be ok.
- Comment on Ice cream trucks still around? 2 weeks ago:
Do you just straight up ask for meth or is there a code word?
- Comment on How do you combat boredom? 2 weeks ago:
Can confirm. Just lie down, and let the boredom soak in for a while. Won’t take long til you remember five things I was supposed to do several weeks ago. Your subconscious mind really hates boredom, and will do anything to keep you busy.
If your to-do list is somehow completely empty, your mind will just come up with random new ideas, like what would happen if you put little wheels on a tomato, can you build a “house of cards” out of eggs, what if there was a set of suitcases exactly the size and shape of the trunk of your car, what if CO2 could be sucked from the air and pushed back underground somehow, what if cryptos are a scam… You know bizarre stuff like that.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, that’s a classic. If it ain’t broken but just barely limps along, infuriating everyone who uses it, and while a new system would actually work properly but costs money and effort that no one wants to spend, don’t fix it.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
But apparently restaurants don’t have a normal point of sale machine at the entrance? Why tuck it away at the back?
