missfrizzle
@missfrizzle@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Slightly Unfair 11 hours ago:
there was another! some kid on the Ars Technica forum liveblogged his attempt. notable highlights:
how it started
I melted a large hunk of uranium out of one side of an ore chunk and it is by far more radioactive than anything I have (gamma). I am however concerned that background radiation level in my office and bedroom (next door) have almost doubled. I will measure again tommorow and see if maybe it is something cosmic related.
…
HOLY FUCK. DO NOT IONIZE OR VAPORIZE URANIUM. IT IS A HEAVY METAL. It’s not the radiation that will kill you. It’s the fucking heavy metal toxicity. Here’s some guidelines for safe handling.
…
I am no David Hahn and am not as stupid, but I HAVE built a functioning breeder Aluminum+Lead sheild, but some radiation is escaping. I am going to beef it up. Right now my office is at 15-25 CPM on the counter (my dosimeter has not arrived yet) and my adjacent room is 6-10 CPM on the counter. This is over the course of 3 days in my configuration. From top to bottom. Am-241 at 2uCi bombarding a thin aluminum sheet (thicker than foil) moderated by a combo of water and paraffin, another aluminum plate to further slow the neutrons down and a crushed pile of U-238 ore (reduced with high strength peroxide). This is enclosed in a inch thick lead shield. Call me crazy if you must… I am currently as I type, evacuating an old gas laser tube. We’ll see what happens. I have Thorium and some U-238 coming in so I will be building a concrete containment block this weekend.
…
got that shit wrong. I am breeding plutonium 239. I got it messed up.
on purpose
So you’re breeding fuel for nuclear weapons? that’s what i thought. you’re breeding pu239, which means you’re breeding pu240, which is a poison. i have not given much thought to how to avoid this and change the reaction to breed something less poisonous, since you have no use for the 239 beyond “dude, i’m breeding weapons fuel!”
I am not breeding it for that purpose. Actually, I dont believe I have stated my purpose, so let me inform the fools here that may think I am breeding weapons useable fuel.<BR><BR>I am breeding this material for its HEAT. U-238 is way too long lived to decay in a manner in which would create any sort of viable heat source for use in a seebeck electric generator of my own design. Now take off the tinfoil and shoe covers and get a grip.
some developments
The gamma output just sharply dropped so something must have changed rapidly. I am just now researching what is going on so I am not quite sure yet what happened. I think I am going to pull the neutron moderators out.
…
not great, not terrible…
Current results for the test dosimeters. 1)Reactor dosimeter - 60 roentgen 2)Desk source - Broken 0-R 3)Personal source (which I had as I slept in the next room) is reading 22 roentgen.
You mean microroentgen… right? Or milliroentgen? Surely not full on roentgen?
Full roentgen.
I’m out of my area of expertise here, but according to Wikipedia, the average lifetime dose is 16R. Is there not some danger in exceeding that amount currently?
Yes, I saw that. Yes, I am concerned a bit. I havent put my reactor into the large concrete containment yet so I guess it is definately time to do so. I have no symptoms of radiation poisoning though…
…
Okay, lesson learned… My equipment is giving me shit readings, or was anyway. Realizing my CDV 715 was shit, I removed the dial from it and attached it to my DSRB88. I based the readout circuit I built on a similar circuit that uses the same GM tube, so I know it is fairly accurate and also uses the same guage. The background radiation level in my office with the reactor is about 30 uR/hr. So, If I had the money, I would get myself a CDV-700, but I do not so I will just have to make due with this. SO I AM NOT DYING AND NEITHER IS ANYONE ELSE.
…
A much better picture of the tube. I finally calculated the emmissions from this puppy to be 6mR/hr. I was hesitant to get my face so close to it, but for the sake of pics
the inevitable conclusion
so…the FBI just came… Yes, with the NRC and Texas health department…raided my home. They accused me of acquiring the materials to construct a dirty bomb. They refferenced the capacitor on page one that makes a quip about it looking like a pipe bomb. They also told me that arstechnica is under constant surveillance for things such as this. I mean, terrorists post thier research online all of the time.
Well, on the bright side, you now have some pretty accurate readings of the radiation.
- Comment on Has this ever happened to you? 6 days ago:
nope, it’s the verbal analogy puzzle format used by tests like the SAT.
- Comment on Has this ever happened to you? 1 week ago:
throuple : threesome :: couple : hook-up
- Comment on IT'S A TRAP 1 week ago:
you know, I’m not sure you can have an uncountably infinite number of people. so whatever that abomination is I’ll send the trolley down its way.
- Comment on oh cool 2 weeks ago:
the SG teams embody American ideals, while the NID embodies American history. specifically, the NID acts like '60s CIA.
- Comment on oh cool 2 weeks ago:
it pleases me that the actress who played Carter cared about science like the character.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 2 weeks ago:
HOG and Hough transforms bring me back. honestly glad that I don’t have to mess with them anymore though.
I always found SVMs a little shady because you had to pick a kernel. we spent time talking about the different kernels you could pick but they were all pretty small and/or contrived. I guess with NNs you pick the architecture/activation functions but there didn’t seem to be an analogue in SVM land for “stack more layers and fatten the embeddings.” though I was only an undergrad.
do you really think NNs won purely because of large datasets and GPU acceleration? I feel like those could have applied to SVMs too. I thought the real win was solving vanishing gradients with ReLU and expanding the number of layers, rather than throwing everything into a 3 or 5-layer MLP, preventing overfitting, making the gradient landscape less prone to local maxima and enabling hierarchical feature extraction to be learned organically.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 2 weeks ago:
I recently told my mother that I’m probably the most intelligent person she will ever meet
and so humble, too! seriously though, this is a major red flag. I rarely find smart people to brag about how smart they are.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 2 weeks ago:
I was taught that serious academics favored Support Vector Machines over Neural Networks, which industry only loved because they didn’t have proper education.
oops…
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
I can’t find the pro-LGBTQ+ ones are they on backorder?
- Comment on Can't argue that. 2 weeks ago:
I have no scientific basis for this, but my suspicion is that what you do with your brain is more important to cognition than whatever raw intelligence you start with. the more languages you study, the more music you play, the more subjects you study and skills you develop and hobbies you tinker with and deep conversations you have… you learn to learn, you learn to think, it all gets wired up and cross-connected and you become more than the sum of your parts.
how much decline is truly biological vs. being stuck in a rut?
also there’s nootropics that could be helpful for concussion recovery/etc. but they haven’t been too well-studied, there’s many different ones with different sketchiness and sources aren’t always trustworthy… but piracetam (iirc) is actually prescribed in the EU for recovery from brain injury, and it’s fairly safe and well-studied. I’m not recommending it either way though.
- Comment on Disney 2025 2 weeks ago:
wtf? didn’t Scrooge McDuck get drafted into the US Navy?
- Comment on Based and Red Pilled Gigachad, many such cases 😔 3 weeks ago:
my sibling in Christ, Reps. Mace and Jackson literally shouted the t-slur yesterday and called for all trans people to be forcibly institutionalized. Trump said he “wouldn’t oppose” banning the trans flag when a reporter asked about “transtifa.” Musk retweeted someone who called trans women “perverted, deranged bioweapons” and trans men “osteoporotic, androgynous goblins,” calling us to be contained and forbidden to communicate with each other. along with someone else calling for a total ban on HRT for all ages. we’ve been kicked out of the military, and stripped of security clearances. the DoJ has floated banning us from gun ownership by ruling that we’re “mentally defective.” my passport has an M on it because Trump reverted all the rules on his first day in office. it’s a literal felony for trans women to use the women’s bathroom in Florida, and for trans office workers to use their own pronouns. coverage for trans health has been stripped from nearly every public service. trans protections have recently been eviscerated in Skrmetti.
it’s really not going great.
- Comment on Political discourse 3 weeks ago:
if you were a centrist before 2020, and you still are in 2025, then you’ve moved Right, since the Overton window shifted Right.
if you kept your principles you’re now Left. that’s how the window works.
- Comment on Based and Red Pilled Gigachad, many such cases 😔 3 weeks ago:
The US passed laws protecting trans people and many Americans are literally trans or allies. Russia however, is extremely anti-trans.
ahh, to live in 2014 again.
- Comment on He died doing what he loved. 3 weeks ago:
update from the future: the suspect is Tyler Robinson, a young white Utah man from a Mormon family, with unregistered party affiliation. he confessed to his father, who called a youth pastor to talk him down from suicide, who then called US marshals to take him into custody.
- Comment on Practical Magic 3 weeks ago:
rule of three is broader than Wicca though. something like it is common in a lot of pagan beliefs.
- Comment on We are helping 4 weeks ago:
Why do we pipe natural gas into homes?
puts on Technology Connections hat
because heat pumps and green energy weren’t a thing in the US until recently!
heat efficiency is weird. electric heaters are 100% efficient, but 1) they’re only as efficient as the generator, and 2) transmission losses add up. and until recently, most power was generated by coal and natural gas. turning those into electricity is lossy, since lots of energy is lost as waste heat. so why not send the gas you were going to burn for electricity directly to the customer?
heat pumps can be 300-400% efficient, since they move heat - from outdoors, into the home - rather than generating it. they can get >100% efficiency even in cold climates! but stupidly the US never bothered make our air conditioners reversible, or every home would have a heat pump by now.
and with solar/wind (for peak) + nuclear or grid storage (for base) power, we can now get rid of natural gas. …once we give everybody heat pumps. …and shutdown our gas generators. …we should probably get on that.
- Comment on We are helping 4 weeks ago:
pragmatically I think reducing meat consumption rather than eliminating it is an easier sell. I’ll admit, I’m too weak of will to become a vegetarian. I’ve been inside a chicken plant, I’ve seen the horrid conditions firsthand. I know the climate change impact. I know my diet is hurting animals and the climate. but I crave meat, and none of the delicious vegan food my partner makes hits the spot.
it’s too hard to forswear every future pot roast, chop and drumstick. I can probably get myself to eat less meat though.
- Comment on Peak 5 weeks ago:
they look a lot like old Soviet children’s dolls/characters to me. like Cheburashka and Nevalyashka.
- Comment on Internet discourse is wonderful 5 weeks ago:
thank you for writing this up. ❤ I’m also trans and spent time in that particular community because I have very intense dysphoria/bdd and found other spaces to be toxically positive. it wasn’t a healthy place, and I picked up more brainworms, but I felt like I could vent and not feel so alone.
it’s really easy for people without crippling dysphoria to sit back and judge you for going to /tttt/. it’s unhealthy, I know it’s unhealthy, but sometimes unhealthy outlets are the only way I can make the hurt get better for a while. I can’t just be all uwu skirt go spinny when my body feels like sewage.
- Comment on Just a little bit more 5 weeks ago:
most fascists don’t call themselves fascists. so censoring the word “fascist” tends to muzzle people calling out fascists, not the fascists themselves. it vexes me.
- Comment on Just a little bit more 5 weeks ago:
lemmy.ml (used to?) automatically replace “bitch” with
*removed*. I’d see people call themselves a “basic removed” or say “removed please” and it was very confusing. it applied to every message.“cunt” wasn’t censored, though? or maybe they removed the filter at some point.
I’m not a tankie so I left and never looked back.
- Comment on Ia Ia! 5 weeks ago:
Unnatty Light
- Comment on android 1 month ago:
long live GrapheneOS! also congratulations to her!