TauZero

@TauZero@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible that the rich are so rich that they have created inflation?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You overlooked the hundred trillion dollar coin inside the […].

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible that the rich are so rich that they have created inflation?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No, money at rest does not create inflation. It is the consumption of goods and services through use of money that does. Trump could mint a one hundred trillion dollar coin and put it on display in the White House, and this would have no effect on prices, even though he is now richer than all Americans put together… as long as the coin stays on display. But the moment he tries to deposit the coin at a bank and start spending its value to pay for goods and services, all prices will skyrocket, because now there are more dollars competing to buy the same amount of food, the same number of houses, the same number of services, that existed/was being produced before, the same that you are trying to buy.

  Remember those news articles last year how the wealthiest 10% of Americans drive 50% of consumer spending? That’s how the rich influence prices. Not hoarding - consumption. The poorest 90% (those earning less than $250k/year, namely you) only have access to 50% of food and consumer goods and such. One person from top 10% consumes 9x more than one person from bottom 90%. If wealth inequality did not exist and the 10% consumed as much per person as the 90%, then you would literally be able to buy 1.8x as much stuff as you can now, with no other changes in productivity required.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I financially enabling child labor in 3rd world countries by buying second hand fast fashion?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Unpopular opinion: yes, you do. 2nd-hand markets contribute to the value of the original item even for things like clothing. When you buy a 2-year old car with intention to sell at 4 years, the price you are willing to pay includes the resale value you expect to get later. Which in turn influences the price of the new car that the original buyer is willing to pay. Another commenter mentioned cell phones having a chain of resales too.

  But even for cheaper items that are donated instead of resold, the 2nd-hand use of the item has a non-zero effect on the original production and sale of it, because the act of donation itself is a notable event. You give away an item for free instead of throwing it in the trash because you think the item still has some value and you want someone else to enjoy that value. This works whether you give it directly for free to a person, or donate to a charity shop that then resells it. A charity donation is also recorded as tax-deductible.

  The act of donation frees you from guilt/responsibility for throwing the item away without using up its full value. You are then free to buy more of the same item new. Faster than you would have otherwise, had the charity shop not existed. You also value it more, knowing that someone else can use it after you.

  So here is a practical scenario for how this effect works. Imagine what would happen if instead of buying problematic child-labor fast fashion clothing from a 2nd-hand charity shop, you refuse! You keep wearing the clothing you have, or buy some non-problematic boring 2nd-hand clothing instead. And I do too. And every other charity store shopper stops buying them as well. Then the charity shop will refuse to take donations of those fast-fashion clothing, right? Just as they would refuse if you brought them a box of VHS tapes today. When the people would bring boxes of their mildly-used fast-fashion clothing for donation, they would be turned away - “nobody wants to buy those!”

  Those people might not believe in their responsibility to eliminate child labor, but they still thought of themselves as good people, because they wanted to donate the remaining value for free, but now they can’t. They have to either keep wearing those clothes themselves, or throw them in the trash without feeling good about it. They end up buying fast-fashion clothes less frequently, or buying other clothes instead. Either way, the value of new fast-fashion clothes goes down and less of them are produced, and fewer children are employed to make them. All because of 2nd-hand.

  IMO, the only way to consume the remaining value of a 2nd-hand item without having an influence on its original production, is to literally pull it out of the trash. And you have to do it in a way that the original owner isn’t aware of it. Because if they knew, they might feel good about it. Like a baker who makes extra bread knowing that most of it will be unsold and go in the trash at the end of the day, because they have seen people rummaging in the trash bin for food at night (not saying that’s bad, just pointing out the chain of influence).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[troll science]: Unruh particle shower on a centrifuge⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  physicists are quite confident only blackholes can Hawking radiate

  Good to know! I was starting to get worried :D

  you absolutely need a horizon to get radiation

  Does the particle need to travel all the way from the horizon to reach you? How long does that take? The horizon still exists on the centrifuge, if only for a moment, shifting slightly from one instant to the next. In principle, at any moment you could detach from the centrifuge and fire 10g rocket thrusters in a straight line instead. In that first instant there is no way to tell the difference between the two.

  I say this because in the linked paper, the “acceleration” experienced by the positrons was the bouncing off the atomic nuclei in the silicon crystal, which takes place over the space of a few angstroms, or at most within the 3.5mm size of the crystal, in the time given by the speed of 178GeV positrons (+Lorenz contraction). This instant was sufficient to claim Unruh effects were occurring.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[troll science]: Unruh particle shower on a centrifuge⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Another complication is that even if the centrifuge slows down as it gets heavier, you can recover most of that mechanical energy when you hop off the centrifuge with your now full jar. Then you can boost it back up almost up to full speed. So I’m not sure exactly at what point you input energy into the system to instantiate the particles. When they hit the belljar bottom transversely maybe? Is this some kind of Maxwell’s Demon situation where you need to close the jar before the particles fall back out?

  Also good to mention Earth! Logically, if Hawking radiation works for black holes it seems as if it would also work for any star or planet! But I’ve never seen this mentioned anywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[troll science]: Unruh particle shower on a centrifuge⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh for sure, science is never boring :D but compare the intense situation in the troll science pic to the displayable results from the actual experiment (fig. 1c):

  Image

  Tip: evidence for the Unruh effect you are looking for is this 2mm difference right here:

  Image

  The teal dashed line is the power spectrum predicted from theory including the Unruh effect, and violet dashed line is without it. The data points match the teal line better. But you can’t even see that by eye from the noisy dots! You need to do chi-square statistics to even prove it. (The dots below 30GeV - outside the “accelerated thermality” region - are not included in the analysis because they are guaranteed to be incorrect, as the experiment wasn’t sensitive in that range.) Boooring!

  What the authors of the paper glance over in a single sentence before moving on to better things is that they had to shoot a FRICKING POSITRON DEATH BEAM FROM THE MFKING LHC through a crystal target and watch the resulting Bremsstrahlung gamma rays that would melt your bones off to obtain these datapoints. Talk about intense!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[troll science]: Unruh particle shower on a centrifuge⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Like many other popular weird physics effects, it has been accepted non-controversially by scientists and then popularized for decades in fun thought experiments and pop-sci videos, all of which neglecting to mention that no actual experiments have yet been performed. This lack of grounding leads to spread of confusing statements like “the Unruh particles exist in the accelerated frame but not in the lab frame”, which make no sense, for how can there be two separate realities that coexist? Luckily we now do have a first Unruh experiment from 2019 arxiv.org/abs/1903.00043v7 and the temperature did rise and reality did not split apart. So no longer hypothetical, just routine and boring.

• [troll science]: Unruh particle shower on a centrifugemander.xyz ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨science_memes@mander.xyz⁩ | ⁨14⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It slaps tho⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You guys can afford sausages?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NYC street names⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Literally one block away: intersection of Dyckman St and Seaman Ave

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨data transfer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The numbers in the meme are off. One sperm is 750MB, or about 1 CD, so full human is 2 CDs. Or a couple 1.4MB floppies if you only store the diff from the reference genome.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jigsaw Trolley Problem⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes! Cancels out, leaving only a very slight edge on door 2. All that work for only… 2.77% edge over picking at random. What a troll problem, huh?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree that OP is in the best position to report the crime to the police - they are closest to the police station, they have video evidence, they literally know who the thief is - but it should not be their responsibility! OP has done nothing wrong and there are no measures they could have taken to prevent this crime (other than not shopping online at all). If OP gets a police report, OP is taking up the task of being the victim, and then BestBuy has no legal obligation to refund them at all, other than out of the kindness of their heart. Rather, BestBuy is the victim in this crime, same as if the item was stolen off the shelf at their warehouse and scanner records forged. It is their responsibility to file a police report, if they want the numbers in their system to add up. Only then could they ask OP to kindly provide the video evidence to help them out, and they’d be lucky if OP would give it to them, having no obligation to do so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jigsaw Trolley Problem⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Knowing that the ball was gold gives you Bayesian knowledge about the boxes behind the door, since the prior probability of the host pulling a gold ball from a 6-gold door is different than from the 3/3 door. So you have to multiply Monty Hall probabilities and Bayesian probabilities together.

  That assumes the host pulled a ball at random, of course, and not a deliberately gold ball.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes! It’s an olympics game of mental gymnastics where everyone - BestBuy, DoorDash, OP, the police - try to offload responsibility onto someone else. However, a crime WAS committed. Someone is the victim. The victim is the one who was deprived of property/money and will not have access to it until/unless the thief is caught and property recovered. BestBuy thinks OP is the victim, since the item was stolen off (not)their porch. OP thinks BestBuy should be the victim, since OP had no involvement in organizing the delivery. DoorDash could also take up responsibility of being the victim, since it was their (not)employee that stole from them.

  If OP goes to the police now, they would be losing the mental gymnastics by accepting the status of the victim. BestBuy would never refund them in this case. It is in OP’s best interest to pursue the chargeback first. If OP succeeds in the refund or the chargeback, then BestBuy will have no package and no money, so BestBuy would be the victim. Then it will be BestBuy’s responsibility to report the crime.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The “libertarian paradise” idea is that as far as Best Buy is concerned, the item was delivered. If the DoorDash delivery driver happened to turn right around and steal the package, that’s a separate crime and a matter for the police to deal with, same as if anyone else had stolen it. And it’s OP’s fault for not picking the box up sooner, during the 3 seconds it was sitting on the porch. The porch that wasn’t even theirs. So anyway, the libertarian solution is for OP to contact police to track down the thief and either recover the stolen item or sue the thief for monetary compensation. Best Buy is innocent and no refund is coming. DoorDash is innocent too because they contracted with an independent contractor to deliver the item, and what the contractor does after the item has been delivered is not their responsibility.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But I am mighty!!⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  @xavier666@lemm.ee If you sit at a magnesium fire, it burns at 3300K, which is hot enough to produce sizeable ultraviolet rays. So you can get your sunburn from that, damaging the DNA in whatever of your remaining cells have not been melted away by heat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jigsaw Trolley Problem⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Doesn’t say the trolley is a runaway. Don’t even need to make deals, you can safely walk away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨KM3-230213A⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  KM3-230213A is an ultra-energetic (220PeV) neutrino event recorded by the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) on the bottom of the Mediterranean sea. The telescope consists of thousands of photomultiplier sensors suspended in the water, watching for Cherenkov radiation of the decay particles resulting from the rare collision of a neutrino with the inside of the Earth. There is no known cosmic mechanism how a neutrino so energetic could have come to be.

  This meme proposes the hijinks of Apu as an alternative explanation of how all those blue-sensitive photomultipliers got activated (saturated even) in a straight line going from bottom up all at once.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jigsaw Trolley Problem⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Your family was kidnapped and is now safely eating ice cream backstage. Tied to the tracks are 5 infinite worlds Hitlers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jigsaw Trolley Problem⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  it’s not clear that he’s following Monty Hall rules

  Whenever I see a badly-specified Monty Hall Problem, I always imagine the host saying something like “Oh, you want to pick door number 1? Well, guess what - the car was behind door number 3 all along! You get nothing but a goat!” And only when you initially pick a door with the car does the host ask “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather switch to door number 2? Look, there is even a goat behind door number 3!” Switching doors 100% gurantees you get a goat… or 50% silver balls in this case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jigsaw Trolley Problem⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, problem doesn’t specify whether you want your family to live. Common mistake.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jigsaw Trolley Problem⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Doesn’t say it’s your family tied to the tracks either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jigsaw Trolley Problem⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Beautifully written!

  I think the probabilities cancel out?

  My conclusion as well. Except that since Jigsaw has taken one gold ball out, door 2 must have slightly better chance of gold ball remaining on average (75% vs 72.2%?).

• Jigsaw Trolley Problemmander.xyz ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨science_memes@mander.xyz⁩ | ⁨40⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China begins assembling its supercomputer in space⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Then you’d be surprised when you calculate the numbers!

  A Falcon 9 delivers 13100kg to LEO and has 395,700kg propellant in 1st stage and 92,670kg in 2nd stage. Propellant in both is LOX/RP-1. RP-1 is basically long chains of CH2, so together they burn as:

  3 O2 (3x32) + 2 CH2 (2x14) -> 2 CO2 (2x44) + 2 H2O (2x18)
  

  Which is 2*44/(2*44+2*18) = 71% CO2. Meaning each launch makes (395700+92670)*.71 = 347 tons CO2 or 347/13.1 = 26.5 tons of CO2 per ton to orbit. A lot of it is burned in space, but I’m guessing the exhaust gases don’t reach escape velocity so they all end up in the atmosphere anyway.

  As for how much a compute satellite weighs, there is a wider range of possibilities, since they don’t exist yet. This is China launching a test version of one, but it’s not yet an artifact optimized for compute per watt per kilogram that we’d imagine a supercomputer to be.

  I like to imagine something like a gaming PC strapped to a portable solar panel, a true cubesat :). On online shopping I currently see a fancy gaming PC at 12.7kg with 650W, and a 600W solar panel at 12.5kg. Strap them together with duct tape, and it’s 1000/(12.7+12.5)*600 = 24kW of compute power per ton to orbit.

  Something more real life is the ISS support truss. STS-119 delivered and installed S6 truss on the ISS. The 14,088kg payload included solar panels, batteries, and truss superstructure, supplying last 25% of station’s power, or 30kW. Say, double that to strap server-grade hardware and cooling on it. That’s 1000*30/(2*14088) = 1.1kW of compute per ton to orbit. A 500kg 1kW server is overkilling it, but we are being conservative here.

  In my past post I’ve calculated that fossil fuel electricity on Earth makes 296g CO2 per 1 kilowatthour (using gas turbine at 60% efficiency burning 891kJ/mol methane into 1 mol CO2: 1kJ/s * 3600s / 0.6 eff / (891kJ/mol) * 44g/mol = 296g, as is the case where I live).

  The CO2 payback time for a ton of duct taped gamer PC is 1000kg * 26.5kg CO2/kg / ( 24kW * 0.296kg/kW/hour) / (24*365) = 0.43 years. The CO2 payback time for a steel truss monstrosity is `1000kg * 26.5kg/kg / (1.1kW * 0.296kg/kW/hour) / (24*365) = 9.3 years.

  Hey, I was pretty close!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China begins assembling its supercomputer in space⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A solar-powered computer in space could recoup the CO2 cost of its launch fuel over its lifecycle (say 10 years?) when compared to coal-fueled electricity on the ground. After that it’s free. Of course, you’d benefit more by filling up every available spot on the ground with solar arrays first! But you will eventually run out, or you might not want to do that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China begins assembling its supercomputer in space⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you have a megawatt solar array, you can also afford a megawatt cooling array. The size is comparable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't these code-writing AIs just output straight up machine code?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Only because it’s English and the model is already trained on a large corpus of English text, so it has some idea of what a “table row” is for example. It could learn the concept from reading assembly code from scratch, it would just take longer. Hell, even Lego bricks can be trained on! avalovelace1.github.io/LegoGPT/

  Our system tokenizes a LEGO design into a sequence of text tokens, ordered in a raster-scan manner from bottom to top. … At inference time, LegoGPT generates LEGO designs incrementally by predicting one brick at a time given a text prompt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't these code-writing AIs just output straight up machine code?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Language is language. To an LLM, English is as good as Java is as good as machine code to train on. I like to imagine if we suddenly uncovered a library of books left over from ancient aliens, we could train an LLM on it (as long as the symbols themselves are legible), and it would generate stories in the alien language that would sound correct to the aliens, even though the alien world and alien life are completely unknown and incomprehensible to us.