Their chat about the limitations of optical memory made me think of Magneto-Optic (MO) memory cells [0] that I read about earlier this year. From what I understood (not an expert - so I'm open to correction) we move away from Von Neumann, to something where memory is a "filter" that light passes through rather than a bucket of data that needs to be moved around.
Overall it’s interesting to me that we can trade a bigger size to get more speed.
For anyone looking for an in-vehicle EDC to solve this problem I'd recommend a Keetch tool. I used them in the fire service with great success on the laminated glass of a windscreen. I assume it'd work equally well on a laminated side window glass - though I've not tried. Nice thing is that the sharp spike on it would work quite well on tempered glass too (though we had proper glass breakers for that).
I think the general premise of AI in war is pretty scary. But this in particular stood out to me as an important challenge:
> There are also fears that automated systems will violate the rules of war. How will they avoid harming civilians, or distinguish soldiers who want to surrender?
As it stands we see guerrilla fighters already ignore these rules (ISIS for example). It's a little frightening to consider such groups acquiring and deploying automated machine guns. We need to regulate these kinds of weapons systems much like we do with CBRN weapons.
The poor regulation around this is pretty bad for startups. Personally I've taken to only buying rechargeable battery powered devices from big brands. Anything else and I look for a power cord, single-use batteries, or mechanical operation.
It's not an ideal solution and not just because of examples like the Samsung Galaxy Note7. It's because I love rooting for the startups, the disruptors, the innovators. But in the world of battery powered products I'm inclined to think (or hope!) that the bigger players have more to lose by cheaping out on cheap batteries.
I have the same policy. It's not worth risking your life just to save a bit of money or try some gadget that is only made by a no-name brand. Often you keep these devices very close to your body or head (e.g. earphones) where they can do a lot of damage if they suddenly explode.
I learned this lesson over 10 years ago when I was visiting a night market in China with someone. He was so delighted with how cheap the portable chargers were that he bought a bunch to give to his friends/family back home. When we returned to the hotel one of them started emitting smoke. From that day I've only ever bought reputable brands, and even then I worry about it.
If you want more context on PFAS, I recommend this Veritasium video [0]. It expanded on my usual thought of "PFAS = bad," explaining why non-stick cookware is probably fine while other forms of PFAS are problematic. The video also covers the environmental damage caused by PFAS manufacturing.
The extremely toxic PFOA and PFOS are byproducts of manufacturing Teflon. After decades, we have managed to just barely regulate it. We don't know if these newer compounds will ultimately have similar effects. DuPont had reason to believe these original compounds were harmful, but they suppressed that fact in favor of profit. "Probably fine" is not acceptable, considering we can't meaningfully clean the stuff up.
"Teflon" ski wax (fluoro-wax) contains PFOA impurities, which is that same problematic chemical. It's expensive to remove so most manufacturers don't bother.
Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong or at least incomplete. I empathise, it’s hard to make definitive statements like that, but maybe at some point it’s better not to if you’re not sure and more about entertainment than anything else.
Why leave off “or incomplete” when people can see it directly above what you misquoted? But sure, plenty of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779199. You can search on Google for Veritasium wrong (or misleading, incomplete, etc.) if you’d like more examples.
The YouTube video in your link refers to a single Veritasium video regarding their coverage of Waymo autonomous driving. But I feel the entire video is invalidated by the fact that Veritasium clearly mentions that their video is sponsored by Waymo. As a viewer I already know that there will be bias because of this declaration. Veritasium isn’t hiding it, so what’s the issue?
On HN I’d hope to read insightful comments instead of ones making strong statements without justification and asking others to Google for examples. If you’re too lazy to type out them out it’s probably better not to post at all; this is not Reddit.
The video was just one example from the linked thread, which was why I linked to the thread not the video. I don't see the benefit of copying all that text here when it's already there, I'm sorry to have to say. You're certainly welcome to believe that there's a good excuse every time he's incomplete or wrong, although I personally don't. I think it's because it's first and foremost entertainment content.
How am I misquoting you? If you meant to say that Veritasium is frequently incomplete then just say that. No need to add the frequently wrong part at all. You’re implying something much stronger than what you intended; just to sway people’s opinion. But I didn’t need to write this because as you say people can just read your bias.
You've misquoted by turning "Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong or at least incomplete" into "Veritasium seems to be frequently wrong" in order to lecture me that saying only that he's frequently wrong is overstating things, and that I should have said incomplete. Which I did - in the non-misquoted version. But of course, you don't need my participation to have debates with imaginary versions of people in your head so I'll leave you to it.
It's not like this is going unnoticed either, though.
The International Ski Federation (FIS) now bans fluorinated wax in all their competitions, and this wax is explicitly called out alongside cookware in much of the legislation that's going around in places like CA/CO for PFAS bans.
You forgot rain. Maybe one day people will remember we're just sharing one small planet, the air, the water, the food supplies, ... all the shit you dump/burn ends up in your food or water eventually
That article's only citation is a review paper, and it doesn't answer my question or substantiate your claim. It only covers how much PFAS is found in rainwater, and not how it got there.
The sources cited includes https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2020.116685, which is paywalled, but the snippet of the conclusion that is shown indicates that a possible major cause is industrial emissions:
> As local sources were determined to be significant, the results imply that local action can have an impact on PFAS contamination in precipitation. A three-way ANOVA model determined that functional group, chain length, and location were significant predictors of PFAS concentrations
If you can get the full text I'd be very interested in reading about it.
Sure, its probably at its highest concentrations right where its being manufactured or used heavily, but in the end its migrating just about everywhere.
> n Figure 1B, the levels of PFOS in rainwater are shown to often exceed the US EPA drinking water health advisory for PFOS, except for two studies conducted in remote regions (in Tibet and Antarctica).
I don't think there are a lot of industrial emissions in Antarctica.
But still a lot of things do, pesticides following the rain cycles is a good example. We're killing the biodiversity and ourselves with it. We already almost entirely rely on synthetically amending fields with petrol byproducts to feed ourselves, tomorrow we might have to manually pollinate crops when insects won't be enough to do the job.
PFAS are a problem, co2 is a problem, but we have dozens of other very big problems that are partially, if not entirely, obscured
> Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process. Thus, the Haber process [enabled] the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.
Future archaeologists will wonder that we first fouled our nest from edge to edge with lead in gasoline, and then there's that radioactive layer, and following immediately after the forever chemicals layer.
Not saying it's a good approach to solving the problem, but surely you'd want to do the filtering at the water utility level. It would be a lot more cost effective that way.
It probably can't be effectively filtered at utility scale. There are only a small number of effective filtration methods and they basically coalesce to either distillation or reverse osmosis, neither of which is effective at utility scale. The other side of that is that both methods concentrate contaminates when removing them, and distillation puts some contaminates into the air, which means neither is a panacea even at residential scale.
The largest reverse osmosis plant in the world produces 165MGD of water, which is less than is required for any of the top 10 largest US cities, while primarily being used purely for desalination (SWRO). At the levels of filtration and membrane size required for removal of PFAS, it would nearly be impossible to cost effectively filter 200MGD+ of water for a major city.
That the way the parent comment is written evokes fear unnecessarily.
There are no definite provable effects of exposure of PFAS - in fact our current knowledge of them is so bad that if you use google and find a list of effects on the body from exposure of PFAS the list is endless and full of things that are unrelated, which is obviously impossible and nonsense.
After seeing warnings about rustwasm not being maintained [1], I'm glad that wasm-bindgen is still actively supported [2]. That said, it's concerning that many previously recommended practices (e.g. like relying on wasm-pack) are now in question [3]. This makes it harder for devs to adopt Rust for building WASM apps.
Money can be "lost", and "created". In fact, it regularly is by commercial banks; this is the cornerstone of the modern economy. The bank of England wrote a pretty accessible document on money being created and destroyed [1]. For a slightly deeper dive (but equally accessible) check out "Can’t We Just Print More Money?" by Rupal Patel, et al. [2] which describes the different kinds of money.
The 2014 doc was a pretty wild read for me when it came out - it changed my perspective quite a bit.
I've recently had a glimpse of that - buying my first .no domain required me to be registered on the Norwegian population register, and full digital verification. There was even a phone call with the registrar! Some of the other rules are bonkers too [1]:
- Each private individual may at any time subscribe to up to 5 domain names directly under .no
- Each organisation may at any time subscribe to up to 100 domain names directly under .no
Is it wrong for Norway to protect its domain? They don't want the ".no" domain to be the target of "domain hacks" from people who have nothing to do with Norway.
So if you want a ".no" domain, prove that you are Norwegian, the limits are to prevent the kind of abuse we see in most other TLDs (domain squatting, etc...). All that seem reasonable to me. Some countries put less restrictions on their own TLDs, especially tiny countries with interesting TLDs which they see as a revenue source, that's fine too, but to each his own.
If you don't like it, use any of the generic TLDs. AFAIK, Norway doesn't put any restriction on them.
You're right, the Norwegian government can do whatever they want. And yes, the ability to stop domain squatting is a nice side effect. For me though, it was a pretty surprising process, and set of restrictions.
Life is full of tradeoffs and this is no exception. I quite like the .no TLD - I find it lends itself to fun product / side project names. It's just a pity that I'm limited to 5 with the .no TLD :)
The problem is that this causes problems when people then move out of Norway, which is not a need you can predict when choosing a domain. So yes, always choose gTLDs but that doesn't absolve .no from criticism.
The restrictions on not owning too many domains are reasonable if still too lax IMO.
A hobby project I started putting together late last year; a little spot on the internet for prayer and reflection.
https://dugnad.stavanger-digital.no/
A pro bono tech consultancy for local non profits. The idea is to help them use tech to better deliver on their mission.
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