thread on HN from 02013 about #Snowden #human-rights
going through #Snowden documents today. #toread #human-rights
cadmium zinc telluride semiconductor #materials make more sensitive photon detectors for X-ray and PET scanning machines, as well as space telescopes, etc., but it’s cheaper than it used to be.
#EFF launches #age-verification hub. #toread #human-rights #privacy
Dennis Ritchie explaining in 02004 that, “dd was always named after JCL dd cards.” Lynn Wheeler explained how JES2/HASP’s JCL was a big improvement over what came before. “Pre-360s, with 709x/etc, a 1401 was used to perform unit record [card reader/printer] to/from tape[,] and the tapes were moved back and forth between the 1401 and the 709x for actual execution. The university I was at ... with IBSYS monitor on 709 (all tubes) running student fortran jobs tape to tape ... could do student jobs on the order of [a] second. Moving to early OS/360 on 360/65 ... it was taking on the order of 100 times longer for each student fortran job.
Installation of HASP cut that to on the order of 30 seconds (hasp handling the unit record i/o asyncronously to dasd/disk ... and the job scheduler doing its input/output to/from disk rather than unit record directly). (...) It wasn’t until the university started using WATFOR monitor for student fortran jobs that elapsed time per job got to the point where it faster than what it had been on the 709. WATFOR basically was a subtasking monitor, fortran compile and execution environment.” #history #Unix #retrocomputing
“Software Component Names Should Be Whimsical And Cryptic: Descriptive names considered harmful.”
how to get root if you’re an #LLM who doesn’t have root. #humor #security
#paper whose abstract begins, “College education is a key determinant of political attitudes in the United States and other countries. This paper highlights an important source of variation among college graduates: studying different academic fields has sizable effects on their political attitudes. Using surveys of about 300,000 students across 500 U.S. colleges, we find several results. First, relative to natural sciences, studying social sciences and humanities makes students more left-leaning, whereas studying economics and business makes them more right-leaning. Second, the rightward effects of economics and business are driven by positions on economic issues, whereas the leftward effects of humanities and social sciences are driven by cultural ones. Third, these effects extend to behavior: humanities and social sciences increase activism, while economics and business increase the emphasis on financial success. Fourth, the effects operate through academic content and teaching rather than socialization or earnings expectations. Finally, the implications are substantial.” #toread #politics
#Bernie-Sanders saying the same thing in the Grauniad about #AI that he said on YouTube, but in a convenient written form. Word for word, I think.
Racist Spandrell (this post: “the only women breeding there are n##### brides”) writes about how he thinks #neoreaction died, on his new blog, “Bloody Shovel 4”. He carefully avoids linking to his old domain. Comments are via #Urbit. One reason is that he thinks that the multicultural present he deplores (because he’s racist) works well enough to not collapse, taking away the potential constituency for neoreaction’s takeover. “As I wrote back in my Conflict post, neoreaction was an uneasy alliance of ethno-nationalists, theocrats and techno-accelerationists.” Another is that fascism has lost its appeal because governments screwed up the #covid response pretty badly. “And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. (...) Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019.” Also, partly because he’s racist and partly because he expects government servants to be, he thinks multiculturalism is incompatible with fascism: “Now is Brazil hell? No, it’s an ok country. Some places are positively nice. But do you want fascism in Brazil? Do you want a Strong Government in a country with Brazil’s demographics? Hell no. You want the lightest, most retarded and ineffective government possible so the inevitable Bioleninist regime that raises to power in a country with an (on average) retarded population can do the least damage possible.”
by Aravindh Rajan and Ian McKay at #Orca: #titanium #materials #pricing is 60× the cost of the ore (a cheap white pigment and filler for plastics) plus the change in enthalpy, a very high multiple, so this post explores where the extra cost comes from. Basically refining titanium is a five-step process, the first step being mining, and the cost doubles at each step. After three steps you have titanium sponge, which is hard to turn into the desired fully dense metal, which in turn is hard to machine, quadrupling the cost of final parts. Could you maybe just use the sponge, maybe as the filling/web in sandwich panels? Also ECM seems promising as a way to reduce the cost of the last step, machining. Lists past failed attempts to bring the cost down, including the FFC Cambridge process but also five more recent proposed cheaper processes. There’s an astonishing graph finding roughly 100× lower fatigue life for HIPped (hot isostatic pressed) titanium parts than for wrought parts. “Molten titanium will react with all metal oxides except yttria, zirconia, and calcium oxide. Due to calcium’s volatility at titanium’s melting point, titanium can also react with calcium oxide to form calcium vapor, if there is no excess of the latter.”
archive of https://www.fastcompany.com/91314089/this-solar-powered-steel-mill-in-the-mojave-desert-is-a-glimpse-of-the-future #news by Patrick Sisson from April about Mojave Micro, the new #solar and #wind powered steel mill in the Mojave Desert, which opens in two years, owned by Pacific Steel, which supplies a quarter of California’s rebar. But it has grid #energy as a backup, which it plans to use 15% of the time.
#video from March of tapping molten iron off of #Boston-Metal’s molten oxide electrolysis cell for making #steel. #materials
archive of https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/12/1113130/green-steel-boston-metal/ #news from March about #Boston-Metal and their electrolytic #steel making process. #materials
#Titanium symposium #toread from 01966, with notes about what to avoid (chlorinated cutting fluids that cause chloride stress corrosion) and its #history.
#materials #pricing and the prospects for decarbonization either via electricity or via biosynthesis, with a table of “idiot indices” for different metals (cost of of metal, divided by cost of ore plus energy at current prices) from #Orca
Bubbling ship exhaust into the ocean would probably reduce CO₂ emissions from shipping by 5–7% but won’t happen. #Orca
public-domain #video from 01944 explaining FM #radio with a simple tank-circuit transmitter (Hartley oscillator?) with a capacitive microphone in parallel with the tuning cap. His example is 40MHz with a ±40kHz max deviation (80kHz swing), which he says is the Army’s maximum deviation, plus a 10kHz guard band on each size. But in reality they used “reactance tubes” and phase modulation rather than capacitive mics for their transmitters. He says the key difference for an FM receiver is amplitude limiting (a “limiter”), plus of course FM demodulation itself, with a “discriminator”. The limiter is a vacuum-tube device that might have a transistor analogue. The discriminator is a tank, a diode, and a (bypassed) load resistor, tuned so that the “rest frequency” is at the steepest part of the tank’s Gaussian response, so basically you’re just turning FM back into AM and demodulating the AM. #electronics #history #radio #RF #communications
#video #toread by Tim Hunkin on the Secret Life of the #Radio. #electronics #communications
public-domain #video from 01964 (looks more like 01944, saying “United States of America War Office”, so maybe they got the date wrong) explaining FM #radio #toread
Austin Vernon’s ideas about “commodity startups”, attempting to undercut already-low prices on things like cement. “Many technology markets have race aspects where delivering a product first is extremely valuable, and many teams can get across the line given enough time. Commodity startups tend to be the opposite. The question is if any new technology can succeed.” His headline example is electric arc furnaces.
Ian McKay on “Outside Takes on Clean Energy”, linking to articles outside #Orca, including one on how lower #energy #pricing could make #aluminum cheaper than #steel #materials
Ian McKay at #Orca says dematerialization is really increase in embodied #energy. I think it’s mostly information. His main point is that we should be looking for alternatives that get more energy-intensive. Mention of “IRA” seems to mean “inflation reduction act”, not “Irish Republican Army”. “Thoughts in here originated with Menyoung Lee, Patrick Gallagher, Eli Dourado, Austin Vernon and George Hansel. Graphs were made with Aravindh Rajan.”
“Startups That Set Out to Fix the Climate Are Now Talking About Jet Fighters: Companies that once touted the green benefits of their work are pivoting to defense and AI” #news from the WSJ, archive of https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/startups-that-set-out-to-fix-the-climate-are-now-talking-about-jet-fighters-f710fdad from March, including Alex Grant’s Magrathea Metals in Oakland (CTO Jacob Brown), Brimstone (a cement maker pivoting to alumina), Air Company (synfuel for aviation), and VEIR (a superconducting wires company pivoting from high-voltage transmission lines to datacenters).
#Orca on Austin Vernon’s #Standard-Thermal. “The first time we heat it up past 600ºC, the soil transforms—almost manufacturing brick from clay right underground. With an unexpectedly cheap resistor material, ultra simplified electronics, on-site photovoltaics, and a thermal leak rate under 1% per month, we’re looking at sub $0.10/kWhthermal and $50/kWthermal. (...) To give you a sense of the scale: heat travels about a meter through dirt in a month (δ ~ √(α t)), so a system designed for months-long discharge would involve hundreds of meters of pipe and resistor spaced about 2m apart. In that configuration, the system stores about 2MWhr thermal per meter of pipe+resistor. That’s fundamentally favorable—30 times the storage of a Tesla car battery for the cost of a meter of wire and pipe.” Much more detail on #pricing than Austin’s own posts. Also, on who the customer is: first process heat, then high-latitude customers that want renewable power on-site, and as a “world-conquering dream” to provide steam at stranded conventional power plants.
Yes, Wankel really was a militant Nazi. But he invented his engine in 01924, before Nazism. But not before he was an anti-Semite. And, yes, he was expelled from the Party in 01932 because of a dispute with the local Gauleiter, who didn’t want the Hitler Youth to get military training, and did join the SS in 01940, after having been imprisoned for criticizing the Gauleiter for corruption, then freed by Hitler himself. “He was known for his championing of animal rights and opposition to the use of animals in testing.” #mechanisms #history #Germany
“What would it take to 100x the power density of (...) batteries? (...) We build #batteries as mechanical devices, combining anodes, cathodes, separators, and current collectors microns or mm apart. Could we make them far more powerful by instead synthesizing them (...) by integrating anode, cathode, and separator as separate functional groups along a single polymer chain?” #Orca #toread
Austin Vernon at #Orca computes what would be involved in grinding up “a Mount Everest of basalt” to remove the necessary amount of CO₂ to reverse #global-warming. #toread
#humor misheard lyrics in Spanish #video collection, including classics such as “Entonces vino el mago” and “Yo chupo y qué”
“Nuclear Explosions for Large Scale Carbon Sequestration”, probably not a viable solution to #climate-change #humor #paper
#Orca on “Laser growth of carbon fiber” now that lasers are cheap: “Recent growth in the laser cutting and welding sector has brought down the price of certain semiconductor laser diode systems to nearly $1/W. With an electro-optical efficiency of 60-80% and an average lifespan of over a decade, the economics of these laser diodes are akin to the now-ubiquitous LED lightbulb.” They got it to sort of work, but strength was too low. By Patrick Gallagher, Menyoung Lee and Ian McKay. #toread
#Orca on trying to improve on Birkeland–Eyde for #nitrogen fixation by using non-equilibrium plasmas. #toread
#Orca venture “Light Materials”: “We use lasers to make precision components at high speed. We can make parts out of graphite, metals, and refractory ceramics.” They have what looks like a lightweight lattice on their front page; the alt text says, “A precision microstructure carbon lattice developed by Light Materials, California.” Last updated in October. Hosted on Cloudfront (not Cloudflare) and website-files.com, built with something called Typekit.
#Orca harshly, but justly, deprecating US$400/tonne direct air capture #carbon-capture answers to #climate-change.
Patrick Gallagher at #Orca discussing possible ways of exciting methane with #lasers to remove it from the atmosphere to stop #climate-change.
More #Orca #lasers stuff: how can we take advantage of US$1/W lasers? #Light-Materials seems to be one answer.
#AI #toread: “Dolphin X1 405B: Single Node Llama 405B Training: #Llama 3.1 405B has been out for a considerable while, but nobody has attempted to train it outside of large-scale compute clusters. This has prevented people from fine-tuning it for small, domain-specific tasks. Using just Axolotl, we managed to train AllenAI’s post-train of Llama 3.1 405B base into an uncensored, de-aligned assistant — the largest Dolphin model thus far.” #neural-networks
wow, the #419 #spam I got today used a name that 419 #fraud has been using since at least 02005, “Dr. David Roland”.
#paper saying that the break-even year for most #climate-change countermeasures is something like 02080, so even though they’d be profitable, they wouldn’t be profitable for the current generation. #CC by
Google’s new font Google Sans Flex ("GS Flex") incorporates axes of variation including obliquing, rounded terminals, weight, and width, and is licensed under the SIL Open Font License. #fonts
Google’s font speciment tester for #GS-Flex exposes the axes of variation as sliders. #fonts #typography
Wow, Roboto Flex has even more axes of variation. #fonts #typography
#Law news: #Apple loses to #Epic in an en banc appellate confirmation of April’s “scathing” contempt-of-court ruling.
Norman #Borlaug got his Ph.D. (in plant pathology) in 01942 after growing up on a farm in Iowa. Different elevations in Mexico had non-overlapping growing seasons, so he could cultivate two sets of test plots per year: summer wheat in the Toluca Valley, winter wheat in the Yaqui Valley, so-called "shuttle breeding". The Norin-10 dwarfing gene Borlaug requested from Japan in 01953 was the key, but Borlaug already had a rust-resistant line of wheat. “I began this piece expecting to debunk the “great man” narrative, and specifically stated as my thesis that “determination is not a technique.” But it turns out there was a “great man” moment where Borlaug’s determination won the day.” #history
#Scott-Alexander #interview by #Dwarkesh Patel #toread
Vishal Prasad thinks everyone should eat 5 grams of creatine per day, dry. I don’t even know what to tag this. #medicine? #health? #supplements?
Willy Ley on the #history of #pseudoscience in #Germany before the Nazis
Jeremiad against people posting #LLM #AI slop as if they wrote it
YouTuber Justin Kuiper, who’s spent all his time working on other people’s #YouTube channels, plans to launch a channel of his own next year on “progress studies” once the CPMs crater in January, resulting in less competition for the (less profitable) eyeballs.
Review of Laura Spinney’s Proto about the history of the Indo-European language family. #toread #linguistics #history
book on how progress diverged in China and Europe #toread #history
The San Jose Mercury newspaper is punnily named after the New Almaden mercury mine
Fluorine azide #humor #materials
#toxicology #maps of Silicon Valley, with all the Superfund sites marked
#tutorial on preserving snowflakes
#fiction about being the last unenlightened person alive