Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
We thought that consciousness was the core of what made something worthy of moral consideration, because only life showed conscious behavior. Now we have machines that can output behavior indistinguishable from consciousness.

I think that reevaluating how to determine if something is conscious is the wrong reaction to this. It should be to reevaluate if consciousness is really the right thing to care about.

Maybe the new consideration should simply be to preserve (biological) life. Or maybe to preserve complexity that can't be easily reproduced. So we should care for humans, the planet, our society, but not for the state of some gpu's VRAM.

Comment · 10 months ago
That CNN website is great, except it still has a huge cookie banner. Looking at the cookies of the site, I think the only cookie it sets is that i clicked on the banner. Most of the size of the page is also related to the banner it seems.
Comment · 10 months ago
This is one of the best, succinct lists of motivations for hybrid warfare i've seen.

But i could suggest another potential benefit for russia: If russia already operates under the assumption that they are in a (cold) war with EU/NATO, and they don't care about the effects on the relationship with Finland. Then this may simply be a really low cost, high damage operation. That not only imposes the replacement cost of the cable, but also forces countries to invest in counter measures.

Comment · 1 year ago
How does it solve for time without location? With GPS location and time are one solution to an equation with 4 unknowns (x,y,z,t). Without location you won't know the time delay between you and the transmitter.
Comment · 2 years ago
I appreciate the effort you put in the comment, and úsed sources rather than just voicing unsubstantiated criticisms.

But still, the mentality in this thread made me double-check if i'm on hacker news or bureaucrat news.

Comment · 3 years ago
I have bought the new SQ probes and went back to only buying the older version.

The new ones are heavier, but that makes it harder to put them at an angle, they fall over more quickly. And the probe heads are bigger so you can't put as many close together.

Comment · 3 years ago
The hub motors on the car in the OP run at ~24k RPM (faster than any production electric car AFAIK) and have a multistage planetary gearbox for reduction.

Pretty much all top Formula Student cars now use hub motors. Mainly for packaging reasons. Putting the motor in the unused space in the wheel means you can make a smaller chassis and have more space for wings and underbody aero.

Comment · 3 years ago
Super capacitors are highly overrated by the general public. They really aren't that much better than lithium ion except for in a very narrow power/time bandwidth.
Comment · 3 years ago
The strangest thing to me is that apparently this material has been developed years ago, the video of a piece floating was uploaded 3 months ago, and apparently it's easy to produce more samples, but the papers still reads like they have been thrown together in less than a week. (English might not be their first language, but the presentation of the figures is also poor) And it also seems like they haven't spent that time by doing high quality experiments. Surely if you have found a magic material that can change the world you would spend more effort than this on doing experiments and publishing a good paper as soon as possible.

The low quality video and poorly presented graphs are reminiscent of Victor Ninov's fraud.

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Reddit going downhill is mostly because they are trying to become more like Meta. A competitor should be less meta, not more meta.
Comment · 3 years ago
I think the original goal, and one I still support, is for websites to realize that they are better off with not showing the banners and just defaulting to "no". It's been surprising to me that an industry that has been somewhat obsessed with click latencies and getting users to content quickly are willing to annoy all their users for the extra income from personalized ads. The difference in value must be a lot.
Comment · 3 years ago
When I tried waymo a month or two ago a remote "driver" took over. When we called the support center about it later they told us that it's not them literally taking over the controls, but only giving some additional guidance to the system.
Comment · 3 years ago
You are probably European? The US uses CCS1 which doesn't support 3 phase anyway.
Comment · 3 years ago
The problem for san Francisco is that they just attract more homeless whenever they try to help them. You can not solve poverty in a single city with open borders, you need to solve it for the whole state/country. Especially if the city has a temperate climate that attracts homeless anyway.

As an aside: The big cities in the Netherlands also have some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country. If you pick a random smaller town/city it is likely to have less poverty than Amsterdam, (but also less wealthy residents).

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