cjbillington
Joined 9 years ago
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174
Submissions
81
Member since
Aug 14
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
The Carnot limit is the theoretical upper limit of the efficiency of a heat pump, so the stated number is presumably with respect to that, not heat moved per unit energy input like you're quoting.
Comment · 1 year ago
If it's true that more phones will allow people to be more productive, that increase in productivity should show up in GDP as well
Comment · 1 year ago
I don't think there'll be any significant drop on a sub-decade timescale unless there's some kind of financial crisis, but the ideal kind of trend is prices stagnating or growing slower than wages, which is the case right now - and the question is whether it will continue.
I think there is a good chance it will, as long as a change of government doesn't deliberately dismantle the current approach. Yes there's population growth and yet prices have been stagnant or declining the past few years and construction has picked up. That's a good trend!
I'm not familiar with the situation with public housing but am happy to accept if the government has failed there. But this seems like a separate failure rather than an indictment of their approach to increasing supply generally which I think is working.
Comment · 1 year ago
Melbourne property prices actually haven't recovered from their 2022 peak, and that's before adjusting for inflation. I believe rents are down in real terms as well.
Things have been crazy for a long time, but I am actually optimistic for Melbourne specifically - the construction rate is up and the state government has been decreasing the power local governments have to block or delay development. If this continues, housing affordability should improve. My main concern is that a change of government may put an end to it, but I hope not.
Some details about what VIC is doing differently in this AFR article if you're interested (archive link because original is paywalled):
Comment · 1 year ago
They'll show up in the diff.
Grep will find them too, but any in the diff you'll know for sure were added by you.
Comment · 1 year ago
Huh, that's not my recollection.
Mercurial on windows was "download tortoisehg, use it", whereas git didn't have a good GUI and was full of footguns about line endings and case-insensitivity of branch names and the like.
Nowadays I use sublime merge on Windows and Linux alike and it's fine. Which solves the GUI issue, though the line ending issue is the same as it's always been (it's fine if you remember to just set it to "don't change line endings" globally but you have to remember to do that), and I'm not sure about case insensitivity of branch names.
Pretty sure Mercurial handles arbitrary filenames as UTF-8 encoded bytestrings, whether there was a problem with this in the past I can't recall, but would be very surprised if there was now.
Edit: does seem there at least used to be issues around this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7256708/mercurial-proble...
though google does show at least some results for similar issues with git
Comment · 1 year ago
Based on the other examples of random inputs not being sufficient, I dare say the fish-based attempt may have been fraudulent.
Comment · 1 year ago
It took me to the end of your comment to realise the crucial bit I was missing: that they're talking about implementing the CPU on an FPGA.
As opposed to, say, interfacing with an FPGA which could be totally different way to be "FPGA-friendly".
Comment · 1 year ago
They had some Starlink simulators they were planning to deploy (to a suborbital trajectory, to re-enter along with the ship) this launch.
Comment · 1 year ago
As of his latest scan in November, 18 months post surgery, Scolyer's cancer hasn't recurred [1]. Average time to recurrence post-surgery is 6 months.
Don't want to leap to conclusions prematurely, but that might be some progress.
Comment · 2 years ago
If you're talking about "whalebait" markets on manifold, that's a bit disingenuous - these are markets where the thing you're betting about is related to trading behaviour itself, i.e. self-referential markets.
I don't disagree that the one french dude betting 30M on Trump on polymarket showed that there isn't enough liquidity in such markets for such distortions to be corrected, but whalebait on Manifold is not really related.
Comment · 2 years ago
They've actually been having to dump propellant in order to more accurately test what a Starship in orbit would be like, given they're not flying with a payload that would consume that propellant on ascent, but that they still want to launch with a full tank.
The dumping of this excess propellant actually caused an explosion and loss of vehicle on the second test flight.
Comment · 2 years ago
That is indeed what you get with tidal forces - bodies closer than geostationary orbit lose angular momentum and decay inward, bodies further out steal angular momentum from Earth and move outward.
I suppose the same effect is there with satellites much smaller than the moon, but it would be tiny.
Comment · 2 years ago
This might be what you meant, but the ordered dicts are faster, no? I believe ordering was initially an implementation detail that arose as part of performance optimisations, and only later declared officially part of the spec.
Oh and to know if it's any good you have to either build two (ideally more) of them to compare against each other (ideally using different approaches so their errors are less correlated), or have access to a clock better than the one you're building to compare to. So you can rarely get away with building just one if you want to know if you've succeeded.
Source: I work on the software for these portable optical clocks: https://phys.org/news/2025-07-quantum-clocks-accuracy-curren...