This passive language bullshit is so obvious sometimes. “Oh, I wonder what the cyclist did to get run over? And that poor SUV driver getting charged for murder because of this event, Paris is really going off the deep end finding ways to attack innocent drivers.” And yet, per the article, the SUV driver ran down the cyclist in a fit of road rage. That sounds an awful lot like an active choice by the driver, not some passive circumstance that the headline implies. If this person got angry and attacked someone with a knife, and the victim died, the headline wouldn’t be “Knife owner charged with murder after person stabbed”. But use the “right” weapon and all of a sudden we put the kiddie gloves on

short distances in solar radii

I think astrophycisists and I may have a difference of opinion on the meaning of the adjective short

For me, I think it’s the fact that I have to prepare for both a social interaction and a monologue depending on whether they answer or not. As someone with mild social anxiety, the uncertainty and the fact that I am unequivocally initiating the interaction messes with a lot of the ways I would cope with joining a normal social interaction and throws me off my game

To be honest, I’m struggling to keep track of the points you are making because you brought in several tangential topics all at once without much context (shale gas vs. oil, oil exports, LCOE, Poland all in a thread about solar energy in Finland compared to fossil fuel energy in Texas). I’ll just point out that the US is #4 in oil exports, by either barrels or export value (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_exports) and the number one oil producer (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production), so I think it is pretty obvious that the investments into fossil fuel infrastructure in the US are well and above what is necessary for a “strategic reserve” use case

Right now a lot of “renewable energy” sources are subsidized in Europe for only political reasons.

I can assure you the same is true for fossil fuels in Texas right now, so I don’t see how this is a strike on renewable energy

Only half serious, but saying “the highest number is best” next to a plot showing North Korea as second highest has to make you ask yourself if either the metric is flawed or your usage of the term best isn’t in alignment with common parlance. A high density of medals per gdp per capita could be representative of an overinvestment into national prestige projects vs. other areas that may be more aligned to economic and social development. That probably goes for all three of the top three shown on this graph, to lesser or greater extents

Nvidia does not have a strong history of open sourcing things, to say the least. That last bit sounds like pure hopium

If you use the right color of light, then the doppler effect means that the atoms will only absorb (and be pushed by) light that they are headed towards. That means that the light will always act as a brake for the atoms and never an accelerator, so the fluid will cool. If you do this from all directions, the fluid will start to stay still in one place and get very close to absolute zero. Idk, I just read the Wikipedia article, but that is my best attempt at an ELI18

Haha, I figured it was 50/50 on whether I would get this comment or something about the ASCII representation of the letter A

Pi is an infinite series of non-repeating digits, and yet you will never find the letter A in pi because there is a 0% chance of the letter A being a digit in a decimal system. By the same logic, infinite possibilities do not guarantee that every conceivable state occurs, if that conceivable state has a 0% probability. As finite beings, it is very difficult for us to accurately distinguish between a 0% probability and a infinitesimal probability, so we end up circling back to “we don’t know”

You’re not wrong that GPU and AI silicon design are tightly coupled, but my point was that both of the GPU manufacturers are dedicating hardware to AI/ML in their consumer products. Nvidia has the tensor cores in its GPUs that it justifies to consumers with DLSS and RT but we’re clearly designed for AI/ML use cases when they presented them with Turing. AMD has the XDNA AI Engine that it is putting its APUs separate from its RDNA GPUs

Fair enough. Was just asking because the choice of company surprised me. AMD is putting "AI Engines in their new CPUs (separate silicon design from their GPUs) and while Nvidia largely only sells GPUs that are less universal, they’ve had dedicated AI hardware (tensor cores) in their offerings for the past three generations. If anything, Intel is barely keeping up with its competition in this area (for the record, I see vanishingly little value in the focus on AI as a consumer, so this isn’t really a ding on Intel in my books, more so making the observation from a market forces perspective)

Why call out Intel? Pretty sure AMD and Nvidia are both putting dedicated AI hardware in all of their new and upcoming product lines. From what I understand they are even generally doing it better than Intel. Hell, Qualcomm is advertising their AI performance on their new chips and so is Apple. I don’t think there is anyone in the chip world that isn’t hopping on the AI train

How nearby is nearby though? And, in the context of the proposed use case for defending a crowded stadium in a populated area, does this put people down range as well that could also be impaired by the pellets?

New study suggests dogs capable of celestial navigation: “Columbus was a sucker for using an astrolabe when he could have just brought along a good boi and watched him shit”

Oh god, converting imperial kHz to metric kHz sounds awful

Based on the Wikipedia article on biological immortality referencing species that live for a couple hundred years and the Wikipedia page on armillaria ostoyae mentioning living specimens that are multiple millenia old (and thousands of acres large!), I’m guessing that may be what the prof is referring to?

Pedestrians very often get the green walk sign at the same time as cars in the same direction get the green straight ahead sign that implicitly allows right turns as well. In that scenario, the cars are often located just behind the pedestrian’s peripheral vision, and the cars are looking up and ahead at the light (or maybe to their left if they were previously hoping to execute a right on red and waiting for a gap in traffic), so it becomes basically exactly what you were talking about with bikes. Cars turning across a “lane” of pedestrian traffic with neither party having good visibility of the other. There are a couple of solutions/mitigations in use for this problem, dedicated “all-red” pedestrian cycles, protected intersections that move vulnerable road users further forward to be more visible, and advanced pedestrian greens that make cars wait until pedestrians are already in the intersection and more visible before getting the go ahead. Or, if your city is like mine and car-centric, they might stick up a yellow sign on the opposite light post across the stroad that says “pedestrians yield to turning vehicles” in text that is just barely legible from across the street at an intersection that has audible wait and walk indicators for blind people who definitely can’t read that sign and will thus be endangered for not getting the memo (not that car drivers are reading it either, so several considerate drivers will wave the pedestrians forward, further confusing the right of way situation). Fun!

In short, every turn you make as a driver should be accompanied by a check for vulnerable road users like cyclists and pedestrians because our infrastructure will not necessarily put them in a place that is easily visible to you

You are giving ants way too much credit. Those fuckers are brutal war criminals, the lot of them. Humans are bad, but we’ve had nukes for almost 80 years without glassing ourselves, ants wouldn’t last a day

Typo, 52 is what I meant. Good catch!