It sounds like a fun & challenging record. Falling off a scooter at 110 mph would certainly shake you up, but it'd probably be a little safer than moto gp if you used similar safety gear. I wonder how it feels at high speed though - I've never ridden one anywhere near that fast, but the scooters I've ridden didn't feel like they'd be very stable at high speeds.
Readit News00N8 commented on $30k Electric Scooter Is Gunning for a Bonneville Speed Record thedrive.com/news/this-24... · Posted by u/domofutu
Does anybody have any interest whatsoever in AR? It seems to be an entirely corporate pushed thing, probably as a means of opening up a new domain of monetization. But in real life, and even on the internet for that matter, I've found practically nobody who has any interest in it whatsoever.
Yeah yeah - 'if I asked people what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses', but if they knew what cars were that quote wouldn't exist. Everybody knows what AR is, a sizable chunk of people have tried it, and nobody seems to want it. If there were some ultra high end AR goggles for $10, I still wouldn't buy them (sans obvious angle shoots like reselling/repurposing the hardware or just pack-ratting it away in a closet).
The reason I mention this is because of this paradox where everybody assumes its success, but nobody has any interest themselves in using it. I think this is because AR is just about literally always a part of sci-fi and so we kind of assume well it must be what the future holds. But it seems like one of those many ideas that sounds way better than it actually turns out to be in real life.
When I'm snowboarding on an overcast day, it can sometimes be hard to see the exact shape & conditions of the snow ahead so I have to slow down to make sure I don't catch an edge on a 'hidden' mogul. I'd like an AR system that used LIDAR/FLIR/etc. to augment my vision to see these features better.
I'm also bad at learning & remembering a lot of people's names at once in social settings, so I'd like a discrete pair of AR glasses that used a local model to add virtual nametags to people in certain situations. (Assuming I controlled the data - I wouldn't like it if this meant data about my acquaintances would be sold behind my back).
So there's at least two potential AR applications I'd be interested in, assuming they could be made to work in a trustworthy & reliable manner for under $1k.
00N8 commented on Plastic bag bans and fees reduce harmful bag litter on shorelines science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/miles
The study finds that plastic bags as a fraction of the waste on beaches increased in all areas, so that’s bad.
A more concerning issue is the nature of the bags being thrown away. California banned “single use” plastic bags (which we used to reuse as trash bags for the bathroom or whatever) but lets you buy “reusable” ones for a few cents at the checkout counter. The reusable ones are much heavier and contain 10-100x more plastic, and take even longer to biodegrade.
The study counts “items”, not weight, and reports a 25-47% decrease.
Assuming California is the region that hit 47% (call it 50%), and the reusable bags are better than the best available (only 10x worse than pre-ban) that translates to a 5x increase in microplastics on the beach. I’d consider this a disaster, not a win.
This matches older studies, which measured total plastic content of landfill waste before and after plastic bag bans like California’s.
Those showed sharp increases in plastic waste too. The studies in question were in places that did not allow the reusable plastic ones that California forced the stores to switch to. Instead, the authors found that people switched from using the disposable bags as trash bags to using kitchen trash bags, which are ~100x worse. If only 1% of households were using disposable shopping bags for trash, and no one reused the new style bags, then the policies ended up breaking even. In practice, the policies increased total plastic waste, despite being better thought out than California’s newer ban.
I’m all for banning plastic bags, but the current bans target the most efficient use of plastic, increasing overall plastic production and waste. The bans should only target things that have plastic-free alternatives, or at least that have less plastic intensive alternatives.
In terms of microplastics, I would think 100 of the old flimsy single use bags would be much worse than 5 reusable plastic bags, even if the total mass is the same. The heavier reusables have less surface area per mass, so they'll be degraded more slowly by the sun. They also are less easily blown by the wind, so it's more likely someone will dispose of them properly or that they'll naturally end up buried somewhere that does a better job of containing the eventual microplastics. Fewer bags in total would probably be better for sea turtles than thinner bags as well.
I'm not sure if that makes the reusables better overall, but I don't think we can say they're 10-100x worse based on weight alone.
00N8 commented on How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine... · Posted by u/rbanffy
Lasers aren't effective. Most of the drone is just an empty frame. The control board is pretty tiny, as is the ordnance. Targeting those or the propulsion systems is quite difficult. Sure, you can punch holes in the chassis but it takes a lot of guesswork to hit something vital. It's the wrong weapon. Something with an area of effect, like a shotgun or a net is much better suited to stopping drones.
Are you sure about that? AFAIK effective laser drone defenses are not yet widely deployed proven technology, but I don't think small beam size is a limiting factor. Getting enough power onto the target to disable it is a big challenge, but part of that is fighting the natural tendency of the beam to spread out & be attenuated by the atmosphere - not that the beam affects too small of a spot on the drone.
Having a laser that spreads out to e.g. 30cm radius at 500m is not hard to do if you need an area of effect weapon & can push enough power (ie. your laser is powerful enough, but not so intense that it ionizes the air & blocks itself). Reflections seem like a bigger problem: If the most effective defense includes guys with shotguns &/or there are a lot of unprotected personnel in the area, how do you make sure stray reflections don't end up blinding them?
00N8 commented on The scientific “unit” we call the decibel lcamtuf.substack.com/p/de... · Posted by u/Ariarule
Maybe I just live on the planet, but I don’t have this problem with dB and to me, it sounds like you’re the alien. Maybe you could elaborate, or give a motivating example?
I just don’t remember encountering the problem you’re describing, and it’s unfamiliar to me. There’s something about your experience that I don’t understand, but I don’t know what it is.
I often see pop sci articles saying something like '400 dB would represent a sound strong enough to tear the world apart', or 'military sonar is X dB -- strong enough to liquefy your organs at Y distance'. It's rarely clear to me which of these usages of 'dB' are directly comparable. I think the dB measurement for sonar is a different scale/unit than the one for hearing damage thresholds in air, but I couldn't figure out how to convert between the two last time I spent a few minutes trying to look it up, so in my opinion it can be fairly confusing.
And I'd argue that we've seen tons of innovation in the past 18 years aside from just "the smartphone" but it's all too easy to take for granted and forget from our current perspective.
First up, the smartphone itself had to evolve a hell of a lot over 18 years or so. Go try to use an iPhone 1 and you'll quickly see all of the roadblocks and what we now consider poor design choices littered everywhere, vs improvements we've all taken for granted since then.
18 years ago was 2007? Then we didn't have (for better or for worse on all points):
* Video streaming services
* Decent video game market places or app stores. Maybe "Battle.net" with like 5 games, lol!
* VSCode-style IDEs (you really would not have appreciated Visual Studio or Eclipse of the time..)
* Mapping applications on a phone (there were some stand-alone solutions like Garmin and TomTom just getting off the ground)
* QR Codes (the standard did already exist, but mass adoption would get nowhere without being carried by the smartphone)
* Rideshare, food, or grocery delivery services (aside from taxis and whatever pizza or chinese places offered their own delivery)
* Voice-activated assistants (including Alexa and other standalone devices)
* EV Cars (that anyone wanted to buy) or partial autopilot features aside from 1970's cruise control
* Decent teleconferencing (Skype's featureset was damn limited at the time, and any expensive enterprise solutions were dead on the launchpad due to lack of network effects)
* Decent video displays (flatscreens were still busy trying to mature enough to push CRTs out of the market at this point)
* Color printers were far worse during this period than today, though that tech will never run out of room for improvement.
* Average US Internet speeds to the home were still ~1Mbps, with speeds to cellphone of 100kbps being quite luxurious. Average PCs had 2GB RAM and 50GB hard drive space.
* Naturally: the tech everyone loves to hate such as AI, Cryptocurrencies, social network platforms, "The cloud" and SaaS, JS Frameworks, Python (at least 3.0 and even realistically heavy adoption of 2.x), node.js, etc. Again "Is this a net benefit to humanity" and/or "does this get poorly or maliciously used a lot" doesn't speak to whether or not a given phenomena is innovative, and all of these objectively are.
I worked for a 3rd party food delivery service in the summer of 2007. Ordering was generally done by phone, then the office would text us (the drivers) order details for pickup & delivery. They provided GPS navigation devices, but they were stand-alone units that were slower & less accurate than modern ones, plus they charged a small fee for using it that came out of our pay.
00N8 commented on Reviving a modular cargo bike design from the 1930s core77.com/posts/136773/R... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
What makes this true of trikes but not of the typical automobile?
Some cars like the Mini Cooper S do lift a rear wheel when turning sharply under braking -- I've seen this a lot in autocross racing. I normally only see front engine/FWD cars with limited suspension travel do it though. Trikes are less stable & will lift a wheel more easily overall.
00N8 commented on Australian who ordered radioactive materials walks away from court chemistryworld.com/news/a... · Posted by u/mrkeen
> It is used for amor-piercing ammunition and turns into fine dust on impact
How can it be amor-piercing and turn in to fine dust on impact?
The Wikipedia article says it's "self sharpening" on impact. I think this involves the projectile's leading parts ablating away into burning pyrophoric dust as they interact with the target.
00N8 commented on First Successful Lightning Triggering and Guiding Using a Drone group.ntt/en/newsrelease/... · Posted by u/gnabgib
So.. how long do we have before situational personal lightning bolt is a thing?
The future is now: Check out Lightning On Demand, https://lod.org/ (Tesla tower approach & scientific motivations) & https://youtu.be/lix-vr_AF38?si=w78LyF9tlxGJB8Ay (capacitor driven Lorentz plasma cannon demo)
It remains to be seen whether (b) will be needed, or for that matter, possible.
There are a lot of other ethical questions around AI too, although they mostly aren't unique to it. E.g. AI is increasingly relevant in ethical discussions around misinformation, outsourcing of work, social/cultural biases, human rights, privacy, legal responsibility, intellectual property, etc., but these topics predate LLMs by many years.