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abhibeckert commented on Puzzling prehistoric artifacts served a practical purpose: ropemaking   science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/diodorus
debacle · 2 years ago
You can't wind rope that hasn't been dried and ret and dried again. There's too much "other stuff" in the fibers, and any rope you make will be incredibly weak.

Everything about this paragraph is confusing:

"The researchers managed to fashion 5 meters of rope in about 10 minutes with their replica batons. For fiber, they used everything from flax and hemp to cattail reeds—all plants that would have grown near the Hohle Fels and Geissenklösterle caves 30,000 years ago. The ropes proved capable of supporting the weight of one of the team’s larger members. Reeds made the strongest rope fiber."

Reeds make very poor quality rope without a lot of processing, and even then the fibers are very weak. In contrast, flax and hemp fibers are exceptionally strong. 5 meters of rope in 10 minutes would be a very crude rope indeed, unless they had a winding rig and all of the fibers ready to go. Cattail makes good rope, but like reed it requires quite a bit of processing because it's so fleshy.

abhibeckert · 2 years ago
I agree - the authors of this paper don't seem to know anything about how rope is made.

Having said that... the tool does look like it could be used for processing and weaving fibres together.

As for "making a rope in 10 minutes"... why would anyone do that? A good rope is a multi-purpose tool that can last a very long time. You'd invest days in it, not minutes.

abhibeckert commented on The three million toothbrush botnet story isn't true   cyberplace.social/@GossiT... · Posted by u/WhyUVoteGarbage
tempest_ · 2 years ago
I have had the tooth brush for a while, maybe four or five years.

When I saw your comment I figured I should check and see and it looks like they dropped the location permission.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.philips.cd...

abhibeckert · 2 years ago
On iPhone, bluetooth is presented to the user as a location check. Big data companies will if you're near your toothbrush then you're at home. And they can figure out where "home" is by other tracking methods.
abhibeckert commented on Show HN: Natural-SQL-7B, a strong text-to-SQL model   github.com/cfahlgren1/nat... · Posted by u/thecalebf
aussieguy1234 · 2 years ago
For those people who would rather use an ORM, its worth mentioning that ORMs write very bad, un-performant SQL under the hood.

They may save you a bit of time initially but when your company gets bigger, the ORMs will become a bottleneck.

abhibeckert · 2 years ago
"Bad" and "un-performant" are relative terms and as your company gets bigger, you're increasingly more and more likely to have colleagues who write even worse queries than an ORM would.

For example I've encountered queries that are not only slow, but they generate several hundred megabytes of output all of which is sent to the user's web browser where JavaScript selects the relevant two kilobytes of data to show the user.

The worst I've ever seen was a system where every single write to the database would be sent to every single web browser viewing certain webpages. 99.999999% of the writes were completely irrelevant and javascript in the browser would simply disregard them. The server load was immense... and eventually our Sysadmin brought it to someone's attention. Where we found out it was leaking sensitive data.

abhibeckert commented on Show HN: CLI for generating PDFs for offline reading   github.com/dvcoolarun/web... · Posted by u/dvcoolarun
algon33 · 2 years ago
Yeah, that would make this post a lot better.
abhibeckert · 2 years ago
Agreed. I would offer a PDF version of the project's readme file as a demo.

OP: this is important. There are a million tools to generate PDF files, most of them don't produce nice looking PDFs.

abhibeckert commented on Relativistic Spaceship   dmytry.github.io/space/... · Posted by u/thunderbong
MilStdJunkie · 2 years ago
Every proton would have the energy of a baseball. It's bananas. Granted, space is really empty, but it's not that empty, somewhere around a hundred atoms per cubic meter. Your ship might look like a very, very long shooting star. Probably dialing the speed down a touch would be worth it for whatever your shielding material is, but who knows? We're talking miracle engines here. I think in the "Valkyrie" ship-on-a-string concept, they had some sort of magnetic thingummy that generated more power as more stuff smacked into it, then as they decelerated they let out this sort of gas mist to go ahead of the ship and smack into things.
abhibeckert · 2 years ago
> Every proton would have the energy of a baseball

I wonder if you could capture that energy and use it to generate thrust.

Most of the energy is coming from your thrust so it'd be a lossy process however if you're able to capture all of the energy then there won't be anything left to damage the ship.

abhibeckert commented on     · Posted by u/passwordoops
abhibeckert · 2 years ago
The title of this post is wrong.

This isn't about the 737-MAX, it's about a new sub-model which currently only exists as a prototype and is undergoing a lengthy test and certification process.

AFAIK it's scheduled to start passenger flights end of this year or year early next year and this specific issue might have no impact on that.

abhibeckert commented on Fixing Horizon bugs would have been too costly, Post Office inquiry told   theguardian.com/uk-news/2... · Posted by u/thunderbong
moi2388 · 2 years ago
This is what I don’t understand. A company violates a law, makes 10 million in profit from breaking said law, and gets a 1 million fine.

Surely it ought to be: pay back all 10 million, PLUS compensation to the people from who you illegally got money, PLUS a fine, PLUS holding the actual people making the decision (because surprise, a company is just actual real people doing stuff) at the very least financially accountable.

abhibeckert · 2 years ago
Fujitsu's didn't prosecute anyone or send anybody to jail. All they did was write software that had bugs in it.

If you look at the version history of any software, you'll find it's full of bug fixes. Writing software without bugs is literally impossible. It's incredibly complex and written by "actual real people" and that means there will be mistakes.

If those mistakes lead to millions in liability, then you're going to have to start paying me those millions upfront, before I write a single line of code.

It's the same with a CEO - if people are criminally liable for mistakes made by people working under them... then nobody's ever going to accept a job where they delegate work to other people.

The solution to this issue is not to attack people who made a mistake. It's to put systems in place where you check for mistakes. I guarantee you the jury and courts that found these people guilty were presented with "facts" such as "nobody else can remotely access the software" which, it turns out, were total bullshit. The people who presented those facts in court are the ones to blame for this. They clearly either lied or made assumptions.

Both of those are serious crimes. You don't say anything in court unless you actually know it yourself. If someone else tells you something is true, you don't repeat what they said. You bring those people in as an expert witness to talk to the judge/jury directly, under oath, and you tell them not to make any assumptions either.

There should have been millions spent on a full code audit done checking for bugs in the software before allowing it to be admitted as evidence in court.

abhibeckert commented on Future gigantic solar farms might impact solar power elsewhere in the world   techxplore.com/news/2024-... · Posted by u/gumby
rokkitmensch · 2 years ago
EV's better be 100x difficult to light on fire, given how much of a pain they are to extinguish.

I'd loved to have been a fly on the wall of the meetings where how much money to spend on reducing ignition risk was dickered out.

abhibeckert · 2 years ago
They're not that hard to extinguish, you can just wait for them to stop burning on their own. Which is generally how car fires are also extinguished. The good news is EV fires take a long time to burn through the fuel, allowing anyone in the vehicle plenty of time to safely get out of the car.

Sure, it's a bit annoying for the fire fighters who turn up 20 minutes later... but I think even they would rather arrive to find a burning car if it means the people who were in that car are safely watching from a distance.

abhibeckert commented on SQLite 3.45 released with JSONB support   sqlite.org/changes.html#v... · Posted by u/genericlemon24
sgarland · 2 years ago
For the love of all that is holy, if you do, only use STRICT tables. By default [0], SQLite will happily accept that not only can an INTEGER column store “1234” (helpfully silently casting it first), but “abcd” can also be stored in the column as-is.

There are other horrors in the link.

[0]: https://www.sqlite.org/quirks.html

abhibeckert · 2 years ago
I actually kinda like the fact that whatever data you write to the table will actually be written.

I semi-regularly fix a serious data loss bug that has been fixed with an alter table query. Maybe converting VARCHAR to TEXT or INT to BIGINT... of course it doesn't really "fix" your problem, because the data has already been lost/truncated.

What's a real world situation where completely the wrong type could be written to a column? Especially in modern software with good type safety checks/etc to ensure you don't have malicious data inserted into your database? If I ever did have that happen... at least the data hasn't been lost. You can run a simple script to clean up the "horrific" data.

abhibeckert commented on SQLite 3.45 released with JSONB support   sqlite.org/changes.html#v... · Posted by u/genericlemon24
mrcarruthers · 2 years ago
It's faster for me than looking down to figure out where the numbers are on the top row
abhibeckert · 2 years ago
If you used the top row more often, you wouldn't need to look down...

u/abhibeckert

KarmaCake day300April 17, 2023View Original