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dTal commented on The enduring puzzle of static electricity   pubs.aip.org/physicstoday... · Posted by u/EvgeniyZh
ddingus · 13 days ago
A while back, I watched a YT video of someone making a large electret. Reading this makes me really want to make one for myself.

An electret is an item that presents a permanent static charge. It is like a permanent magnet. Has an enduring charge polarity.

The only use of an electret I know of is the electret microphone. And those use a very small electret.

In the video, the author made a large one. Hockey puck sized. He used some type of nylon. (I think I remember it right...)

dTal · 12 days ago
n95 masks use electret filters, which allows them to capture particles much smaller than the 0.3 micron mesh size - such as coronavirus virions.
dTal commented on If you're remote, ramble   stephango.com/ramblings... · Posted by u/lawgimenez
bagacrap · 21 days ago
I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.

However I do think we need to make extra room for parents (I am not one, yet). I'm going to need a doctor who's younger than me when I'm 80+

Folks could always just disappear instead of announcing these things, but is that better? And as a senior on my team, I over announce certain stuff to let the other team members know that WLB is ok.

dTal · 21 days ago
>I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.

If you don't normalize one-day "under the weather" events, you are trading them for multi-day "off sick" events.

Personal anecdata: I recall once at a job with a particularly easygoing boss I simply didn't feel up to my morning commute, for no easily definable reason. I rang in sick anyway and went back to sleep. I then proceeded to more or less sleep through the entire following 24 hours, until it was time to go to work again. Lo and behold I magically had the energy this time, and bounced into work. I then realized that I had been suffering from fatigue from the early stages of an infection which I had successfully fended off through rest - had I dragged myself into work, I most assuredly would not have been there the following day, and probably not the day after that either.

dTal commented on The bitter lesson is coming for tokenization   lucalp.dev/bitter-lesson-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
munksbeer · 2 months ago
It doesn't feel particularly interesting to keep dismissing "these LLMs" as incapable of reaching AGI.

It feels more interesting to note that this time, it is different. I've been watching the field since the 90s when I first dabbled in crude neural nets. I am informed there was hype before, but in my time I've never seen progress like we've made in the last five years. If you showed it to people from the 90s, it would be mind blowing. And it keeps improving incrementally, and I do not think that is going to stop. The state of AI today is the worst it will ever be (trivially obvious but still capable of shocking me).

What I'm trying to say is that the shocking success of LLMs has become a powerful engine of progress, creating a positive feedback loop that is dramatically increasing investment, attracting top talent, and sharpening the focus of research into the next frontiers of artificial intelligence.

dTal · 2 months ago
>If you showed it to people from the 90s, it would be mind blowing

90's? It's mind blowing to me now.

My daily driver laptop is (internally) a Thinkpad T480, a very middle of the road business class laptop from 2018.

It now talks to me. Usually knowledgeably, in a variety of common languages, using software I can download and run for free. It understands human relationships and motivations. It can offer reasonably advice and write simple programs from a description. It notices my tone and tries to adapt its manner.

All of this was inconceivable when I bought the laptop - I would have called it very unrealistic sci-fi. I am trying not to forget that.

dTal commented on OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio   george.mand.is/2025/06/op... · Posted by u/georgemandis
behnamoh · 2 months ago
> His natural talking speed is already >=1.5x that of a normal human. One of the people you absolutely have to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x when listening to follow what's going on.

I wonder if there's a way to automatically detect how "fast" a person talks in an audio file. I know it's subjective and different people talk at different paces in an audio, but it'd be cool to kinda know when OP's trick fails (they mention x4 ruined the output; maybe for karpathy that would happen at x2).

dTal · 2 months ago
Compress it using a VBR speech codec and measure the compression ratio?
dTal commented on Kubuntu finally removes support for X11 in new installs   neowin.net/news/end-of-an... · Posted by u/bundie
AbuAssar · 2 months ago
Wayland verion 1.0 was released back in 2012, how is that a half-baked solution 13 years later?
dTal · 2 months ago
The publishing of v1.0 of a protocol has little to do with the stability of software implementing that protocol. The software in question is in fact KWin, the KDE window manager. It is the most mature and featureful Wayland compositor, and the KDE devs have done a lot of work over the past few years to get it competitive with its X11 backend. However even they themselves still consider this a transitional phase: https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Wayland-Is-The-Future

Also, time is in any case less relevant that developer hours. Were I feeling snarkier, I might point out that GNU/Hurd was first released in 1990 - perhaps we can finally switch to that...

dTal commented on Open source can't coordinate?   matklad.github.io/2025/05... · Posted by u/LorenDB
dTal · 2 months ago
@dang

Why editorialize a question mark into titles like this? What does it signify? We are not talking about a factual assertion of debatable veracity, but a statement of opinion along the lines of "considered harmful". Disagreement and debate is the obvious expected result of such a statement. HN admin using special mod powers to editorialize a title which is neither misleading nor clickbait, simply to indicate skepticism, comes across as petty and not a little hypocritical in light of the "don't editorialize titles" site guideline.

dTal commented on Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book   understandingai.org/p/met... · Posted by u/aspenmayer
bee_rider · 2 months ago
Even if it is recalling it 50 tokens at a time, the half of the book is in some sense in there, right?
dTal · 2 months ago
If I give you a vision algorithm that, given every other frame of a Harry Potter movie, can accurately predict the interstitials - would you say that half that Harry Potter movie is "in" it?
dTal commented on In case of emergency, break glass   morrick.me/archives/10048... · Posted by u/microflash
mschuster91 · 2 months ago
So to sum it up, a user (or let's be real, a consumer) has three choices for a desktop / laptop:

- an ad-ridden, privacy invading hellhole that goes for "flat design" even worse than macOS's newest iteration (Windows 11), with machines mostly built out of cheap plastic, with the hardware being inadequately cooled and built on a CPU architecture that leads to guzzling power worse than an X-series BMW with its gas pedal floored on a German Autobahn. On top of that, AI slop everywhere.

- a visual hellhole that, gotta admit it, still has by far the upper hand performance-wise thanks to a best-in-class-by-far hardware and excellent integration with the OS (macOS)

- an "OS" that's more like 20 different ways of doing things, with not a single one achieving any sort of visual integration across at least the major applications because there's like a dozen UI frameworks and serious issues with hardware support across the board on top (Linux)

Brave new world lol

dTal · 2 months ago
>not a single one achieving any sort of visual integration across at least the major applications because there's like a dozen UI frameworks

I beg to differ. GTK and Qt cover 99% of applications. If you run Plasma, you get a pleasant GUI for theming which lets you set them both to a matching theme. Look and feel consistency is on par with Windows 95 (and far superior to modern Windows), and I can't even tell which UI framework is being used a lot of the time.

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KarmaCake day17524June 2, 2013View Original