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gattr commented on Custom telescope mount using harmonic drives and ESP32   svendewaerhert.com/blog/t... · Posted by u/waerhert
zokier · 12 days ago
One thing that I'd be interested in is having telescope mount suitable for doing quantitative measurements, basically doing astrometry from first principles. To me solving the orbits of planets (etc) based solely on my own measurements sounds very compelling. It would be like retracing the steps Kepler etc did.
gattr · 11 days ago
Another interesting project might be capturing host star light curves for transiting exoplanets. For a number of closer ones, it can be done conveniently from a backyard with just a photographic lens. Here's one amateur using ASI178MM-c with a Canon FD 300 mm:

https://astropolis.pl/topic/60163-wasp-10-b-w-pegazie-1270-m...

gattr commented on US AI Action Plan   ai.gov/action-plan... · Posted by u/joelburget
tbrownaw · a month ago
Everything except geothermal and fission.

Unless you count where the fissionable elements came from, in which case you're only left with the portion of geothermal that's from gravity (residual heat from the earth compacting itself into a planet).

gattr · a month ago
To be nitpicky, our uranium and thorium were made via r-process (rapid neutron capture), which is not the kind of fusion occurring in the Sun at present.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-process

gattr commented on US AI Action Plan   ai.gov/action-plan... · Posted by u/joelburget
markburns · a month ago
what set off the spinning?
gattr · a month ago
Earth's spin comes from the parent molecular cloud which formed the Solar System (including any impacts during the protoplanetary phase.) And that ultimately from density fluctuations after Big Bang, and the way they led to coalescence of galaxies and galaxy clusters.
gattr commented on 23andMe is out of bankruptcy and it still hasn’t substantially changed its ways   washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7
anothernewdude · a month ago
Be careful not to delete all your DNA if you're still alive and using it.
gattr · a month ago
You could always restore from incidental backups (hairbrush, etc.).
gattr commented on The Rise of Whatever   eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/th... · Posted by u/cratermoon
Ezhik · 2 months ago
I feel it. We can debate AI over and over and over but my ultimate problem is not even the tech itself but the "whatever" part.

I'm a bit annoyed with LLMs for coding, because I care about the craft. But I understand the premise of using them when the end goal is not "tech as a craft" but "tech as a means". But that still requires having some reason to use the tech.

Hell, I feel the "tech as a means to get money" part for people trying to climb up the social ladder.

But for a lot of people who already did get to the top of it?

At some point we gotta ask what the point of SEO-optimizing everything even is.

Like, is the end goal optimizing life out of life?

Why not write a whole app using LLMs? Why not have the LLM do your course work? Why do the course work at all? Why not have the LLM make a birthday card for your partner? Why even get up in the morning? Why not just go leave and live in a forest? Why live at all?

What is even the point?

gattr · 2 months ago
On a more positive note, LLMs (or their successors) could be used to create a perfect tutor. Taylored for every individual, automatically adjusting learning material difficulty, etc.

But yeah, first we'll go through a few (?) years of the self-defeating "ChatGPT does my homework" and the necessary adjustments of how schools/unis function.

gattr commented on Couchers is officially out of beta   couchers.org/blog/2025/07... · Posted by u/laurentlb
UltraSane · 2 months ago
"He has the ugliest towels I have ever seen! I still have nightmares about them! 1 star!"
gattr · 2 months ago
You jest, but if you encountered towels with print of the logo of a programming language you detest?...
gattr commented on Evidence of a 12,800-year-old shallow airburst depression in Louisiana   scienceopen.com/hosted-do... · Posted by u/keepamovin
btilly · 2 months ago
Yes. If it exploded in the air, then there is no crater.
gattr · 2 months ago
Indeed, cf. Tunguska event ([1]) from 1908.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

gattr commented on Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images   rubinobservatory.org/news... · Posted by u/phsilva
gattr · 2 months ago
Related: When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk [1];

TL;DR: VCRO is capable of imaging spy- and other classified US satellites. An automated filtering system (involves routing through some government processing facility) is in place to remove them from the freshly captured raw data used for the public transient phenomena alert service. 3 days later, unredacted data is made available (by then the elusive, variable-orbit assets are long gone.)

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...

gattr commented on Is gravity just entropy rising? Long-shot idea gets another look   quantamagazine.org/is-gra... · Posted by u/pseudolus
dist-epoch · 2 months ago
I read the gravity explanation for the sun low entropy in the "Road to Reality" book from Roger Penrose. Asked Gemini to summarize the argument (scroll to end)

https://g.co/gemini/share/bd9a55da02b6

gattr · 2 months ago
It's also in his previous book "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics", along with a lot more. Strongly recommended (even though after reading a lot of Greg Egan, my views on consciousness somewhat shifted towards "classical computation can do it, too".)
gattr commented on Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first   tudelft.nl/en/2025/lr/aut... · Posted by u/picture
trhway · 3 months ago
>drones smart enough to dodge bullets

well, there will be similarly smart "predator"/defense drones. The humans will have no chances on such a battlefield populated by thousands drones per square kilometer fighting each other.

>The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.

And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.

>or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing

just a bit of arithmetic comparing new weapons - drones vs. classic guns. Say a radar guided gun takes 1 sec. to train onto a drone and shoot several bullets. The range is max 3 km (an expensive 20mm-30mm autocannon like Pantsir) - 35 seconds for a 200 miles/hour drone. Thus all it takes is maximum 36 such drones coming simultaneously from all the directions to take out that gun. At less than $1000/drone it is many times cheaper than that radar guided gun. (and that without accounting for the drones coming in very low and hiding behind trees, hills, etc and without the first drones interfering with the radar say by dropping a foil chaff clouds, etc.) It is basically a very typical paradigm shift from vertical scaling to horizontal scaling by way of software orchestrated cheap components.

gattr · 3 months ago
I agree, but I'm a bit disappointed it will probably come to this, instead of having a mano a mano like in the movie "Robot Jox".

u/gattr

KarmaCake day549December 6, 2017
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I like graphics algorithms, astronomy, Rust and Linux.
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