We maybe distributed, but we die united...
Divided we stand,
United we fall.
Readit Newshangsi commented on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1 health.aws.amazon.com/hea... · Posted by u/kondro
- my understanding of nonlinear optical mediums is negligible. Something like the crystals that cause quantum entanglement and emitting photon pairs?
- what is a "photon gas"? Is this a state of matter? What is the matter if photons aren't matter?
- ideal gas law, PV=nRT not obeyed? Due to ionization or something? Photon pressure?
- Joule-Thompson Effect?
- Building computers out of light?
- Which thermodynamic properties or laws are being obeyed? Is this something like a Carnot cycle, but with photons?
The almost-wrong simplification is that a nonlinear medium changes the wavelength of the light that passes through it.
If you can control the nonlinearity, you can control the wavelength change and so change properties such as the angle of refraction to change where the light goes (like in a rainbow/a prism, where the red light refracts more).
hangsi commented on The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe techtrenches.substack.com... · Posted by u/redbell
This isn’t just an insightful comment. It’s profound.
I’d like to delve into the crucial topic of whether AI generated slop is respectful to the innovative entrepreneurs of Hacker News. If they won’t assert the value of their time, who will?
In this digital age, can we not expect writers to just keep it brief? Or heck, just share the prompt, which is almost certainly shorter than the output and includes 100% of the information they intend to share?
Or is true 21st century digital transformation driven by the dialectical tension between AI generators and AI summarizers?
> can we not expect writers to just keep it brief?
In essentially every situation, you cannot expect readers to read.
I visited Bletchley Park museum this summer when in London. Can recommend and it's also really easy to get there; just a 50 minute train ride from London Euston station, and 5 minute walk to the museum. Entire family enjoyed the museum (have two teenage kids). There is also the "National Museum of Computing" located next to it which contains the Bombe, Collosus and related equipment. As I understand it most (or all?) of the original hardware was destroyed after the war to avoid leaking any information about the British code breaking skills. Thus, the machines on display are replicas, but should be fully working.
The computer museum also exhibits post-war computers all the way to modern machines. I'd say that museum is more for the geeks while the Bletchley Park museum is definitely worth a visit even if you're not into computers.
I recall from my own visit that the electrical transformers are supposedly original. So, the National Museum of Computing justifies calling its Colossus a rebuild rather than a replica, since it is made with some original parts.
hangsi commented on · Posted by u/thunderbong
This is excellent. I wonder how deep the roots of pre-20th century computing systems go. Babbage, Lovelace and the Difference engine are well catalogued, and I have seen a Jaccard loom in a museum with my own eyes.
What comes before this that isn't a history of mathematics, aside from the abacus? If this search is broad enough to include the topic of this article and Luca Pacioli's briefly mentioned double-entry ledgers from Italy, then I can imagine systems from all over the world where commerce flowed or administration ruled: similar systems must have existed in China and India, and I have heard of the Quipu system in the Andes that functioned as a digital storage medium for thousands of years.
How many modern components of information systems are reinventions of past ideas, rather than upgrades?
Normal people signup to post not to hang around and scroll and like until the account is warmed
This seems untrue, especially for reddit?
Using the 1/9/90 split [0] for creators/commenters/readers, it seems farfetched to suggest that reddit accounts (which benefits readers making an account to curate subreddit subscriptions) can't follow this pattern where many legitimate human users do not comment often.
[0] "The 1% Rule", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
> enshittification
Tangentially, what does enshittification mean now? Quoting Wiktionary, at one point it meant "The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits" (coined by Doctorow), but now people seem to use it to mean... things becoming shit?
You are right. The grandparent post ironically uses word this in a cheapened, shallow way when they can use it freely in their own writing.
You could argue this is the very sort of activity they were criticising when they posted! We are all vulnerable.
hangsi commented on America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1 semianalysis.com/2025/03/... · Posted by u/lasermatts
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes?
Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries.
We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
Tell that to the Pierce-Arrow company: makers of the first official cars for the white house, but they didn't survive cash flow problems from the great depression. Meanwhile, Ford survives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company
hangsi commented on Scotland's first 'enclosed' salmon farm to open on Loch Long bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-... · Posted by u/colinprince
In addition to the sibling comment's mention of the Congressional Review Act for agency oversight, there is a US Office of the Law Revision Counsel [2]. It has an official website [3] which is beautifully old-fashioned, but looks to be purely a resource for accessing the letter of the law and doesn't recount its volume of repeals in the same way.
None of this matters if the insane or counterproductive regulations are deliberate and desirable for the current lawmakers, of course.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_commission [1] https://lawcom.gov.uk/repeals/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou... [3] https://uscode.house.gov/