Readit News logoReadit News
minetest2048 commented on The natural diamond industry is getting rocked. Thank the lab-grown variety   cbc.ca/news/business/lab-... · Posted by u/geox
XorNot · a month ago
My wife wanted a sapphire and we met during Ph D research. It's straight up not possible to pay more then like, a dollar for a synthetic sapphire so that's what's in her ring.
minetest2048 · a month ago
I like my scintillator crystals.. they're purpose built to be very fluorescent
minetest2048 commented on Some bits on malloc(0) in C being allowed to return NULL   utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/ingve
david-gpu · 2 months ago
As per the specification, it has to be a unique pointer.

Being tasked to implement a specification typically means having to pass extensive conformance tests and having to answer for instances of noncompliance. You soon learn to follow the spec to the letter, to the best of your abilities, unless you can make a strong case to your management for each specific deviation.

minetest2048 · 2 months ago
This is embedded C where standard abuse is a thing: https://thephd.dev/conformance-should-mean-something-fputc-a...
minetest2048 commented on Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds   arstechnica.com/gaming/20... · Posted by u/_JamesA_
Macha · 2 months ago
Factorio and Minecraft (Java edition) are two of the few games that come to mind where the Linux port got comparable effort to the Windows port, and I don't think people are in a rush to play either of them in Proton.

Your latest AAA open world RPG on the other hand? Yeah, you're probably going to have better luck in Proton even if it gets a native Linux port.

minetest2048 · 2 months ago
Factorio is the only game that I know that have Linux (and Mac) exclusive feature, which is non-blocking saving: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-408
minetest2048 commented on Giant, all-seeing telescope is set to revolutionize astronomy   science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/gammarator
fastball · 2 months ago
Why is the substrate glass? Lack of reactivity? Ability to remove imperfections? As a layman with almost zero knowledge of telescope construction, I feel like a heavy amorphous solid would not be my first choice for the base layer underneath the reflective/mirror coating.
minetest2048 · 2 months ago
Its not your normal soda-lime glass, its more of a glass-ceramic material that have very low coefficient of thermal expansion, something like zerodur: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerodur , which means it can keep its shape and focus even under varying temperature

Interesting demo by Huygens Optics: https://youtu.be/qi8jmEbWsxU?si=rj0I3k-l74Xhg7vC

minetest2048 commented on SpaceX Starship 36 Anomaly   twitter.com/NASASpaceflig... · Posted by u/Ankaios
zx8080 · 2 months ago
Why is this called "anomaly"? It's "exploded".
minetest2048 · 2 months ago
The space industry people have been saying this since 1997: https://youtu.be/z_aHEit-SqA?si=N6-PtezdsOhsv63O

Delta 2 rocket exploded during launch, raining flaming debris everywhere and the announcer says we had an anomaly

minetest2048 commented on Negotiating PoE+ Power in the Pre‑Boot Environment   roderickkhan.com/posts/20... · Posted by u/pietrushnic
minetest2048 · 3 months ago
Related problem is single-board computers that relies on USB-PD for power. USB-PD sources requires the sink to do power delivery negotiation within 5 seconds, or it will cut its power or do funny things. Because USB-PD negotiation is handled in Linux, by the time Linux boots it will be too late, and power supply will cut the power, so it will be stuck in a boot loop: https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-usb/msg239175.html

They way they're trying to solve it is very similar to this article, by doing the USB-PD negotiation during U-boot bootloader stage:

- https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...

- https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/20241015152719.88678-1-sebast...

minetest2048 commented on Disabling kernel functions in your process (2009)   chadaustin.me/2009/03/dis... · Posted by u/rolph
DavidVoid · 3 months ago
There's a great Random ASCII blog post about an obscure FPU issue like this [1].

  - The crash was in a FPU that Chrome barely uses  
  - The instruction that crashed Chrome was thousands of instructions away from the one that triggered the exception  
  - The instruction that triggered the exception was not at fault  
  - The crash only happened because of third-party code running inside of Chrome  
  - The crash was ultimately found to be caused by a code-gen bug in Visual Studio 2015  
I've run into this kind of thing once myself (sharing a process with other companies is fun!). It was real confusing to get a stack trace showing our code suddenly crashing on a line of code that was doing the exact same thing with the exact same values as it had always done before.

[1]: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/everything-old-...

minetest2048 · 3 months ago
This also happened in python ecosystem where gevent were messing with numpy because gevent was compiled with -ffast-math, which disables subnormal numbers

Blog post: https://moyix.blogspot.com/2022/09/someones-been-messing-wit... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41212072

minetest2048 commented on The SpaceX genie is out of the bottle   chrisprophet.substack.com... · Posted by u/Teever
minetest2048 · 3 months ago
> SpaceX plan to turn the internet into an outernet, by routing the majority of data traffic through their Starlink satellites. This should be particularly attractive to global users because a network of interconnected satellites is inherently more secure and faster than conventional fiber internet between continents

As a space engineer this is very wrong, no satellite solution can beat the reliability or throughput of a submarine DWDM fiber. Satellites are vulnerable to solar storms, cosmic radiation, nuclear attacks, jamming and a lot of other external factors while fiber cables are safely buried / submerged, protected against those kind of problems. Except for ship anchors and fiber seeking backhoes.

Another thing is that satellite to ground downlinks are still using RF, which is getting congested. You can work around that by going to optical downlinks to get the speed, and in ideal world you can have DWDM fiber speed that way. But got a cloudy sky and you lose your connection

minetest2048 commented on NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix   theregister.com/2025/05/1... · Posted by u/nullhole
imhoguy · 4 months ago
It may be survivorship bias but I can't imagine current so complex and fragile engineering achieving such durability.

Once you apply vibe-engineering to everything how we can even keep anything working beyond 1 year warranty. You can't RMA space probes.

But maybe we should send 50000 cheap (fr)agile probes like Starlinks into deep space and push updates randomly. Maybe just one makes it over 50 years mark.

Ah, and we should call it Starsperm. I think I should add "/s" here.

minetest2048 · 4 months ago
Breakthrough Starshot StarChip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot#StarChip) is the closest thing:

> StarChip is the name used by Breakthrough Initiatives for a very small, centimeter-sized, gram-scale, interstellar spacecraft envisioned for the Breakthrough Starshot program,[1][36] a proposed mission to propel a fleet of a thousand StarChips on a journey to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, about 4.37 light-years from Earth

minetest2048 commented on Spade Hardware Description Language   spade-lang.org/... · Posted by u/spmcl
alain94040 · 4 months ago
Fair, but it's just a tooling issue. You don't debug your Verilog anymore at the gate-level, do you?
minetest2048 · 4 months ago
> it's just a tooling issue

FPGA toolchains are infamous for one of the worst and cursed toolchains in the world. Where writing tcl scripts to imperatively connects blocks together in a block diagram that will integrate all the verilog code is not just normal, but encouraged. Because their internal block diagram description file is git hostile

u/minetest2048

KarmaCake day263May 4, 2019View Original