procflora (u/procflora)

procflora commented on Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/signa11

SwiftyBug · 10 days ago

I thought planes had insane redundancy exactly so stuff like that don´t happen. How can a bit flip cause the system that controls altitude to malfunction like that?

procflora · 10 days ago

From what I've heard (FWIW), Airbus released a version of the software for one of the flight computers that removed SEU protections (hence grounding affected models until they could be downgraded to the previous version).

There was still hardware redundancy though. Operation of the plane's elevator switched to a secondary computer. Presumably it was also running the same vulnerable software, but they diverted and landed early in part to minimize this risk.

So not just redundancy but layers of redundancy.

procflora commented on GPT-5.2 openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/atgctg

xhkkffbf · 10 days ago

It doesn't hold true across the universe? I thought this was one of the more universal things like the speed of light.

procflora · 10 days ago

G, the gravitational constant is (as far as we know) universal. I don't think this is what they meant, but the use of "across the universe" in the parent comment is confusing.

g, the net acceleration from gravity and the Earth's rotation is what is 9.8m/s² at the surface, on average. It varies slightly with location and altitude (less than 1% for anywhere on the surface IIRC), so "it's 9.8 everywhere" is the model that's wrong but good enough a lot of the time.

procflora commented on An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643... · Posted by u/rapnie

ge96 · 11 days ago

tangent conspiracy thought

was watching a video about ICBM detection/taking them out in boost phase, and needing a lot for coverage if you had these LEO satellites ready to go but need a lot of delta v (fuel), star link... plenty of em but nah it's for internet/basic navigation/not much fuel

procflora · 11 days ago

My first thought about that is you'd need a lot of satellites already nearly co-planar with the ICBM's inclination and there probably aren't enough Starlinks in any given inclination to make that realistic (granting secret dV and a sporty enough TWR). Boost phase is pretty short.

procflora commented on Sugars, Gum, Stardust Found in NASA's Asteroid Bennu Samples nasa.gov/missions/osiris-... · Posted by u/jnord

procflora · 17 days ago

Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff!

procflora commented on FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-... · Posted by u/CrankyBear

zinekeller · a month ago

Possibly Twitch, Amazon Prime Video, and another one that escapes my mind (AWS-related?).

procflora · a month ago

AWS for sure (Elemental maybe?), but could also be Ring.

procflora commented on US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces bbc.com/news/articles/cqx... · Posted by u/tartoran

kome · 2 months ago

The whole WikiLeaks affair about "Collateral Murder" was also about hiding U.S. war crimes. US army goes a long way to hide that stuff...

It was followed by a decade of ridiculous but very effective character assassination of Assange, who is hated based on how dislikable he appears.

I recommend youngsters and "zoomers" read about it, because the recent past is often the most forgotten: https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/

procflora · 2 months ago

Indeed, the recent trend of the US government itself posting videos of the drone murders of Venezuelans stands in real stark contrast to how that was handled just 15 years ago.

procflora commented on Astronomers 'image' a mysterious dark object in the distant Universe mpg.de/25518363/1007-asph... · Posted by u/b2ccb2

catigula · 2 months ago

If you think that's crazy, it's likely a drop in the bucket comared to the noumenonal world.

There's no reason to think that our senses encompass the vast majority of understanding everything in reality and current evidence that they, in fact, do not, via dark matter as a primary source.

I suspect our senses encompass a meaningless fraction of the noumenon.

procflora · 2 months ago

In what way is dark matter not a phenomenon? Just because we don't know what it is doesn't make it a noumenon.

procflora commented on 60 years after Gemini, newly processed images reveal details arstechnica.com/space/202... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

CobrastanJorji · 3 months ago

What does "stack hundreds and hundreds of frames to bring out incredible detail" mean, technically?

procflora · 3 months ago

To take many exposures of the same scene and average the pixel values with the corresponding pixels from all the exposures. This increases the SNR and dynamic range, but naturally doesn't work very well if your subject isn't static. It doesn't increase the resolution of the image though.

For the 16mm movie cameras in this case, they probably selected frames from rigidly mounted cameras with little subject motion to get a good result out of it. Glenn strapped in tight in his tiny cockpit probably provided them with a decent number of frames they could stack without introducing much motion blur. In fact, you can see a bit of blurring at the end of one of the white straps center frame in that shot: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/03b-G...

It's a pretty common technique in astrophotography. Here's a page that goes into some more detail in that context: https://clarkvision.com/articles/image-stacking-methods/

procflora commented on I hacked my washing machine nexy.blog/2025/07/27/how-... · Posted by u/JadedBlueEyes

bilinguliar · 5 months ago

I suggest pushing washing machine metrics to Prometheus, it just asks for it.

procflora · 5 months ago

I'd say laundry is more Sisyphean than Promethean in my experience.

procflora commented on Why you can't color calibrate deep space photos maurycyz.com/misc/cc/... · Posted by u/LorenDB

klysm · 5 months ago

I know nothing about astro-anything so forgive my ignorance, but what light source would a nebula be reflecting? Is it meaningfully distinct for each nebula?

procflora · 5 months ago

I'm no expert either, I just think they look neat. But from what I know it's primarily the nearby star or star cluster illuminating them, so yes it'd be distinct. Also there are mixed emission and reflection nebulae so technically I suppose they reflect some of the light from the emissive portions, though I'm sure it's a tiny contribution.