slm_HN (u/slm_HN) - Readit News

slm_HN commented on Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bswud

slm_HN · a year ago

"Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure."

What does graft mean in this context? Is there a process where you graft diamonds, like plants? Does it refer to the diamond seed crystals mentioned in the article?

slm_HN commented on Thorium – A Starship Bridge Simulator thoriumsim.com/... · Posted by u/matijash

alexanderson · 3 years ago

Hey friends. Thorium's developer here. Happy to answer any questions or give more insights.

Thorium Classic has been in development since 2016 and is primarily intended to be used in brick-and-mortar space centers out in Utah, like the Space Place[1] and CMSC[2]. As such, there isn't a lot of content and documentation to get newcomers up-and-running with it.

Thorium Nova is currently under development and is intended to be used by a broader audience. It will include much more content, pre-built missions, and more integrated tutorials.

The project is open-source, so anyone is welcome to contribute[3] and follow along with the progress of each alpha.

1: https://www.thespaceplace.org

2: https://spacecenter.alpineschools.org

3: https://thoriumsim.com/blog/contributing-to-thorium-nova

slm_HN · 3 years ago

Was the program was based on the classic book, https://www.amazon.com/Star-Ship-Simulation-games-no/dp/0918... ?

slm_HN commented on What is Chess? What to think and for how long alexcrompton.com/blog/tim... · Posted by u/awalias

brrrrrm · 3 years ago

Puzzles + learning openings. I highly recommend lichess for this

slm_HN · 3 years ago

Puzzles are great for learning tactics, but eventually you need to learn some strategy and positional play. You'll need to read a book or two for this. And don't forget endings!

slm_HN commented on Chess is booming and our servers are struggling chess.com/blog/CHESScom/c... · Posted by u/dsr12

slm_HN · 3 years ago

Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr.

However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org.

They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, which is good for chess since it allows more chess players to make a living.

slm_HN commented on MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max apple.com/newsroom/2023/0... · Posted by u/ValentineC

slm_HN · 3 years ago

Tell me you don't have anything to contribute other than a weak, ten year old meme without saying that you don't have anything to contribute other than a weak, ten year old meme.

slm_HN commented on · Posted by u/rafaelc

slm_HN · 4 years ago

Yeah, I'm not buying this. For three years China has desperately been searching for an animal reservoir for the virus. They have found nothing at all. This report wants me to believe there was one infected animal at the market and that was it?

Or is it more likely that the lab, which had numerous coronavirus samples, did gain of function research and had a history of accidental leaks, was not involved at all?

slm_HN commented on The Dark Side of Chess: Payoffs, Points and 12-Year-Old Grandmasters nytimes.com/2021/07/13/sp... · Posted by u/mykowebhn

slm_HN · 4 years ago

This is a surprisingly good article. Most of the time when the mainstream press covers the chess world there are just too many inaccuracies in the reporting.

slm_HN commented on The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days guzey.com/science/sleep/1... · Posted by u/luu

fossuser · 5 years ago

I think this book is mostly bullshit - the same author that wrote the linked HN post dug into that book and there was a ton of manipulative data and just straight up false claims. [0]

I get a pretty strong pseudoscience vibe from it.

From a previous post:

I got a strong motivated reasoning/bullshit vibe from Walker in this interview: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630792401/sleep-scientist-war...

Particularly this section:

> “Sleep is not like the bank. So you can't accumulate debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time. And the reason is this - we know that if I were to deprive you of sleep for an entire night - take away eight hours - and then in the subsequent nights, I give you all of the sleep that you want - however much you wish to consume - you never get back all that you lost. You will sleep longer, but you will never achieve that full eight-hour repayment as it were. So the brain has no capacity to get back that lost sleep...”

I don’t think this follows - seems likely to me that sleep is not some linear time thing and that there’s a standard overhead that doesn’t need to be repeated to extend and make up the time. This feels like a symptom of not understanding the mechanism and making a bad assumption.

I also found the “I won’t mention the cognitive failures I can detect” irritating. If there’s some actual thing to mention, say it - this kind of thing sets off alarms for me.

It doesn’t surprise me that the rest is similarly bad.

[0]: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

slm_HN · 5 years ago

>I get a pretty strong pseudoscience vibe from it.

I don't quite know how to categorize complaining about pseudoscience based on a "vibe".

It's not quite irony... maybe it's just humorous. As a member of the post Alanis Morissette generation I guess I can no longer recognize irony.

slm_HN commented on A casino card shark’s first time getting caught narratively.com/a-casino-... · Posted by u/smoyer

chongli · 5 years ago

This is blackjack we’re talking about, not poker. There’s no “reading the opponent”. The opponent is the dealer who hits on a sixteen or less and stays otherwise.

For the people with a flat bet (on a card counting team) there’s no decision making at all. They simply follow basic strategy which prescribes exactly what move to make in each situation.

slm_HN · 5 years ago

In fact there is opponent reading (literally) in Blackjack. The opponent (dealer) must check his hand for blackjack, if the dealer's upcard is a 10 or an Ace, after having dealt the initial two cards to every player. "Hole peeking" is a technique where a teammate stands behind the dealer so they can see the hole card when the dealer checks for blackjack. They then signal this information to the player so he knows the value of the dealer's hand. Hole peeking used to be so common that casinos now have card readers built into the blackjack tables so that the dealers don't have to expose their hole card to check for blackjack.

It is/was also possible for a player at the first seat of the table to see a sloppy dealer's hole card when checking for blackjack. This is called "first basing" while using a teammate is generally called spooking.

slm_HN commented on Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016) disclose.tv/these-5d-glas... · Posted by u/elorant

dotancohen · 6 years ago

I absolutely loved this book. However, isn't it curious that the humans arrive just as the cheela are reaching the level of technology needed to communicate? In terms of human time, they could have come a year earlier, or a year later.

slm_HN · 6 years ago

As I remember the book it was the humans probing the neutron star with something (x-rays?) in order to survey/study the star that triggered the evolutionary advances in the cheela. So no, it wasn't curious timing, the humans precipitated the rise of the cheela.

Great book btw, hope I'm remembering it correctly.