waterheater (u/waterheater)

waterheater commented on New records on Wendelstein 7-X iter.org/node/20687/new-r... · Posted by u/greesil

brohee · a month ago

Does it kill the idea of a tokamak as an energy production device? As in a stellarator proving the much more promising design...

waterheater · a month ago

Tokamaks are conceptually elegant but contain significant inefficiencies which negatively impact potential net power output. Both tokamaks and optimized stellarators have magnetic fields possessing omnigeneity [1], but tokamaks require two magnetic fields (poloidal and toroidal) whereas stellarators employ one.

The bigger question is if magnetic confinement fusion will lead to the best energy producing devices. Competitors include inertial confinement, pinches, or some other exotic method. If a magnetic confinement fusion device produces net power, it's going to be a stellarator.

Sources:

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

waterheater commented on TSMC bets on unorthodox optical tech spectrum.ieee.org/microle... · Posted by u/Rohitcss

qwezxcrty · 3 months ago

Not an expert in communications. Would the SerDes be the new bottleneck in the approach? I imagine there is a reason for serial interfaces dominating over the parallel ones, maybe timing skew between lanes, how can this be addressed in this massive parallel optical parallel interface?

waterheater · 3 months ago

>serial interfaces dominating over the parallel ones

Semi-accurate. For example, PCIe remains dominant in computing. PCIe is technically a serial protocol, as new versions of PCIe (7.0 is releasing soon) increase the serial transmission rate. However, PCIe is also parallel-wise scalable based on performance needs through "lanes", where one lane is a total of four wires, arranged as two differential pairs, with one pair for receiving (RX) and one for transmitting (TX).

PCIe scales up to 16 lanes, so a PCIe x16 interface will have 64 wires forming 32 differential pairs. When routing PCIe traces, the length of all differential pairs must be within <100 mils of each other (I believe; it's been about 10 years since I last read the spec). That's to address the "timing skew between lanes" you mention, and DRCs in the PCB design software will ensure the trace length skew requirement is respected.

>how can this be addressed in this massive parallel optical parallel interface?

From a hardware perspective, reserve a few "pixels" of the story's MicroLED transmitter array for link control, not for data transfer. Examples might be a clock or a data frame synchronization signal. From the software side, design a communication protocol which negotiates a stable connection between the endpoints and incorporates checksums.

Abstractly, the serial vs. parallel dynamic shifts as technology advances. Raising clock rates to shove more data down the line faster (serial improvement) works to a point, but you'll eventually hit the limits of your current technology. Still need more bandwidth? Just add more lines to meet your needs (parallel improvement). Eventually the technology improves, and the dynamic continues. A perfect example of that is PCIe.

waterheater commented on The origin of the cargo cult metaphor righto.com/2025/01/its-ti... · Posted by u/zdw

airstrike · 8 months ago

The girl already cried. Making it into a meme doesn't make her cry more. People using the meme are exercising their Freedom (of speech, in this case). That freedom of speech isn't really infringing on anyone else's rights, so it's essentially zero cost. Freedom is the second most important natural right, right after Life.[1]

The only argument for not using the meme here would be if _the actual girl in the meme_ wrote an open letter asking people not to use it publicly because every time she sees it she feels those emotions again or some such. I would definitely stop using it then--not that I use that meme to begin with, but that's really besides the point.

I don't care if some rando online wants to police speech. They have no power or right to do so. They are free to have an _opinion_, just as I am, because again, Freedom is a very important right. And they have no right to limit any of my rights, unless my exercise of some right infringed on a higher right of theirs e.g. I cannot claim to have the Freedom to negatively affect their Life.

And, importantly, I think some third-party claiming they are hurt by the use of that meme on behalf of the woman in the photo is not a tenable position. They could only do so if she had expressed the desire for people to stop using the meme, in which case it would still not make a difference whether such people felt hurt or not, but rather that the actual woman was hurt.

There's your argument from first principles. QED.

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1. I'm handwaving this hierarchy of rights and the existence of natural rights, but hopefully it isn't too controversial to claim that the Life is the paramount right and Freedom should follow closely. I've thought long and hard about this and could never find a better hierarchy. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that every other right derives from just those two rights and their hierarchy relative to each other and to all other rights, but since I have no degree in Law or Philosophy to support such a claim robustly, I can only propose it as a thought experiment left as an exercise to the reader.

waterheater · 8 months ago

Great argument overall. What strikes me is that I have also thought long and hard about fundamental natural rights, and my proposition is that Free Will is paramount and Privacy is the close second.

I believe such a claim can be robustly supported, and it is my hope to one day do so, ideally supported with a degree of philosophy. Your perspective is, in some ways, quite similar to my own, though it also has notable differences. I do believe it can be rigorously argued, for example, that Life is an outcome of Free Will, not the other way around. I believe it can also be shown that Privacy (not the cybernetic privacy, or cyberprivacy, articulated with privacy policies, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA) is (a) distinct from Free Will, (b) uniquely allows for the expression and development of Free Will, and (c) that maximal expression of Free Will is the global optimum for Life.

waterheater commented on Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news english.elpais.com/techno... · Posted by u/belter

robertlagrant · a year ago

I tend to agree, but maybe I'm talking about something slightly different. I was meaning that when I watch a YouTube video, if the creator has monetised it then they get a tiny amount of money, which enables them to do more videos. The Web in general doesn't have anything like that.

waterheater · a year ago

True. You should look into Project Xanadu, which was created with seventeen original rules, one of which is the following:

>Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document.

waterheater commented on Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news english.elpais.com/techno... · Posted by u/belter

jarjoura · a year ago

I actually think hiding behind “journalism” gives you more freedom to say what you want. In theory, you couldn’t blatantly make stuff up, because you risk getting sued. However, if the last decade has taught me anything, even then, the burden of proof is on the victim.

I think these high profile media folks volunteer that what they say is opinion, not out of freedom, but more so to frame their talking points in a more persuasive way. Humans will naturally put up their bullshit detectors if they think something is reported as fact, and expect to see evidence. Opinion on the other hand, means your guard is down and you will hear the same message, but consider it.

waterheater · a year ago

Historically, people trusted something reported as fact and were naturally skeptical of opinion. It seems that many people are realigning to an environment where the "facts" were presented to create a limited, specific perspective of the world (which is closer to opinion) and the majority of "opinion" producers were challenged to be, and in some cases became, more evidence-based (which is closer to fact). In effect, the system is self-correcting to reflect the natural state of the world: truth exists, and the task is on you to discover it.

waterheater commented on How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s kottke.org/24/03/how-phot... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

wodenokoto · a year ago

A librarian friend had the same complaint.

The problem is that libraries Dewey decimals are managed by librarians who want to sort things correctly. YouTube would be managed by uploaders who wants their stuff to be managed _incorrectly_.

YouTube recommendations and search is a super interesting problem not just because of the scale but also because uploaders are an adverse opponent, trying to keyword stuff their spam.

waterheater · a year ago

The obvious solution is to actually have librarians correctly classify the videos. DDS focuses on the nature of the work itself, not on the keywords or spam in the content. Librarians understand how to class all kinds of works, and it should be relatively simple to build a DDS/MDS index (Melville Decimal System since it's open, see https://librarything.com/mds) for YouTube videos. Just like with books, disagreement on classification is inevitable and perfectly natural; there's no perfect classification scheme, though DDS/MDS does a generally good job.

waterheater commented on Ephemeral usernames safeguard privacy and make Signal harder to subpoena theintercept.com/2024/03/... · Posted by u/georgecmu

andrewjl · a year ago

I might be missing some background on the topic but is this a real-world example of a differential privacy[1] technique?

[1]: https://privacytools.seas.harvard.edu/courses-educational-ma...

waterheater · a year ago

No, ephemeral usernames are not differential privacy. Differential privacy is repeatedly sampling a database through a differentially-private interface which returns data samples which are either real or fake. The mean and variance of the sampled data match the true mean and variance of the dataset according to a system-defined epsilon value. The end user isn't able to know if any given piece of data is real or fake.

I really don't like differential privacy.

waterheater commented on US permanently deploys training mission in Taiwan defensehere.com/en/us-per... · Posted by u/lando2319

givemeethekeys · a year ago

I don't understand. Is Taiwan or isn't Taiwan an independent country? If it isn't, then did we just declare war on China?

waterheater · a year ago

Other folks have highlighted the basics, so here's an analogous situation to think about: imagine that the US civil war saw the CSA taking over the territory of the USA, with the US federal government moving to a large hypothetical island off the East Coast. The CSA never completely eliminated all constituent US elements, so the USA still technically exists.

Fast forward to sixty years after the fighting just stopped one day. How would you view those two political entities? Are they equal? Does the existence of the CSA mean the USA doesn't exist as a country? What if the CSA implements trade policies which dissuade you from recognizing the USA as an independent nation? Does the USA still exist in your eyes? Is the USA or the CSA the "true" country?

The answer at this point in time is quite simple: the Republic of China (aka Taiwan) is clearly an independent country. However, the People's Republic of China (aka China) holds such economic power, they bully the rest of the world (though trade policies, etc.) into not recognizing Taiwan as an independent country. Also, the combination of geography and maritime law means that if Taiwan is an independent country, China has very little direct access to the open seas. They want freedom of navigation, so there's a geopolitical angle as well. Look into the construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea to advance the Nine Dashed Line policy.

You also need to remember that Chinese civilization is extremely old. The PRC claims to hold something called the Mandate of Heaven, which is a fairly important concept in Chinese history, as it is divine authority to rule over the Chinese people. Frankly, based on how the PRC acts, the RC clearly holds the Mandate of Heaven these days.

waterheater commented on Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf] courthousenews.com/wp-con... · Posted by u/modeless

gregwebs · 2 years ago

This suit claims breach of the "Founding Agreement". However, there is no actualy Founding Agreement, there are email communications claimed to be part of a "Founding Agreement". IANAL, but I would suspect that these emails don't matter for much now that there are Ariticles of Incorporation. Those articles are mentioned, but the "Founding Agreement" implied by emails is mentioned more. The suit also seems alarmist by stating that GPT4 is AGI.

It seems like Elon could win a suit to the extent that he could get all of his donations back based on the emails soliciting donation for a purpose that was then changed.

But Elon's goal in this suit is clearly to bring back the "Open" in "OpenAI"- share more information about GPT4 and newer models and eliminate the Microsoft exclusive licensing. Whether this would happen based on a suit like this seems like it would come down to an interpretation of the Articles of Incorporation.

waterheater · 2 years ago

It likely depends on what constitutes a valid contract in this jurisdiction. For example, some states recognize a "handshake agreement" as a legally-binding contract, and you can be taken to court for violating that agreement. I'm certain people have been found guilty in a legal context because they replied to a email one way but acted in the opposite manner.

The Articles of Incorporation are going to be the key legal document. Still, the Founding Agreement is important to demonstrate the original intentions and motivations of the parties. That builds the foundation for the case that something definitively caused Altman to steer the company in a different direction. I don't believe it's unfair to say Altman is steering; it seems like the Altman firing was a strategy to draw out the anti-Microsoft board members, who, once identified, were easily removed once Altman was reinstated. If Altman wasn't steering, then there's no reason he would have been rehired after he was fired.