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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Dope, I’ll get a large SUV or truck to replace my small hatchback so I don’t have to slow down at all. Larger vehicles improve pedestrian safety right?

    Speed bumps are a bandaid being used as a solution. They fuck with emergency vehicles, encourage rapid braking and acceleration, incentivize getting a larger vehicle, reduce gas mileage, and create noise from braking and acceleration. I’ll take literally any other traffic calming measure over a speed bump.


  • Giants trucks and SUVs are getting more and more prevalent and don’t have to slow down as much. This trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down. You can’t make the bumps big enough otherwise it’s going to wreck cars. People also haul ass immediately after getting off the bump, so you end up with lovely brake squeals and engine sounds for a few hundred feet of decreased speed. They prematurely wear suspension components and brakes and lead to increased fuel usage.

    They’re shit and I’m so glad I’ve moved out of the southern US and back into snow country where speed bumps simply can’t exist. I don’t know why speeding through residential areas is so much less prevalent in the north, where there are far fewer speed bumps, but I love it.





  • I don’t feel college is about teaching you how to do <current technique> so much as it is about teaching you how to critically think and teach yourself.

    I’m currently working in healthcare IT as an EMR analyst, I’ve got a degree in biochemistry. My IT experience is from fucking with my own computer since ~1999. I don’t feel I missed out on much by not getting a degree relevant to my current career.

    I never performed a Western blot a single time outside of a classroom lab but learning that process, how it worked, the precision and attention to detail needed to do the thing, how to troubleshoot a failed test, etc have been relevant regardless if I’m doing clinical lab stuff or implementing a new cardiology computer system.

    Then again I also didn’t go to college for tech so maybe I’m not understanding the issue here. Are people in IT not expected to learn on the job about how things are done at that organization? That’s been my admittedly narrow experience in the field.




  • I don’t understand the point being made here. The fact we don’t have SSTs sucks, and if they did exist anyone traveling on them would benefit. Who wouldn’t look forward to a significant shorter trip overseas? Faster traveling wouldn’t only benefit executives and world leaders.

    Consider a very brief history of airspeed in commercial air travel. Passenger aircraft today fly at around 900 kilometers per hour—and have continued to traverse the skies at the same airspeed range for the past five decades. Although supersonic passenger aircraft found a niche from the 1970s through the early 2000s with the Concorde, commercial supersonic transport is no longer available for the mainstream consumer marketplace today.

    To be clear, there may still be niche use cases for many gigabits per second of wireless bandwidth—just as there may still be executives or world leaders who continue to look forward to spanning the globe at supersonic speeds.






  • Did you want to add anything to the discussion or just make a snarky comment? I looked through the paper linked in the article and didn’t see a capacity listed.

    Our approach directs an alternative Li2S deposition pathway to the commonly reported lateral growth and 3D thickening growth mode, ameliorating the electrode passivation. Therefore, a Li–S cell capable of charging/discharging at 5C (12 min) while maintaining excellent cycling stability (82% capacity retention) for 1000 cycles is demonstrated. Even under high S loading (8.3 mg cm–2) and low electrolyte/sulfur ratio (3.8 mL mg–1), the sulfur cathode still delivers a high areal capacity of >7 mAh cm–2 for 80 cycles.

    A 5C charging rate is great, but it’s pretty useless if the battery is too small to be practical.





  • I think the Chinese room argument published in 1980 gives a pretty convincing reason why the Turing test doesn’t demonstrate intelligence.

    The thought experiment starts by placing a computer that can perfectly converse in Chinese in one room, and a human that only knows English in another, with a door separating them. Chinese characters are written and placed on a piece of paper underneath the door, and the computer can reply fluently, slipping the reply underneath the door. The human is then given English instructions which replicate the instructions and function of the computer program to converse in Chinese. The human follows the instructions and the two rooms can perfectly communicate in Chinese, but the human still does not actually understand the characters, merely following instructions to converse. Searle states that both the computer and human are doing identical tasks, following instructions without truly understanding or “thinking”.

    Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and the human in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing behavior that makes them appear to understand. However, the human would not be able to understand the conversation. Therefore, he argues, it follows that the computer would not be able to understand the conversation either.