skillissuer

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 81 points 1 week ago (12 children)

Electoral college is fucking weird

That you disallow prisoners to vote, but a felon can run as a candidate

That you end up in situation where there are hours long lines and you don't have one station per, say, 1000 people at most

Registering to vote is weird, but that is i understand mostly a consequence of not having countrywide ID standard. In my country you're automatically registered where you live, and IDs are free of charge and mandatory to have (not driving license or passport. there are fees for these)

Election isn't on weekend, there's zero reason why it couldn't be or it could be made national holiday. There was even free public transit for election day in my city, but that one was paid by the city

That some of people (republicans) seem to be into politics in the same way ultras seem to be into football, it's still fucked up but i've seen it in other places so it's not that weird by now

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

ah yes it's reactionary to checks notes not support the righteous biggest bubble since dotcom era

you okay out there bud?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

what neutrons? we're talking about shielding of spacecraft moving out of earth's magnetosphere, not a spacecraft travelling through core of active nuclear reactor

the kind of radiation that is relevant are high energy protons (and alphas and electrons, with a sprinkle of heavier nuclei) from sun, mostly. there's no relevant source of neutrons

(and incidentally water is pretty good at absorbing neutrons too)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

water does not expand upon irradiation, what the fuck are you talking about. you can't reflect high energy protons (what would be important in radiation in interplanetary travel) you can only either absorb them or let them pass, there's no third option, same for anything above uv and electrons

to a first approximation (rather good one at that) (for gammas) absorption is proportional to how much mass per area unit is used as a barrier. 1 g/cm^2 of water is just as good barrier as 1 g/cm^2 of lead or steel. this means that you can absolutely use completely normal, regular potable water as a radiation shield

Water in its purest form would have to take on mass to “absorb” radiation, expanding a hull and destroying it over time.

i'm not even sure what it's supposed to mean, unless your understanding of ionizing radiation is uncut nonsense

chemically speaking, it's completely fine to irradiate water because whatever is formed as a result of radiolysis would just most of the time form water back, with the rest becoming very weak solution of hydrogen peroxide. this is big part of the reason why water is used as a coolant in nuclear reactors

there are also specific nuances to stopping anything that is not gammas, like secondary x-rays, gammas from neutron absorption etc and this actually favours light element shields, like water or liquid hydrogen, for this kind of radiation shielding

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

i don't get what you fail to understand, water doesn't became radioactive or harmful in any other way after irradiation, and irradiation of food is routinely used for extending its shelf life

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

"remove" what exactly? water is not alive so it's okay to irradiate it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation

[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

thank brexiters for that, it's illegal in eu

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

nvidia executive called saltman a podcasting bro

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

the problem with that is that training can't be done "immediately" it takes tons of compute

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Copyright and IP concerns disappear with an open dataset.

i don't think i'd agree with that, doesn't matter if dataset goes open if content went there without consideration for authors

also even things like thispersondoesnotexist were used to mass-create fake identities and such

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

i'm not. just because he's an underdog here means that you're gonna ignore all the harms of generative ai up to this day? it's like complaining that big oil stole the idea of adding tetraethyllead to gasoline from you and you got no profits from that as a result

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

You might be semi-comfortably running linux mint cinnamon on these (assuming 4gb ram) with xfce you're trading clunkiness and ancient looks for lower memory usage

no idea about the usual suspects, wifi, bt, graphics probably will require tinkering as is tradition

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