• 6 Posts
  • 151 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 24th, 2023

help-circle



  • Computers can really just do two things: copy data and do math. Anytime your your doing anything but copying data verbatim, there is math involved. Anytime your reformating, filtering or acting on data their will be some math involved.

    Take displaying an image: you can’t just copy image data to the screen, because it could have a different resolution, or color space, or be compressed. In all of those cases, you will need to do a lot of math to get things to work right.

    The exact math varies, in graphics, CAD or geospatial stuff, expect a lot of geometry. Any sort of statistics or classifier is going to involve a lot of linear algebra. Even simply storing data in s quickly accessable manner involves quite a bit of math.








  • A banana naturally has has around 15 Bq of potassium 40. Assuming a volume of 100 mL, mashed bananas have around 400 Bq/L.

    Currently, the treated water has around 250 Bq/L, around a fifth of mashed bananas. In other words, a banana smoothie could easily be more radioactive then the water as it was released.

    The banana’s potassium 40 has a half life of more then a billion years, so it’s not going anywhere, unlike the tritium who’s amount will half every 11 years. Also, potassium is concentrated by many plants and animals, while tritium is not.


  • Fake nudes of real people are generally illegal, regardless of if the nude is real, or photoshopped, or AI generated.

    People have been arrested and convicted for AI porn of real people.

    For now convictions seem to be confined to people who have already created/used more traditional CSAM (hidden cameras). This could just be because it is hard to catch someone simply generating images, so if someone with no record would be jailed for just fake nudes remains an open question. Fake nudes of fictional people are also very much an open question. Being very new technology, new laws have yet to be made, so feel free to write to lawmakers about where the line should be.





  • Well first off, how nice/tolerant is your management? Do you have savings? Some companies can fire people over this stuff, other will just ignore it.

    The easiest (and least likely to make anyone mad) solution would just be to bring in your own machine and use celular internet. This way your setup will be completly seperate from the company network, and they can hardly claim you were exposing them to malware or anything. On the other hand you might have problems accessing devices like printers without copying files back and forth (are USB drives allowed?).




  • The TV will try and amplify and display any signal. Without a station, it will end up amplifying random radio noise and tiny fluctuations in the amplifier circuits themselves.

    The momentary signal strength is interpreted as brightness of a spot which is rapidly scanned over the display. In this case the signal is random so every spot on the screen will be a random brightness, changing every frame.

    Modern digital TVs won’t do this, because with compressed video recognizable data is needed to even attempt displaying a picture.

    As for the sources of the radio noise, most of it is from electrons being jostled by heat, some from space. (Including the cosmic microwave background others have mentioned)

    The electron jostling (thermal noise) is the reason the receivers on radio telescope as cooled to insanely low temperatures often with liquid helium.