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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • sushibowl@feddit.nltoEurope@feddit.org*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    Drones work now because they are $1000 (random number in the right range), while a patriot missile is $4 billion dollars each. Sure you could shoot a drone down with one, but if you do the enemy will just send more and bankrupt you.

    I agree with the point but these numbers are some orders of magnitude off. A patriot missile is typically 4 million dollars (so not billion). Drones vary widely depending on the type. Man-portable scouting drones can go as low as a few hundred dollars. I don’t think a patriot missile would ever target something that small flying that low though. The Iranian Shahed is estimated to cost around $30-50k. Russia produces its own upgraded version (better navigation systems, bigger warheads, etc.) that costs around $80k.

    Even then, you can make 50 drones for the cost of a single patriot. The economics are not favourable.


  • A system I work with gives all keys a string value of “Not_set” when the key is intended to be unset. The team decided to put this in because of a connection with a different, legacy system, whose developers (somehow) could not distinguish between a key being missing or being present but with a null value. So now every team that integrates with this system has to deal with these unset values.

    Of course, it’s up to individual developers to never forget to set a key to “Not_Set”. Also, they forgot to standardise capitalisation and such so there are all sorts of variations “NOT_SET”, “Not_set”, “NotSet”, etc. floating around the API responses. Also null is still a possible value you need to handle as well, though what it means is context dependent (usually it means someone fucked up).



  • No magnetic confinement fusion reactor in existence has ever generated a positive output. The current record belongs to JET, with a Q factor of 0.67. This record was set in 1997.

    The biggest reason we haven’t had a record break for a long time is money. The most favourable reaction for fusion is generally a D-T (Deuterium-Tritium) reaction. However, Tritium is incredibly expensive. So, most reactors run the much cheaper D-D reaction, which generates lower output. This is okay because current research reactors are mostly doing research on specific components of an eventual commercial reactor, and are not aiming for highest possible power output.

    The main purpose of WEST is to do research on diverter components for ITER. ITER itself is expected to reach Q ≥ 10, but won’t have any energy harvesting components. The goal is to add that to its successor, DEMO.

    Inertial confinement fusion (using lasers) has produced higher records, but they generally exclude the energy used to produce the laser from the calculation. NIF has generated 3.15MJ of fusion output by delivering 2.05MJ of energy to it with a laser, nominally a Q = 1.54. however, creating the laser that delivered the power took about 300MJ.



  • They are emissions credits. Every company receives some amount of “CO2 emission credits” from the government. These allow you to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. If you don’t emit all the CO2 that your credits allow, you can sell those credits to other companies that need more than the government gives them.

    The idea is to put a total limit on the amount of emissions in the country, while letting the market figure out where it makes most sense economically to invest in emission reduction.

    Tesla makes only EV cars and so it doesn’t need all the credits a typical gasoline car company would receive. So they sell them.










  • Technically there is no Hi syllable in Japanese either. There is ひ, which phonologically is neither “Hi” nor “Fi”, but somewhere in between. The exact pronunciation varies depending on surrounding sounds, as well as the speaker’s regional accent.

    So I wouldn’t say they really use WiHi. They write WiFi and they say “ワイハイ” which is the closest you can get to WiFi using Japanese sounds. It will kinda sound like WiHi to an English speaker.


  • Microsoft and the European Commission agreed to an initial period of five years. That ended in 2014, and the measure was not extended mainly for two reasons:

    1. Data showed the selection screen had had essentially no effect on browser market share whatsoever.
    2. This period was basically the height of browser competition, with Chrome, Safari, IE, and Firefox all showing significant market share.

    With competition in the browser market seemingly healthy, and the browser ballot not doing much to affect it, it was seen as pointless to keep requiring Microsoft to display it.