Viewing profile — vibrolax

I spent 25+ years in the precision optics industry, a large portion of which was building machines and instruments for fabricating and testing aspheric lenses and mirrors. Designin…

Twice bitten, three times shy. After the Slotin incident, prompt critical assemblies by hand were prohibited. Los Alamos then built a series of remotely operated critical assembly …

Probably because EU/national governments have regulations with respect to the safety and privacy of the users, and the purveyors must evaluate the performance of their products aga…

gen-z channels ee cummings

I've wanted to play games since Atari Pong came out. But I've never owned a console, and haven't owned a computer with a discrete GPU since 2005. Twenty years ago, I satisfied my u…

I periodically check out YouTube while not signed in, to see what YouTube is pushing to the unidentified. It's just like TV used to be, aimed at a pretty low target. And that's nea…

Yes, and now the government will have another $100m per year to bestow on its favored media companies.

I did just that, including signing up for discord. Despite never having used discord before, I was able to find the link to the beta AppImage in a pinned message and downloaded it.…

Well we have the Canaveral National Seashore to enjoy today, which was constituted from the undeveloped portion of the space program reservation. Otherwise, that area today might b…

If the family ran Linux, they would likely be always in touch with you. Different questions, but questions nonetheless.

I've been following this project for the past couple of years. The process of learning to manufacture enormous Nixie tubes as a product is a testament to Dalibor Farný's incredible…

My wife and I agree that eating well is one of the most affordable luxuries. Eating in ordinary restaurants and ordering takeout becomes less attractive once you hit a threshold of…

I like the term "confabulation". A hallucination is an artifact of an intoxicated or malfunctioning brain. In my experience, confabulation is a common occurrence in normal brains, …

It's an anhinga. Their feathers are not oiled, so they get wet in the water. They have to air dry their feathers.

I was defeated in my first couple of attempts to reach page 100 in _GR_, so I picked up _The Crying of Lot 49_ to get a handle on pynchonism. That confirmed for me that reading _GR…

What worries me about interacting with any cloud LLM or other AI is that the provider will record/analyze/sell my inputs, as is done with search queries today. I bet models can be …

I occasionally watch "let's play" videos as a harm reduced alternative to actually playing games. A half hour spent watching someone play a game/sim totally relieves my FOMO. It al…

I used an Alesis Quadraverb GT with an ART X-11 midi foot switch since 1991. I love great sounding pedals as much as the next guitarist, but I really didn't enjoy the care and feed…

Me too. I would be running my 440BX today, but all the motherboards died from bad electrolytic capacitors that were endemic in that era.

Same thing happened to me. Then I decided to start reading ahead every 5 pages, scanning for something that engaged me. I finally found it in the chapter "Un Perm' au Casino Herman…

I don't know. Having the theoretical and experimental physics talent was a necessary condition for producing the atomic bomb, but was not sufficient. What was lacking was a governm…

I worked for a small precision optics company that made components for their development efforts. We made machines for fabricating unconventional optics for both MIC and commercial…

In Orwell's "1984", a machine called the Versificator generated the music and literature for consumption by the proles.

The first man-made fission reactor was built in a squash court.

Everything fell into place for me as a runner after I joined an adult running club whose coach used Jack Daniels "Running Formula" as the basis for setting each member's training i…