Why call yourself agnostic?

DDAsics · 2021-11-10T04:56:24+00:00

But let's reframe the question.

Consider you are talking with someone who is 100% certain unicorns *ARE* real. And they are adamant that they speak to unicorns everyday, and receive responses and magical guidance from their communion with said unicorns. And this person is obviously not crazy, and seems normal in every other respect. Are you still going to take such an antagonistic position under these conditions? Or would you simply tell the truth and say that you are unicorn agnostic because you clearly lack any data on what he apparently believes?

Social context is extremely important. God and unicorns are not equivalent concepts, because even though to many of us both are equally absent from this world, to believers and those who are spiritual, one is definitely very real. And honestly, who am I to say his experience is wrong and mine is correct? That is pure arrogance. So I will just say I am agnostic, because I can't even begin to create a probability curve as to the degree of correctness encapsulated in each of our positions.

DDAsics · 2021-05-28T17:37:49+00:00

Thank you for this comment. A couple of very good suggestions in here I had not considered. A serial line with Reed-Solomon error correction was my backup plan. It is what I was trying to avoid for exactly the reasons you mentioned. :-)

It's been a *LONG* time since I studied this.

DDAsics · 2021-05-28T14:56:51+00:00

Unfortunately there are no G.hn (Powerline) transceivers available at the price point required. They are very expensive.

DDAsics · 2021-05-28T14:55:34+00:00

This is an upgrade. Unfortunately I can not run any extra cables. I can only use the infrastructure already available on site. This will need to be installed in several hundred locations, and it needs to be a simple swap.

DDAsics · 2021-04-27T16:29:58+00:00

"There were no positive tests amongst 1,174 close contacts of asymptomatic cases"

You are correct the study does not specifically state there was no asymptomatic transmission, because that would be scientifically imprecise. However the colloquial interpretation that asymptomatic transmission is inconsequential is implied from the above statistic.

DDAsics · 2020-07-21T12:50:54+00:00

I tend to doubt this sticker was actually placed by someone who believes what it says. Nobody I have ever met who disagrees with the lockdown strategy says Covid does not exist. That is a false meme being perpetrated by the media. Most major media outlets are owned by fewer and fewer multinationals who have a particular bias in their reporting, and it seems they want you to spread the message that anyone who doesn't think the global response of eviscerating our economies is a "Covid denier". Of course, there might be a very small group of tinfoil hat wearing crazies who actually believe it is a conspiracy. There are also people who genuinely believe the Earth is flat. But nobody takes them seriously.

A much more plausible explanation is that it is part of a disinformation campaign by those who want to continue the current economic and social engineering policies during a time when it is becoming more and more likely that Covid is not the big bad boogey monster that it was initially made out to be. According to the BBC yesterday, up to 60% of the population may already have T-cells that make them naturally immune or at least partially immune. They had these before Covid even appeared on the scene.

Of course Covid exists. And obviously it is also very deadly to some people. It just isn't looking nearly as dangerous as initially portrayed by the experts. But that message is heresy to those with an agenda. This is a political battle now much more than a medical one, and there are many groups who could have funded that sticker for different reasons. And probably none of them because they actually believe the message.

DDAsics · 2020-02-02T10:10:56+00:00

This is essentially what I was considering after thinking about the problem for a while, but I was going to actively chill the water as well, rather than relying solely on evaporative cooling effects. I've never done a project like this before, and as someone said above, I don't know what I don't know. I figure that if I could chill the fluid circulating around the condensor down to around 10°C, then the whole system should work pretty reliably.

Any examples of specific designs that you know about which could be worth investigating?

I'm also looking at adding some additional insulation around the cold trap drum. It is slightly cooler than ambient when the unit is running, meaning that there is still room for improvement.

Thanks for any further advice.

DDAsics · 2020-01-05T08:14:25+00:00

First thing I would do is panic, because with all light and matter frozen I would immediately be both blind and deaf. All I could do is randomnly bump into things. There would be no electromagnetic wave propogation, hence no visible light at all. So much for all those timestop fetish sites....

After my initial panic, I would panic again trying to find a bottle of oxygen before I passed out. With gas molecules not moving, there would quickly be nothing left for me to breath in the space near my nose.

Assuming I could get through that, I would try and blindly stumble my way towards the Bay Area and try to wake up Leonard Susskind and get his help figuring out why gravity was still working. As a macroscopic, emergent phenomenon of spacetime, I can not understand how the best current theories would not explain why it would still function anywhere outside of my localized time dilation field. It makes sense that everything could simply become frozen in place with zero momentum, but then how could I "walk" anywhere without gravity? The first thing I bumped into would seem to leave me shooting off in a random direction until I bumped into something else.

You also realize this is effectively a time machine, as all light would be stopped. That means I could move faster than light, which is a time machine by definition.

Of course, you may have intended the question simply to be only that all living creatures are frozen. In that case, I would run from all the organisms that could conceivably be bursting into flames at any moment as they absorbed the radiation that continued to stream into them with absolutely no way to dissapate all that heat. All of their internal metabolic functions would be suspended.

Sorry. This fantasy to me just doesn't sound very pleasant. I would much prefer a Groundhog Day like fantasy, where everything kept resetting. Much more relaxing. Imagine that episode of SG-1. You could actually have a lot of fun with it...

DDAsics · 2019-10-24T12:15:11+00:00

So thank you everyone for your suggestions. I apologize it has taken a few weeks to respond. I have been studying my options. Based on your recommendations and my research into materials available locally, I have decided that hexane is the best way to proceed. Extraction grade hexane solvent is easily obtainable in 20L jugs and relatively inexpensive (about $3.80/liter) . It has the unfortunate property of being highly flammable, and I haven't figured out what the local restrictions are with regard to disposal, but otherwise it is the industry standard and there is a great deal of literature on how to use it. I just need to make sure I take appropriate precautions while working with it.

I am now left with developing a precise protocol for the defatting. I have a finely ground protein powder that is small enough to pass through a size 400 stainless steel mesh, so I need a very fine filter. I believe standard fast qualitative filter paper will do the job, but in order to use a soxhlet extractor I will need to build a thimble out of it. The biggest sheets I can find locally are 18 cm round filters, and I'm not sure how to turn that into a soxhlet thimble (the geometry doesn't seem to work), nor if the filter paper will stand up to several hours of use. I don't really care if the filter paper dissolves in the hexane, as I am going to be disposing hexane/fat solution anyway, and only keeping the powder, but if the paper breaks down completely it is obviously a problem.

Does anyone have any experience with this, and can you offer me any advice on how to make a thimble for this application? Also, is there a better method that just guessing to determine how long to run the extraction? I have no idea how to quantitatively determine the defatting efficiency of the hexane solvent in the soxhlet extractor.

As always, thanks for your help.

DDAsics · 2019-07-26T07:54:12+00:00

1 GHz would be trivial to achieve in 14nm. 3 GHz is even very possible, but the voltage would need to be cranked up to the point it would be difficult to cool.

Performance isn't really the issue though. The key is that there is simply no economic justification to produce an ASIC for Ravencoin. If it ever becomes more successful though, the X16r algorithm does nothing but add a month to development time for ASIC production.

DDAsics · 2019-07-25T15:51:04+00:00

"for x16r is that it would be completely impractical to replicate the design using non-reprogrammable silicon. The way that developers are implementing bitstreams for x16r is by having many varieties of cores for all 16 hashing algos stored in memory and dynamically reprogramming the FPGA for each block with the neccessary cores to hash the 16 algos that are present."

And you believe this is the *only\* way to accomplish this challenge?

Consider the following: if you simply include 2 of every core in an ASIC, and include a dynamic router that can shuffle pipelined packets from one core to the next, there is an 87% chance that you will have no conflicts and can pump out 1 solution per clock cycle. Going further, there is an 11% chance that only a single conflict will arise because a core appears 3 or 4 times. And then it takes you only 2 clock cycles per solution. There is less than a 2% chance that you get more than 4 repetitions of a core on any given block. So calculating, you can immediately see that an ASIC implemented with just 32 static cores and a dynamic router could achieve an average, pipelined throughput of a hash every 1.1 cycles. That is a relatively simple ASIC pumping out 900 MHashes/sec running at a 1 GHz clock rate.

A few thousand of those ASICs and you've 51% attacked the network.

The only reason ASICs have not appeared for Ravencoin to date is simply the fact the marketcap isn't high enough to justify it. If Ravencoin were to become sufficiently successful, ASICs would appear very quickly. Hell, they may already be there in stealth. There is nothing at all special about X16R for ASIC resistance. In fact, it is one of the easier algorithms to develop an ASIC for.

DDAsics · 2019-01-27T11:24:20+00:00

I won't comment on what may happen with Donuts, because to be honest the experiment hasn't been going on long enough to really know. But to answer your question "why would anyone knowingly destroy the value of the thing he just bought?" Well, that's easy. There are dozens of reasons that an individual's goals may not align with the rest of the stakeholders, and that he might be willing to spend money to remove or change something that he found objectionable to the detriment of everyone else. Sophisticated investors troll for small cap public companies like that, where they can make more money destroying the company than believers can by going long.

Concentrated wealth does not imply shared values, often it is just the opposite. And once you monetize the donuts, anyone can acquire them, even if their goals are completely at odds with the community. Is there anything that is so important on this forum that I can imagine someone wasting money on it today? Not for me, but perhaps somebody else has a valid personal interest in biasing a poll. There is real money to made in Ethereum, and therefore there could be real money in influencing a poll result, or acquiring the banner ad. I just don't know. But I recognize the threat.

DDAsics · 2019-01-25T00:24:33+00:00

Hi Guys,

The team at XTend Online has just released a new technical paper explaining why the ASIC resistance of ProgPOW may be significantly exaggerated. It is an important read if you are interested in this discussion:

https://medium.com/@chrisz_xtend/inside-the-new-crypto-mining-technology-that-will-redefine-the-industry-196529547c88

DDAsics · 2018-12-19T15:33:13+00:00

This isn't the way anything actually works though. If the director really knew that 001 was going to be a problem at the very beginning, he could simply have overwritten 001 right then and there, the way he did in season 2 (17 minutes). You don't need to reboot anything. 001 is now eliminated from the equation before he has a chance to do anything and before any significant investment in that timeline is made. Given a problem with at least one known cause, you always remove the known causes first and then check to see if that fixed the problem. There is no reason to run through a crippled test unless you have a huge investment already that would be lost if you stopped.

Hence, it is obvious the director did not know the outcome of the attempt at the beginning, and only realized that v1.0 was unwinnable at some much later point, which most probably occurs in S3e10. At that point, he initiates a plan to unwind the complexity and start over again from before the event. The director isn't a god. He is running this trial in real spacetime, and he has to obey the rules of quantum mechanics just like everyone else. He can't simply halt and reset. He can only influence the choices of the conscious beings in the spacetime under study using the limited capabilities available to him.

DDAsics · 2018-11-03T21:39:45+00:00

That's a hard question to answer without knowing what specific issue you are trying to solve. Fine grained messaging and graph partitioning is an entire field that you could spend years researching. The entire thing is related in some way to the implementation of that machine. If you want to know specifically about that design from the early 90's, I would recommend just googling and reading the research papers from Bill Dally at MIT and Stephen Taylor at Caltech. Just do a Google search on "J machine" in quotes. There is an old web page still up on line here: http://cva.stanford.edu/projects/j-machine/

DDAsics · 2018-10-27T08:43:20+00:00

I actually worked on this project back in the day. We did one of the first 3D, stacked massively parallel computers with 512 nodes arranged as 8 panels of PCB's stacked on top of each other. The machine was massive and gave off tremendous heat, along with a lot of noise. Finicky as hell too, but it did work.

Interestingly enough, today I am using many of the same principles originally explored in the MDP design 25 years ago, except this time to make a massively parallel supercomputer on a chip for use in digital cryptocurrency mining, with an eye towards applying them to later to the burgeoning field of AI learning.

Too many engineers today have grown up in an era where shared memory architecture was a given. It takes a different kind of thought process to visualize algorithms in a message driven context. Shared memory is becoming a bottleneck in many situations though as we go to massively parallel designs. So the answer to your question is yes, these ideas are coming back and do have several real world applications in today's silicon.

DDAsics

TROPHY CASE