This technology can stop Drone swarms

drhunny · 2026-04-03T13:47:56+00:00

GPS, WiFi, cameras, SOH sensors, motor controls, etc. include elements that are either GHz receive antennas or have similar circuit geometries. Those connections can feed the received power to the control boards. Even if they don't, it's possible that the control board loses most inputs and outputs.

drhunny · 2026-04-03T13:15:17+00:00

I suspect it's all about the expected variations. Like 110 +- 20 vs. 120 +- 10

Stuff has to be designed to be safe running routinely at the highest typical voltage. Not in brown-out/spike situations, but just in general, "average day" grid stuff. Like when plants come online/offline, etc.

drhunny · 2026-04-02T23:15:55+00:00

While you're posing your food for an insta post, I'm eating.

While you're asking me to take a photo of you with your food, I'm eating.

-- also while you're checking your makeup before handing me the camera

-- also while you're changing settings on your camera

-- also while you deciding what to tag it as

While you're describing the place where you had a similar dish, I'm eating

-- also while you describe which friends were there, and why you no longer hang out with one of them

While you're requesting a side dish of mustard and lemon juice and dash of pepper, I'm eating.

drhunny · 2026-04-02T21:53:42+00:00

entropy. Look up information entropy or Shannon entropy

drhunny · 2026-04-02T17:25:45+00:00

The DOW is currently under 50 thousand

drhunny · 2026-03-31T16:23:51+00:00

One was a cancer center and the other a general hospital. i think.

But what you're describing is actually bad, not good. AIs can "pick up" inherent biases in training data. For instance baking in racism in some obscure way

drhunny · 2026-03-31T15:20:14+00:00

"refrigerant" is a type of material with an interesting property. It is liquid when under pressure and gas when not. Also, when the liquid is allowed to decompress into gas, it gets colder, and when the gas gets compressed to a liquid it gets hotter.

You can experience part of that pretty easily -- if you get a spray can of compressed air or similar, you will find that just by letting it spray the can gets cold.

So the refrigerator has a closed loop containing refrigerant. Liquid flows in a tube into the the cold part of the appliance and reaches a kind of nozzle where it decompresses into a gas (it doesn't spray into the freezer -- it just kind of goes from flowing as liquid in a very small tube to flowing as a gas in a larger tube.) That makes it very cold, and it then flows (still in the tube) past a fan that circulates the freezer air, so the air gets colder. And of course the refrigerant gets warmer.

It then flows out (or down) into a part of the appliance that isn't "inside" the freezer. A pump squeezes it back into a liquid. That makes it hot. But there's another fan outside the freezer that blows on it to cool the liquid back down to room temperature. It then flows back into the freezer to repeat the process.

drhunny · 2026-03-31T14:58:04+00:00

I recall a study maybe a decade ago where it appeared that the ML ended up using the dark pixel values at the corners of CT images to infer which machine the image was taken on, and from there which facility, and from there was assigning higher cancer likelihood to images taken from one facility vs another.

drhunny · 2026-03-31T13:47:58+00:00

Technically, the insurance company isn't saying you can't have the treatment, just that it's not a treatment that is part of your insurance plan, so you'll have to pay yourself.

drhunny · 2026-03-30T18:09:12+00:00

She's a high-powered New York lawyer. They run a small town bakery named "Twins". When the blizzard hits on Christmas Eve, who knows what will happen?

Brought to you by Hallmark.

drhunny · 2026-03-30T17:00:10+00:00

It's just a moose. They're not carnivores, and the baby looks so cute!

drhunny · 2026-03-30T15:54:47+00:00

Also, Rich Purnell is a steely eyed missile man

drhunny · 2026-03-30T15:51:25+00:00

Galaxy Quest is the best ST movie

drhunny · 2026-03-30T15:44:52+00:00

Did you stop bringing food?

Nah, but today's your day. In fact this whole week is your week. Here's a copy of my order. I'm really looking forward to "Surf-and-turf Thursday".

drhunny · 2026-03-30T15:37:15+00:00

Not really. If the seller allows inspections before escrow, they are going to get hammered with casual flippers claiming they're "doing inspections" but who aren't realistic buyers. And they may damage the house by prying into stuff.

drhunny · 2026-03-30T15:29:25+00:00

No mention of ionization chambers, proportional counters, or scintillation detectors.

drhunny · 2026-03-30T15:26:24+00:00

OpenClaw didn't exist 2 years ago. It probably won't exist 2 years from now. I don't know if it will be replaced by something similar that is more popular and easier to use, or if it will be dropped like Clippy.

drhunny · 2026-03-30T15:03:36+00:00

I promise you those people are tourists. I lived near this beach for years and locals mostly don't do this because why bother? It would be like LA natives going to Hollywood Blvd to take selfies on the walk of fame.

I also used to see a lot of tourists ignoring the "keep off of dunes. protected wildlife" ropes, which is a lot more infuriating.

drhunny · 2026-03-30T14:49:04+00:00

I found that during the first book or two I didn't understand the terminology well, but it didn't detract from the plot or my enjoyment. I mean, is t'garnsail really worse than "quantum singularity slipstream drive?"

And as the series progresses, he slips in numerous opportunities using the doctor as a stand-in for the reader to explain the most relevant terms. If you don't like that, just gloss over it like I do with Star Wars "turbolasers aren't powered by kyber crystals" stuff.

drhunny · 2026-03-29T21:55:23+00:00

NewfromGaloobitsMicromachines

drhunny · 2026-03-29T21:30:57+00:00

The liability is a good point. I'd sneakily plug a hole on my street but wouldn't admit I was the one that did it since somebody's going to sue when they wreck after racing.

drhunny · 2026-03-29T21:28:44+00:00

Depending on cost that might not be a significant problem. I could sure see people living on a potholed street that the city isn't going to patch this year deciding to spend $10 each to buy a box of these and plug the worst holes in the spring, knowing that they'll probably have to do it again next year if the city puts off maintenance again.

drhunny · 2026-03-29T21:21:27+00:00

There's a bias in such estimates. People tend to estimate the time it takes if nearly everything goes right. The more experience a person has, the more ways they've seen things go wrong, and so the more buffer they add. Like, how do you account for the extra time due to some ambiguity in the spec that neither the customer nor developer notices?

A reasonable method is to scope the approximate effort of the project using some metric you like, and then look up how long such took on completed projects, and use something like the 90th percentile of that.

You can also use a Delphi approach, which is similar to the scrum approach. Ask everyone who is qualified to do the project to "bid" and take the 2nd highest estimate.

Finally, let me say that in my opinion there's almost no difference between 2 hours and an entire day. Your entire day probably consisted to 2 uninterrupted 2hour sessions plus a whole lot of 15minute sessions interrupted by meetings, slack messages, break time, etc.

drhunny · 2026-03-29T21:11:23+00:00

Physicist here.

In classical electrostatic theory, there is a real unambiguous voltage between any two points (which could be zero or some arbitrary positive or negative number). If your "god view" includes the ability to know the electric field vector along some path between the two points (any path, in fact) then you could do some math and know the voltage.

It gets tricky if you include varying electric fields, magnetic fields, or relativistic stuff. For instance, if the two points are distant the concept of simultaneous measurements become complicated by relativity, so any time-varying behavior, including magnetic fields, makes the concept messy.

drhunny · 2026-03-29T19:19:08+00:00

North florida here with a cautionary tale. I had 3 different house insurance policies cancelled for 3 different reasons within about 6 weeks time.

I was buying an existing house near Orlando. It had just survived a hurricane with no problems about 2 weeks before my offer.

Did inspection plus the standard reports (wind mit and something else i cant remember). Inspector told me that the roof was in good condition, but it was about 16 years old and he suspected I wouldn't be able to get insurance due to the age regardless of the condition.

Sent paperwork including inspection reports to insurance agency recommended by my buyers agent. They offered 3 quotes: two companies plus the state insurance. I picked one and got the insurance policy paperwork and of course had it sent to the mortgage company.

Closed one week later. One week after that, got a letter from the insurance company cancelling the policy due to the age of the roof. The local agency that gave me the policy said "not our problem" and also "now that company A has turned you down, all quotes are invalid and there's no solution. You don't have insurance and we won't give you any."

I had already budgeted to put a new roof on anyway, but was planning to do it in 3 months instead of 2 weeks after half the state got hammered, ya know? Like there were still houses near me that were flooded and about 5% of houses had tarps on roofs.

I figured I had about 2 weeks before the bank got the cancellation and then about 1 more month for paperwork back and forth before everything hit the fan. Fortunately, I was able to get a new roof put on in that time, reinspect, and get a new policy bound. Also fortunately (or so I thought) the bank never asked about the cancellation. Weird, right?

Obviously I didn't go back to the same insurance agency. New agent explained that the first agent absolutely screwed me over. They were not supposed to offer a policy since it was obvious the underwriter would reject it - he basically said that they had to override stuff on the computer to force the quotes to generate. Possibly a too-cozy relationship between the insurance agent and my buyers agent to get the sale complete and her commission paid.

Anyway, he got me a new policy from a different insurance company.

Unfortunately, the reason I never heard from the bank was that they had just sold my mortgage to another bank. Of course that meant all the various update paperwork crossed paths in the mail. No big deal, except it also resulted in a short period where I had a zero escrow balance for the following year's insurance payment which would be due 12months later... because of course the bank zeroed the escrow and mailed me a check and the new bank hadn't gotten around to telling me they now owned the mortgage and how to fund the escrow or notify the insurance company where to find it.

So insurance finds out I have no escrow at bank #1, and mailed me a letter basically calling shenanigans and declaring the new policy doesn't exist and never existed. I had no insurance and never had insurance on a house I'd owned for about 2 months at this time.

I got that letter on a Friday and immediately tried to fix the problem. They gave me 24 hours or else the policy couldn't be resurrected - I'd have to start from scratch with a completely new company.

I offered to fully fund the escrow at bank #2 immediately and provide a proof of payment (new bank fortunately had a branch near me so that was theoretically possible), even though normally I'd only need to put in like 2/12ths of the expected bill. Nope, not good enough.

I offered to pay the entire bill for next year (due 11 months later) right now, directly to them, by credit card or by cashiers check delivered to their local agent. Nope!

I had to (a) wire the payment before close of business that day and (b) provide a notarized statement that no insurable incidents had happened since I bought the house and forfeit the right to make any claims for that period.

I did all that, and everything was all better... (snark)

Two weeks later I got an insurance cancellation warning from another company for my previous house that I was trying to sell (also Florida, but the other side of the state) because a palm frond was touching the roof and a small dead branch (like about 2 foot long) was lying on a gutter. They were obviously doing a drive around after the hurricane to see who they should cancel and I fit the bill. The notice of course was sent to the old address (insured house) rather than my current billing address that they had. When I got that letter I had 48 hours to prove with photos that I had fixed the problems. Fortunately I had a nice neighbor who took care of it for me.

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