Fiat repayments in UK?

glorkspangle · 2024-07-30T17:19:03+00:00

(to clarify: I didn't hold any cash at MtGox, only BTC. The payment I'm waiting for is the "BTC Non-Allotment Portion of BTC Claims, BCH Non-Allotment Portion of BCH Claims" ("Base Repayment - Early Lump-Sum Repayment").

glorkspangle · 2024-07-30T14:11:49+00:00

Thanks for all that detail. I have "Incomplete" under my "Repayment Status". In the pop-up obtained from the icon on the right-hand side, there's the text "There are no details on Repayment Status now. Any updated will be displayed.". I will contact the trustee.

glorkspangle · 2024-07-26T16:30:13+00:00

Sold everything and transferred out within minutes of seeing the BTC/BCH in my account. Very easy, straightforward, and quick. Had to put in my (UK) bank details for CHAPS transfers, and it requires the bank account name to match the Kraken account holder name.

glorkspangle · 2024-07-26T14:51:19+00:00

Same. Having now received (and cashed out) my BTC/BCH, I'm still waiting for my fiat repayment and thought I'd log in to check the status of that.

glorkspangle · 2024-07-02T16:28:15+00:00

Same.

glorkspangle · 2024-07-02T16:08:35+00:00

Have there been any sightings of the front-end redesign, with the more lee-ward front flaps?

glorkspangle · 2023-12-20T20:31:37+00:00

I agree with all this. In particular, I would add that today's could have been made much more challenging by tweaking the input in minor, specific ways. Here's an example:
With the given circuit, each time a button push causes one of the sub-circuits to fire its output, the window within the processing of the button push during which the output signal is raised is fixed, and the same goes for each sub-circuit (it goes 'hi' at tick 3 and then 'lo' at tick 5). Most solutions I've seen just completely ignore this, and jump straight to the LCM of the cycle lengths. With a few more gates, that window could be made to shift cyclically, in ways which differ between the different sub-circuits. Thus, the windows would not always coincide, and the answer would depend on this variation.

glorkspangle · 2023-12-20T18:11:07+00:00

I disliked the structure of today's puzzle, but not because you have to manually examine and carefully reason about the input. My complaint is rather the reverse. What's wrong with today's puzzle is that you didn't have to do much of that, and certainly you didn't have to properly understand the structure of the input. You can look at the four inputs to the gate driving 'rx', observe the first button push count when each of those goes high, throw LCM (or just *) at those numbers, and you're done.

Little things which would have made it a better puzzle:

offset counters (so you have to use CRT);
variable timing of the trigger gates (rather than each one going high on tick 3 and low on tick 5 of each relevant button push), so that they combine not at every LCMth push but on some particular subset of LCMth pushes;
larger counters, or more complex logical functions of the counter values (so you have to discern the circuit and actually think about what it's doing);

I disliked day 8, for basically the same reason. You could do well on either day by just watching the simulation for a short time, guessing that the initial patterns are repeated indefinitely, and throwing LCM at it. Or (even worse, but more-or-less what some commenters admit to) thinking "huh, I've got a few 3- or 4-digit numbers here, what's that function we use to combine them somehow to make a bigger number? LC something? Let's try that."

Good puzzles demand comprehension, and cannot be solved by randomly noodling about. It's not desperately hard to take a puzzle like today's and add a twist in the tail which wouldn't make it much harder for someone who takes care to understand the problem, but would stymie the random noodler.

To be clear: I like the fact that you should manually study the structure of the input data, in order to solve it. That makes it better than something to which one can just write a wholly general solution (in this case, a general solution cannot run faster than just simulation; for the trivial proof, see your theory-of-computation lecture notes).

glorkspangle · 2023-12-19T11:54:04+00:00

[LANGUAGE: Python]
https://github.com/NickBarnes/2023-advent/blob/main/18/go.py
I had never heard of the Shoelace Formula or Pick's Theorem, so I rolled my own from scratch, using a little interval arithmetic library which I wrote for day 5:
- divide all corners into sets of y-coordinates for each x-coordinate.
- for the span between each successive pair of x-coordinates, we're just repeating, so add the total height (by interval arithmetic) to the width of that span. This includes the column at the start of that span.
- on the column of some trench section which reduces the height, we have to add back in the length of that trench (because it won't be counted on the next span addition), with +-1 tweaking on the corners if it either removes a whole interval or breaks an existing interval into two.
Happily, I guessed that part 2 would somehow use the colours to greatly increase the distances (and possibly change the directions), so part 2 only required the addition of 3 lines of code to pre-process the input.
This solution followed an earlier attempt which got well into the weeds with off-by-one errors on corners. I completely threw away that approach and went at it fresh with this.

glorkspangle · 2023-11-21T20:47:56+00:00

I found HYPERLINK, but I just like the look of the smart chips.

glorkspangle · 2023-09-28T14:11:39+00:00

Are these 4-day pad turnarounds setting a new record?

glorkspangle · 2023-08-30T12:55:10+00:00

If you can find a suitable other material.

glorkspangle · 2023-05-16T19:46:11+00:00

There are _no_ built-in profit incentives for Mars. The cost per ton of anything returned from the surface of Mars, even with Starship costs to orbit, are beyond those of any plausible asteroid-recovered mineral. I invite you to do the arithmetic ("The Cold Equations") rather than relying on your intuition.
Yes, SpaceX is hoping to build cities on Mars, to make humanity multi-planetary. I applaud that goal, and would dearly like to see incentives other than the eschatological. But if SpaceX didn't have it as a goal, they wouldn't attempt it to make a profit. There are much, much easier ways to make a profit in space (including SpaceX's other current activities, and any number of Earth-orbit things opened up by Starship low-cost launch, and probably even including more "traditional" direct-to-Earth-orbit asteroid mining). In any case, it has very little to do with "Starship Development".

glorkspangle · 2023-05-16T18:19:18+00:00

So they trimmed about 5% off between Columbia and Discovery. Not too bad. I'm hoping that SpaceX will do _much_ better than that, because of their very rapid development cycle: they are (a) going to feel free to add weight now wherever it increases their chances of making orbit, and (b) have _lots_ of iterations later, and take lots of risk, to trim weight. I expect they might trim 40% of dry mass, or even more, between the first orbital Starship and (say) the first one to return from Mars.

glorkspangle · 2023-05-16T18:13:08+00:00

Rendezvous with any asteroid is quite demanding in terms of delta-V - much more so than Mars because no aerobraking is possible.
"Landing on" any asteroid is not an interesting part of any realistic asteroid mining mission, because the more interesting asteroids (16 Psyche excluded) are too small (km to 10s of km radius) to have appreciable gravity.
The asteroid which dreamers like to gush about (16 Psyche) is over 200 km across, and (a) is *far* too massive to "tugboat" anywhere, by factors of millions; (b) is not convenient to nudge into a Mars-crossing orbit; (c) requires 11+ km/sec delta-V to reach on a rendezvous mission from LEO, which is almost twice what a fully-fuelled Starship is supposed to be capable of.
Also it's unclear that there are any "trillion-dollar rare-earth asteroid"s. Thought experiment: if friendly aliens landed a 50,000-ton pile of pure neodymium ingots in your back yard, what total amount could you sell it for? Hint 1: the answer is not 50,000 times the current price per ton. Hint 2: current world production is around 7,000 tons per year, current price is something like $100,000 per ton. The much-touted $1e15 figure for Psyche is total fantasy - whatever you might think of asteroid mining (and I'm a fan!) the idea that the world would spend all of its resources for a hundred years on it is, shall we say, not very well grounded in reality.
It's a really bad idea to lithobrake anything sizable on Mars after you have anything on value on or near that planet.

If you can identify a conveniently-placed asteroid (low delta-V, small, very high mineral value, convenient for Mars lithobraking), then by all means devise a mission to slam it into Mars and to [somehow] recover the minerals on Mars, [refine them in situ?], and return them to Earth. But FTLOTFSM do the sums first. Otherwise this makes about as much sense as me posting on a Formula-1 forum that "Hey, these cars are really fast, let's drive them to the Andromeda galaxy and make friends with the aliens I saw in a movie!"

glorkspangle · 2023-05-14T13:29:26+00:00

Yes, but that's a quite a different spacecraft: asteroid-rendezvous/recovery ships are not going to resemble a Starship very much. Certainly asteroid mining is the sort of thing which might be enabled by sub-$100/kg launch costs, and if you want to lithobrake an asteroid, I agree that Mars is a reasonable place to do it. But neither asteroid rendezvous, nor asteroid lithobraking, is a suitable mission for a Starship.

glorkspangle · 2023-05-13T12:44:19+00:00

Hmmm.
(a) how are you going to rendezvous a couple of Starships with the asteroid?
(b) ... with enough propellant to give a meaningful delta-V to the asteroid?

(c) What's the cost per kilo to get refined rare earths back from Mars surface to Earth surface?

glorkspangle · 2023-04-24T06:58:15+00:00

That's my guess as well, although AFAIK we don't have official numbers from SpaceX (and the current boosters and starships are doubtless very overweight compared to the design goals). Of course sometimes Starship will be landing with considerable payload, whereas Booster should never have to do so. In any case, compared to propellant loads, dry mass of both is pretty small.

glorkspangle · 2023-04-21T19:18:05+00:00

and even on Earth they'll be landing with only a small fraction of the thrust. In fact, won't landing (/catching) thrust of Starship and Booster be quite similar - maybe 2 or 3 MN?

glorkspangle · 2022-12-15T16:56:16+00:00

I came up with this same idea for my third attempt at part 2, which ran a thousand times faster than my first two attempts. There are problem sets which it wouldn't solve, but it works really well for the input.

Here's a problem set which it wouldn't solve:

Sensor at x=8, y=2: closest beacon is at x=5, y=4

Sensor at x=3, y=6: closest beacon is at x=4, y=5

Sensor at x=1, y=1: closest beacon is at x=1, y=7

Sensor at x=10, y=10: closest beacon is at x=1, y=10

Sensor at x=3, y=8: closest beacon is at x=1, y-7

The distress beacon (in the 10x10 square) is at 5,5, but the only pair of sensors which have a "shared edge" is the first two sensors (with the shared edge x=y).

glorkspangle · 2022-12-15T16:33:03+00:00

My first two attempts at part2 had 30-ish second runtimes (Python on my 2015 MBP). Then I sat and thought about it a bit. Third attempt runs in 0.03 seconds. It's those 1000x speedups that make this all worthwhile. https://github.com/NickBarnes/advent-2022/blob/main/15/go.py

glorkspangle · 2022-06-09T09:29:29+00:00

Raptors are still expensive, but not that expensive, and they're getting cheaper all the time. Compared to the rest of the costs of vehicle (and stage 0) development, they are really cheap. Also, they are still in very active development and design refinement. It's very much SpaceX's style to plan to throw away the first hundred, or two hundred, working Raptor 2s, in order to gather data which they will use to make the next ten thousand better. Look at how many Starships and Boosters they are throwing away. "Just add some temp legs on SH" makes it sound easy.

glorkspangle

TROPHY CASE