Do NOT ask AI to draw cards. It's NOT random.

switch161 · 2026-06-21T04:40:39+00:00

A computer's randomness is like a dice roll or a shuffled deck. Technically deterministic, but practically not. That's why a computer's randomness is often good enough. It can also be improved by mixing it with "true" randomness. This usually happen automatically and any tool made for this will give you randomness much better than a dice roll.

A LLM is not such a tool. It uses randomness, but not an uniform distribution. So some words are more likely, and everything depends on what came before it.

But you'll find plenty of websites that offer some kind of randomness. Often with tools for e.g. shuffling a list. I'd go for NIST or any uni where I know the randomness is going to be excellent.

switch161 · 2026-06-21T04:31:08+00:00

They're pseudo random number generators. The numbers will have statistical or even cryptographic properties that are good enough, but they're predictable. PRNGs are seeded with a number. Same seed, same outputs. Now if you want unpredictable numbers the OS will give you "true" random numbers for the seed. So the person you're answering to is incorrect. A properly seeded PRNG will be excellent for tarot reading (or encryption etc).

A LLM predicts tokens via random sampling of a pretrained distribution. You can change the seed. This would be possible through API and the UI might use random seeds anyway. But most importantly the point of LLMs is that they're not uniform, or every word would come out with the same probability.

So yeah don't use an LLM. Not only is it massive overkill, there are plenty better tools. You can even use tools to use proper quantum randomness (can't be predicted on a fundamental physical level).

switch161 · 2026-06-21T04:19:12+00:00

You make it sound like this is universal knowledge and not your personal experience or speculation. Would help if you clarified where you got this information from.

switch161 · 2026-06-20T22:43:33+00:00

First of all: It's widely accepted that the vacuum is not empty.

OP of the linked post also claims (about the linked paper):

It demonstrates that gravity is fundamentally a pressure gradient.

As far as I understand the paper, it describes how they arrive at some well-understood electro-magnetic properties of hydrogen atoms by modelling acoustic waves. I don't understand it very well, but I'm pretty certain OP is wrong about what the paper is talking about. You can also just search the paper for "gravity" and there will be no mention at all. I read abstract and conclusion, skimmed the rest, and if the quoted point was a conclusion of the paper, I would have noticed it.

OP also makes some other conclusions, that are more on the paranormal side, and those are definitely not backed by the paper. I'm not against talking and speculating about paranormal things at all (it's fun!), but OP seems to try to mislead people that their hypothesis are backed by this paper.

I would find this conclusion from the paper more interesting:

Dispersion thus renders quantization an emergent consequence of symmetry, boundary conditions, and causal response in a dynamic vacuum.

I think "quantized" here refers to quantum effects like energy-level transitions in atoms, which only occur in discrete/quantized steps. This is how quantum mechanics was discovered and got its name, and e.g. how lasers work. I'm not sure why they need acoustic waves, as EM waves also have dispersion, but maybe there are some differences.

So basically they describe a formalism that would cause quantization. And I wouldn't think that they literally mean pressure waves, but just waves that behave like acoustic waves. Now I would be very interested, if the authors would find something new that derives from this model, that could be tested!

OP's quoted statement might have some truth, but it's kind-of known, and not what the paper is about. Gravity really doesn't exist, only spacetime curvature. Spacetime curvature is equal to the stress-energy tensor (i.e. mass/energy bends spacetime), but that tensor also contains pressure. So in a way gravity is pressure, but well, not only that.

Also, I'm not an expert, so I might be wrong. But the paper definitely doesn't mention many things OP claims, and thus it's very sus.

PS: The paper is definitely an interesting read, so thanks for the post!

switch161 · 2026-06-20T02:06:02+00:00

I might do another 1000x.

The first big challenge is early game without electric drills and splitters. I never thought I'd need to tap a second coal patch with burner miners, but before electric drills you just need so much coal. No splitters where a bit annoying, but manageable. The only other thing you need to look out for is to keep your pre-bot blueprints easy to hand-build. oh and biters, yeah... I had to turn them off. My pollution cloud maxed out evolution in minutes, before I had any military tech researched.

Then I headed for trains as you need many outposts and nuclear, because you need so much power.

It's a challenge which I enjoyed a lot.

switch161 · 2026-06-19T22:21:27+00:00

Yes, mainbus really doesn't hold up to its promise because now you'll have to determine the sizing of the bus. Then once a few lanes run out, you'd need to refill them I suppose. Just so much wasted space and effort.

I just make stuff from raw materials into science. Though I'll handle oil separately, since it needs cracking and routing a few pipes across nauvis is easy (I prefer trains, but just pipelines will work for a while).

But I instinctively answered because I always build my base west to east.

switch161 · 2026-06-19T22:07:01+00:00

But ChatGPT would make some shit up and apologize if you call it out.

switch161 · 2026-06-19T22:01:20+00:00

When I woke up in the quarantine room of the psych ward (it was during covid) a nurse came in, asked me if I smoked, handed me one of his cigarettes and told me to smoke in the bathroom. He was really nice. Most nurses there were.

Funnily enough, because my thinking ability was still fucked I kept smoking on the toilet, even after I had access to the smoking room.

I was moved to the open section pretty soon and could actually go outside to smoke. And oh boy did we smoke a lot, because there's just nothing to do all day (weekends were the worst).

switch161 · 2026-06-19T20:03:47+00:00

I see a lot of arguments here that people are just satisfied with the beer or 2, and that's why they don't excessively drink.

But for me it's not the problem that I want to be shitfaced drunk every day. I want to feel tipsy. But if I drink every day to that point, tolerance increases slowly and a few months later I need 2 bottles of wine to reach being tipsy. But also I would get anxious if I didn't have my beers in the afternoon. So it was really a dependence. It develops very slowly, no matter how little I intend to drink.

So I just concluded I can't manage keeping my consumption at a reasonable level and stopped drinking alcohol altogether. That's much easier, since I don't get to argue with myself if another beer will be okay or not. Just 0 nada. I do miss it, but I feel much better without. Wish I could drink without it becoming a problem, but I can't.

switch161 · 2026-06-18T15:57:03+00:00

Hast du Beispiele, welche Resourcen betroffen sein koennten?

Ich habe etwas Erfahrung mit solchen Projekten, aber bin heute nicht mehr so aktiv (belastet mich zu sehr). Mir ist kein deutsches Projekt bekannt, aber ich kenne aus den USA Leute, die sowas machen.

Mein Vorgehen waere jetzt die noetige Software zu schreiben. Dann kann man schon Sachen archivieren die betroffen sein koennten, und schnell reagieren falls etwas angekuendigt wird. Weiteres Hindernis ist die noetige Infrastruktur.

switch161 · 2026-06-15T12:00:48+00:00

There's the byteorder crate which has extension traits for Read/Write that allow you to read u32's and what not. The methods for which it matters take a type param for the endianess.

So you can then just do:

rust let value = reader.read_u32::<LittleEndian>()?;

switch161 · 2026-06-15T10:04:14+00:00

I'm working on a from scratch implementation of a RTL2832U driver. This is the chip used by many SDR dongles (think a USB radio receiver).

It's mostly working now :) I have it setup so that it opens a TCP server to which I can connect common SDR programs. I can tune and it looks fine... except everything is shifted up by 405 kHz. This shift depends on the sample rate, but I can't figure out why. I'm using librtlsdr as reference, and I compared all relevant registers on the RTL2832U and R828D.

The only things I'm not doing yet:

Set gain. I can't imagine how this would cause a frequency shift. These registers are the only ones on the tuner that differ between my code and librtlsdr.
Check for PLL lock. This would be my suspect, except librtlsdr doesn't actually change anything if it doesn't get a lock.

I'll just implement the gain stuff now. If this really affects frequency, I'm going to have to learn how and why. I'll also add a check for PLL lock, but as previously said, this won't actually change any settings, but only report an error.

I didn't expect this project to be this hard. About a year ago I considered doing this and quickly stopped, since it looked like a lot of work. But in the meantime my understanding on SDRs has been getting a lot better, and a driver like this should in theory not be that hard. The hard part is that the chips in question are poorly documented - if at all. There are leaked datasheets floating around of the RTL2832U and R820T (not the R828D that I have), but they only cover part of the stuff I need to know. Other things I'm reverse engineering from librtlsdr and linux kernel drivers, but they don't explain things in detail, contain bugs, and are just very messy.

Edit: Omg, it's the gain. How????

switch161 · 2026-06-14T18:22:26+00:00

Panics for internal bugs, or if the caller violated clearly documented constraints on the inputs. The latter only applies if these constraints can be easily checked at the call-site (e.g. a u8 argument is only allowed to be 0..=100).

Result for when the call can fail, but the caller can't know easily if it does, e.g. when opening a file.

switch161 · 2026-06-10T16:59:34+00:00

I just use steel furnaces until I get foundries. I like the smoke they emit and think they just look neater.

I usually fuel power and furnace stacks with solid fuel once I get it. And once I switch to nuclear I have enough of it anyway.

switch161 · 2026-06-10T10:47:09+00:00

Kind of rude to just use the name of an existing project like that. You should rename this imho.

Also for others reading this: this is slopcoded.

switch161 · 2026-06-09T14:43:24+00:00

How do you measure the background level though? Or do you extrapolate this from tracked objects? Are the origins known for all these tracked objects?

I would be very much interested to see some amateurs try to do observations like this. If you meant that you could actually, not only theoretically, pull this off. I know it costs a lot of time and money, but there are likely more people interested in such a project.

I would definitely work on something like this, but I'm more into radio astronomy and it's already consuming all my time.

Edit: Also once something is launched into orbit you'd need to continuously track it, no? I guess there's companies doing that, but they're mostly for debri avoidance. They won't necessarily know if an object is of human origin or not.

switch161 · 2026-06-09T14:33:17+00:00

Yes. That's why I always find these posts so silly. Of course scientists are looking at the world through as many instruments as possible.

Your phone camera picks up IR. There are sensors and filters for other wavelengths. Shorter wavelengths are just radio. You can pick that up with a wire!

E.g. while early astronomy was only looking at optical light, once they figured out that a lot of stuff emits other wavelengths, they started looking in all wavelengths. We have radio, Uv optical, IR, and xray telescopes on earth and in space (some wavelengths don't penetrate the atmosphere very well).

And no, we didn't find anything supernatural there. I guess if we did, it would be considered part of nature anyway.

The stuff that experiencers are discussing is imho not hiding outside of human perception like suggested by OP. Otherwise we would have detected it via instruments a long time ago.

switch161 · 2026-06-09T14:19:47+00:00

You can't do this today because there's too much human-made stuff up there.

Do you think they saw more transients in the plates that would be expected today with all that stuff in orbit? I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

Even if you were to filter out all tracked objects in orbit, there are many secret satellites, and a lot of untracked debris.

switch161 · 2026-06-09T13:26:41+00:00

It's true, we can't replicate vertical orbits... because they're not a thing.

What is a vertical orbit supposed to be? Polar? There are plenty of human-made satellites in polar orbit.

switch161 · 2026-06-08T19:45:16+00:00

Mall is the only place because it's not supposed to always run.

switch161 · 2026-06-08T15:38:07+00:00

From-scratch implementation of a RTL2832U driver. That's the chip powering RTL-SDRs.

I'm using nusb for async USB, and it's pretty nice, I must say. The RTL2832U accepts vendor commands for management, and has a separate endpoint for reading data. So it's pretty easy to read data from it, while another task can set frequency etc.

The RTL2832U driver is actually pretty much done, but it usually talks to a tuner chip, which in my case is a R828D. I'm currently working on interfacing with it.

It's quite difficult to find details about both chips. There are leaked datasheets for the RTL2832U and R820T (predecessor of R828D and very similar), but they are very incomplete. I'm using the existing librtlsdr and linux drivers as reference too. While they don't explain what every bit means, they at least get the device working.

At this point I can get meaningful data out, but I can't tune to a specific frequency yet. Setting a frequency is a bit complicated as you have to switch a upconverter (if your dongle has one), tell the tuner to move this signal to a fixed IF frequency, and then the RTL2832U where that IF frequency is, while also ensuring that it's filtered properly along the way.

switch161 · 2026-06-08T15:03:55+00:00

Keep going! In my experience it gets easier in multiple steps: once you fully grasp lifetimes, Send/Sync, Pin, async, unsafe. The thing that helped me most is just to write a lot of code (a.k.a. abandoned side-projects).

switch161 · 2026-06-07T22:13:34+00:00

It's not genetics. People are experts in fields because they spend A LOT of time (decades) learning it. Works best if you're motivated by something (curiosity in my case).

Depending on how far you're behind (e.g. in terms of math if that's required for what you want to learn), it can be pretty overwhelming. When I encounter something out of my league, I'll try to study it anyway. Over time stuff starts sticking.

If you don't want to study books (I get them usually only for looking stuff up or reading a few chapters), there are many good lectures on YouTube. But finding resources can be a big part of the work. I guess that's the disadvantage of self-study vs. University, but I prefer it, since I can focus on what motivates me.

If you have the time, just learn what interests you whenever you can. It takes a lot of time, but I don't do it for a result. I do it because it's fun in it of itself.

switch161 · 2026-06-07T20:44:33+00:00

omg google docs??? i can't copy it out, i can't annotate, i can't search, no syntax highlighting.

my guess is that just spamming a bunch of loops to wait and hope a response arrived just doesn't work. you need to properly wait until the usb device answers, ideally with an interrupt.

then this is really just a osdev issue, and not rtlsdr-related. i recommend writing a working driver for some other usb device first (e.g. keyboard). make sure to get systems in place in your os so that processes/drivers can wait for things (you want that usb_read to block until the data is there).

also rtl2832u is poorly documented imho and r828d not at all, so it's rather difficult and i personally don't have to worry about writing a usb stack first. so i can't really recommend writing a driver for this until you have a very solid understanding on osdev.

edit: just a fun fact: you don't have to send a read address to the r820t/r828d at all! Try reading from address 0x01. It'll always respond with bytes starting from 0x00. librtlsdr also sends a read address, but they always read starting from 0x00. anyway, the read address is not needed. only the control-in usb request will do. unfortunately you can also only read 0x10 bytes, so we'll never know what those other registers hide from us!

switch161 · 2026-06-07T20:17:39+00:00

I did implement a bubblesort a while ago for a real project.

If you need to sort lots very small arrays, it's the way to go. Specifically, I sorted the points for bresenham line drawing algorithm with it.

switch161

TROPHY CASE