HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

emergentstate

no profile record

comments

emergentstate
·vor 4 Jahren·discuss
Friends I’ve spoken to who live in Ukraine say the same thing, for what it’s worth. There seems to be a major disconnect between the recent alarm in the US/UK media and the actual residents of the place in question. Either these people are awfully naive or they recognize bluster when they see it.
emergentstate
·vor 4 Jahren·discuss
Sure, but satellites do cluster in useful orbits — it’s not some uniform distribution over the space. That significantly increases the chance of direct collision, which has already managed to occur a few times, despite back-of-the-envelope low odds.

And the risk of a runaway effect is fairly unique to the orbital setting. If cars magically kept careening down the highway after a collision, constantly tumbling and shedding parts and disintegrating without losing any kinetic energy, we probably couldn’t tolerate the current density of vehicles on roads.
emergentstate
·vor 4 Jahren·discuss
I have pretty mixed feelings about FreeCAD, having used it for 100+ hours across a few different projects.

It’s wonderful to have a open-source alternative to the expensive CAD software that muscled its way into a near monopoly in academia/industry, but it suffers from some really inexcusable design problems, on a fundamental level. As it is, I don’t think it’s really usable as a serious tool for creating complex assemblies.

I’d be curious if anyone here has managed to use it effectively for a large project (something real-world, not just showcasing FreeCAD).
emergentstate
·vor 4 Jahren·discuss
But the anecdote you're relating doesn't really say anything about the ability of a normal distribution to describe a population. It's just a natural consequence of having a high-dimensional multivariate distribution without accounting for correlation or covariance, along with a low sample size. If you have 4,063 pilots and you take the middle 30% of ten (assumed independent) factors, you're looking at 0.3^10 * 4,063 = 0.02 people who actually fall into that bin, on average -- it's more a dimensions game than anything profound.

That's not to refute the anecdote's takeaway, but the same reasoning doesn't apply to a unidimensional unimodal distribution.