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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Seeming useless math can be applied if you look for opportunities.

    When I attended military training for sergeant rank, there was a land navigation part. Plot the grid coordinates on a map, use a protractor to figure out the angles, which you then aim the compass towards and count paces to find the points out in the woods. I realized these made triangles and said fuck a protractor. I used trigonometry instead. Figured out the lengths of the sides of the triangles from the grid coordinates, then used those lengths and tangent to figure out the compass angle and distance. The instructors had no clue what I was doing. Took first place in that course because the other person I was tied with only found 3 out of 4 points in his two tries at landnav.

    The best math skill for everyday life has to be dimensional analysis, though. Want to figure out how expensive it is to drive per hour? Well, you’ve got miles/hour, dollars/gallon, and miles/gallon. This can get you to dollars/hour by just canceling out the units. (I don’t have a paper to write things down but I think this is correct)

    dollars/gallon X gallons/mile X miles/hour = dollars/hour

    You can use dimensional analysis to convert all sorts of things. It’s awesome.

    Yeah I know it’s the shitpost community but math is pretty cool.


  • Did you want to add anything to the discussion or just make a snarky comment? I looked through the paper linked in the article and didn’t see a capacity listed.

    Our approach directs an alternative Li2S deposition pathway to the commonly reported lateral growth and 3D thickening growth mode, ameliorating the electrode passivation. Therefore, a Li–S cell capable of charging/discharging at 5C (12 min) while maintaining excellent cycling stability (82% capacity retention) for 1000 cycles is demonstrated. Even under high S loading (8.3 mg cm–2) and low electrolyte/sulfur ratio (3.8 mL mg–1), the sulfur cathode still delivers a high areal capacity of >7 mAh cm–2 for 80 cycles.

    A 5C charging rate is great, but it’s pretty useless if the battery is too small to be practical.





  • I think the Chinese room argument published in 1980 gives a pretty convincing reason why the Turing test doesn’t demonstrate intelligence.

    The thought experiment starts by placing a computer that can perfectly converse in Chinese in one room, and a human that only knows English in another, with a door separating them. Chinese characters are written and placed on a piece of paper underneath the door, and the computer can reply fluently, slipping the reply underneath the door. The human is then given English instructions which replicate the instructions and function of the computer program to converse in Chinese. The human follows the instructions and the two rooms can perfectly communicate in Chinese, but the human still does not actually understand the characters, merely following instructions to converse. Searle states that both the computer and human are doing identical tasks, following instructions without truly understanding or “thinking”.

    Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and the human in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing behavior that makes them appear to understand. However, the human would not be able to understand the conversation. Therefore, he argues, it follows that the computer would not be able to understand the conversation either.