• 8 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Not even playing lip service to supporting the open source stuff they built upon. They’ve also recently been trying to lockdown and paywall (or just drop) features. Including legal action against people trying to undo the damage.

    The general sniff test is they are trying to lock people in before milking them for all they can.




  • QM isn’t insane to understand. It’s main issue is that it doesn’t map well/at all to our normal experience. You need to dive into the maths, and accept what falls out.

    The main deeper level here is how the blurring happens. The photons explore all possible paths. The result is an integral of them all. In general, vast areas cancel out, leaving classical (ish) behaviour. This makes sense mathematically, but has no classical analogy to compare to.


  • It’s quantum mechanical, so the maths gets complex. It can be simplified in a useful way however.

    Basically, atoms can absorb photons and then re-emit them. You can think of the photon flying past at C, but getting absorbed and emitted along the way, adding delays. In QM however, neat particles don’t exist, it deals with quantised, probabilistic waves. The above effect gets blurred over the waveform. No one atom definitely absorbs it or doesn’t, it gets blurred together into a general slowing of the wavefront.







  • Imagine you have a paper balloon setup. It randomly takes hits from a high powered rifle. In theory, you could harvest the energy. However, it’s delivered in such powerful, random bursts that capturing it is difficult.

    Gamma rays punch straight through the structure of the craft. The actual energy is small (around 1/1,000,000 of a joule), but it’s so focused that it damages anything it hits. If it hits the atoms in a transistor, that transistor gets ripped up at an atomic level.