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If your close neighbours have surge protectors then you benefit little from installing your own.

Another perspective: we should install whole house surge protectors if we can afford them, not only for ourselves, but to help our neighbors - even if in reality the help is minimal and they need their own as well. In the best case scenario, if everybody in a neighborhood has them, each individual house will be more resistant to surges than if they were the only house with one (five houses with surge protectors nearby is a lot better than one) - everybody wins.

Why? If the voltage spikes on the grid (that's what I understand a power surge to mean), wouldn't even more of it end up in your house (that is: the grid voltage spike even higher) if the neighbors have equipment that doesn't let their devices consume some of that energy?

Edit: wait, maybe I figured it out: those devices must be consuming the excess rather than blocking it. Is that it?


Yes, energy dissipates. Although one still needs to look out for the distance from the neighbours as your ground can be different from your neighbours ground potential.

You might as well phrase that as "If your close neighbours have gotten vaccines then you benefit little from getting your own."

We live in a society. Everybody chips in. And each surge protector adds to the robustness of the grid.


Yes, that puts it down perfectly. That’s why some don’t ever see the benefit of installing their surge protector whereas others install one way too small for their situation and find them useless anyway.

Eh. Most nice power strips are also surge protectors.

> Another reason ignoring the literature can be helpful is that sometimes a bunch of work tries to solve some problem, and so everyone assumes it must be hard---just because no one has solved it yet, even though no one has really tried a fundamentally different approach

How does one approach collaborators in this situation? Like, hey, I have this idea that solves the problem you have been trying to solve in a fundamentally different way that invalidates all the legacy approaches you have invested in, BTW. My emails that follow this spirit tend to get ghosted.


Sometimes you don't need a collaborator if you have the idea. If the other party is not at all working on the angle that you're interested in, it's probably not the correct collaboration to ask to.

Also, a collaborator is usually not a stranger over the internet, it's often someone who you know and you already worked with, so it is not that ackward to expose a new idea and propose to work together.

It takes time and social skills to make long lasting collaborations, the two parties must trust each other in order to collaborate. In this context, exchanging ideas is not really an issue.


I felt this was why math textbooks pose open problems without mentioning them as such. I feel Karatsuba for example was able to come up with his multiplication scheme because he wasn't aware a mathematician had written a false result proving impossibility of faster than quadratic time multiplication.

Or more concretely that famous story where a student had solved certain open problems in statistics thinking they were homework problems.


This is unlikelly because Iranian regime is going to execute false flag operations against their people to steer public opinion in their favour.


Not if the US kills the whole regime. They certainly have the firepower. And Israel has the intelligence.


As long as someone else does the porting and maintains the compatability between both subecosystems of thoose who prefer using Jax and thoose who prefer depending on the NumPy. Also not having zero overhead structs that one can in an array handicaps types of performance codes one can write.


A significant obstacle to adoption is that cryptographic research aims for a perfect system that overshadows simpler, less private approaches. For instance, it does not seem that one should really need unlinkability across sessions. If that's the case, a simple range proof for a commitment encoding the birth year is sufficient to prove eligibility for age, where the commitment is static and signed by a trusted third party to actually encode the correct year.


I agree. I've been researching a lot of this tech lately as a part of a C2PA / content authenticity project and it's clear that the math are outrunning practicality in a lot of cases.

As it is we're seeing companies capture IDs and face scans and it's incredibly invasive relative to the need - "prove your birth year is in range". Getting hung up on unlinkable sessions is missing the forest for the trees.

At this point I think the challenge has less to do with the crypto primitives and more to do with building infrastructure that hides 100% of the complexity of identity validation from users. My state already has a gov't ID that can be added to an apple wallet. Extending that to support proofs about identity without requiring users to unmask huge amounts of personal information would be valuable in its own right.


> It took me days to get that build to work; doing this compilation once in CI so you don't have to do it on every machine is trickier than it sounds in Julia

You may be interested in looking into AppBundler. Apart from the full application packaging it also offers ability to make Julia image bundles. While offering sysimage compilation option it also enables to bundle an application via compiled pkgimages which requires less RAM and is much faster to compile.


Such tedious derivations used to be a work of poor PhD students who were instrumentalized for such tasks. I envy those who do PhDs in theoretical physics in the age of AI, people can learn so much about their field quicker via chat than reading obstructing papers.


In essence liquid democracy makes votes a transferable currency bringing it fairly close to what money already is. It would be really hard to prevent existence of an exchange rate between money and vote transfer making that a capitalist dream (until markets themselves gets monopolized).


This is the best way to look on this. Furthermore these surveys are susceptible to bias introduced by the varying degrees of participant engagement. One application I could see for such tools is distill some of participant generated proposals that could be rectified in a further surveys or referenda.


Tangentially, does anyone use a stamping device to put dates in their notebook? I am looking for something that sets the date and, preferably, the time automatically so that I have less friction keeping my notebook timestamped.


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