News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

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Re:Kagi: Announcing The Assistant on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:41PM (#41449833)
For users of both, how does this compare to searchGPT, in terms of results quality and quantity?
Re:Reflect Orbital – Sunlight After Dark on Sunday August 25, 2024 @06:33AM (#41346216)
Is it snake oil? The amount of power that would be delivered to the ground seems quite minuscule based on that small orbital mirror size.

In fact it should be over three orders of magnitude lower than that of normal sunlight on the solar panel, which is roughly 1000 W per square meter.

Here are the calculations:

---

Assumptions:

Solar constant: 1366 W/m²

Mirror area: 100 m² (10 m x 10 m)

Reflectivity of aluminized Mylar: 90%

Atmospheric attenuation: 70% of reflected sunlight reaches Earth’s surface

Spot diameter on Earth: 500 meters

Spot area on Earth: π × (250 m)² ≈ 196,350 m²

Calculation:

Total incident power = 1366 W/m² × 100 m² = 136,600 W

Reflected power (after reflectivity) = 136,600 W × 0.90 = 122,940 W

Power reaching Earth’s surface (after atmospheric attenuation) = 122,940 W × 0.70 = 86,058 W

Power per square meter actually delivered at Earth’s surface = 86,058 W ÷ 196,350 m² ≈ 0.438 W/m²

Re:Prevention of HIV on Saturday August 17, 2024 @12:08PM (#41275511)
From what I read, it interferes with capsid formation. Since HIV is a retrovirus, by the time capsid formation is happening it has already integrated itself with the host cell’s DNA.

That implies that as long as the drug is present, the virus won’t be able to replicate, however as soon as the drug is no longer present the virus will start replicating. Because the cell has been infected.

Re:LoFone is the antidote to smartphone addiction on Saturday August 17, 2024 @12:05PM (#41275490)
Since it has the eink it could also be a book reader. I know that once too many things are added it takes away from the low aspect, but that seems like a good one to me.
Re:Prevention of HIV on Wednesday August 07, 2024 @08:14PM (#41186842)
No problem with this is it it does not interfere with infection. Only with replication. So it will not stop people from becoming infected.
Re:The Autopilot Data That Reveals Why Teslas Crash on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @03:42PM (#41113356)
I really believe that reliable and safe autonomous driving requires LIDAR or something else that gives direct distance readouts In all lighting conditions.
I bought Affinity and have tried to use it but really don’t find it anything like equivalent to the Adobe products unfortunately.

For color correction of photographs, PhotoPea does a much better job than Affinity I feel.

After wasting 15 or 30 minutes trying to get Affinity to work for a photo touchup and color correction, I give up and use PhotoPea.

The drug, Lenacapavir, is a capsid inhibitor. That means it prevents HIV virus from assembling into infectious particles by interfering with the production of the capsid and packaging of viral RNA into it.

This also means that it actually does not stop infection. Cells still get infected, but this drug prevents more virus from being produced.

My question is, since there are infected cells in these individuals, if they stop taking the drug aren’t they likely to become immediately highly infected, because the drug only interferes with viral replication while it is present in the body? Once infected, a cell is permanently infected.

I think this should be the case, unless infected cells are somehow killed off through some other mechanism: maybe they get lysed through an accumulation of partially formed capsids?

Seems important to know anyway

Re:Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed on Monday February 17, 2020 @12:31AM (#22345807)
Alien Blue works better than Apollo in reader mode in several very significant ways:

- In AB dark mode there is no white flash! The screen stays black while the page is loading. In Apollo the screen goes white until the page is finished loading.

- In AB the reader mode forces all sites into reader / minimal HTML mode whether or not the website wants to allow reader mode

- In AB the reader mode seems to get more images and other content which is left out of reader mode by websites. It also seems to be less confused by some websites that display something other than the main content when reader mode is selected.

Re:The Barlow Knife on Saturday April 07, 2018 @02:13AM (#16779613)
I met Barlow in 1995 in Cannes at the digital conference (the name of which I forget) that was held there, where I was trying to get international distribution for a product I'd created. We had dinner together at a funky restaurant up the hill which might have been called the Flying Saucer.

We'd met at a cocktail party earlier that day while I was arguing with Nicolas Negroponte after a talk he'd given where he had claimed that the internet would automatically route around any barrier. I was telling him that the Chinese were bound to put in border routers or firewalls blocking their citizens from accessing content they didn't want them to see.

Barlow chimed in and said that I was right and that we had to stop that from happening everywhere. Negroponte didn't want to hear it.

Now it turns out we were both right: the Chinese and others try to block data with varying success and the Internet still to some extent routes around it. I wish there was less of the former and more of the latter.