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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • It’s a bit disheartening that VR is still not a good experience on Linux. I was wrestling with my Vive several years ago now, but I just got sick of dealing with it (literally and figuratively) due to the jitter, randomly breaking features (even mid-session), crashes, and other random things. It was a coin toss every time whether it was going to even launch at all.

    It just wasn’t worth it, so it has been collecting dust now for a few years. Was hoping that one day I’d be able to just plug it in and have an ok time.


  • I don’t remember encountering the particular bug they’re describing. I was hoping it was about the behaviour of drag-and-dropping something into the browser, such as with those “drop a file here to upload”. I am often simply unable to make that work because instead of the thing being dropped into the webpage’s element, it opens the file in the browser instead, which is not really something I ever want to do.


  • As I understand it, they are making measurements of an otherwise single isolated particle as it moves about in a controlled space, and the measurements confirm (yet again) that the measurement outcomes match the probabilities given by the Schrödinger equation, which means that it interferes with itself.

    The language used may lead some to think that we now have images showing a wave-like particle, but again, that’s not something that can ever happen. What we have are boring old images of a single classical-looking particle, but the patterns they display tells us that quantum mechanics is very much at play in between the takes.


  • tl;dr:

    Peter Schauss at the University of Virginia says the wave packet is such a well-understood component of quantum theory that the findings of the new experiment are not surprising – but they do show that the researchers had a high degree of control over the processes used to cool and then precisely image the atoms.

    I’m not entirely sure what they mean by having images of their waviness, because that is not how it works. You can not measure a quantum wave, because it isn’t a “particle” wave but a wave-like distribution of mutually exclusive measurement outcomes. Taking a picture is the same as entangling yourself, which embeds you in the quantum wave function such that it describes all possible combinations of you ending up with every possible outcome.








  • Just want to add that I don’t think it’s a technological plateau. I think it’s capitalism producing shiny and “upgraded” versions of things that are easy to sell. Things that enable accessible and rapid consumption. High refresh rate, vertical high-resolution screens for endless scrolling in apps optimised for ads-scrolled-past-per-second. E-ink devices only good enough that you can clearly see the ads on them as you read your books. Things are just not made for humans. They’re made for corporations to extract value out of humans.