talklittle's recent activity

  1. Comment on 2025 Nobel Prize – This year's Nobel Prize announcements will take place between 6th - 13th October 2025 in ~science

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    [Offtopic] Oops didn't see you were already posting the individual prizes in the comments here. Oh well, I thought the quantum one was interesting so doesn't hurt to have as a top-level topic IMO.

    [Offtopic] Oops didn't see you were already posting the individual prizes in the comments here. Oh well, I thought the quantum one was interesting so doesn't hurt to have as a top-level topic IMO.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on 2025 Physics Nobel awarded to three scientists for work on quantum computing (in the 1980s) in ~science

    talklittle
    Link
    The timing makes sense given how quantum computing is getting more attention than ever. Kind of funny the committee chose work from 40 years ago in spite of all the supposed progress being made...

    The timing makes sense given how quantum computing is getting more attention than ever. Kind of funny the committee chose work from 40 years ago in spite of all the supposed progress being made today. Maybe a lot of today's quantum research is difficult to objectively validate and therefore controversial?

    "To put it mildly, it was a surprise of my life," said Professor John Clarke, who was born in Cambridge, UK and now works at the University of California in Berkeley.

    Michel H. Devoret was born in Paris, France and is a professor at Yale University while John M. Martinis is a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara.

    [...] The Nobel committee recognised breakthrough work performed by the three men in a series of experiments in the 1980s on electrical circuits.

    In the words of the committee, "the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit".

    5 votes

  4. Comment on Humble Choice - October 2025 in ~games

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    Oh boy. Didn't realize that extra free time would lead to one-man plays being written. Now I'm having some regrets about the extension. Should have created it a long time ago!

    Oh boy. Didn't realize that extra free time would lead to one-man plays being written. Now I'm having some regrets about the extension.

    Should have created it a long time ago!
    10 votes

  5. Comment on Harvard physicists working to develop game-changing tech demonstrate 3,000 quantum-bit system capable of continuous operation in ~science

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    Answering myself: After thinking and rereading, I realized this stability presented in this article is separate from the circuit design. There's not any claimed breakthrough in number of qubits or...

    Answering myself: After thinking and rereading, I realized this stability presented in this article is separate from the circuit design. There's not any claimed breakthrough in number of qubits or the circuit size. The decay is happening in the circuit itself due to the materials and tiny nanoscale environment it's dealing with. So temporally a quantum circuit will naturally decay, and these researchers found a way to stabilize that temporal decay by replacing the atoms leaving the system.

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Harvard physicists working to develop game-changing tech demonstrate 3,000 quantum-bit system capable of continuous operation in ~science

    talklittle
    Link
    I'm having trouble finding it but there was an interesting graphic, maybe on Mastodon or Bluesky, illustrating how adding one logic gate to a quantum circuit could increase the required components...

    I'm having trouble finding it but there was an interesting graphic, maybe on Mastodon or Bluesky, illustrating how adding one logic gate to a quantum circuit could increase the required components by an order of magnitude? Very fuzzy but it was something like: 5 logic gates requires around 20 fundamental gates, and 6 logic gates requires hundreds of fundamental gates. Does anyone know the graphic I'm talking about?

    Is that quantity at all related to the 3000 qubits talked about here? Implying that going from 300 qubits to 3000 qubits allows one additional logic calculation added to a circuit?

    Ah, I see this article that explains it better: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/microsoft-new-quantum-chip-explained

    One inherent issue is that qubits are notoriously error-prone; building error-corrected systems typically requires a massive overhead of additional qubits to stabilize just a few “logical qubits” that do the calculations.

    (Referring to Microsoft's "Majorana 1" quantum chip that they announced earlier this year, claiming it will lead to a million qubits on a single chip.)

    The major problem with the terminology is that "qubit" is so overloaded. Can't tell at a glance if the qubits are doing actual logical work, or if they are helpers there to stabilize the logic qubits. Even with these systems that introduce stability like in the posted article, it's unclear to me if that means fewer qubits are needed on a circuit to do the same amount of work.

    6 votes

  7. Open-source robotics simulations on Godot and Unreal Engine, and ROS2

    ~comp Text 530 words
    I'm info dumping some links about open-source robotics. The rabbit hole runs deep and this barely scratches the surface. Disclaimer: I haven't tried any of these yet. Based on a cursory search and...

    I'm info dumping some links about open-source robotics. The rabbit hole runs deep and this barely scratches the surface.

    Disclaimer: I haven't tried any of these yet. Based on a cursory search and following links from the great Open-source robotics Wikipedia page.

    Robotics simulation on Godot

    Robotic car simulation on Unreal Engine and Unity

    • https://github.com/carla-simulator/carla - "CARLA is an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research." They mostly target Unreal Engine. Regularly updated and popular with 13k stars on GitHub.

    • https://github.com/microsoft/AirSim - Microsoft and IAMAI collaborated (plus DARPA funding?) to create an open source simulation platform for both flying drones and autonomous cars. Targets Unreal Engine and experimentally Unity also. Soon being sunset and replaced with a new project confusingly named "Project AirSim."

    • https://github.com/iamaisim/ProjectAirSim - The successor to AirSim. The GitHub shows it's only at version 0.1.1 though.

    Robot Operating System (ROS2)

    How to get started?

    That's a lot of links. I'd first figure out what I want to do. Humanoid robots seem popular lately—like the Berkeley 3d printed robot—so it'd be interesting to start there, although it doesn't map cleanly onto the projects I linked. So maybe if I imagined a robot with a human torso and arms, but with wheels and car-like locomotion. Then I could use a combination of the car simulators and probably ROS2 to deal with the upper body components? Or maybe there is another solution for the torso and arms that is a more direct fit than ROS2? Maybe iRobot/Roomba has a better solution for the car-like locomotion at this small scale?

    Anyone used these before and have a story to share? Anyone curious to try one out and report back? I plan to, but no idea on my schedule.

    11 votes

  8. Comment on Berkeley engineers develop customizable, 3D-printed robot for tech newbies in ~tech

    talklittle
    Link
    This looks awesome. What could a 1-meter-tall robot be used for? The article mentions it can walk and grasp objects including a Rubik's cube. Risk of theft/vandalism aside, could this feasibly...

    This looks awesome. What could a 1-meter-tall robot be used for? The article mentions it can walk and grasp objects including a Rubik's cube.

    Risk of theft/vandalism aside, could this feasibly walk down a city sidewalk to the corner store and buy a sandwich? How about staying home, boiling water and cooking instant noodles, and serving it in a bowl? Cracking an egg without leaving any shell in it?

    1 vote

  9. Comment on Horror games to play during October in ~games

    talklittle
    (edited )
    Link
    Apparently SOMA got a patch last week on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/282140/view/542243094205040852?l=english Game: - Fixed faulty spam filters on Simon’s PC Users may still...

    Apparently SOMA got a patch last week on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/282140/view/542243094205040852?l=english

    Game:
- Fixed faulty spam filters on Simon’s PC

Users may still receive suspicious correspondence due to treemail 0.1 filtering process issues.

Misc:
- Bug Fixes

▔░▕▄ ▋▕▛▕░▜ ▀▚▀█//////////▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▒▒▒▒▒▒

▀ ▒█▍▂▄░▄ ▔▇▀▍▊ ▜▎ ▕ ▅░▎ ▌ ▅░█▂▔█▎ ▍▀▋ ▆▀▌▌▌▄▄▄▄▄▒▒▒/////▒▒▒▒▒

    Unfortunately doesn't look like it's on sale though: https://isthereanydeal.com/game/soma/info/
    [Edit: Now on sale for $2.99 until October 6.]

    It was also released on Switch this July.

    12 votes

  10. Looking forward to Apple Container/Containerization tool in macOS 26, an alternative to Docker

    ~comp Text 165 words
    Haven't been following the macOS updates closely but a big feature I'm looking forward to in macOS 26 is Apple's container solution as an alternative to Docker. The "container" command line tool:...

    Haven't been following the macOS updates closely but a big feature I'm looking forward to in macOS 26 is Apple's container solution as an alternative to Docker.

    The "container" command line tool: https://github.com/apple/container

    The underlying Containerization package: https://github.com/apple/containerization

    The main improvement over Docker on Mac is that it uses separate lightweight VMs per container, instead of one shared Linux VM hosting all containers. This means the RAM allocation can be dynamic instead of the user having to decide how many total GB to allocate for the Docker VM. So if I'm running a lot of containers I expect it to work without manually changing settings, and if I'm running only a single container then I expect it won't waste resources with allocated-but-unused RAM.

    Currently these repos are on version 0.4.1 and 0.8.1 respectively, which tells me they're not ready yet. Hoping they're ready around the time macOS 26 releases to GA.

    29 votes

  11. Comment on KeenWrite 3.6.3 in ~comp

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    I reached out to someone I know who is very well versed in academic research and publishing papers. Hope this doesn't sound too discouraging but this is what they had to say. When it comes to...

    I reached out to someone I know who is very well versed in academic research and publishing papers. Hope this doesn't sound too discouraging but this is what they had to say.

    When it comes to technical papers, in this person's opinion, LaTeX still dominates and there's not really a replacement. They pointed out that convenience tools around LaTeX are immensely popular, including things like the online LaTeX editor Overleaf.

    Apparently Markdown is considered niche and for technical users, who are technical enough to go ahead and learn LaTeX anyway.

    Non-technical users tend to go with the traditional Word doc or Google doc.

    Hope that is helpful info, even if it's not the encouragement that I'd hoped to provide. At least among technical users there might be room for a comfortable niche for a Markdown-based tool.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Three Cheers for Tildes: App updates and feedback (April 2025) — Version 1.4 adds a text size setting in ~tildes

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    Sorry for the inconvenience. I investigated more and there is a bug affecting Android 11 and earlier, when voting. I'm pushing out a fixed version 1.4.5. It's apparently been broken since version...

    Sorry for the inconvenience. I investigated more and there is a bug affecting Android 11 and earlier, when voting. I'm pushing out a fixed version 1.4.5. It's apparently been broken since version 1.3 released in February.

    4 votes

  13. Comment on Three Cheers for Tildes: App updates and feedback (April 2025) — Version 1.4 adds a text size setting in ~tildes

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    Unfortunately I have to ask that you re-login fully. That means deleting the account from the System Settings under Accounts, then going back to the app and logging in. When the login session...

    Unfortunately I have to ask that you re-login fully. That means deleting the account from the System Settings under Accounts, then going back to the app and logging in.

    When the login session expires, there are cases where the app cannot automatically refresh it, and the app doesn't handle it well. Targeting the next version after 1.4.4 I've added some additional checks, but still will require the user to login again.

    In the future, depending on how the Tildes API ends up being implemented—which there has been some movement on recently, largely thanks to contributions from @polle—there might be more elegant solutions.

    4 votes

  14. Comment on Three Cheers for Tildes: App updates and feedback (April 2025) — Version 1.4 adds a text size setting in ~tildes

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    Thanks for reporting. I've pushed out a fix version 1.4.4 which may take a day to get through Play Store review. (Apparently YouTube is getting stricter about API clients setting the HTTP Referer....

    Thanks for reporting. I've pushed out a fix version 1.4.4 which may take a day to get through Play Store review. (Apparently YouTube is getting stricter about API clients setting the HTTP Referer. Many apps are affected this past week.)

    7 votes

  15. Comment on AI content warning label in ~creative

    talklittle
    Link
    The best proof I've seen is when artists have a video/stream documenting their work process so the audience can watch the artwork evolve. Digital artists sometimes provide (often for sale) their...

    The best proof I've seen is when artists have a video/stream documenting their work process so the audience can watch the artwork evolve. Digital artists sometimes provide (often for sale) their work assets like layered Photoshop files, which as I understand it, is difficult for AI to produce, but I'm not sure if that's still true.

    The following is tangential as it's a physical rather than a digital watermark: There is some research on light-based watermarks that can be applied in real life settings while recording a video, as one measure to protect against deepfakes. The light signatures are supposedly difficult to reproduce with generative AI available today. So if someone is recording a video on a camera they could potentially use some kind of physical watermark like that.

    3 votes

  16. Comment on Waymo has received their permit to operate at San Francisco International Airport in ~transport

    talklittle
    Link
    Following their recent approval at San Jose airport.

    Following their recent approval at San Jose airport.

    We’ll partner with SFO to prepare our operations at the airport in phases, beginning with employee testing soon ahead of welcoming Bay Area riders. Pickups and dropoffs will initially start at SFO’s Kiss & Fly area – a short AirTrain ride from the terminals – with the intention to explore other locations at the airport in the future.

    [...] With years of experience serving riders at Phoenix Sky Harbor (PHX) and operations beginning soon at San Jose Mineta International Airport (SJC), we’re accelerating our efforts to serve more airports in more cities as we scale.

    7 votes

  18. Comment on Experiences with FarmBot or similar gardening robots? in ~tech

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    Really fascinating stuff! Thanks a lot for sharing. I'm clearly in way over my head but it's cool to read about. It sounds like farms and warehouses have things in common, as well as vast...

    Really fascinating stuff! Thanks a lot for sharing. I'm clearly in way over my head but it's cool to read about. It sounds like farms and warehouses have things in common, as well as vast differences. In common are that automation is most effective and foolproof when it comes to controlling variables of an enclosed space. And manned machinery is widely deployed to great effect. Difference is the warehouse is a cleanroom, vastly different from the outdoor environment, so mobile robots can actually work well in warehouses. Whereas locomotion is the achilles heel of the farm robot, directly contributing to breakdowns and jams.

    4 votes

  19. Experiences with FarmBot or similar gardening robots?

    ~tech Ask
    This is just a random thought I had. I don't do gardening currently and not looking for advice per se. Just thinking about how the physical world feels far behind in terms of automation compared...

    This is just a random thought I had. I don't do gardening currently and not looking for advice per se. Just thinking about how the physical world feels far behind in terms of automation compared to the digital world, and wondering what kind of possibilities are out there. I was wondering how close we are to having consumer-form-factor robots to help with various things, and growing food is a natural starting place.

    I was imagining what kind of robots are needed to deal with a garden—assuming a house with a plot of land suitable for a large garden—with tasks like:

    • Fetching water, either from plumbed water or a natural water source
    • Getting seeds from somewhere. Maybe online shopping and then the robot knowing how to open the box. (Probably not by identifying existing plants and picking/stealing them.)
    • Planting the seeds in the right place
    • Watering the plants regularly
    • Maintaining temperature and sun exposure
    • Digging up the plant and bringing it indoors so I can inspect or smell it without having to go outside. Then replanting it safely.
    • Determining when food is ripe, picking it, reusing the seeds
    • Washing and cooking it

    It feels like a lot of these are already available off-the-shelf today. I searched and there is a project which I hadn't heard of before called FarmBot which seems neat and geared toward enthusiasts ("prosumers") and education, and includes open source hardware and software. To be clear I'm not affiliated with them in any way.

    FarmBot probably handles a lot of the important parts of gardening, but I'm sure it doesn't handle everything on my list. How far are we from a 100% automated experience?

    Other than that there was some recent marketing around cheap robots like LeRobot by HuggingFace (the company where basically all the open-weight AI models are hosted). It has nothing to do with farming except that they have one shaped like a hand, so it could probably be programmed to grasp and move things around.

    Sorry for the rambling post. Really curious to hear if anyone else has gone into robotics and interested in hearing your experiences and also other resources on what state-of-the-art looks like. Also I bet a lot of this is solved in proprietary solutions and by Big Agriculture, but right now I'm more curious on the consumer-grade level.

    12 votes