Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Did you take physics in high school (or elsewhere) and learn about half lives? Many of the main ingredients in nuclear weapons all have half lives: tritium, plutonium, etc – and most have fairly short half lives. They need to be continuously produced, enriched, refined, etc. to keep the purity high enough to be detonated. Some of them require breeder reactors and other fun thing.

    Well, okay, U235 has a half-life of 700 million years, but you still need to enrich uranium to increase to proportions of U235, since U238 cannot sustain a chain reaction.

    The original nuclear weapons were U235 weapons. Later bombs added all the harder to make stuff to make them bigger – fusion bombs still usually have a U235 starter to get the reaction going, but rely on things like tritium and plutonium to do the fusion bits. Even the Lithium-6 (which is stable) slowly decays to helium and tritium inside the weapon as neutrons from the other components hit it.

    Anyway, enjoy the Wikipedia rabbit hole.


  • The good news about nukes: they have a shelf life – most soviet-era nukes needed to be replaced every 12 years, as the loss of fissile material to natural radioactive decay would render them dirty bombs after a certain point. Now don’t get me wrong, a dirty bomb still sucks, but it’s no nuke.

    So when a collapsing Russia is hypothetically selling nukes, they’re probably selling old depleted nukes or nearly expired nukes. To a terrorist it is almost the same thing, but to nation stations looking at MAD, it really isn’t.




  • Not in favour of the individual suffering here, but illegal mining is about the worst thing that can happen anywhere.

    Furthermore, in most jurisdictions where illegal mining happens, you get these gang run pyramid scheme shenanigans going on where the miners are very nearly enslaved to their handlers. Shutting them down can only be a good thing!

    On the larger scale: Environment and safety regulations exist for a reason.

    That said, the suckers in the mine starving themselves to avoid arrest might not see it that way.


  • Troy@lemmy.catoComic Strips@lemmy.worldBoomers
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    23 hours ago

    You’re correct. They are the same. Loan may also apply.

    However, depending on where you are, there are regional differences in where the terms get used. Locally, you rent an apartment but lease a warehouse (why?). Also, if you rent an apartment and turn over your lease agreement to another person, you are sub-letting the apartment. And “let” also means lease in this context. Err rent. Fuck, I’ve gone cross-eyed



  • I love hitting these things in the real world. Not the big, but the comment. You just know someone spent a fortune in time and company resources to never solve the problem and their frustration level was ragequit. But then something stupid like adding

    while (0){};

    Suddenly made it work and they were like, fuckit.

    Usually it’s a bug somewhere in a compiler trying to over optimize or something and putting the line in there caused the optimization not to happen or something. Black magic.

    The downside is that the compiler bug probably gets fixed, and then decades later the comment and line are still there…







  • Duck typing is the best if fully embraced. But it also means you have to worry just a little bit about clean failures once the project grows a little. I like this better than type checking relentlessly.

    It also means that your test suite or doctests or whatever should throw some unexpected types around now and again to check how it handles ducks and chickens and such :)