fyi one of better methods that american cops use to detect meth labs is to just wait for them to catch fire. whether it is a statement on how hard they drop the ball or on safety mindset of cartel chemists i'll leave that up to you
considering practicality of their actions, groundedness of their beliefs, state of their old boat, cleanliness of their rolling frat house trailer park "stealth" rvs, and from what i can tell zero engineering or trade background whatsoever, i see no reason to doubt that they could make a 400L, stainless steel container that has to hold 200L+ of corrosive liquid at 160C, perhaps 10atm, of which 7 atm only is steam, and scrubber to take care of ammonia. they are so definitely not paranoid that if they went out to source reagents, there's no way that they possibly could be confused for methheads on a shopping spree. maybe even they could run it on solar panels
as a rule of thumb, everything else equal, every increase in temperature 10C reaction rates go up 2x or 3x, so it would be anywhere between 250x and 6500x longer. (4 months to 10 years??) but everything else really doesn't stay equal here, because there are things like lower solubility of something that now coats something else and prevents reaction, fat melting, proteins denaturing thermally, lack of stirring from convection and boiling,
if this is peak rationalist gunsmithing, i wonder how their peak chemical engineering looks like
the body is placed in a pressure vessel which is then filled with a mixture of water and potassium hydroxide, and heated to a temperature of around 160 °C (320 °F) at an elevated pressure which precludes boiling.
Also, lower temperatures (98 °C (208 °F)) and pressures may be used such that the process takes a leisurely 14 to 16 hours.
heavy insistence on this mechanism was how smallest (liberatian-ish) party of last coalition iirc limited defense spending including military aid to Ukraine. in last elections they fell under electoral threshold and have no seats in bundestag at all, rip bozo, you won't be missed
You can do RC4 on pen and paper, more precisely 256 pieces of paper. There's also a variant of this cipher that uses deck of cards instead, RC4-52. There's also another stream cipher that uses deck of cards to store state and it's called Pontifex/Solitaire. Both have some weaknesses
VIC has way too short key for modern uses, but maybe there's a way to strenghten it
On related note, i guess that it would be possible to implement modern stream cipher with NLFSR in electromechanical machine, no silicon needed. WW2 era cryptography like this (enigma, M209 etc) were in a way stream ciphers and these require some of least hardware. Key storage and scheduling becomes bigger problem
you don't see BNC as often because it's more expensive, bulkier, requires different crimping tool and has a separate soldered pin. but if you need to connect and disconnect things often and quickly, then it's a good connector. i bet you've seen (RP-)SMA a lot instead, but this one is also more expensive than F, has separate pin and is too small to easily make a connector for common 75 ohm cables. reducing diameter would mean higher loss
i keep hearing that F stands for Flimsy. no idea where that came from, unless something is seriously wrong with crimping technique. i guess there's a tradeoff between CCS or copper cable with durability of pin/center conductor vs bending radius, and some people don't like how it turns out, while ignoring that it's cheap and not really designed for multiple disconnections
but yeah, as long as everything is matched good-enough then it's a cheap way to connect low loss, cheap cable (75 ohm only. otherwise i'm in the N/SMA/BNC camp, UHF connectors are unreasonably obsolete)
The context of the whole thread, though, was end-user, repeated, frequent connections for people who have to be reminded by a manual that the thing needs to be plugged in. Coax is horrible for that.
power plug with 3 wires or 5 wires (3-phase) could be made safe-ish if there was a button at the very end that connected to a relay or something. but plug like this would be comically long for any practical power
i don't think you're supposed to hotplug soldering iron tip. besides it's a simple thing, isn't that just two resistors - one for heating element and another for measuring temperature? hard to break that. not sure about how ipod shuffle worked or what precautions were needed. also today USB can deliver power at higher voltages than it used to
There are two immediate problems with round USB. First one is that audio jack carries no power and it's generally rather harmless for finals or microphone to have some contacts shorted or crossed for time when plug is inserted. USB, let's even day just 4-pin, carries power and i'm not sure how well would either of devices react to having data bus connected to +5
The other problem is that USB is proper radiofrequency connector, unlike audio jack where anything goes. This means it has to be shielded and impedance has to be some specified value, which in practical terms means that there's some specific ratio of metal to plastic and shape of conductors that has to be used. Barrel plugs would have way too low impedance and already bulky connector needs extra shielding which makes it even bigger
Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy wrote on X that GPT-4.5 is better than GPT-4o but in ways that are subtle and difficult to express. "Everything is a little bit better and it's awesome," he wrote, "but also not exactly in ways that are trivial to point to."
plebeian, you don't understand, you're sniffing our farts wrong
