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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • A well maintained and in-spec AR is phenomenal. Jim Bob’s AR he bought on sale from BCA is going to be a piece of shit. (I had one of their bolts dissolve on me once.)

    The tricky bit is getting one that is actually in-spec. The original blueprints are good, but the way they are laid out gives manufacturers too much wiggle room and can be a bit more difficult to read. This leads to a slew of problems when you have people jamming together random bits from different sources.

    It’s a versatile weapon and I like them when properly engineered and properly maintained. It absolutely isn’t the end-all-be-all and it’s embarrassing to see it in the hands of idiots who just want to make a political statement.




  • Thats kinda is how neural networks actually function. They don’t store massive amounts of data but, similar to us, tweak and adjust complex pathways of neurons that kinda just convert an input into a response.

    When you ask an LLM a question you are actually getting a list of words based on probabilities, not anything the LLM had to “think about” before responding. During its training, different patterns fed to the AI tweak and balance how and when specific neurons should fire. One way to think about it is that “memories” or data is stored in how the paths are formed, not actually in the core of the neuron itself.

    There are several hundred configurations of artificial neural networks that can mimic different functions of our brains, including memory.


  • Did you compute for air in the barrel after calling out there was no air in space? Just curious about that, s’all.

    With that, there would be a hell of a suction on the bullet after the cartridge was fired. Also, the detonation doesn’t happen all in one go and continues as the bullet moves to the muzzle. (I did quite a bit of experimenting with that to reduce muzzle flash, actually.) So, the bullet is accelerating until the pressure is released when the bullet passes the muzzle.

    While air in the barrel isn’t really a factor on earth, surrounding air pressure absolutely is. It affects burn rate most but how it affects burn rate is a characteristic of the powder itself. (In zero-G, I would speculate a slower burn because the powder would be more prone to floating if it wasn’t a compressed load.)

    When I plan to go to lower altitudes, I typically use lighter loads or I risk over-pressure conditions. (I’ll basically just compute for a couple hundred pounds less pressure chamber.)

    After all that, I have no fucking clue what would happen in space because the conditions are so wonky.