sure thing 😊

oh hey that’s my group ❤️

even better, I think that slide was made by a good friend of mine as part of a collab that our trans activist group did with FnB, we’re both members of catalyst.

Sure do, it’s a bit of a full house right now

I actually started the whole thing at urgent care, who took one look at me and immediately sent me to the ER haha. I don’t expect to be back anytime soon, things are going well healing wise, it’s just freaky as hell that the standard is to not stitch up the big hole in me.

Merry Christmas to you too 😊

I had emergency surgery a couple of days ago, and I’ve been home trying my best to recover but this is a new level of body horror I was not prepared for. I’m so glad the whole thing was free though, and the hospital stay was genuinely quite pleasant (I got lucky and ended up with a private room).

Here’s hoping I get through the next couple of weeks without any complications, I just want this thing to be over and done with.

It’s just a regulated amount set by the government of each region, the manufacturers want to make them as profitable as possible, but the regulations say they can only be so profitable. The thing is, if you’re losing 2% per game, it doesn’t seem like much, but the point of slots is you play a lot of games, people sit there for hours and hours and the machines can run multiple games at once in some cases. You can lose all your money quite quickly.

I never worked on physical machines so I can’t really answer any questions about coins, I just got data sheets with the reels on them and info about stuff like custom rules and bonus rounds.

I can’t really see that in the meme, but your explanation makes sense

It depends on the region, we were certifying globally. I don’t remember the numbers that well, it was years ago and I only did a few months there, but I think it’s something like a 98% return for the player, so if you put $1 in, you get 0.98¢ back on average.

Very sarcastic comment, but if the traffic is bad enough then it becomes safe to cycle again because of how little anyone in a car can move.

Is it meant to be “that would exist” or is this a pro-colonisation meme? (I know little about the Romans, if I’m just misunderstanding something)

I very briefly had a job as a mathematician for a company that certifies pokies (slot machines). I was technically also a software dev, but my job mainly consisted of calculating the theoretical average returns for each machine, writing basic code to simulate the machine for millions of games and then making sure those two numbers matched. I’d pass that on to a physical testing team who hack them to run real games.

It was a horrible fucking job and I got out basically a month after I finished my training. All we did was prove the machines were exactly as profitable as allowed in whatever location they were going to be deployed at…

Now I work as a regular software developer and it’s also a horrible job.

Yeah that’s why I said they hadn’t done work before they collect the particle, I assume capturing it will involve some transfer of energy but again it depends on the experimental setup.

Very unsure of this, but I believe there’s relative motion between the thermal particles and the accelerating observer, so I guess it would make sense. I vaguely recall it being refered to as a thermal shower.

Regardless, yes you have to provide the energy to create those particles somehow. You’re ending up with something other than the vacuum state and energy must be conserved.

Hawking gave that very explanation in his paper, so it’s his own fault for inflicting bad science communication on the world haha

An asteroid falling into a black hole is in free fall, it’s not accelerating.

There are lots of related questions about black holes and hawking radiation one can ask and the answer is we don’t know, we don’t have the physics to describe it yet.

It doesn’t, it’s a direct result of mixing relativity and quantum physics. It’s painfully complicated and I wouldn’t even know where to begin because I only really know how to understand it through the abstract mathematics.

I guess the simplest explanation I can give is that in quantum field theory, the definition of what is and isn’t a particle depends on your frame of reference. Hence accelerating observers (in free space or hovering near black holes for example) see particles where others may see none.

FWIW that description of Hawking radiation is wrong and I think Hawking even says as much in his original paper on it. The real process is far far more complicated and involves tracing quantum field waves of various frequencies from the infinite past, through a collapsing star/black hole and into the future. Everything else is spot on.

In QFT the definition of a particle itself becomes kinda abstract and hard to define in a consistent way.

I studied stuff like this in excessive detail a few years back but I don’t remember it super well now. Here’s my best guess from what remains of my intuition:

An accelerating observer sees a shower of thermal particles due to a change in their reference frame. In QFT this is represented by a Bogoliubov transformation of the vacuum state to a non-vacuum state. I don’t think the observer has done work on the vacuum at this point as it’s technically still equivalent to the vacuum. When they collect particles, they put them onboard their ship in some container. When returning to an inertial frame they do work on them, expending energy and disrupting the vacuum state.

In essence, when returning to the inertial frame, the state of the field is not represented by the inverse Bogoliubov transformation from the thermal Unruh state. There’s a complicating factor where energy is injected into the vacuum, and what that looks like mathematically depends on your experimental setup.

The comparison with the Sydney Metro is silly, they’re extremely different projects. Melbourne’s metro tunnel isn’t a metro, it’s a badly named but very welcome change to make some suburban lines through running.

I have to keep doing that for mine, it has a stupid built in plug that’s too complicated so it constantly clogs with random stuff like hair and mysterious black slime…

The fossil fuel industry doesn’t pay enough in taxes for it to be worth it tbh, it’s just making a handful of very rich people even more so…