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frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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'Vortex Cannon vs Drone' - Mark Rober shows off tech from a "defense technology company that specializes in advanced autonomous systems". That seems bad

I've enjoyed Mark Rober's videos for a while now. They are fun, touch on accessible topics, and have decent production value. But this recent video isn't sitting right with me...

frezik ,

This, I think, is more a symptom of YouTube no longer supporting creators. Most every big channel is looking to alternate income sources. YouTube ad revenue and sponsor inserts aren't good enough.

Thing is, I wouldn't mind it if channels could self-fund by things like this, but it's being done on top of all the ads, not replacing them.

frezik ,

20 years ago, it was The Matrix. 10 years ago, Guy Fawkes masks. Thigh highs and cat ears are the least cringy of the possibilities to date.

frezik ,

Maybe a historical biopic in the style of photos of the time. Like take pictures of Lincoln, Grant, Lee, etc., use voice actors plus modern reenactors for background characters, and build it into a whole movie.

I dunno, I'm probably reaching.

frezik ,

It's been two years away for the last 30 years.

frezik ,

There's a different way to look at companies. They're not just profit-making entities. They are ways of organizing people to accomplish things nobody could do on their own. The profit is just there to keep the lights on and pay everyone a living wage.

Our current system doesn't encourage that approach, but that's just a problem with the current system.

frezik ,

No, stop, please, don't kill your platform, no, stop. Eh, nevermind.

frezik ,

Battery advancements aren't crap. We've gotten 5-8% improvement in capacity per year, which compounds to a doubling every 10 to 15 years. Every advancement covered by over sensationalized pop sci articles you've ever heard has contributed to that. It's important not to let sensationalism make you jaded to actual advancements.

Now, as for broadband, we haven't pushed out the technologies to the last mile that we already have. However, this sort of thing is useful for the backbone and universities. Universities sometimes have to transfer massive amounts of data, and some of the most efficient ways to do that are a van full of hard drives.

frezik ,

"I took 50mg of acid, as directed in the book 'Never Do 50mg of Acid'".

Breakthrough promises secure and private quantum computing at home (www.physics.ox.ac.uk)

The full power of next-generation quantum computing could soon be harnessed by millions of individuals and companies thanks to a breakthrough by scientists at Oxford’s Department of Physics guaranteeing security and privacy. The advance promises to unlock the transformative potential of cloud-based quantum computing and is...

frezik ,

Limited, but there might be a few. Generating the best route between two locations might be one.

There's some stuff at medium sized businesses that would be useful, like how to pack a box most efficiently. Or many boxes in a truck.

Maybe some fast sorting algorithms, or compression? Not sure if there's algorithmic efficiency to gain, there.

frezik ,

If you're thinking of quantum encryption, that's entirely separate from quantum computing.

frezik ,

Shell does that all the time. Among the oil companies, they seem to be the biggest advocates for hydrogen.

They 100% know that electrolysis methods won't be economically viable. The path through hydrogen goes through traditional hydrocarbon sources.

One maybe possibly exception is the recent finds of underground hydrogen sources. Still unclear if that's going to be economically viable. But even if it is, we would just add it to the list of decarbonized energy sources. We're not short of solutions; we're short of political capital to implement them.

frezik ,

There isn't a real need for hydrogen. We have plenty of other solutions. People have the expectation that our society changes from unsustainable to sustainable by just swapping in clean technologies in place of the dirty one's. That isn't going to happen, and hydrogen won't change that.

frezik ,

There's a better way to word the argument: it isn't possible to do hydrogen in renewable ways economically.

Electrolysis is easy enough to do at home if you like. Doing it at mass scale to fuel cars and airplanes is another matter.

frezik ,

There's no particular reason to store up power with hydrogen like that. We have tons of grid scale storage solutions. Heating up sand will work, or spinning up flywheels. Flow batteries are looking promising. We're not stuck on the limitations of lithium batteries for this purpose. There are so many other possibilities, and hydrogen production is not likely to come out on top.

frezik ,

Proton emission does happen, and that's just a positive hydrogen ion waiting to steal an electron from something else.

You could say that everything came from fusing hydrogen in the first place, and so the hydrogen being created here is just returning to its original form.

frezik ,

The alternative to trucking is a better cargo rail system on electrified rail. Won't get rid of all long haul trucking, but it'll displace at least 70% of it.

Even if that doesn't happen, battery capacity improves by 5-8% per year. At the low end, that's a doubling every 15 years. We're not close to theoretical limits yet, so we can expect this to continue as long as we keep funding the research.

Solid state batteries are still some time away, but once those are on the market, they'll leapfrog everything. Good enough not just for trucking, but also airplanes, which was thought to be out of the question otherwise.

I find with a lot of workers in positions like that tend to focus on what exist right now. Then they sit around at a truck stop over coffee, reinforcing their opinions and laughing at battery trucks. They don't think about what's likely to happen over the next decade.

But still, trains are the way to go. The US needs to start that process by renationalizing the railroads.

frezik ,

We don't have a lack of other possibilities for using excess solar/wind. Heating up rocks can work.

frezik ,

They've been using keyword checks to filter candidates for a long time. They apparently don't like it when things are turned back on them.

I've seen some seriously awful resumes get through the first level filtering. As long as they hit the keywords, nobody cares about formatting or coherency. Those candidates are usually terrible in other ways, so this system ends up wasting the time of people higher up the chain who have other things to do than interviewing.

frezik ,

I don't know anything about the book in question, but I assumed it was because of the way the hook at the end of tape measures has a little play to it. If it's a poorly made tape measure that doesn't account for this properly, you get slightly different measurements by hooking around something versus pushing it against a surface.

(See point #5: https://www.ustape.com/hidden-features-of-measuring-tape/)

frezik ,

If it's a poorly made tape measure to begin with, doesn't really matter. Could easily end up with 1/12" off.

frezik ,

Not sure what you mean. Do you know about Active Desktop in Win98? They've been doing shit like this since forever.

frezik ,

Trolls of Lemmy, you can pack your bags. You will never be able to come up with something dumber than this.

frezik ,

Floppies got worse over time. Stuff that was commercially duplicated was usually high quality, and those are still OK for the most part. The consumer-level blank disks, though? By the late 90s, those were hot garbage. You'd buy a 10 pack and at least 3 of them had to be thrown out. We're burning through the old stock from that time, and with degradation over time, it's now more like 6 out of 10 being thrown out. It's not like the "good" ones in the box are going to last, either.

frezik ,

Home computers had hard drives by then. This was after Win95 was out.

frezik ,

By 1998? No, hard drives were standard and reasonably reliable by then. Floppies were headed towards the end of their lifecycle with a high failure rate due to cutting costs.

frezik ,

All orbits are elliptical. Eventually, it will.

frezik ,

You're saying the same thing by a different route. It's orbit through the galaxy eventually comes back around to us.

Incidently, this is also why we can't just send nuclear waste on a solar escape trajectory. It eventually comes back.

frezik ,

It is, but not around us. It doesn't matter, because that orbit still comes back around.

Roku explores taking over HDMI feeds with ads (www.lowpass.cc)

Roku is exploring ways to show consumers ads on its TVs even when they are not using its streaming platform: The company has been looking into injecting ads into the video feeds of third-party devices connected to its TVs, according to a recent patent filing.  ...

frezik ,

That only works if you're headquartered in China.

Not that the HDMI Fourm will stop them, anyway.
More likely, the companies involved will want to license Roku's patent.

frezik ,

I'll take it one step further: if you don't print much at all, you should use a print service.

Yes, I bought a Brother because of convenience. Just realize that you're going to spend a lot more money for that convenience.

frezik ,

One of the better tooling ideas I've heard is from a friend of mine who does board game development. One of the problems is going back and forth with the artist over what's wanted. With an AI image generator, he can get something along the right lines, and then take it to the artist as an example.

frezik ,

Yeah, unless they lived in a cave with some pigments, everyone started by being inspired in some way.

Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores (gizmodo.com)

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company’s senior vice president of grocery stores says they’re moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.

frezik ,

They couldn't train an AI well enough to replace humans in the loop. That suggests it was a bad idea from the start. If it were possible at all with the current state of the art of AI, Amazon would be one of the companies that could do it.

frezik ,

Right, it happens every time cops beat or kill someone. They had cocaine in their systems, or they got arrested once before, or there's a teacher who said they got detention a lot. In their minds, that's enough to think of them as a Bad Person, and therefore deserved it.

frezik ,

In the story, they are the Sadducees. Jesus scoffed at them. He went up against the Pharisees more, but that's something like a modern American leftist arguing against the Democrats. They tend to agree 95% of the time, at least on paper.

frezik ,

Right. If it's not getting updates, then it's only a matter of time before it has a critical security vulnerability. If not Linux, then what? Will GNU Hurd run on it?

frezik ,

In practice, you tend to need something not too out of date. Just about any distro ships with internationalization support, and the fact is that it takes a lot of RAM to do that. A Pentium 1 may not support enough.

I did an install on a Pentium II a few years ago. I used Debian 2.2. Since I had used it back in the day, it seemed easier than finding something more modern that would work.

frezik ,

That's agnostic atheism. The term "agnostic" is the opposite of "gnostic". Being a gnostic atheist would mean you think there's direct proof against god as a concept, rather than merely saying there's no evidence in favor.

I'm gnostic about the Abrahamic god existing, and agnostic about any other god existing. I call myself an atheist, and most other atheists seem to hold a similar position. Not that I have a randomly selected poll of atheists or anything; just anecdotal observation.

frezik ,

Vegans in western cultures have access to dietary supplements derived from non-animal sources. That's basically impossible without access to modern industrial food processes.

If we're talking about cultures without ready access to plant fibers for clothes, then they're not going to have vegan supplements, either.

frezik ,

There's a bit more to the scan. You usually see the cropped version, but the full version has naughty bits. Not sure if it's ever been published that way in journals.

frezik ,

It's embarrassing when a modern game does that. Game Programming 101 now tells you to keep physics and graphics loop timing separate. Engines like Unreal and Godot will do it for you out of the box. I'm pretty sure the SDL tutorials I read circa 2003 told you to do it. AAA developers still doing it on this side of 2008 should be dragged outside and shot for the good of the rest of us.

frezik ,

I learned recently that the Jedi Engine for the original Dark Forces had an additional trick. You could have a hallway over another hallway--which Doom cannot--but you can't see both hallways at the same time. So there might be a bridge over a gorge, but the level design forces it so it's a covered bridge, and you wouldn't have an angle where you could see inside the bridge and down into the gorge.

frezik ,

There's a real challenge out there for the Cray 1. On paper, it appears fast enough, but the architecture makes it difficult to impossible in practice.

frezik ,

You can copyright a translation of a bible, and they usually are unless they're an old translation.

frezik ,

Any preface or art work or anything else attached? Those parts can be copyrighted. Even the cover design could be.

frezik ,

That's the story told by his followers decades later. He would have been an apocalyptic peasant preacher, and most of those people have some combination of narcissism and mental instability. Most likely, he got killed for exactly what the sign on his crucifix said. Whitewashing his personality came later.

It's no good reason to kill someone. The Roman Empire was a brutal place. But he probably was guilty.

frezik ,

Usually have to go up higher in the market, but take a look at any review site that focuses on printers. Different sites will have slightly different methods, so you can't compare across different sites. That said, if you check between lasers and the better inkjets on the same site, the inkjets tend up being cheaper per page.

But again, you have to run through the entire ink before it dries. If you don't do that, then get a laser.

frezik ,

A Gentoo upgrade package list with over 100 packages and conflicts all over the place. Then do it again when the list grows to the same size in a few months.

This is why I don't use Gentoo anymore.

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