Eufalconimorph
@Eufalconimorph@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas 6 months ago:
Tomato soup in a bread bowl, with cheese. Not quiche, the filling isn’t egg-based.
It’s delicious. And since the Italians call just about any round bread with toppings pizza (e.g. Bartolomeo Scappi’s pizza was cake with powdered sugar & saffron toppings) it’s pizza. As is New England clam chowder in a bread bowl!
- Comment on The Eurobean Mind Cannot Comprehend 6 months ago:
A thousand Roman paces. A pace is two steps, each about 1m, so 1mi is about 2km. The conversion from paces to meters isn’t exact, and definitions have shifted over time.
- Comment on BitLocker encryption broken in less than 43 seconds with sub-$10 Raspberry Pi Pico — key can be sniffed when using an external TPM 9 months ago:
CPU doesn’t have any secure storage, so it can’t encrypt or authenticate comms to the TPM. The on-CPU fTPMs are the solution, the CPU then has the secure storage.
- Comment on Crispr gene editing shown to permanently lower hereditary high cholesterol 1 year ago:
RF circuits are the same core principles filtered through black magic and the Laplace domain.
- Comment on 🌿👀🌿 1 year ago:
Not if they have to see that guy with his pants off!
- Comment on If civilization continues to the year 9999, is the idea to go to year 10.000, or...? 1 year ago:
DOH, skipped those two critical letters! Thanks for the correction.
- Comment on If civilization continues to the year 9999, is the idea to go to year 10.000, or...? 1 year ago:
Astronomers already use Julian Dates for various reasons. Right now it’s 2460261.2834606, it’ll be later by the time you read this. Julian dates/times are fractional days starting from January 1st, 4713 = 0. Just keep counting up from there.
- Comment on Do gravitational waves exhibit wave-particle duality? 1 year ago:
Yeah, not disagreeing there!
- Comment on Do gravitational waves exhibit wave-particle duality? 1 year ago:
Gravitons are the name for the quanta of the (hypothetical) quantum gravitational field. They’d be the force carriers of the gravitational force in a theory of quantum gravity, if we had one.
Gravitational waves would still be physical waves like water waves, and they’d be composed of moving gravitons. Spacetime would likely be quantized instead of continuous; this becomes very hard to resolve since quantum mechanics needs to be reformulated to use discrete math instead of calculus, and we don’t really know how to do that (non-uniform spacetime breaks QM).
- Comment on Do gravitational waves exhibit wave-particle duality? 1 year ago:
Wave/Particle duality of quantum objects (quanta) is a bit like bicycle/car duality when looking at motorcycles. Light isn’t a wave or a particle, but it has properties of both. Motorcycles aren’t pedal-powered bikes or cars, but have properties of both.
There are no particles, just quanta.
- Comment on Bought my first "bench" power supply 😁 1 year ago:
The “isn’t huge” is the issue. Linear supplies need a rather big transformer to work with 60Hz mains instead of chopping it up at 20kHz or more like switchers do. I’ve got a Siglent SPD 3033X-E (decent, reasonably cheap) and a BK Precision 9201 (better, more expensive).
- Comment on Bought my first "bench" power supply 😁 1 year ago:
The small supplies are nice for size, but tend to have more noise than the big linear supplies. If you’re working with low-precision DC circuits, or even stuff up to audio frequencies (basically still DC) it’s not likely to be an issue. If you’re working with RF circuits it’s more likely to be an issue, though of course if they’re not too close to the switching frequency it’s easy enough to filter the output.
- Comment on Community seems dead. Can we mirror reddit posts here? 1 year ago:
No, they made an assertion, without statistics or raw data to back it up. How many replies do cross-posts get, compared to regular posts? What’s the mean? What’s the median? Does the distribution look Gaussian, and if so what’s the standard deviation.
- Comment on Community seems dead. Can we mirror reddit posts here? 1 year ago:
Interesting. I’ve mostly seen communities overwhelmed with bot posts and 0 replies, but I haven’t taken any statistics.
- Comment on Community seems dead. Can we mirror reddit posts here? 1 year ago:
If there’s more activity on Reddit then here, then Reddit repost bots make it feel like all the community action is happening on Reddit. They push people back to Reddit because that’s where all the new posts are coming from, so why engage here if the active discussion is already in progress over there?
- Comment on The average car purchased in 2023 emits higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) than its 2013 equivalent. This is due to the large proportion of SUVs in the mix, which tend to be bigger and heavier. 1 year ago:
Yep, providing exemptions for vehicles under the weight threshold where a commercial driver’s license is required is dumb.
- Comment on The average car purchased in 2023 emits higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) than its 2013 equivalent. This is due to the large proportion of SUVs in the mix, which tend to be bigger and heavier. 1 year ago:
Yep. If exemptions required a CDL there would be far fewer exempt vehicles being made.
- Comment on How to use Liquidwire (conductive paint) 1 year ago:
Copper or silver-based should be lower resistance. These conductive paints tend not to be very conductive, the carbon stuff is essentially making a thin-film carbon composition resistor. Good for repairing rear window defroster heating elements, not so great as a 0-ohm trace in a keyboard. For short (<1cm) wires it’s usually not too bad, but with the amount of damage I’m not sure you’ll be able to repair the thing.
It looks like it might be from a Model M-style keyboard. Unicomp sells those.
- Comment on At what size of transistor does semiconductor manufacturing become practical for independent manufacture? 1 year ago:
We’ve had open-source chip design software since the 1980s. Magic VLSI, for example. There are quite a few OSS tools for various parts of the chip design process.
- Comment on At what size of transistor does semiconductor manufacturing become practical for independent manufacture? 1 year ago:
Also bleeding-edge processes mean smaller, thinner gates. That’s what gives them the fast switching speeds, but it reduces the max allowable voltage. For parts that need to handle more than 1.8V or so a modern 5nm process will just end up using bigger gates than the process is optimized for. May as well go with an older process (bigger minimum gate size) that’s better suited to switching the voltage needed. For Bosch (automotive parts, power tools, etc) they’re making a lot of parts with really big output transistors (switching 14V, 48V, etc) and not super high-performance processors.
The big disadvantage with particularly old processes is that they used smaller wafers. So fewer chips per wafer processed, meaning lower overall yields and higher price/chip. The switch from 200mm wafers to 300mm in 1999 meant the wafer area increased by a factor of 2.25! 300mm wafers also required fully-automated factories due to the weight of a wafer carrier (a front opening wafer pod, or FOUP, is 7-9kg when loaded with 25 wafers), which save on labor costs. So processes older than 1999 (around the 180nm node) are sometimes not worth it even for power electronics.
- Comment on The temptation is always there 1 year ago:
int const golden = 1.618; int* non_constant = (int*)&golden; golden = 1.61803399;
Casts are totally not a danger that should require a comment explaining safety…
- Comment on The temptation is always there 1 year ago:
And more generally mutable aliasing references of any sort are evil. Doesn’t mean they’re not useful, just that you need magic protection spells (mutexes, semaphores, fancy lock-free algorithms, atomics, etc) to use them safely. Skip the spell or use she wrong one, and the demon escapes and destroys all you hold dear.
- Comment on How should I get started? 1 year ago:
That is an excellent source.
- Comment on Using a sledgehammer to crack a nut 1 year ago:
Well, you’ve got 1. And -1. And sqrt(-1). And the unit pseudoscalars of the Clifford algebras for every number of dimensions.
So there are a countably infinite number of solutions. Can anyone find a bigger set? Something with an uncountably infinite set of solutions?
- Comment on Can you melt eggs? Quora’s AI says “yes,” and Google is sharing the result 1 year ago:
If you heat carbon in a vacuum, it sublimates straight to gas. If you heat it under extreme pressure in an inert gas atmosphere, then it can melt. Unfortunately creating such pressures in the lab is only possible with diamond anvil presses, which are themselves carbon and thus tend to sublimate from the heat, resulting in pressure vessel failure. Doing the experiment on the surface of a neutron star would work, but presents some other difficulties.
- Comment on What is this format specifier? 1 year ago:
On libc functions yes. Maybe on some from other libs, if they provide man pages.
- Comment on If you were to turn into food, what food will you turn into? 1 year ago:
Soylent green, clearly.
Or meat. Humans are mostly meat.
- Comment on Hell freezes over, MS Paint adds support for layers and PNG transparency 1 year ago:
Yes, Krita is by far a better editor.
- Comment on Hell freezes over, MS Paint adds support for layers and PNG transparency 1 year ago:
Or color spasecs other than sRGB (8 bits/channel). I’ve a camera that takes 10 bits/channel photos, a monitor that displays 10 bits/channel, etc. But GIMP will just distort the colors because they hard-coded the color space! Can’t edit for print either, no CMYK. GIMP is an image editor for the noughties, not the 2020s.
Then again, we’re talking about MS Paint here. If Paint fills your needs, GIMP will be fine.
- Comment on For those with larger phones, how do you handle them without grip accessories? 1 year ago:
Same, I’ve tiny hands and a Note 9. Works fine.