mriguy

@mriguy@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientific conferences are leaving the United States amid border fears⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I just went to a conference in Hawaii, which is usually a very popular, but half the poster boards were bare. I saw multiple recorded talks because the speakers were denied entry visas, including one of the opening keynote speakers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Prototype of RTX 5090 Appears With Four 16-Pin Power Connectors, Capable of Delivering 2,400W⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And the fuse for the circuit absolutely should not be the limiter, the RCCB should trip WAY before the main fuse.

  While that certainly SHOULD be the case, in the US at least while RCCBs (we call them GFCIs) are generally required in wet areas and perhaps for new construction, in most older houses the majority of circuits don’t have any sort of ground fault protection other than the fuse/breaker. In my current house we have them on only two outlets - one in a bathroom and one in the kitchen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Prototype of RTX 5090 Appears With Four 16-Pin Power Connectors, Capable of Delivering 2,400W⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In most household shocks, you touch a conductor, and you are the resistor to ground. Your resistance is independent of the drive voltage, so if you touch a 110V wire, the current will be half of what you get with a 220V wire. So the voltage determines the current, and this the lethality.

  There’s lots of other factors that go into the effective resistance like the amount of moisture on your skin, what shoes you’re wearing, and what the floor is made of, etc, but in all cases twice as much voltage will cause twice as much current.

  It’s a bad idea either to go touching live wires either way, but the rule of thumb I heard was was that a 110V shock usually won’t kill you and 220V shock usually will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Heat setting magnets is bad.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Fun fact - some soldering irons regulate their temperature using the curie point. There’s a disk of ferromagnetic material with a particular curie point in the tip. A magnet in the barrel of the soldering iron is attracted to the tip, and when it sticks to the tip, it switches the heating element on. When the disk hits its curie temperature it’s no longer magnetic, and the magnetic switch opens and shuts off the heating element (it’s on a weak spring). When the tip cools down enough it becomes magnetic again, and the magnet is pulled to it and turns on the heater. You can have different tips with different curie temperatures, so one soldering iron can do multiple temperatures with very cheap internal electronics (basically, just a switch).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X blocks 8,000 accounts in India under government order⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Elon Musk, guardian of free speech!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The first driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes | CNN Business⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A road built and maintained by taxpayers is much cheaper (to a shipping company) than building, maintaining, and operating a railway. Making taxpayers responsible for the infrastructure you use is one way to make your business much more profitable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The first driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes | CNN Business⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, but that’s all subsidized by taxpayers, so it’s more expensive overall but cheaper for YOU.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook Pushes Its Llama 4 AI Model to the Right, Wants to Present “Both Sides”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What it will mean in practice is that every objective fact has to be balanced with a right wing talking point.