litchralee

@litchralee@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG OLED TV is changing inputs automatically.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve changed the setting to prevent the behavior, but the prompt is still missing.

  You’ve disabled the automatic switching based on HDMI CEC, and yet the TV still automatically switches and without a notification/option in advance? This just sounds like a firmware update for the TV introduced a bug.

  I’m in the same camp with the other commenter who suggested never attaching a so-called smart TV to the Internet, for then it can never perform an unwanted update. Because for whatever near features an update may bring, it rarely can be reversed if proven to be undesirable. I’m staunchly in the “own your hardware” camp, so automatic-and-non-undoable updates are antithetical to any notion of right-to-repair principles, and will inevitably lead to disposable electronics.

  [gets off soapbox]

  Your best bet might to try attempting a manual software downgrade using a USB stick.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do dams pregame?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For an example of when a dam is teetering upon catastrophic failure, with operators stuck between a rock and a hard place, see the 2017 Oroville Dam crisis: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis

  This was covered in a Plainly Difficult video on YouTube, as well as other channels like Practical Engineering (also on YT).

  Essentially, in that situation, the operators were discharging water until they found the main spillway was becoming damaged (uncovering shoddy work from decades ago). But the amount of rain meant that using the never-tested emergency spillway might actually damage the dam foundations. So in the end, they had no choice but to use the main spillway, as the less worse of two awful choices.

  Known only after the fact, 2017 was a particularly wet year in California, coming after years of drought conditions. So holding onto water within the reservoir wasn’t imprudent. But a flaw in the main spillway, and lack of testing of the backup, made a bad situation worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why doesn’t Apple/Samsung/Google use new tech like every other phone maker?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There was a video by PolyMatter recently on the economics of why Apple cannot yet move the bulk of iPhone manufacturing away from China (available on Nebula and on YouTube). This is perhaps the singular quote which helps answer your question, around the 02:35 mark:

  Any country can assemble the iPhone. But Apple doesn’t need to make an iPhone, it needs to make 590 every minute, it needs 35,000 per hour, 849,000 per day, 5.9 million per week. That’s the challenge facing Apple.

  The sheer scale of Apple’s manufacturing – setting aside Samsung’s also humongous scale – means that there might not be a supplier for that quantity of large image sensor or new-tech batteries. Now, Apple could drive that sort of market, and they probably are working on it. But as the video explains, Apple’s style is more about finding an edge which they can exclusively hone, up to and including the outright buying out of the supplier. This keeps them ahead of the competition, at least for long enough until it doesn’t matter anymore.

  In some ways, this might sound like Apple has a touch of Not Invented Here Syndrome, but realistically, consumers expect that Apple is going to do something so outlandish and non-standard that to simply be jumping onto a bandwagon of “already researched” technology would be considered a failure. They are, after all, a market leader, irrespective of what one might think about the product itself.

  Historical example of heavy R&D paying dividends until it stopped being relevant: Sony’s Trinitron CRT patent expired just around the time that LCDs started showing up in the consumer space. Any competitor could finally start producing CRT TVs with the same qualities as a Sony Trinitron TV, but why would they? The world had moved on, and so had Sony.

  In brief, Apple probably can’t deliver an iPhone with massive image sensors right now. But that certainly doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have their camera team looking into it and working with partners to scale up the manufacturing, such as by increasing yield or being very clever, probably both. Ever since that one time an iPhone prototype was found in a Bay Area bar, their opsec for new prototypes has been top notch. So we’ll only know when we know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you had a huge slingshot, how much rubber band would you need to send a spaceship into space?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve added this clarification to my comment. Thanks!

  It seems that common types of rubber have a propagation speed in the range of 1.5-1.8 km/s, so we’re still quite a bit away from 10.5 km/s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you had a huge slingshot, how much rubber band would you need to send a spaceship into space?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Whoops, force of habit. Fixed now to not be sizable fractions of the speed of light.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you had a huge slingshot, how much rubber band would you need to send a spaceship into space?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Let’s break this down into parts:

  send a spaceship into space

  Assuming we’re launching from Earth’s surface, we will need to: 1) get safely away from the ground (or else we’ll crash first), and 2) achieve an orbital velocity of at least 11 km/s, which is needed to escape the influence of Earth’s gravitational pull. If we launch from the equator and launch towards the east, we get the free benefit of the equatorial velocity, which is about 0.44 km/h, so that reduces our required speed to “only” 10.56 km/h.

  huge slingshot

  The thing with all machines that yeet an object into the air is that they’re all subject to the trajectory calculations, again due to that pesky gravity thing. As much as we’d like things to be as easy as “point and shoot” in a straight line out into space, the downward force of gravity means we must aim upward to compensate.

  Normally when one thinks of trajectory, it is to aim an artillery piece in such a way that it’ll land upon a target in the distance, but typically at about the same altitude as where it was launched from. But if the artillery piece is perched upon a hill aiming down into a valley, then a smaller angle correction must be made because it would hit farther than intended. When aiming at a target located higher than the gun, the correction would be a slightly larger angle.

  In this case, to aim into space – assuming we mean something near the Karman line at 100,000 km above MSL – that’s a substantial height and we’ll need to aim the slingshot with a substantial vertical component. The exact angle will depend on what horizontal component (is velocity) we need, which was discussed earlier.

  how much rubber band

  The relationship between the necessary vertical component (to overcome gravity) and the horizontal component (to reach escape velocity, which is caused by gravity) can be drawn as two orthogonal vectors, with the rubber band having to provide the angled thrust equal to the sum of those two vectors.

  We’ve ignored air resistance, but with this simple relationship, it’s clear that we can use basic trigonometry and the Pythagorean theorem to find that the rubber band vector is the sum of the square of those two vector magnitudes. Easy!

  The only problem is that, on its own, the square of some 10.5 km/s is a huge number. Even 10.5 km/s is a huge number, already exceeding the speed of sound (0.343 km/s) many times over. I vaguely recall a rule somewhere that elastic deformation cannot exceed the speed of sound, for reasons having to do with shockwave propagation or something like that.

  But I think it’s all fairly intuitive that for a rubber band slingshot to accelerate an object, it too must be in contact with said object while accelerating. And since a rubber band probably can’t reach the speed of sound (and remain intact), then it also cannot accelerate another object to the speed of sound. To then ask for the slingshot to accelerate to 30x the speed of sound would be asking too much.

  For this reason, I don’t think the rubber band slingshot to space will work, at least not for a typical linear slingshot. If you do something that rotates and builds velocity that way, then it becomes feasible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If people's voices become copyright protected in the future as a response to AI, will any non-commercial uses of voices be affected as well?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In a nutshell, voices are not eligible for copyright protection under USA law, whose hegemony results in most of the world conforming to the same. The principal idea for copyright is that it only protects the rendition of some work or act. A writer’s manuscript, an artist’s early sketches, a software engineer’s source code, and a vocalist’s audition recording, are all things that imbue their creator with a valid copyright, but only for that particular product of their efforts.

  It is not permissible to copyright the idea of a space opera, nor a style of painting, nor an algorithm for a computer routine, nor one’s own voice. Basically, pure thoughts cannot be copyrighted, nor things which are insufficiently creative like a copyright on the number 42, nor natural traits or phenomenon.

  If we did change the law to allow the copyright of a human voice, then any satire or mockery that involves doing a good impression of someone speaking would suddenly be a copyright violation. This is nuts, because it would also deny someone else who – by no fault of their own – happens to have an identical voice. Would they just not be allowed to speak ever? Although intellectual property rights stem from the USA Constitution, so too do First Amendment speech rights, and the direct collision of the two would have strange and unusual contours.

  For when ideas can be protected by law, see patents. And for when voices can be protected, see soundmarks/trademarks and brand rights, the latter stemming from rights of association.

  So for the titular questions, the hypothesis posed simply will not occur under current law, and it’s hard to see how it would be practical if the law did permit it

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How differently would have information technology developed if most of the world were under authoritarian regimes instead of liberal democracies? Would encryption have been more restricted?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, amateur radio was illegal to encrypt

  Was? I’m not familiar with a jurisdiction that presently allows licensed amateur radio operators to send encrypted or even obfuscated messages, with the unique exception of control-and-command instructions for amateur radio satellites. The whole exercise of ham radio is to openly communicate, with other frequencies and services available for encrypted comms and whatever else.

  To be abundantly clear, I very much support encryption because it keeps good people honest and frustrates bad people. But it’s hard to see how, for ham radio, encryption could be reconciled with the open and inviting spirit that has steered the radio community for over a century. In a lot of ways, hams were doing FOSS well before the acronym came into existence.

  I have great admiration for the radio operators, precisely because when all the major infrastructure falters, it takes only a battery and a wire up a tree to recover some semblance of connectivity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are display sizes always measured in inches?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It gets even more interesting when aviation uses:

  • feet for vertical distances – such as 1000 ft overhead separation for aircraft heading towards each other
  • meters for horizontal distances, such as
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are display sizes always measured in inches?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When traveling in Japan, I do recall seeing TVs marked in inches. But in a world where globalization has made goods ever more accessible and affordable, this shouldn’t be too surprising.

  Another example of ostensibly American or British Imperial units, lots of plumbing around the world is sized in inches or fractions of inches. But even in the USA, there might not be any dimension which actually measures the same as the trade designation. For example, 1/2-inch Schedule 40 PVC pipe has an inner and outer diameter that is larger than 0.5 inch (12.7 mm). In the UK, I understand that they might round off these trade designations to centimeters, but I have no idea if that would then reflect their true outside diameter or if it’s just a straight conversion of the trade destination.

  Aviation also uses feet for altitude in most of the world, with even ardently metric countries like Russia changing in 2017-2020 from meters to feet. In all these cases, it’s ultimately a matter of harmonization to reduce confusion and increase compatibility, either technically, procedurally, or economically.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m no expert in New York City governance; I’m not even on the same coast as New York. West Coast, Best Coast.

  With that said, NYC’s size and structure is not too dissimilar to that of a US State, save for a unicameral legislative body (New York City Council). Matching that, the Mayor of NYC is the head of the executive, with powers to appoint commissioners to various agencies and civil/criminal courts, as well as executive functions like administering city services like fire departments, police, and tax collection.

  Meanwhile, the 51-member Council is headed by the Speaker, who presides over the body and controls the order that legislation is considered. So far as I can tell, the members are elected by district, every four years, so that each district has roughly the same population. So far, these procedures parallel those of US State governments.

  As for the interplay between the Mayor and the Council, the defining criteria of any government is how it achieves its policy objectives, in passing the budget. Like with the California Governor, the Mayor’s office will propose – and later execute once duly-passed – the budget and the Council will consider and approve or reject it. The final budget is sent to the Mayor for ratification, but can also be vetoed. In this case, the Council can vote to override a mayoral veto.

  So for the titular question, with regards to only the structure of the government of NYC, yes, the Council could very much block much of what a future Mayor Mamdani wants to achieve. The Council could do this by passing laws that mandate minimum fares for transit, forcing tax breaks for the wealthy, and anything else that directly counters his policies. But he could veto such laws, and the Council would have to muster some 2/3 of the votes to push it through.

  In turn, though, a future Mayor Mamdani could potentially use his executive control to direct the transit system to vary (read: change) the tariff structure so that bus routes in less well-off neighborhoods become free. Within the parameters of existing law, the Mayor could also instruct the Police Chief to do (or not do) certain things, and this wouldn’t be within the Council’s direct control except that they could have a Council committee do an investigation and raise new legislation. But that goes back to what the Council can and can’t do.

  Essentially, there’s a fair amount of ground for a progressive NYC Mayor to deliver campaign promises, except that the budget and existing laws will require working with the Council. But as a practical matter, if a future mayor wins a substantial fraction of the city-wide vote, it would be strange that 2/3 of the Council could be in staunch opposition.

  And that budget vulnerability can actually be a negotiating tactic. Here in California, setting aside any broader opinions about the policies and wisdom of the currently second-term Governor of California, he managed to negotiate a bill to cut red-tape for housing (or roll-back environmental laws, depending on who you ask) and tie it to the state budget, due end of June. So when push comes to shove, when the budget is coming due, there would suddenly be room to negotiate, even with bitter enemies. No one respects a government that cannot pass a budget on-time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Using a PWM controller as audio AMP?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Based solely on this drawing – since I don’t have a datasheet for the PWM controller depicted – it looks like the potentiometer is there to provide a DC bias for the input Aux signal. I draw that conclusion based on the fact that the potentiometer has its extents connected to Vref and GND, meaning that turning the wiper would be selecting a voltage somewhere in-between those two voltage levels.

  As for how this controls the duty cycle of the PWM, it would depend on the operating theory of the PWM controller. I can’t quite imagine how the controller might produce a PWM output, but I can imagine a PDM output, which tends to be sufficient for approximating coarse audio.

  But the DC bias may also be necessary since the Aux signal might otherwise try to go below GND voltage. The DC bias would raise the Aux signal so that even its lowest valley would remain above GND.

  So I think that’s two reasons for why the potentiometer cannot be removed: 1) the DC bias is needed for the frequency control, and 2) to prevent the Aux signal from sinking below GND.

  If you did want to replace the potentiometer with something else, you could find a pair of fixed resistors that would still provide the DC bias. I don’t think you could directly connect the Aux directly into the controller.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Using a PWM controller as audio AMP?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  are not audio drivers but PWM drivers

  They can be both! A Class D audio amplifier can be constructed by rendering an audio signal into a PWM or PDM output signal, then passed through an RC filter to remove the switching noise, yielding only the intended audio.

  That said, in this case, using the unfiltered PWM output would work for greeting cards, where audio fidelity is not exactly a high priority, but minimal parts count is.

  This made me wonder if normal PWM controllers could be used to drive more power full LEDs.

  What exactly did you have in mind as a “normal PWM controller”? There’s a great variety of drivers that produce a PWM signal, some in the single watt category and some in the tens of kilowatts.

  Whether they can drive “more powerful” LEDs is predominantly a function of the voltage and current requirements to fully illuminate the LEDs, plus what switching frequency range the LEDs can tolerate. Some LED modules that have built-in capacitors cannot be driven effectively using PWM, as well as anything which accepts AC rather than DC power. You’d need a triac to dim AC LED modules, and yet still, some designs simply won’t dim properly.

  My idea was to just remove the potentiometer and feed in music from Aux at that point.

  You’ll have to provide a schematic, as I’m not entirely sure where this potentiometer is. But be aware that the output current needed to drive a small speaker is probably insufficient to light up a sizable LED, nevermind the possibility of not even having enough voltage to meet the required forward voltage drop of the LED.

  Is there a chance of this working?

  It might, but only if everything just happens to line up. But otherwise, it’s likely that it won’t work as-is, due to insufficient drive current.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A phone playing a video would not be sufficient to establish that you were at home, but merely that the phone was powered on somewhere. But if YouTube had records that indicated your phone was connecting using an IP address at your home, then the phone’s location could be ascertained.

  But that still doesn’t say anything about where you are, since not everyone – even in 2025 – carries their phone every time they leave home.

  But if YouTube also registered a Like on a video at a particular time, and it can separately be proved that no one else could be at your house and no one else connected to your home network, and that your phone was not modified in such a way to fake such an action, then this would be enough circumstantial evidence to convince a jury that you were probably at home.

  And if home is nowhere near the murder scene, then this could be a defense.

  Maybe. As you can see, a lot of "if"s are needed to string together an alibi, let alone a good one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If one were so inclined, could you take your plot of land, parcel it up into 1-meter-squared (or smaller) sections, and sell each of those sections to different people/companies?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In much of the USA, the county-level is the administrator for deed recording and for land parceling. Municipalities (eg cities, towns) within the county may have their own zoning rules, and so the question can be divided in two:

  1-meter-squared chunks

  Zoning laws can enforce minimum lot sizes. For example, an agricultural or business district might disallow plots smaller than 5 acre or 2000 sqft, respectively, because anything smaller would become economically infeasible for those purposes. A legitimate goal of zoning is to make land more economically productive, and plots that are oddly-shaped or impractically small would be counterproductive. The county and cities would also be concerned with tax revenue per area, which scales up with productivity of land (for whatever use is permitted in zoning). Note: I’m not a fan of American-style zoning, which has proven to be quite overburdening and frequently racist over the last 100 years.

  But setting aside zoning, there’s also the matter of land administration. Subdividing a parcel into smaller lots is common, but since those small lots will take up ledger and deed records at the registrar’s office, that adds a non-insignificant cost per plot. Easily several hundred dollars per subdivision, as the process is normally meant for larger real estate transactions in preparation for development.

  sell each of those sections to different people

  Land transaction costs in the USA are not uniform throughout the country, but they often amount to several thousands just to verify title to land. Part of the problem is that most states don’t keep an authoritative land registry that shows exactly who owns what. Instead, title insurance companies make money by assuring the title after a process that investigates the land’s title history. Here in California, that history often has to be traced back to Mexican land grants in the 1800s, which is kinda nuts just to sell a small home.

  Sure, for a 1 sq meter plot – which no one should ever buy using a mortgage – the buyer might not need/want title insurance. But the lack of title provenance inflates purchase prices, simple because people do want to know that they’re actually buying something real and it’s not a worthless deed.

  (as an aside, it’s entirely possible in California and other states to sell a deed for land you might own, but which the seller makes no guarantee that they do in fact own. It’s kinda like a fork in cryptocurrency, where if the fork is later rejected, then that part of the ledger history is entirely dead and you’re SOL. Again, we could really use a central land registry…)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you were to launch a rocketship parallel to the earth, on wheels, how big would the ramp have to be to get it into space?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You can’t just point your spacecraft into space, give it a boost and be flying off into the void forever.

  To be clear, is the reason this is not sufficient for flying forever is due to orbital mechanics making “point and shoot” not feasible if aiming for the void? Or because the boost isn’t sufficient to escape the planetary system’s influence and thus still predominantly subject to its gravitation pull? Or both?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How is spontaneous betting (as portrayed by comics and movies) supposed to work?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  shouting style betting

  I don’t have the answer to your question at large, but your description reminded me of the old method of how stock trading floors used to work. My understanding is that it involved lots of yelling and hand signals, with video of the whole process likely available online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is having a lawyer present during police interviews "opt in" rather than "opt out"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Here in the USA, we have numerous substantive and procedural criticisms of the legal system, and while IANAL, the latter is of particular interest to me and is the in domain of your questions. I will try to address each in turn, since they kinda build upon each other.

  Shouldn’t [providing a lawyer] be the default and not require the suspect/subject to actually ask for one?

  To get to the answer, we need to step back and get examine what the exact obligation is. In the USA, the specific right in question is the individual’s right to choose legal counsel. That is, a person has the final authority as to who will represent and advise them in legal proceedings. This right isn’t unlimited though, and it doesn’t mean that they ought to be represented by a specific lawyer for free. But rather, the right means that no one else can make that decision on that person’s behalf.

  But in the Anglo-American formulation of what a right is, it is also an obligation upon everyone else. Specifically, the government is obligated to not interfere with a person’s free choice of lawyer. This was poignantly and recently examined by the federal court in DC, as it pertains to the executive’s attacks on the law firm Perkins Coie, where the federal judge ripped the government for interference with due process rights, from which the right to choice of lawyer.

  But there’s a wrinkle with rights: if the liberty it affords is the ability to choose, how would choosing nothing be handled? That is, if a person wishes to not choose, how can they affirmatively decline to choose? There are – and it’s a foolhardy exercise – criminal defendants in the USA that plainly choose to represent themselves in court, with no lawyer to aid them. The general rule for a “unilateral” right such as this one is that it is “optional”, where affirmative actions are needed to involve the right, otherwise the default is that the right isn’t invoked.

  And that sits fairly well in the breath of rights that civilians enjoy, such as the right to travel the public lands (eg walking or riding a bicycle on the street) to the First Amendment’s right to petition the government. After all, no one from the govt is phoning people up every day to ask “do you wish to unicycle on Main St today?” or “would you like to comment on the city budget next Tuesday?”. More clearly, those rights are fairly obvious when they wish to be used, or when they don’t wish to be used. (Though I grant you that the latter implicates a right to notification, but that’s a whole different matter)

  The system of rights gets even more complicated when someone holds two opposing rights. For example, in the USA, everyone has both the right to free speech, plus the right to silence. In that case, it absolutely forces the matter, because the absence of speech is very much a matter than can be criminalized. For example, failing to say something under penalty of perjury. How this is handled gets complicated, and generally speaking, such actions or inactions have to clearly show intent to invoke (or not) the specific right. This is precisely why it’s important to say “I wish to invoke my right to silence and to an attorney” when arrested, because otherwise the government’s obligations are confused, since the rights are confused. That statement unquestionably clears up the situation for how the govt must behave.

  Basically, in order for the govt to meet its obligation not to interfere with someone’s choice of lawyer, it would not be proper if they then proposed a lawyer by name to represent that person. Even just making such a proposal is coercive, since the govt holds most of the power and clout when in court. Instead, if the person voices their request for a lawyer, then that sets into motion the apparatus for verifying their eligibility for a public lawyer from the Public Defender’s office – btw, these offices are woefully underfunded, so contact your representatives to fix this! – and then finding such a lawyer to represent the person.

  All of this stems from due process, and the “Miranda warning” is the practical implementation of due process. Since if someone doesn’t even know they have a right, it might as well not exist.

  I think the only question should be “do you have your own lawyer you like to use, or are you happy enough with the court-appointed one?”

  This is the obvious question, following notification that the right even exists. But again, if the appointed lawyer has already been selected and it’s only a trinary choice - your own lawyer, this specific public defender, or no one – then that’s still somewhat coercive. It precludes the possibility of having a different public defense lawyer, of which the existing process already handles.

  When I say that the public defender’s office finds a lawyer to represent someone, they do so while mindful that not every lawyer can represent every client. After all, Greenpeace wouldn’t want a lawyer that’s also currently working a case for Chevron, the oil giant. Conflicts of interest may arise, as well as any other scenario that would make said lawyer less effective at their job: zealously advocating for their client.

  But again, this isn’t an unlimited right of the person, so a case cannot be delayed indefinitely because the client doesn’t like any of the public defender lawyers. But a case can absolutely be parked due to no available public lawyers, though if this happens, courts typically have other avenues to clean the logjam but without infringing on civil rights.

  Has there ever been any attempt to make that the norm in any countries?

  I’m only vaguely familiar with Anglosphere jurisdictions, and haven’t come across a system that improves on this situation. Though quite frankly, if it’s going to happen, it should be tried at the state level in the USA, where there’s the most room and latitude for improvement.

  I’m not even sure opting out should be allowed, but I’m open to hearing reasons why that would be a bad system

  The coercion issue from earlier can be turned to 11, if the govt is operating in bad faith. Imagine, for example, that the govt charges someone with bogus accusations, then bribes a corrupt lawyer from out-of-state to come represent the defendant against their will, who will then “throw” the case and land the defendant in prison. There are a lot of norms and procedures that would have to be violated to do this, but that’s kinda the point: defense in depth is equally applicable to computer security as it is to civil rights.

  An institution that assumes good faith govt will be hard pressed to deal with a govt that acts in bad faith. I make no excuses for the numerous American federal and state-level judicial fails, but when it comes to institutions that will uphold civil rights, individual liberty with regards to accessing the legal system is crucial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I weird for avoiding flying on prop planes, and only fly on jets?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Answering the titular question, I personally don’t find it weird that someone might avoid certain types of aircraft, in the same way that some people strongly prefer certain aircraft. For example, the big windows and the more-comfortable pressurization of the Boeing 787 is appealing for some. But alternatively, some might prefer the modern Canadian design of the Airbus A220.

  Objectively speaking, though, propeller planes is a very wide category, and I’m curious which specific aspect you want to avoid. Piston-powered propeller craft are basically non-existent in commercial passenger airline service, with the exception of small “puddle jumper”, 15-seat air taxi services. Such airplanes tend to be loud and also use leaded gasoline – hilariously still called “low lead” despite apparently having more lead additive than what motor gasoline had in the 1980s.

  Then there are turbo prop aircraft, like the ATR-72, which are basically a propeller taking power off of a jet engine core. No lead here, and noise is slightly less bothersome due to continuous jet combustion, but the sound of the propeller remains. Though this is offset by the lower cruise speeds, so less “wind noise”.

  If perhaps the concern is about propeller failures, bear in mind that commercial passenger aviation is exceptionally safe, across all aircraft types. The propulsion method is small-fries compared to the backend support and logistics of an airliner and ATC, plus having two pilots, and all manner of other things which blend into the background but are essential for safety. Pretty much only the elevator would be safer than air travel, even accounting for some rather unfortunate recent incidents here in USA airspace.

  That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that propeller and jet fan failures have had fatalities in living memory, with a notable event being the blade ejection of a Southwest Boeing 737 that pierced the fuselage and partially ejected a passenger.

  Overall, I personally have zero qualms about commercial passenger propeller aircraft, and up until the Boeing 737 MAX fiasco, most people did not care at all which type of airplane they were boarding. Since that event, booking websites added filters to allow excluding specific types of aircraft by model. But I’ve not seen one which excludes by propulsion type.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wifi Portal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  But how do they connect to your network in order to access this web app? If the WiFi network credentials are needed to access the network that has the QR code for the network credentials, this sounds like a Catch 22.

  Also, is a QR code useful if the web app is opened on the very phone needing the credentials? Perhaps other phones are different, but my smartphone is unable to scan a QR code that is on the display.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wifi Portal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not immediately understanding what the user scenario/story is. Would a family member open this web app on a desktop computer, in order to obtain the WiFi credentials to configure their phone or tablet?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are standing seats on airliners actually going to be a thing?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Setting aside whether such seats are actively hazardous to passengers for anything more than a short-haul flight – they almost certainly are – we can fairly easily rule out the possibility based solely on one of the more important airline test criteria: evacuation time.

  For all commercial passenger airliners, the primary limiting factor for economy seating is how to get everyone out of the airplane in an emergency situation within the stipulated time, in ideal circumstances. In the USA, that time is 90 seconds, based on research that the inferno post-crash due to ruptured fuel tanks would only allow the plane to remain intact for about two minutes. Front that article, the largest passenger jet in the world – the Airbus A380 – could evacuate 873 people through 16 doors on two dual-aisle decks. A typical short-haul, single-aisle Boeing 737 has only six doors and carries a maximum of 230 passengers with the still-being-certified 737 MAX 10 variant.

  The benefit of having more doors and more aisles must not be understated, but even then, another limiting factor is takeoff weight. Using the 737 MAX 10 as an example, the difference between its empty weight and takeoff weight is some 40,000 pounds. But 230 people already makes around 20,000 pounds, so the aircraft already cannot be fully loaded with its intended 44,000 pound fuel capacity. Packing more people into this aircraft would steal even more capacity and leaving the aircraft unable to support transcontinental USA flights.

  But supposing that was overcome, and flights with so-called standing seats were only about 2 hours long or so, the problem would be with seat durability during a crash scenario. Jet airlines seats are designed to absorb energy, since excessive G-forces would kill a human, well before any fire might get to them. A seat which relies on legs for vertical support would be unable to adequately absorb downward forces from a hard touchdown, nor from forces from hitting an obstacle or being rammed from behind. These two directions are what humans are best able to cope with, and a standing seat steals these benefits away.

  Thus, a seat that complies with energy absorption requirements would be at least as thick as existing seatbacks, and would probably be thicker or heavier, further reducing available payload.

  The only conceivable revenue service would be one where economy class uses so-called standing seats, in order to free up room for business or first-class seats, staying within the existing seat limits for existing aircraft. However, the time to board such an aircraft would be noticeably slower than with a conventional seat aircraft, so at some point, such an airliner would need to consider whether a stopped aircraft loading passengers is better value than an aircraft which can be quickly turned around for another flight segment.

  All of these factors point to a technical inability to squeeze more passengers into less space. And remember that there’s no free lunch: a “standing” passenger frees up space between rows, but requires more height at each seat. At least from my experience, one cannot stand up in a conventional seat, without hitting the ceiling. How would a typical 5 ft 9 in (175 cm) American be able to use a “standing” seat safely?

  I personally discount the possibility of “standing” seats deployed on existing and proposed aircraft, so it would be at least 10-20 years before we even see such a thing for revenue passenger aircraft.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Besides money/capitalism, why are tech companies trying to push AI text generators over search engines?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Money and incentives are very powerful, but also remember that these organizations are made of humans. And humans are vain.

  Amassing station and power can scarcely be divorced from the history of human civilization, and even fairly trivial things like the job title of “AI engineer” or whatever might be alluring to those aspiring for it.

  To that end, it’s not inhuman to pursue “the next big thing”, however misguided that thing may be. All good lies are wrapped in a kernel of truth, and the fact is that machine learning and LLMs have been in development for decades and do have a few concrete contributions to scientific endeavors. But that’s the small kernel, and surrounding it is a soup of lies, exaggerations, and inexactitudes which somehow keep drawing more entities into the fold.

  Governments, businesses, and universities seem eager to get on the bandwagon before it departs the station, but where is it heading? Probably nowhere good. But hey, it’s new and shiny, and when nothing else suggests a quick turnaround for systemic government, economic, or academic issues (usually caused by colonialism, fascism, debt, racism, or social change), then might as well hitch onto the bandwagon and pray for the best.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digital buffer works for a bit, then stops, turning it off for an hour resets it to working again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  BTW, you might consider posting about your finished results at !micromobility@lemmy.world . We enjoy all things bicycle-related there, especially when it’s solving a unique problem or solving it in unique ways.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digital buffer works for a bit, then stops, turning it off for an hour resets it to working again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  (sorry for the long delay)

  From your description, I’m wondering if the internal pull-up from the bike computer might actually be an active output, and that the open-drain buffer is causing the bike computer to give up sourcing that pull-up voltage. That is to say, if a larger-than-expected current is drawn from the bike computer, it might trigger a protection mechanism to avoid damage to its output circuitry.

  To that end, I would imagine that either: 1) an inline resistor to limit drain current, 2) a push-pull buffer, or 3) both, would help rectify the issue.

  My suspicion is based purely on the fact that getting stuck low for an open-drain device could be an issue “upstream”. If it were stuck high, I wouldn’t normally suspect this path.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digital buffer works for a bit, then stops, turning it off for an hour resets it to working again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For your edit #2, can you post a schematic of the relevant part of the circuit? It’s a bit hard to imagine how things are arranged, especially where your pull up resistor at the output of the buffer is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digital buffer works for a bit, then stops, turning it off for an hour resets it to working again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If I had to guess, perhaps the buffer circuit is going onto latch-up due to ESD spikes, which is then locking the open drain to conduct, which is why you’re seeing a LOW output.

  When in doubt, I suppose you can tack on more decoupling capacitors nearby the buffer’s Vcc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digital buffer works for a bit, then stops, turning it off for an hour resets it to working again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When the buffer gets into this glitch scenario, is the output stuck at high or low?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Typically, business-oriented vendors will list the hardware that they’ve thoroughly tested and will warranty for operation with their product. The lack of testing larger disk sizes does not necessarily mean anything larger than 1 TB is locked out or technically infeasible. It just means the vendor won’t offer to help if it doesn’t work.

  That said, in the enterprise storage space where disks are densely packed into disk shelves with monstrous SAS or NVMeoF configurations, vendor specific drives are not unheard of. But to possess hardware that even remotely has that possibility kinda means that sort of thing would be readily apparent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not a pilot but have always looked to the open skies with dreams and admiration. I think we need to unpack a few assumptions.

  something that’s very forbidden in the aviation world because of lightning

  Weather (WX) has always been an integral part of aviation, as early as the lighter-than-air (ie hot-air balloon) days. The strength of human kind is no match to what nature can throw at us, and so instead we adapt to what nature gives us. On one hand, nature provides niceties like prevailing wind and thermals, to allow us to build runways pointing into the wind and for gliders to gain altitude. On the other hand, nature can decide that an Icelandic volcano shoots hundreds of thousands of tons of particulate matter into the air, grounding all commercial flights in European airspace.

  Resilience becomes the objective, to safely operate revenue aircraft in the face of fickle natural phenomena. And this is achieved in a multi-layer approach, with resilience baked in at every step. The aircraft itself, the crew, the airports, ATC, and the regulators, they all are trained and briefed on known hazards, which is part of why commercial aviation is one of the safest modes of travel, sans maybe the elevator.

  Unlike volcanic activity or windshears/microbursts, thunderstorms and lightning give plenty of warning through day-ahead WX forecasts, as well as onboard radar. These are not fool-proof – for example, radar can be shadowed by nearby precipitation, hiding enormous thunder clouds beyond. But despite how terrifying it may sound to fly through a storm, it isn’t impossible and certainly not unmanageable. But it does take preparation, and requires sufficient margins so that if anything starts to look awry, there’s an escape path.

  Often times, the escape path is just to climb away.

  Lightning struck the plane … which could’ve been catastrophic

  There are many things which are potentially catastrophic for aircraft: loss of engines, loss of pressurization, a lithium ion battery fire in the cargo compartment, a medical emergency while overflying the mid-Atlantic.

  But while a gut-reaction would be to outright avoid risk, human endeavors can make no progress like that. So instead, worst-case planning means developing procedures for when not if something bad happens.

  Aircraft are designed to take lightning strikes, and although the Boeing 787 uses a lot of composite material, it too has provisions for lightning.

  the report for this incident

  Seeing as the incident here occurred on 17 March 2025, I wouldn’t expect the Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB; the air safety regulator, equivalent to USA NTSB) to have published a final report. There might be a preliminary report, but this is not that.

  This appears to be a collection of ADS-B data, a mention of damage to a control surface, and a Twitter post about airline compensation due to diverting from Haneda (HND) to Narita (NRT).

  Were it not for the control surface damage, this incident might have fallen below the threshold for reporting, since no source suggests there were injuries and I don’t see – having not watched the video – an emergency being declared by the pilots. Diversions are not wholly uncommon, for a number of operational or WX reasons.

  I’m pretty sure if a US or European pilot did this, they’d get their license revoked

  I think this is wrong, based solely on the robust safety culture in both the USA and in European airspace. Safety culture means that procesures are developed to manage risk, these procedures are regularly practiced, are updated with the latest available recommendations, and non-wilful deviations from procedure (aka mistakes) will be addressed by additional training, not by punishment.

  As Mentour Pilot eloquently reminds viewers of his YouTube channel, if punishment were metted out for every mistake, then it’s a disincentive to report mistakes, which makes safety worse for everyone.

  No doubt, there are pilots which have operated grossly outside the bounds of acceptability, like flying an empty jet into coffin corner, or allowing a child to fly the plane. Such accidents are reported precisely because they blew through every layer of the Swiss cheese model of accident causation, and tragically took lives.

  So with all that out of the way, I think we can still try to answer the titular question.

  A scheduled passenger airliner tries to get passengers from airport A to airport B. A lot of prep is done in the background to make this happen, organizing the ground crew, flight crew, and backend operations at the airliner HQ. Most of the time, the flight is uneventful and arrives as expected. A few times, there might a go-around, but pilots are trained to not shy away from doing a go-around, and have the reserve fuel to do so.

  With any sort of damage on approach, be it from a bird strike or lightning strike, the pilots will have to: 1) secure the plane, usually by initiating a go-around to buy valuable time and get away from the ground, and 2) assess the condition of the airplane and make a plan. In this case, the airplane diverted to a nearby airport, which was probably the backup destination airport.

  As mentioned before, WX is fickle, and a storm can easily creep over the airport when the plane is within radio contact. And even if the storm was already over the arrival path, if the indications are still suitable for landing – eg low crosswind, no tailwind, no predicted windshears, no prior pilot reports of landing troubles – then the pilots will have discretion to continue their approach.

  For a healthy safety culture, the airliner’s own procedures have to place the pilots as the ultimate decision-makers once a flight is underway, and so while it’s unfortunate that damage occurred unexpectedly, nothing from the minimal available information suggests this amounts to a systemic or procedural error, nor wilful malfeasance.

  The fact that the airliner returned to service days later means this might simply be slightly more than mundane happenings. Though it would be prudent to keep an eye out for a future report from the safety regulator.