litchralee

@litchralee@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could I just create my own drive format?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I vaguely recall what was effectively a delay-line implemented using terrahertz-modulated lasers aimed at the retro reflector on the moon from Earth’s surface. The data storage capacity was something in either the hundreds of GBs or low TBs. But I can’t find the reference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could I just create my own drive format?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I wish to advocate in the name of DIY minimalism. That is to say, it’s true that none of us – Linus Torvalds is not in the room, right? – can hope to churn out anything approaching a full-blown filesystem on the order of ext4 or NTFS if we worked our entire lives. But if those filesystems were the end-all-be-all of innovation in those spaces, the richness and intrigue of computer science would have died out long ago, relegated to only the pinnacle of engineers and no one else.

  But I feel like that can’t quite be the case, because all engineering is about achieving careful balances. And as fine as ext4 is, it must be said that it’s anything but minimal. It’s full-featured, which also implies that it might have more than what any one person requires. If OP wants to write a very compact filesystem designed for 8-bit microprocessors, I can’t badger them with ext4’s existence, because that’s not going to be usable on an 8 bit machine.

  Much like how Python includes a really tiny HTTP server, and we can all agree that it’s order of magnitudes less sophisticated than nginx, such implementations can have their time in the sun. And I think a tiny, absurdly minimal, almost code-golf of a filesystem, might have a place in this world, if OP really wants to undertake that effort.

  Computer science, I wish to believe, still has doors awaiting exploration.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if a billionaire wants to help you?⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) in the USA are made to track both potential tax evasion and money laundering. This is where the $10k cash “limit” comes from, but SARs can/should be filed for higher amount that create suspicion.

  Someone depositing a check for multiple times their lifetime transactions total would absolutely create suspicion on themselves, especially if it was a personal check. But if it were a business check from “ABC Mortgage Escrow”, that’s probably legit but a bank clerk is well within their rights to flag it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could I just create my own drive format?⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Lots of good answers, especially using FUSE for experimentation. One thing I’ll add is that if you just didn’t want to use any filesystem at all … you don’t have to!

  At least in the Unix realm, a disk drive is just a bunch of contiguous blocks, and you can put whatever you want in them. Of course, Unix itself famously needs a filesystem for itself, but if you want to just store all your giant binary blobs – cryptocurrency block chain? – directly onto a drive without the pesky overhead or conveniences of a filesystem, that’s doable.

  It’s not generally a useful idea to treat a disk drive as though it’s a tape drive, but it does work. And going further into that analogy, you can use “tar” to collect multiple files and fit them onto the drive, since a tarball preserves file metadata and the borders between files, but not much else. This is the original use of tar – “tape archive” – for storing Unix files onto tape, because the thought of using tape as working storage with a filesystem was – and still is – a terrible idea. And that’s basically the idea with a filesystem: it’s better than linear access.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if a billionaire wants to help you?⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Banks can and do get into hot water if they’re found to have handled – inadvertently or not – funds which ends up with banned entities, like DPRK or terrorist groups, or are the product of fraud AND that they ignored reasonable suspicions.

  The classic example is the so-called “703 account” of fraudster Bernie Madoff, held at JP Morgan Chase bank. Although a humble checking account, it saw huge money inflows and outflows, with one reference showing a single withdrawal of $1.3 billion. For their wilful disregard of the obvious red flags, the bank was fined $461 million of their own money, separate from the seizure of the account to pay the victims.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Server sorted, on to switches⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  From my limited experience with PoE switches, how much power being drawn in relation to how much the switch can supply has a notable impact on efficiency. Specifically, when only one or two ports on a 48-port switch are delivering PoE, the increased AC power drawn from the wall is disproportionately high. Hence, any setup where you’re using more of the PoE switch’s potential power tends to increase overall efficiency.

  My guess is that it has to do with efficiency curves that are only reasonable when heavily loaded for enterprise customers. In any case, if either of those two candidate switches meet your needs today and with some breathing room, both should be fine. I would tend to lean towards Netgear before TP-Link though, out of personal preference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨anyone have personal experience with industrial tourism?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The larger town next to mine has monthly tours of their wastewater and water processing plants. Although they’re scheduled to be amenable for K-12 student field trips, they also see adults who wish to understand how their tax dollars are being expensed for the public good.

  For other municipal services, you might also reach out to the director of that department, since as public servants, they can also schedule special tours of the facilities for members of the public. It can’t hurt to ask.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I determine what a mystery dongle does?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never had a need to use a Yubikey, but is that the button which spews gibberish into DMs? I’ve seen that a lot at work on Teams lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I determine what a mystery dongle does?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It looks a lot like a Yubikey, which is used to securely authenticate to company resources like a VPN. Fortunately, unlike losing a hard drive, a Yubikey can be deauthorized by the company and this the device becomes useless for malicious use.

  So if you want to use that USB port for something else, it shouldn’t be a problem to remove a Yubikey for the prior user’s employer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Couldn't big-tech shut out non-monopoly laws by saying that it's meant to be like that on "their" product?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  aren’t these kind of laws; telling a maker to make the product in a specific way, eliminating creative freedom?

  In the realms of monopoly regulation, product liability, energy efficiency, or pollution emissions, to name a few examples, the objective of the law is to define a floor (read: minimum requirements) that balance competing interests. In a democratic society, the government holds the public interest in high regard, but solely focusing on just that would lead to some very strange results, some of which are too philosophical to distill into practice.

  Laws on anti-competitive or unfair business practices serve to level the playing field, so that businesses cannot assert an undue advantage over competitors, often to the hindrance of a competitive market for consumers. So there are two harms: other businesses have no hope of breaking into the market, and consumers don’t get as many choices as they could have had.

  The word “undue” is carrying a lot of weight, because some practices definitely assert an advantage to the disadvantage of everyone else: retaining all the good engineers is one such example, because good engineers can churn out good products, meaning other competitors have a harder time producing similarly-capable products. But that’s not an unnatural advantage, unless somehow the deck is being stacked to produce that result.

  As a practical matter, flouting the law is an excellent way to get one’s products banned from the marketplace, either by mechanism of law or by alienating consumers. Take VW’s emissions scandal as an example: US State DMVs were prepared to invalidate the vehicle registrations for noncompliant automobiles already on the road, and consumers fled for other automakers, causing both the used and new prices for VW cars to drop. Many (all?) US States prohibit the sale of automobiles currently subject to a recall, with penalties for the seller. So why would anyone want to continue owning such a car, nor could they even get rid of it except by getting/using VW to buy it back.

  When a government really wants to turn the screws on a nonconforming business, they absolutely have the means to do it. And it doesn’t even require a top-down regime like what’s often said about the Chinese government.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can I put a cold oxygen plasma generator in my fridge?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I got my hands on a cold oxygen plasma generator

  My dude, very unique opportunities seem to be a common occurrence for you. I remember when I answered your question about 240v residential power. And now a plasma generator??

  Sadly, I don’t have an answer to your present inquiry, but I hope the other commenters are of aid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could one legally get a hold of those bank bill dye security dye packs, dye your own legally obtained cash with it, and spend it places? Just to make people suspect you're secretly a bank robber.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there anything legally stopping you from making your town think you’re a gangster who robbed a bank and somehow got away with it?

  If the goal is to convince other people to think you’re a bank robber, but without actually having to rob a bank, I think it could be done with much less effort and likely more effective. But this then gets into the ethical line between little white lies and outright deception or misinformation.

  Because one way to achieve that goal is to doctor a bunch of evidence that would “incriminate” yourself, such as AI-generated video, then disseminate that to local reports, while also plastering it on social media, and might as well stuff a copy into a manila envelope and mail to the local District Attorney.

  And all of that is probably legal in most jurisdictions in the USA, with the probable sole exception of intentionally wasting the prosecutor’s office’s effort, since they had not solicited such evidence. Compare this to “tip lines”, which expressly seek info and they are fully cognizant that not all the tips will be good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hypothetically, if the police seized your electronics (for an unrelated investigation) and found out you have a lot of pirated content, what would happen?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Possession of content – with the unique exception of CSAM – in the USA does not draw a distinction between how it was acquired, whether or not it may have violated a license or copyright. The primary provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976 are to protect the production and distribution of copyrighted works. So unless your stash of content is being hosted on a server for others to access – which constitutes distribution, though one could possibly argue that if no one ever accessed it, it’s not distribution – then the mere possession does not incur criminal liability. Of course, civil liability may attach, meaning that the copyright holder could sue you for the cost of buying a legit license. Though there’s zero reason for the police to pass that info to whomever the copyright holder is. Whether police can gratuitously share investigation info with a third-party is a matter of state law.

  But the other potential criminal charge could come from the infamous DMCA, whose provisions make it a crime to circumvent DRMs. Though this provision has an out, whereby certain circumvention is permitted as exceptions for designated purposes, created and renewed through a regulatory process. Outside these exceptions, the standard defense of fair-use for copyright infringement does not apply to a charge of DMCA circumvention. So if the police could put together evidence that your content stash is the product of circumvention, and other evidence shows that you used or have the tools/software to perform that circumvention, that’s technically a charge which could be leveled.

  This would take a colossal amount of effort, for something which generally has to be brought by the (federal) US Attorney’s office, rather than a state-level District Attorney. So realistically, this would only really be considered if you somehow managed to annoy an FBI investigator enough. And even then, it’s quite petty to charge DMCA circumvention alone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG OLED TV is changing inputs automatically.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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 ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.