ChairmanMeow
@ChairmanMeow@programming.dev
- Comment on Mario Kart DS was released 20 years ago today on November 14th, 2005 2 days ago:
Left-right on the D-pad is hardly a complex input. Just about every child managed to discover it. It was one of the few ways they could make Mario Kart a bit more skill based.
- Comment on YSK before you buy a replacement for your cellphone that has stopped charging, buy the $10 cleaning kits and spend the time deep cleaning the phone's charging port. 1 week ago:
You really won’t short something, and wooden toothpicks are at risk of splintering and leaving more behind than getting out if you’re not careful.
- Comment on YSK before you buy a replacement for your cellphone that has stopped charging, buy the $10 cleaning kits and spend the time deep cleaning the phone's charging port. 1 week ago:
You generally won’t be touching the contacts much, since most gunk like lint can just be scooped out. Just be a bit gentle and you’ll be fine.
- Comment on YSK that risks to exposure of nuclear radition are often over exaggerated by considering a Linear No Threshold (LNT), which does not match with many studies. 2 weeks ago:
China is investing more in solar. But China is also very power-hungry, so any energy they produce will get sold to the market, so their market looks significantly different. Their economy is different and so is their power usage.
- Comment on YSK that risks to exposure of nuclear radition are often over exaggerated by considering a Linear No Threshold (LNT), which does not match with many studies. 2 weeks ago:
The same could be said of solar. ‘It’s a very expensive capitol investment and as soon as the sun goes down it’s just a stupidly expensive roof costing money’.
Solar is significantly cheaper. Like it’s not even funny how much cheaper it is. This means that other than the sun going down, they’re always going to be producing because it’s by far the cheapest power available. And because they easily earn back what they cost, it’s perfectly fine if they don’t operate at 100% efficiency.
For nuclear to remain economically viable in these market conditions it has to be similarly profitable, and it just isn’t.
- Comment on YSK that risks to exposure of nuclear radition are often over exaggerated by considering a Linear No Threshold (LNT), which does not match with many studies. 2 weeks ago:
You’d have similar problems doing this under communism tbf. It’s expensive under any economic system. Solar at least has the advantage that any Joe Shmoe can put it on their roof and produce their own power, not being dependent on big energy corpos.
- Comment on YSK that risks to exposure of nuclear radition are often over exaggerated by considering a Linear No Threshold (LNT), which does not match with many studies. 2 weeks ago:
Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope.
In the power grid of today (and even more so in the future), that’s fairly slow. On good days wind and solar already produce more than 100% in several countries, so it needs to be able to drop to 0%. Worse however is that nuclear is already expensive, and shutting it down means it’s just a hunk of a building costing money. It’s why private investors have largely shunned nuclear in the modern days: it’s not econonically viable anymore, or even if it is it’s just not profitable enough. And that picture seems to be getting worse and worse every year.
The costs are just externalized and safety is, comparitively, neglected.
Sure, but the power companies don’t pay for that so to them it’s cheap, which was the point.
- Comment on YSK that risks to exposure of nuclear radition are often over exaggerated by considering a Linear No Threshold (LNT), which does not match with many studies. 2 weeks ago:
The main issue with nuclear is that it just doesn’t make economic sense. It’s far too expensive to build and it takes ages to get running too.
Second problem is that due to the variability in output of other renewable sources, anything that intends to be the “backup power” has to be very variable as well. Nuclear can’t quickly scale up and down, and even if it could it’d make nuclear even less economically viable. It’s why currently gas plants are used as backup: they’re cheap and can scale up/down very quickly.
And then there’s the big advantage that solar has, which is that people can own the power generation themselves, saving a lot of money and in some cases even making money. It’s also decentralized: an accident or attack at a nuclear plant would have huge consequences for electricity availability (not to mention other safety problems). Solar is also dirt-cheap and getting cheaper every year, faster than most scientists predicted it would.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
You might just have the wrong shape of glasses. I thought for years I had the right shape of glasses on my face, but as it turns out a different shape looked way better.
- Comment on Is. It....German????? 3 weeks ago:
No it’s about the 2014 World Cup.
- Comment on Why do so many boomers and even some gen x believe so peristently that if you dressup and show up in person anywhere you will get whatever you went there for? 3 weeks ago:
Yeah Abagnale pretended to be a doctor and conducted 12 “fitness examinations”, supposedly for Pan Am, on young female students. Definitely creepy.
And then there’s the individual women who accused him of all sorts of stuff.
- Comment on Why do so many boomers and even some gen x believe so peristently that if you dressup and show up in person anywhere you will get whatever you went there for? 3 weeks ago:
You should probably know the best con that Abagnale pulled is making people believe he actually did all of those things. Journalists have discovered that the vast majority of his claims are completely fabricated.
- Comment on 4chan fined $26K for refusing to assess risks under UK Online Safety Act 4 weeks ago:
Ignoring that the UK isn’t part of the EU, the EUs privacy laws extend to all European citizens, and it has treaties with most of the world (including the US) allowing it to enforce those.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
I suggest you look at someone else for reviews because this review is both inaccurate and somehow also blindingly stupid.
- Comment on Logitech will brick its $100 Pop smart home buttons on October 15 - Ars Technica 5 weeks ago:
It’s literally happened to every single version of Windows, 10 and below.
- Comment on Logitech will brick its $100 Pop smart home buttons on October 15 - Ars Technica 5 weeks ago:
This has literally happened repeatedly in the past. Just last year an exploit came to light affecting Windows XP that was so bad Microsoft had to release another security patch for it. WannaCry and NotPetya malwares used similarly severe exploits in 2017.
- Comment on kurzgesagt – AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel 5 weeks ago:
The point was that they haven’t always held themselves up to those standards and have sometimes only used professionals espousing a single viewpoint (where multiple exist).
I should mention this isn’t bias, iirc the channel did release a video apologizing for some of the issues (though not all), so it wasn’t even up to their own standards by their own admission.
There’s a wikipedia entry listing some of the controversies: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurzgesagt#%3A~%3Atext=Whil….
Looking things up now, I see that the plagiarism case was slightly different: they had published a video on addiction, which was fairly explosive in its claims. Turns out it was citing basically just one fringe researcher who was also accused of plagiarism. The claims did not seem to hold up to scrutiny.
When another channel doing a series on how pop-sci influencers can sometimes spread misinformed ideas asked some questions to Kurzgesagt, they were immediately a bit apprehensive but agreed to do some interview questions, though with the caveat that they were busy with other things and needed a few weeks before it could take place. Then before the interview took place they suddenly put out their own apology video and took the addiction video down. At no point was it mentioned that another channel prompted this action, it was presented as some kind of inward reflection that they had come to themselves.
- Comment on Logitech will brick its $100 Pop smart home buttons on October 15 - Ars Technica 5 weeks ago:
Well, unless some exploit is discovered that doesn’t require user interaction. Then merely being connected puts your device at risk.
And given historical precedent, it’s going to be a matter of time until one is discovered.
- Comment on kurzgesagt – AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel 5 weeks ago:
I mean there’s been some controversy surrounding a number of their videos. Some were under fire for poor research or demonstrating a singular, not widely-held view on certain topics. And I think for one video they were accused of plagiarism iirc. This was when it was still somewhat early days for the channel, haven’t followed them since so not sure what the state is now.
- Comment on Trump floats dropping Spain from NATO alliance 5 weeks ago:
Not buy enough American weapons.
- Comment on America could have avoided all of this with a functional justice system 1 month ago:
In the Netherlands, to become a judge you must first study Dutch law at a university, then get at least 2 years of work experience in a law-related job. Then you take a second study of 15 months to at most 4 years to become a judge, which also has very strict selection criteria.
After that, you can become a judge. The judiciary branch selects its own members in that way.
If you want to become a higher level judge, you need 10 years of related experience and another study taking at most 2 years.
There’s no supreme court in the Netherlands. The legislative may make laws that supersede the constitution, but only if a very strong argumentation as to why is provided. The Raad van State (Council of State) can judge whether the cabinet has properly applied the law when writing new laws or taking executive decisions. The cabinet can suggest who should join the council, but the council determines if they are a good candidate (ranging from judges to scientists to former lawmakers). They then serve “for life” meaning until they turn 70, after which they retire. There can only be 11 members at a time.
- Comment on Disney going places... 1 month ago:
IIRC there were also some trademark issues?
- Comment on Borderlands 4 Dev Gearbox Asks PC Gamers to Wait 15 Minutes for Shaders to Compile in the Background While Playing After Reports Indicate Recent Update Causes Stuttering - IGN 1 month ago:
UE5 by default uses a lot of flashy tech that is supposed to improve performance, but a lot of it only does so in scenarios that are already extremely unoptimized. Using more traditional methods tends to achieve the same fidelity at a fraction of the performance cost. But there’s no time for optimization, and these fancy options “just work”, so there ya go.
The end result is a poorly running blurry mess of a game, but at least it’s on schedule I guess.
- Comment on Renewables blow past nuclear when it comes to cheap datacenter juice 1 month ago:
Nuclear power requires a lot of water for coolant. Usually they use river water and release the heated water back in the river, which quite heavily disrupts the ecosystem.
Additionally, during heatwaves (which we’re getting more and more of) the river water may get too warm to use, so the reactor has to shut down (happens in France almost every heatwave), which is bad as that happens when power usage tends to spike.
Nuclear is also extremely expensive, costs many years to build, not to mention we don’t have enough educated nuclear engineers nor build capacity to keep up with the demand for new power. It’s why investors generally don’t bother with nuclear much, outside of specific niche cases. Not to mention the carbon footprint of building a power plant.
It’s also likely going to get more expensive to run in the future. As renewables keep contributing more power to the grid (since they’re so cheap and getting cheaper still), power generation will also fluctuate more. Meaning, other power sources need to be very flexible in when they output power themselves. Nuclear is famously quite inflexible, it takes time to spin up and wind down. There are reactor designs that are better at it, but even for those shutting down the reactor for a couple hours tends to be economic suicide as well. This exact reason btw is why gas is still used a lot; it’s cleaner than coal at least, but also very easy to spin up or wind down without creating much extra cost. And it’s much cheaper than nuclear (leaving more money to invest in renewables).
Nuclear could be great, if it was A) cheaper, B) faster to build and C) more flexible. And no, so far SMRs have not proven to be any of those things yet.
- Comment on Helium-3 mining on Moon: A new frontier for science and geopolitics 1 month ago:
No, it was Iron Sky (2012), with the Swastika-shaped lunar base.
Let’s not give Elon any ideas.
- Comment on 'Windmill': China tests world’s first megawatt-level airship to capture high winds 1 month ago:
They accidentally added a zero, it’s supposed to be 1000m (doubke 500m).
- Comment on Uh oh lol 1 month ago:
Given the vastness of space, this is a lot less likely than you might think, and the process itself would likely take millenia anyway.
- Comment on Silent Courier: UK intelligence service MI6 launches dark web portal to recruit foreign spies 1 month ago:
Money.
- Comment on Keir Starmer in crisis as Labour drops to 16% in devastating new poll 1 month ago:
I wonder how many Labour PMs we’ll see before the next GE.
- Comment on 'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed' 1 month ago:
It’s poorly optimized UE5 slop. Looks like shit, plays like shit.
Hard pass.
