Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Today's Survey. One point for everything that you have NEVER DONE⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The country were I was living when I rented videos didn’t have Blockbuster, so 1.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With the current state of the news, April's fools aren't fun anymore because they can't be distinguished as easily as before⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Being a fool has become a year-long occupation for many …

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Virgin Physicists⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For starters resistance changes with temperature.

  Also even in a multi-turn potentiometer, getting a precision of 1 in 10^9 would require an equal level of precision in the angle you rotate that potentiometer to (for example, a 0.1 degree error in a 10 turn potentiometer - which I believe is more turns than anything that actually can be bought - translates into a 1 in 36,000 error in resistance, so about 3000 larger than 10^9) even if you had a perfect material whose resistance doesn’t change with temperature.

  The joke here isn’t even specifically about resistances and electronics, it’s that the real world has all sorts of limitations that when you’re doing things whole in the mathematical world you don’t have to account for, and that’s a hard realisation for Physicists (having gone to study Physics at uni and then half way in my degree changing to Electronics Engineering I can tell you that’s one of the shocks I had to deal with in the transition).

  (In a way, it’s really a joke about Theoretical Physicists)

  See also the “assuming this chicken is a spherical ovoid” kind of joke.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calm your tits⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  We had a saying in my country which goes roughly like this: “It’s not the dog that barks which bites”

  I’d say it applies here, and I ain’t talking about the corgies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump supporter Rick Fuze was arrested in CA for using a stun gun on peaceful protesters outside a Tesla dealership. The woman kicking this guy’s ass is a retired professor with 16,000 citations.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Worry not: soon the American authorities will treat the former pretty much the same as the latter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Enshittification⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Easy to measure (support manpower costs) vs hard to measure (business lost due to bad support).

  Good engineering (and old fashioned business practices) would try to better measure the hard to measure stuff (for example using surveys).

  Modern MBA business practices just uses the asy to measure stuff as guidelines and doesn’t even try to measure the rest, possibly because “if we don’t officially know it the I can’t be blamed for it”.

  Mind you, maybe they’re right since most consumers get shafted and still keep on coming back for more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  More broadly, I would expect UBI to trigger a golden age of invention and artistic creation because a lot of people would love to spend their time just creating new stuff without the need to monetise it but can’t under the current system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Enshittification⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Just thinking out loud, I’m wondering if there’s not a mix of two innovations - the big innovation such as whole new software or hardware to do something that wasn’t possible to do before or at least not in that way and small innovation, i.e. incremental improvements.

  In Tech, companies usually start with one big innovation (consumer OS for Microsoft, web search with automated crawling for Google, universal discussion forum for Facebook and so on) and after that mostly do smaller innovations on it. Whilst they often have a couple more big innovations in them (for example Android OS for Google and Office for Microsoftw) they seem to eventually run out of such innovations or maybe just become too much “play it safe” when it comes to them so don’t really do the break-through big innovations anymore.

  All this to say that I suspect corporatisation destroys the environment in a company for big innovation - it’s a lot easier to keep on milking the existing cow that to try and come up with something completely different and the very mindset of the company changes from “try crazy ideas” of the small, poor and desperate startup to the relying on steady and safe income streams that more appeals to the bean counters that take over those companies when they get big enough.

  Under a sales model, you need a steady stream of small innovation on the core product to keep the steady and safe income stream going - people need to be convinced to buy the latest and greatest version of the product so it general need to offer something more than the last one, and although marketting can be used to convince people to buy a new version which has little more than the last one (look at iPhones of late), as the product matures there is less and less small innovation on it that’s actually usefull to there is less and appeal for consumers to get the latest version and that income stream falls.

  Both subscription models and paid-by-advertising upend that need even small innovation - a company doesn’t need to regularly make a new and improved version of their original big innovation, they just need to keep on getting the steady stream of revenue from their existing product. I would say that this appeals even more to bean counters that the small innovation cycle since it’s even more predictable, hence you see big companies shifting to it even in things which make no sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Israel publicly announces genocidal intent⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re going to protest, cast a blank vote, if you abstain you’re just going to end up mixed with the “too lazy to vote” crowd.

  Also, having maned voting booths in my own country a couple of times (I expect it’s not all that different in the US) writting stuff in the your ballot paper will just make a vote invalid and nobody will record or even care about you wrote there - maybe 2 or 3 people will see your words there while counting votes, but that’s it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Israel publicly announces genocidal intent⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “yOu ShoULd hAve vOTeD FOr OuR BabY kiLLeR INsTeAD!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chinese EV maker BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That second formula is for how much power gets dissipated in a resistance (hence the R in it) , not how much power travels through a line.

  That said the previous poster was indeed incorrect - the required thickness of a cable through which a certain amount of power passes depends only on current, not voltage: make it too thin and it can literally melt with a high enough current and the formula of the power it is dissipating as heat that can cause it to melt is that second formula of yours and the R in that formula is inverselly proportional to the cross-cut area of the cable, which for a round cable is the good old area of a circle formula which depends on the square of the radius - in other words the thicker the cable the less current it can take without heating up too much or, putting it the other way around, the more current you want to safely pass through a cable the thicker it needs to be.

  In summary, thinner cables heat up more with higher currents (and if they heat up enough they melt) because even pure copper has some resistance and the thinner the cable the higher the resistance. If you need to move Power, not current specifically (such as to charge something), you can chose more current or to have a higher voltage (because P = V x I), and chosing a higher current means you need thicker cables (be cause as explained above the cables would overheat and even melt otherwise) but a higher voltage doesn’t require a thicker cable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Starlink is now accessible across the White House campus, which was already served by fiber cable, after service was “donated”, as some cite security concerns.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  … we should further have a carrier pidgeon with USB Flash disks system for ultra slow but highly private Internet access.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Something's wrong with denmark⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My experience living in The Netherlands (which has a similar system) as a non-native whose mothertongue is from the Romance branch is that you eventually get used to it. I think that’s because as your language skills improve you just stop interpreting the parts of the number individually and handle hearing and speaking those “nastier” blocks of two digits as if the whole block is a language expression.

  Even better the apparently flip-flopping between one way of ordering digits and another one in longer numbers (for example: “two thousand and two and ninety”) actually makes the strategy of “everything between 0 and 99 is processed as an expression” viable, whilst I’m not so sure that would be possible if instead of 100 numerical language expressions we had 1000 or more.

  (If you’re not a Franch native speaker and you learn the language you might notice something similar when at some point your mind switches from interpreting “quatre-vingt” as “four twenty” to just taking it in whole block as an expression that translates to eighty)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thinkpad for the win⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In electronics there are actually milspec versions on microchips different from the normal space (they have a wider range of operating temperatures plus I also believe higher resistence to electromagnetic radiation and mechanical vibration, similar to microchips “for automobile use”), but I suspect that when it comes to actual consumer electronics devices the words “military grade” are not a protected tag (as in, electronic devices said to be “military grade” are not forced by regulation to have certain characteristics) so those words are generally marketing bullshit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thinkpad for the win⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also now you have to buy a special cloth from Apple to clean the gold logo on the Apple MacBook Cleaning Cloth Pro without scratching it.

  (It’s cleaning cloths all the way down!)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Having a baby? Use this one weird trick!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think at least some countries in Europe had a similar system as the US but moved to Restricted Birthright in the 80s because of freeloading - i.e. well off people with no connection to a country just flying over and having their kids there to give them citizenship in that country.

  With Restricted Birthright the parents have to have been living in that country for a few years - so de facto being members of that society - to earn that right.

  Personally I think it’s fair that those comitted to participating in a Society all deserve the same rights (including local nationality for their children) independently of themselves having or not the local nationality, whilst those who are not comitted to participating in that Society do not, and “being resident in that country for more than X years” seems to me a pretty neutral and reasonably fair way to determine “comitted to participating in that country’s Society”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Having a baby? Use this one weird trick!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s what everybody will be saying in the Northern Hemisphere every time there is a break in the nuclear winter cloud cover, only with more feeling of joy (so, more exclamation marks!!!).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Having a baby? Use this one weird trick!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that the Restricted Birthright citizenship which is most common in Europe tries to navigate somewhere between those two extremes - in it basically if you’re a Resident in that country for more than X years (from what I’ve seen usually X years is 2 years) then your children born there get citizenship.

  It filters out freeloading - well-off people who have no personal investment in a country and its future and never contributed to it in any way, just flying over and having their kids there to give them citizenship - whilst still extending the same rights as locals have to those who, whilst not having the local nationality, are participating members of that society.

  I think the fairest way is to give equal treatment (including giving the local nationality to their children and making it available to they themselves after a few years living there) to those who are participating members of a society but not to those who are not members of that society, and that would also mean that the fairest treatment would be that the children of local nationals who have long ago left (and the children themselves never in fact lived there) do not get that nationality automatically for merely their parents having it.

  Ultimately I think nationality should be earned by living as part of a Society and when they’re born children, having not have had a chance to “earn” it, would inherited that from the or parents.

  That said some level of obtaining nationality based on the nationality of one’s parents makes sense to cover the time gaps of people who moved abroad and had children there before they could qualify for the nationality of the country they were born with, since otherwise those children would be stateless.

  As for the decision mechanism being “years legally living in a country” it’s just the simplest and most equal for all (passing no judgment for things like what people do for a living) way of judging “participating in that Society” whilst only excluding people who were neither invited in nor taken in because they’ve truly need help (i.e. it’s only for legal immigrants and refugees).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Digital Packrat Manifesto | DRM and big tech's war on ownership has led me to make my own media libraries, and you should too⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been a “digital packrat” for ages and in my experience storing things like video files in external hard-disks has been the superior option since around the time of Bluray and Xvid encoding (so, from around the mid 00s).

  Further, whilst most of my collection from back in the days of recordable DVDs is stuck in them until I have the patience to transfer them (which would be many days worth of work), upgrading the harddisk storage over time as you need more storage is a breeze.

  Also thanks to me using HDDs for media storage I’ve had easy access to my media collection from the comfort of my living room for almost 2 decades, since I put those disks on a homemade NAS (which for a while was an old Asus EEE PC with Linux) and had a TV Media Player on my living room connected to my TV and to the network so I could just use a remote to access the files via SMB and play them on the TV. (This was well before Android TV, and back then the Media Players were dedicated hardware solutions such as the ASUS O!Play)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Digital Packrat Manifesto | DRM and big tech's war on ownership has led me to make my own media libraries, and you should too⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been doing exactly this and for even longer than this guy.

  Then again almost 3 decades in the Tech industry (which amongst other things means seeing several comes and goes of “providers”) have taught me to be suspicious of being dependent on 3r party providers, and even more so of having my stuff hostage to their wills (either hosted in their machines or wrapped in encrypted envelopes which I cannot remove).

  There is no actual good consumer reason for a seller of digital goods to keep it in their systems or in your own storage but encrypted, without letting the buyer have free access to what they bought.

  Back when they started a lot of people went for the convenience of encrypted Apple music on their iPods, encrypted books on their Kindles and buying videos that they could only stream never get and, inevitably, they got screwed and here we are.

  I, for one, didn’t got screwed with that stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Electronic devices or 'signal jammers' used in car thefts to be banned⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So, only criminals will have them?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨All 50 States Have Now Introduced Right to Repair Legislation⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  More likely it will lose superpower status and just become a run-of-the-mill large size developed country like Britain or Germany.

  Living in a run-of-the-mill developed country isn’t actually bad - in fact the best places to live in the World in terms of median quality of life are all pretty run-of-the-mill places.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Im thinking we still have a deeper bottom⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They “are” for those people who are too stupid to understand that individual consumers don’t have the time, expertise, access to inside information on company processes and their own labs so that they don’t need to rely on regulators to make sure they’re not buying and consuming dangerous shit, and can do it all by themselves as individuals.

  The “too stupid to understand regulators are there to do what individuals don’t have the time, expertise and power to do as individuals” neatly brings us around exactly to the point the OP was making.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nuked from orbit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t take this the wrong way but from the list of achievements she sounds very much a Politician/PR-person/Lobbyist specialized in the area of Space Exploration, not an Engineer or a Scientist.

  Still beats Beer-belly Brad by a long distance (probably not hard), but is such a person really worth celebrating in Science Memes?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has America Reached Its Tipping Point with Ignorance?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The abuse of autoritative source (not to be confused with “authoritarian”) positions for personal upside maximization (which often meant spreading propaganda) and subsequent fall in trust in authoritative sources long predates Trump.

  I mean, in the US, Newspapers - which are supposed to inform people, not to convince them of anything - openly gloat about their “opinion making” and are criticized if they do not openly support a candidate in Presidential Elections (the very opposite of Journalism)

  Then there’s the decades-long massive abuse of “expert sources” on Finance and Economics by Neoliberalism to push very specific narratives, for very specific political ends which overwhelmingly benefited a very specific subset of people.

  What you’re seeing now is the product of the deceit practiced by many of those who are supposed to be independent experts who inform the rest on important subject, and the blanked distrust on the the Media and “experts” and subsequent blooming of shameless loudmouth liars who speak with maximum confidence in politics is really just the harvesting that which has been sowed since at least the 80s.

  IMHO the tipping point was decades ago and what you see now is the acceleration downhill having been going for long enough that the speed of travel downwards has become scary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The one change that worked: I set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ three years ago – and have never looked back⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that stuff it’s pretty hard to learn and it’s worse when you’ve never worked in an environment where people in general tend to practice good time management - a lot of thing you would normally not risk doing because they look like time wasting turn out to be the key to saving time and problems (which in turn, are also time when you’re the one that has to fix them) later, but only after you’ve seen it in action can you know for sure that such things will in overall save you time (and can actually justify doing them to others because you’ve seen them actually work).

  I was luck that after 2 years working, having chosen to leave my country I ended up in The Netherlands, and the Dutch are very good at working in an efficient and organized way that properly respects work-life balance, so I learned a lot from them and watching and learning how they worked and the results of it, gave me a whole new perspective into the work practices from my first job which until then I though were “the way everybody works in this area”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The one change that worked: I set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ three years ago – and have never looked back⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No idea. I learned it from a manager who went into a management course, was taught it and not even a week later was back in full reactive mode treating any new thing coming in as Urgent Important even when non-urgent or at least non-important, as she had been doing before going to that course.

  Let’s just say she was a lousy manager.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The one change that worked: I set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ three years ago – and have never looked back⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, as /u/joel_feila@lemmy.world pointed out, people tend to be forced to, at the very least, work in the Urgent and Important quadrant because that’s what one has to give top priority to, no matter what (and part of the work of triaging the demands on one’s time is to make sure one doesn’t miss or delay things from that quadrant because of too many Non Important stuff interrupting one’s work).

  However you want to try and get yourself in a situation were Non-Urgent Important stuff is what you do most, because amongst other things by tacking potential problems in Important domains before they become Urgent, you have a lot more space to do it properly, something which in turn avoids further problems due to one’s half-arsed solutions for Urgent not working anymore of breaking easilly when touched.

  In summary, Non-Urgent Important is the ideal, Urgent Important is what gets to priority, Non-Important is what you do when there’s nothing in the other 2 quadrants to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The one change that worked: I set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ three years ago – and have never looked back⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The whole point of triaging incoming demands and doing all you can to subtly train the people upstream who are already informed of the importance and urgency of something to only get it to you in a way that interrupts your work if those things are indeed urgent, is exactly to create and maintain the space that lets you address most things in the Non-Urgent Important quadrant before they transit into the Urgent Important one.

  If you don’t have “thinking things through” and “maintenance/tweaking” time you’re going to get a lot more fires and a lot more of the fires which start small grow into full-blown fires before you spot them, all of which just turns into a feedback cycle were all that urgent firefighting means you don’t have time for preparation, prevention and detection, which in turn creates more fires and more small fires growing hence you have to spend more time in urgent firefighting.

  To be honest, in my entire career I have never managed to, in a specific job, pull out from a “constant urgent firefighting mode” to a “mostly steady mode of work with an urgent fire having to be fought once in a while”: making it happen has always been a case of me starting a new job and bringing in best practices from the start, so that by the time I’m finished with learning the environment, and integrating with a new team, and am working full speed, I’m keeping things under control. Doing it from the start of a new job is often possible because in my area (Software Engineering) people aren’t expected to hit the ground running at full speed (since you have to learn the installed codebase and integrate with the team) so there’s a lot of leway when starting a new job which you can use to set expectations from the start and to justify the extra time it takes to actually get a decent work process in place.

  As I’ve written somewhere else, I’ve actually managed to bring over and use the Dutch style of working in a British Finance environment (which is hectic and prone to shoot-from-the-hip management and firefighting) to yield better results (faster and more predicable deliveries, were the work I made was better matched to use needs and had fewer bugs) than most of my colleagues and did all this working 8h/day rather than the 10h+/day they did.

  IMHO, the process works, and I believe that’s the merit of the process rather than being a “me” thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The one change that worked: I set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ three years ago – and have never looked back⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  From what I’ve observed when living in the UK and now that I’m living in Portugal, it’s shit management practices all the way up, with the politicians at the top being the worst managers of the lot.

  But yeah, I can empathise with being in an work place were no matter what you don’t to try and manage your time to deliver your best (as the years went by in my career, I’ve learned various professional occupations which are are part of the “feed-in” for job I’m supposed, to quite an advanced level, merely as a means to improve my performance at delivering the right results at the right time, which is taking efficiency improving to quiet an extreme level), it just feels that all levels all the way up are working against you and that you’re just rowing against the current all the time.

  Fortunatelly for me, I can just change employers and even countries if I think the overall work conditions are shit and I will never be able to properly manage my time, though I’ve noticed that plenty of medical professionals can’t, plus in my experience, when you’re snowed in by out of control inflows of work, you don’t generally have the energy to even start planning your way out of it.

  That said, having moved from The Netherlands (whose management and work culture is generally very good) and into Finance in the UK (which is a pretty hectic and ill organised “shoot from the hip” environment), it’s perfectly possible to apply the techniques of highly organised and well managed environments in disorganised ones to produce superior results (in speed, quality and predictability of delivery timings) than everybody else there.

  That said, I talking about Software Engineering here, which is a Logic+Creative area were you can “backup your patient” before you do something in case you make a mistake, unlike Medicine (though in Finance things can get “interesting” - read millions of dollars can be lost - if your code starts getting used by Traders and it’s not working properly)