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- Comment on After trying them in the mountains, I think Carbonated Beverages were better closer to sea level. 2 weeks ago:
Yeah but not to sea level pressure. Cruising above 10,000ft, planes are required to maintain an internal pressure equal to that of 8000ft or less, and it's usually close to that 8000ft, because that takes the least energy.
See "Need for pressurization".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_pressurizationThe difference in apparent altitude is why your ears pop when ascending or descending.
- Comment on After trying them in the mountains, I think Carbonated Beverages were better closer to sea level. 2 weeks ago:
Maybe this is my unpopular opinion, but Dr. Pepper out of a can on a plane at cruising altitude (~8000ft elevation equivalent) tastes way better to me than anywhere on the ground. I call it my magic sky juice. Dr. Pepper is really the only soda I enjoy, anyway.
I am unsure if there are any other changes made to the cans of soda they serve on planes, like a different carbonation pressure, etc. that might make a difference instead of just the altitude.
- Comment on Reverse Mermaid 🧜♀️🐠 2 weeks ago:
There's a bar near me that has a very large reverse mermaid painted on the front, and just yesterday I met a woman with a reverse mermaid tattooed on her arm...
Maybe you just aren't looking hard enough!
- Comment on It must have been a whole lot more difficult to design and build tall buildings before computers existed 3 weeks ago:
My grandfather was a draftsman for one of the big military contractors back in the day. He's got some of his old work framed, it's really amazing what the human hand used to accomplish with only a straightedge and a compass... As an engineer who uses a lot of Solidworks, sometimes I romanticize and yearn to blow everything up and return to the artful days of hand-drafting as the standard.
My first job out of college was re-making tools to manufacture small electromechanical assemblies for repairing old military aircraft. (Said tools had been thrown away by some previous now-fired director who thought "We haven't used these tools in 15 years, surely we don't need them anymore...", but when the military calls up and asks for part XYZ for a B52 that you've manufactured for the last 65 years, you don't say no, even if you haven't made the part in 2 decades). I had an entire room full of B, C, and D-sized hand-drafted drawings to pull specs and dimensions from, and each one was so beautiful in its own way.
- Comment on Im an unworthy Fraud when it comes to Tech 3 weeks ago:
I'm not in IT, but I was trying to get a coworker to send me a file they were supposed to have generated. I sent them a PDF and I wanted them to update it with current procedures (they were the area supervisor) and type it out in a word doc so it could be edited and rev controlled.
They never got back to me, 2 weeks passed. It was a 2 page document, so I emailed them to ask if they had finished. They responded that oh yeah they had finished a while ago, and I could find the completed document attached.
They sent me back the original PDF I sent them. After a confused follow up email, they again sent me back the original PDF.
I went over to their desk, which I had never been to before, usually I interface with them out on the assembly line. I was like "Hey what's up, could you send me the .Doc file you created?"
Their response? "I forget what I named it so I can't find it."
I am even more confused. After some general troubleshooting I ask them to open their documents folder, which they did not know how to do. It didn't matter because it was empty. They then close out of Outlook, which had been fullscreened the whole interaction.
Their desktop was the most densely packed jumble of hundreds of files I have ever seen. Not snapped to grid.
Turns out every document they ever interact with gets saved to their desktop permanently, and to find things they use Windows search. This explains why I kept getting back the original PDF, they searched for the name of what the file was supposed to be, and they just grabbed the first result without looking and slapped it in the email.
I ended up finding the document by showing them how to open a finder window, navigate to their desktop, and sorting by "last modified", then asking them what day they remember finishing the document. It was named New Document.doc.
- Comment on Is the periodic table still getting new additions? 4 weeks ago:
It depends on which theorist you talk to. Some say seconds to minutes, others say days to weeks, the nutcases say thousands to millions of years.
And at the end of the day, the electrical properties of these elements probably aren't that interesting or useful, and almost certainly won't be like, semiconductors or anything fun. Just dumb, heavy, really fucking radioactive wire lol.
- Comment on I feel like it was on purpose 4 weeks ago:
I will try and dig through my e-reader to find it, but it was a while ago so I might have purged the file.
On a completely unrelated note, just this week I finished up the last of Greg Egan's works, I've been binging all his stuff. If you haven't read any of his stuff I highly recommend it. They were all so good, but Diaspora and the Orthogonal Trilogy were my standout faves. the Orthogonal Trilogy is so unbelievably deeply technically detailed, it kept me glued to the pages and pages of equations, even if the characters were a little dry. It's all about the universe-building in that one. Egan has an entire website with a massive amount of additional information and details about the physics of that universe.
- Comment on I feel like it was on purpose 4 weeks ago:
Hah, I guess I wasn't thinking far enough into the Trekkiverse.
I had recently read a book that had replicator-like technology but the matter stream was a luxury that not everyone could afford to connect to, it was laid out as an analog to the internet or other services like that, so that's where my mind went. I can't for the life of me remember which book that was...
- Comment on I feel like it was on purpose 4 weeks ago:
I'll put on my best Keiko voice and disappointed stare.
"But Miles, where do you think the matter replicators get their matter from? And where does the power to run them come from? Until a complete and total change in human philosophy regarding the accumulation of wealth, any required resource will become the new vehicle of capitalistic control."
- Comment on Is the periodic table still getting new additions? 4 weeks ago:
The "island of stability" actually encompasses many of the superheavy elements that we have already produced. The "stability" part comes from "magic numbers" of neutrons in the isotopes that are theorized to have some kind of stabilizing effect on the nuclear shells.
The difficulty is that we can theorize the number of neutrons we need to stabilize a certain number of protons, but finding atoms with the right number of protons and neutrons to smash together to hopefully create that total number is... difficult. Sometimes those particular isotopes with the proton/neutron quantities required either just plain don't exist, or are themselves a wholly synthetic isotope with its own set of problems like being insanely slow or difficult to produce, having a crazy short half-life, etc.
- Comment on Is the periodic table still getting new additions? 4 weeks ago:
The elements at the very end of the periodic table are somewhat tenuous as we know "elements" to be, as there has only ever been very VERY small amounts of this material produced, and the isotopes of those materials that ARE produced split apart almost immediately with insanely small half-lives, so it's not like there's any amount of it just kicking around in a jar somewhere in some lab.
There's a ton of interesting reading on the theoretical island of stability in superheavy elements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stabilityI think there are elements theorized up to around atomic number 125 or 127. Currently the highest confirmed, named, and somewhat categorized is 118.
- Comment on The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics 4 weeks ago:
Several years ago Nokia made a couple prototypes of an official Star Trek communicator phone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3EN05faZVU
I would do some seriously regrettable things to have one of these that works with modern networks.
- Comment on The worst part of getting old is that you get less and less "first experiences" and are always comparing current with previous ones 1 month ago:
My recent ex girlfriend would take certain things we were about to do together (traveling, going to the spa, going to a particular restaurant close to my house, spending the day at a museum, etc.) and would just automatically assume that I had already done that same thing with some unspoken past ex of mine, and get preemptively sad, upset, and self-conscious that she wasn't "the first"... What? Life isn't all about firsts, why even get upset about that? So what if I've already done something before with someone else, I am still going to enjoy it with YOU right NOW. Maybe a lot of people do compare past experiences to current ones, but I don't find that very fulfilling, so I just don't. It's a lot easier to just live day to day.
- Comment on Instagram makes people unhappy and unhappy use Instagram to show that they are not unhappy. 1 month ago:
If you use Android, check out "Distraction-free Instagram". It's an app that lets you disable various parts of the app like your home feed, stories, etc.
I really wanted to stop scrolling on Instagram, but I also really wanted to keep posting my photography, as the interactions I sometimes get on my posts are fun and I enjoy sharing my craft. I also have some friends who ONLY interact via instagram messaging.
I downloaded the app, and disabled everything except messaging, and it's been great. It's definitely made me happier overall.
- Comment on Most of the audience of Nickelodeon's Kids Choice Awards have no idea why slime is a thing. 2 months ago:
I desperately wanted to be on Figure It Out (With your host, Summer Sanders)
I reference the secret slime action fairly frequently, and it seems that maybe I'm the only person in my area who watched/enjoyed the show, because most people have no idea what I am talking about.
Don't even get me started on Figure It Out Wild Style.
- Comment on Rich people know their cosmetic surgery is obvious and uncanny, but that's the point; it's a way of signalling that you belong in a certain income bracket and that you're part of the 1% 2 months ago:
It can fall under the same umbrella. Unrealistic beauty standards being set by the "rich", who some people look up to as role models. If there were something that you could do that you might be able to afford, like botox or lip fillers, that you believe would make you more beautiful, closer to your role model... If that sort of thing matters to you, then yeah, you might go for it.
I was sort of thinking more like this though with respect to extreme alterations...
- Comment on Rich people know their cosmetic surgery is obvious and uncanny, but that's the point; it's a way of signalling that you belong in a certain income bracket and that you're part of the 1% 2 months ago:
I think it has more to do with an erosion of reasonable beauty standards than anything. Less of a "status symbol" and more of an act of "because I can". I think a lot of the people who you look at and think "what the fuck" actually think they are beautiful and attractive. I don't think someone who has everything, and can get whatever they want would purposely make themselves look grotesque, but I'm neither rich, nor a psychologist, so maybe I'm totally wrong...
The Bogdanoffification has been happening for a while...
- Comment on Why is cottage cheese the only cheese defined by some relationship to a building? 2 months ago:
Pub cheese would like a word.
- Comment on If a sandwich is defined as any food item between two pieces of bread, then a layer cake is a type of sandwich. 2 months ago:
Also, I think you might be hard-pressed to find anyone who would consider sugary cake sponge to be "bread". (Something something Ireland's supreme court ruled that Subway's bread isn't legally bread for tax purposes due to its high sugar content)
It'd be like layering up some sourdough slices with sweet sugary icing slathered between them, most people probably wouldn't call that a cake.
- Comment on Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task 2 months ago:
I've actually taken note of my navigational skills over the last couple years... I grew up in one state, and then a few years after graduating college, moved to a different state. When I was growing up, phone navigation didn't really exist as it does now, cars didn't have built-in navigation, and standalone navigation devices were slow and not all that great (at least the ones I could afford).
I find that when I return home, even 10 years later, I am able to navigate all the places I used to go unaided with ease, back-roads, niche routes, able to travel for hours without getting "lost".
When I moved, though, I had very recently gotten my first smartphone, and google maps was very convenient to "learn" the new area. I ended up just continuing to use navigation since it was convenient. I've found that beyond the major main routes, I don't have the same kind of "built-in" navigational skill that I do for my original home-turf. I never really learned the area.
I am moving towards a smart-phone-less life, and I've been able to let go of a lot, but GPS navigation remains a sticking point. I need to start training myself to navigate unaided in my current area.
- Comment on Reading is consciousness-altering and a bit toxic. 2 months ago:
I think it was just an odd way of making him seem more human and normal. Also the fact that he doesn't mention anything about it carrying over from his previous lives leaves an interesting open question that could either lend credence or hinder his whole backstory... At least that's how I interpreted it.
- Comment on Reading is consciousness-altering and a bit toxic. 2 months ago:
It's ironic that I have an anecdote that I recently read that feels very fitting here.
Permutation City by Greg Egan. Post-human digital consciousness via uploaded brain-scan becomes possible, and there are interesting questions about how the "sense of self" is derived, and how much someone can change themselves before they are no longer the same person. There are many different characters that deal with a newfound immortality in different ways, and either embrace, or shun, the ability to change themselves at a whim to fit their needs or wants. It's a very prominent part of the overall plot and is prevalent right up until the last sentence.
Also, separate from that, I have the exact opposite feeling as OP. When I'm reading a book, I feel like my world is expanded in new directions. I tend to see certain things from slightly different perspectives in the context of what I'm reading. I've been reading Greg Egan's entire body of work (after reading Diaspora and absolutely fucking loving it), and some insight and thoughts I had about the book Quarrantine actually pushed me to make positive changes in my life that have been really hugely impactful, and I don't think I would have had the courage or drive to make them had I not been thinking about my life in such an abstract manner.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
FxTec Pro1 X... As someone who has spent years searching for a modern-ish phone with a Qwerty keyboard... How has this flown under my radar for 5 years?!?
I've completely rethought my phone situation recently and it wouldn't really fit my lifestyle, but man I am still tempted to keep my eyes out for a cheap one.
- Comment on Jeff Geerling: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful (updated). Youtube removed his content, saying that self hosting content is "dangerous or harmful content" 2 months ago:
Costco bought RAC in 2437 after Costco's CEO Harambe Memelord Disney Jr. offered RAC's CEO Squiggy John John John John Johnson a 2-for 1 deluxe latte coupon and an extra big-ass fry.
- Comment on Cancel Lemmy - A piefed community to discuss Alternatives to and moving away from Lemmy 2 months ago:
Not very. Still working on getting a VPN set up and learning the ropes of self-hosting in general. Most of the research I've been doing has mentioned that Piefed seems to take less resources than Lemmy for some reason. We'll see how it goes once I actually figure all this out. I just learned that my choice of home internet might make it difficult since I apparently can't get a static IP. (T mobile 5G)
- Comment on Cancel Lemmy - A piefed community to discuss Alternatives to and moving away from Lemmy 2 months ago:
I'll also comment to say that the "cancel" part of this is stupid and should be reconsidered. (There seems to be a pretty thorough consensus on that). Isn't the whole point of this to have options, to spread the resources out to as many points as possible to prevent a single point of failure, corruption, or censorship?
I ended up at Piefed, because I'm interested in self-hosting, and I understand Python more than any of the other languages represented. That's really the full depth of my choice, and I'm not sure there should be much more thought behind it other than "How does this particular software package perform and meet my needs?"
- Comment on NAS Power Consumption 2 months ago:
They run a custom vendor-locked distro named QTS, so they're not really as easy to modify as a normal system, I don't think you can even install programs like that.
I'll definitely bookmark it though if I ever get around to building my own solution, thanks!
- Comment on NAS Power Consumption 2 months ago:
I have no idea if it's a QNAP-wide issue, or just some specific models, I haven't bothered to do that much research. I'm guessing that the discs WOULD spin down if you have that option selected if they weren't constantly being pinged a couple times a minute. That constant pinging is the part I can't seem to track down.
An excerpt from a post I was reading while researching this sums it up prettt well: "700 posts about spindown/sleep/standby not working in the QNAP HDD Spin Down Forum. No one seems to be able to resolve it. Qnap clearly couldn't care less."
The only solution that I've found that seems to work is to install some other operating system on it, which kind of defeats the purpose of buying a turn-key NAS.
- Comment on NAS Power Consumption 2 months ago:
If you can figure out how to get a qnap to spin down its disks, please let me know lol. I've been searching for months and haven't found a reliable solution. I basically only need to access it once a day at MOST, so having the disks spinning away for like 99% of their life sucking down power is something I'd like to avoid. The problem seems to be that even with a perfectly clean slate, no services running, all the system set up in their own RAID0 SSD pool, the HDD's, even with 0 bytes of data on them, are being pinged for access at least once a minute. I'm assuming it's some log being written to, but it's not anything visible in the file system, and I haven't been able to find any solution online, lots of people seem to have the same issue.
I'm tempted more and more every day to just grab one of those low-power embedded ITX boards and build up a custom rig.
- Comment on Endangered classic Mac plastic color returns as 3D-printer filament 2 months ago:
I've been building a small 10" server rack and have also been using the bone PLA for the "beige" parts to match my stack of variously-yellowed beige desktops, but yeah, this will be awesome to have "authentic" beige! The bone white is a little too brown/tan if you look too hard.
I should pre-order some.
