batmaniam

@batmaniam@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little dude ATP⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not me. Thaaaats asbestos.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little dude ATP⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I worked in bioelectrochemostry. We had looked into that to see if we could juice reactors. Turns out it’s not the bugs that limit things, but godamn did that stuff make them boogie.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Worshippers of Cthulhum, a Lovercraftian themed town builder where you play the bad guys, released in early access on Steam⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No but it’s got a demo for free

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Alan Wake, Control developer agrees €15m convertible loan from Tencent⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  People who don’t want to use the epic store. That was me. I just don’t want another launcher, another account. I’ll get around to it at some point I’m sure but I didn’t buy AW2 and probably would have if it wasn’t an exclusive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They say “anyone can become president”, but this will be the first presidential election since 1970s, where there is no Bush, Clinton, or Biden on the ballot.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No George Clinton was in parliament.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Climate change⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not as great as it seems. The thing is, everyone’s retirement is tied to real-estate. The numbers my vary country by country, but nearly all pension funds and mutual funds have significant exposure to real-estate that is just ignoring the issue that those properties may become uninsurable. That’s before what happens due to the economic disruption of all those cities slowly, then at an increased velocity, relocating.

  It’s not going to be pretty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Climate change⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So yes, I realize this a joke map (honestly, a giant, probably mostly freshwater sea, in the US would be a blessing). But what you’re describing is the main issue with climate change.

  It’s not going to be “the day after tomorrow”. It will be coastal cities… which are… like nearly ALL of them… losing all their economic value. In the US when having this conversation I say “what do you do when any building in Manhattan is uninsurable? What do you do when it’s sure to have severe damage?”.

  For most people there are plenty of places to go, but the “going” is going to be very, very ugly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remedy and Annapurna announce a strategic cooperation agreement on Control 2⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Or just… Don’t make a launcher?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can you "change" the environment in your "local" area?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Trees actually do a lot of this on their own. If you want an absolutely fascinating read check out “the hidden life of trees” by wholleben.

  The tl;Dr is that a forrest is an organism unto itself. Trees literally use each other for support, regulate the temperature, and terraform the ground around them (pine being the most visible example). The natural cycles and interspecies communication is jaw dropping.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Researchers discover battery-free technology which harvests power from radio and Wi-Fi signals for low-powered devices⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  how much you can build without a complete understanding

  We’ve never actually never had one. I’d have to check the timelines but Tesla was almost certainly working on a functional, but inaccurate atomic model (Bohr). Medicine is actually a great example of all this. We are so used to just kind of knowing “there’s a bad bug or bad gene that’s making me sick”. Like you may not know the details, but you’ve got some loose concept a bunch of cells in your body are pissed off. For the vast, vasssssssst history of medicine, it was all empirical, and the thing is, it kind of worked… sometimes.

  My favorite example of “knowing without fully understanding” is Mendel and his peas. If you do a 4x4 punnet square (that gene cross thing), and look at the frequency of co-inheritance, you can track how far genes are from on another (because the further they are, the more likely there will be a swap during the shuffle). Thing is… because DNA is an integer thing (no such thing as ‘half a base pair’) it works DOWN TO THE SINGLE BASE PAIR. Mendel was accurately counting the number of freaking base pairs separating genes without knowing what a base pair, or indeed even really a molecule, was.

  Tesla would have lived to see some absolutely nutty stuff in physics. Boltzman, Einstein with relativity, it must have seemed like pure madness at the time.

  So yeah, we discover new and interesting stuff all the time. I personally think that some of the weird quantum stuff is going seem as rote in the future as germs do to us now. As in, the same way any lay-person shoved into a time machine would at least be able to give the basics to a medieval European, someone from the future would be like “well I don’t remember much about quantum tunneling, but…”.

  And that’s all before getting into some of the bizarre things going on in math itself. Be careful if you look into that stuff though, it’s easy to fall into the “Terrance Howard” style rabbit hole. Suffice to say there is some really interesting and unexpected implications we’re discovering, but if you don’t have a solid grasp of theory, it is easy to be led astray but sources that want to gloss over details to talk about a conclusion that isn’t actually supported. It’s like if you tried to explain time dilation to an ancient Greek, and they excitedly hopped on their fastest chariot thinking they could “fast forward” to the future, because time moves “more slowly” for you when you’re going faster, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Look, honey! Grandma got you one of your little comic book toys! What do you say?"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I assumed it was “Harley Quinn” Jim Gordon because THAT Jim absolutely would. He’s a damn good cop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you rank sums of single-digit numbers ?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re wrong. You’re so wrong. The warm light of everything good in this world has clearly never warmed your face nor caused the roaches to flee from the empty, echoing cavern that holds not but rot, mold, and regret where a brain is sorely missed. I pity you, your parents that birthed you, and all of humanity at large for now knowing a person could be so misguided. I pray for your strength on the inventible day when the faintest candle of reason illuminates the vaguest shadows of comprehension, and you may finally witness your errors, so long called accomplishments, as they loom over you like demon gods eager to drag you to hell in a cage you’ve spent a lifetime creating for yourself.

  7+9 is dope though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Las Vegas' dystopia-sphere, powered by 150 Nvidia GPUs and drawing up to 28,000,000 watts, is both a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat | PC Gamer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  oh I’m not shortchanging it, I work in the field. It’s crazy how “simple” it is in concept and hard to deliver. But it’s on par with antibiotics with how many lives it’s changed. Like you said, it’s like a lot of civil stuff. A solid highway system, for instance. Just some dirt with fancy rocks on it right? Righhhhhhht?

  And don’t get me wrong, wastewater has tons of complications. Any plant is operated in equal parts science, engineering, and art. It’s a living, breathing, bioreactor. They’ve each got their own distinct personality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Las Vegas' dystopia-sphere, powered by 150 Nvidia GPUs and drawing up to 28,000,000 watts, is both a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat | PC Gamer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thrilled you asked! So yes: Treatment is always required, but the final destination of the treated water can vary. For instance, in a lot of places they may have municipal water TO a home or business, but that may be discharged to septic, as opposed to the river. Also in a lot of areas, water may be taken out of an underground aquifer (either by private well or a municipality) but when treated it may be discharged into a river or ocean. That can create problems because if you’re near the coast, the empty space in the aquifer may be filled by salt/brackish water that can lead to salinity rises in the aquifer. To solve that some places turn to “ground water recharge”, which is just a fancy way of saying “we built a big well to put it back in the aquifer”.

  Increasingly, you’re seeing some places essentially sell their treated water. Santa Rosa CA, for instance, built an entire pipeline that goes from their treatment facility to another municipality to be injected into their groundwater.

  So yes, everywhere treats it, but the final destination makes a difference. Las Vegas (or anyone else on the river) only gets credit for what goes back into the river, so any evaporation etc is a problem. It sounds trivial, but there is a reason those other strategies exist. It essentially doubles every pipe, limits where you can park a treatment plant etc. Vegas also does some great grey water re-use. That essentially means it doesn’t go “back” but can get used many many times, limiting the initial draw.

  Wastewater is funny because it’s far from rocket science, but the numbers to implement any of it get staggering very quickly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Las Vegas' dystopia-sphere, powered by 150 Nvidia GPUs and drawing up to 28,000,000 watts, is both a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat | PC Gamer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know about power, but Vegas is actually incredibly water efficient. Due to the way the water rights work with the Colorado river, they’re not allowed very much, but it doesn’t “count” if you put it back in. So nearly every drop they use is treated and put back (probably cleaner, tbh). Boggles the brain, but somehow it’s actually a fairly sustainable city. More than any other other major metro, in any event.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dead Tesla traps toddler in boiling hot car as electric doors fail⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  lmfao, rereading this we 100% are in agreement and talking past each other with great zeal. Bare with me here.

  First off, I’m not in finance. I used it as an example to point out that systems and considerations in a field outside of anyones experience are usually there for a reason, even if they’re frustrating in the moment because one hasn’t bumped into them yet.

  To your point, you are 100% correct, there are tons of regulations and best practices developed over decades meant to minimize impact of edge cases. But it sounds like you’re in the field, and you and I both know that invariably someone will try and solve the problem by solving a different problem sometimes. It’s why project scoping and definition is so important.

  I hope you’re having a great day, and that you might reread this and take away the same reminder I do that 2 people can be in strong agreement and still talk past each other.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dead Tesla traps toddler in boiling hot car as electric doors fail⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No. It’s not missing nuance. If you want them as customers stop fucking injuring/killing them. Simple as.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dead Tesla traps toddler in boiling hot car as electric doors fail⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My understanding is there is, in-fact, a mechanical way to go about it. But it’s nothing but a design failure it’s not evident to an average user. A deadly one.

  Canadian engineers have a tradition around an iron ring as kind of “class ring” when you graduate (they’ve kind of tried to push it in the states but it didn’t catch on in the same way). The notion is “it’s heavy, but not because of the weight”. It’s meant to be a reminder as you go out into the world that what you put on paper has real implications.

  I get down on Tesla specifically because they’ve got… I don’t know, 100 years of history to learn from? Like you had the whole world on your side and you gave us the effing “explode on rear impact” pinto, but without the luxury of saving the victims the cremation costs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dead Tesla traps toddler in boiling hot car as electric doors fail⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If it were up to engineers like this we’d all be direct wiring appliances as trivial as a phone charger, and they’d be pissed people weren’t willing to do it. People really aren’t dumb, there’s a reason for the world around us and it takes different folks. I do consulting, and the engineers (who usually call me under duress) always get frustrated with finance. I use the example of that person who got millions in fake invoices from google, facebook, etc as an example. It takes different people, and dismissing use cases is tantamount to saying “I’m just not good enough to build this product”. That’s all well and good for some things. No ones saying you need to make a heart-lung machine an accountant can operate. But like… cars exists.

  They had such a huge head start, and just refused to do the real work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just Plain Terrifying⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My dad was a farmer. I AM AN ORPHAN.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was it a good thing that SNW explicitly said the Federation is socialist?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That and post-scarcity doesn’t mean “zero scarcity”. Like if someone wanted to create a picard funkpop the size of a planet, I don’t think they’d be allowed the resource budget.

  It’s like how it doesn’t matter where you live, if you want to buy on the silk road, you need bitcoin. Presumably even the federation can’t just make latinum whenever they please, or we wouldn’t see them haggle with it. Although, it would be fun to see that they could and just take the responsibility of not crashing non-federation cultures entire economies very seriously, either out of respect or treaty.

  Damnit, I want a LD episode where the crew is frustrated and desperately wants to just “buy” their problem away but can’t because an economist at command says it’ll mean they have to rescue all these non-federation colonies that are currently self sufficient. Come to think of it it’s right there with the “you break it you own it” concept of the prime directive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dead Tesla traps toddler in boiling hot car as electric doors fail⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The hubris of the company is insane. People treat the FSD updates like it’s nothing when they’re essentially rolling untested patches that may behave differently and drive into traffic it wouldn’t have yesterday. Tesla defended the auto-close mechanism on the CT (when a youtuber showed it severely pinching his finger) by saying “They were doing it wrong, by design if you’re hitting the button repeatedly it uses increased force assuming something is stuck”. They just don’t have a culture to make consumer goods. They constantly dismiss the design constraints required to be in the market they’re in.

  And it is the worst kind of engineers who dismiss that stuff with “omg people are so stupid”. Other (better) companies have worked it out. It’s a reasonable expectation. No ones forcing you to make goods for this market, but the constraints are what they are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah like… Netflix has peering agreements and whatnot but… It’s not 2005.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Next on the hydraulic press channel!⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s so you can create “and” conditions for unlocking. IE: If you’ve got two locks, each with their own key, both person 1 AND person 2 need to unlock it. So you can have multiple people and/or multiple crews working on the machine across different aspects. Maybe one crew is doing electric, the other some kind of plumbing, and they’re working at different times. When one crew finishes their work, they can release their lockout without making it unsafe for the other crew.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨mycology⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So most fungi do have a lifespan, they have teleomere decay, and when you’re cloning mushrooms (from propagating mycelia) you have to let them go to fruit (the part that looks like a mushroom) every now and then. It’s a pain in the ass.

  But like the other poster said, they play it fast and loose with which part you consider the “organism”. My favorite thing is that they do cytosolic streaming. Genetics can be a pain on mushrooms because not only do they share nutrients and metabolic burden through mycelia, they can share nuclei.

  One of the weird convienent realities we used extensively is that cells are big enough you can spread them over a petri dish with a little loop, and if you diluted the initial sample enough, the colonies that developed were, practically speaking, from one parent cell. So you could try to modify a bunch, and then plate them (spreading the cells around) and pick individual colonies that were all clones from a single parent. Fungi mycelia means the nucleus isn’t stuck in one cell. It also means expression levels can be variable (some cells will have multiple nuclei, and then later maybe they don’t).

  Fungi are a godamn pain in the ass to study. They’re not mysterious, they’re not alien, they’re just fucking assholes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Boycott Tesla’ ads to air during Super Bowl — “Tesla dances away from liability in Autopilot crashes by pointing to a note buried deep in the owner’s manual, that says Autopilot is only safe on fr...⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If I still have to pay attention, what my Hyundai has is fine. I think that’s the biggest issue with any FSD. Theres a sharp diminishing returns past a point. If I can’t take a nap, I don’t care. And I’ll trust any of them the day there are laws on the books imposing a $7.5MM fine per casualty.

  Those cars make the manufacturer money while hoisting the risk onto the public. People talk about stats compared to human drivers, it’s not about stats, it’s about accountability.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-Generated George Carlin Drops Comedy Special That Daughter Speaks Out Against: ‘No Machine Will Ever Replace His Genius’⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen it brought up before, the notion isn’t that it’s ethical or OK, but some people think that the draw post any of that stuff will be gone because anyone could do it and you’d never know if any of it was authentic. Kind of like if you flooded the market with lab grown rhino horns to crash the price and stop poaching, and then also the demand goes away because there’s no allure anymore.

  I don’t know if Id bet on it, but it’s different than saying “I can deep fake porn of anyone without their consent so who wants revenge porn”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Breakthrough: "Electronic soil" boosts crop growth by over 50%⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The browns gas thing (usually “using water as fuel” by splitting it… Using power from the engine) actually has insanely specific be credible use case.

  It turns out that in very specific engine types, you can gain additional engine efficiency that’s worth the energy it took to generate the gas. The us army did a whole proper study. That net gain was, however, only present in vehicles not maintained on the usual schedule. So it did infact help some engine types that were not well maintained.

  I know this because I did a dive years back. Effeciency be damned, building a reserve of browns gas that I could dump in when I wanted for a power boost sounded fun as hell to me. You wouldn’t gain any effeciency (probably loose a ton) but you would have more power when you were mixing in the reserve you’d built up. I wound up not doing it because 1) the vehicle I had in mind was carb not fuel injection so no power gains there. And 2) dealing with generating, pressurizing, storing and delivering a gas isnt a ton of fun in a “for the lolz” project.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Breakthrough: "Electronic soil" boosts crop growth by over 50%⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So I’m trying to find an academic article, but it’s not just the substrate. They blew right past it in the article but there is electric potential applied, and the substrate is slightly conductive which is what allows it. They seem to imply that leads to better root growth but like I said the article barley mentioned the actual e of the e soil lol.

  But bioelectrochemistry is a thing. I work on the other end, where microbes are depositing electrons, but I am aware of different technologies where the bugs use a potential as an energy source for specific reactions, usually around remidiating some nasty stuff in the ground.

  Im less aware of it affecting a plant directly (I’d assume it changed the soil bugs or something) but it’s not hard to picture. Good be something as simple as the potential changing the osmotic pressure and making it easier for the plants to take up nutrients or something.

  But yeah, pretty far from a rod in the ground, although in some cases that is basically all you’d need. The bioelectrochemistry field always had junk science to contend with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What DID Apple innovate?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also standardizing hardware. Part of the iPhones success was that developers had to develop for A phone, singular. There were a lot of cool palm programs and whatnot, but having a single hardware set to bug-smash had to be a big part of making the app-market go into hyper drive.

  I don’t own a single apple product, but credit where credit is due.