Thorry84
@Thorry84@feddit.nl
- Comment on am i stupid or are solar panel's efficiency independent on latitude 1 day ago:
Please note whilst the jist of this diagram is correct, it’s not drawn properly. The sun is so far away and much larger than the Earth. This means sunlight is about as parallel as it can be once it gets to Earth. So the lines aren’t going through the atmosphere at different angles. The angle is the same, but since the Earth is a sphere it will travel through more atmosphere before hitting the ground.
- Comment on am i stupid or are solar panel's efficiency independent on latitude 1 day ago:
It’s not just the cloud cover and going through more atmosphere, it’s also the amount of energy per square meter hitting the ground. But a large part of it is most solar panels aren’t tracking and even if they are it’s usually in the horizontal and not in the vertical.
It’s impractical to mount solar panels at such an extreme angle, but it also won’t help very much since the sun is so close to the horizon shadows will be terrible. Imagine two rows of panels, once you set up the first one almost vertical, the second row won’t get any sun. And that’s if there is even a clear view to the horizon, in most places that’s not true. It’s also very hard to mount panels at such an extreme angle because the wind will catch it more easily. Mounting flush to the roof is usually preferred, or at a fixed angle with struts for flat roofs.
Because the panels don’t track, higher latitudes are less efficient, as the sun varies more in angle during the year. From just peaking out over the horizon in winter, to high in the sky in summer.
- Comment on Microsoft has created an AI-generated version of Quake 2 days ago:
Yeah it’s the difference between playing an old game today and remembering what it was like to play in the past. Not the same thing at all.
Plus a big part of old games these days is decompiling it, so you can recompile to run with higher framerates, higher resolution and without emulation. It’s also possible to add nice QoL features and entire new game modes.
Just look at what Ship of Harkinian has done with OOT. It looks great, it feels like OOT still, but has the nice quick buttons. And if you want to experience the game like it’s brand new, there is the randomizer. And similar projects exist for other old games.
And there’s also people going through the code, figuring out glitches. And how certain mechanics worked, nobody understood very well back in the day. Discover Easter eggs that were never found.
That’s game preseveration, not some AI fever dream if you squint a bit it kinda sorta looks like the old game.
A lot of the AI stuff I’ve seen from Microsoft also sucks hard and they know it. But they operate under the assumption these LLM systems will get better and better. Like this game thing they admit it sucks now, but imagine what it could be one day. However the reality seems to show more and more the point of rapidly diminishing returns has been reached. Throwing more data and processing at the thing isn’t going to make it a lot better.
They are also so busy inventing new AI features nobody wants. Putting new flashy buttons everywhere and doing awful tech demos. They completely forgot to make actual useful features. For example a thing that happens a lot when working with less computer capable people, is people sending screenshots of Excel data. How awesome would it be if instead of helping write a new signature, the AI would go: “Wow what an asshole, sending a screenshot like that. Here is the original data so you can copy paste.”. Or when trying to send an email without the attachment that really should have an attachment, it warns you. It already does this, but I think it just triggers on certain keywords like attach. This would be an excellent use case for an LLM, where it doesn’t even matter much if it’s wrong some of the time.
For me personally “AI” in the form of LLM can fuck all the way off. It certainly has it’s uses, but this all in use it everywhere for everything has made me hate it. And the misleading marketing making people think it’s basically AGI is wrong on so many levels.
- Comment on Nintendo delays Switch 2 preorders over tariff concerns 4 days ago:
Well we knew the price didn’t include the tarrifs when we saw Europe get absolutely crazy high prices. Higher than the US and a lot higher if we take into account the dollar tanking right now.
- Comment on A Real Scumbag 1 week ago:
Tesla is also under investigation for fraud in the US. They have a wire fraud case running since last year. There is a new securities fraud case in New York. And the financial statements they’ve been reporting are under investigation.
It’s a good thing he’s investigating the fraud, since he has hands on experience with all kinds of fraud.
- Comment on We are so cooked 1 week ago:
- Comment on Why don’t brands make simpler names? 1 week ago:
Well you’re always limited to what the distributors have selected for a certain region.
However you can get around this sometimes with so called “grey” import. That’s when you buy something meant for one region in another region, which happens a lot in Europe because the differences don’t really matter. For example something made for Germany is perfectly fine in the countries around Germany, they all use the same plugs, same regulations, the manual is often in every language anyways (plus who reads the manuals). But it can cause trouble when you need warranty as the manufacturer doesn’t like this, so they will refuse service. The EU has gotten on the ass of manufacturers to tell them to just service the customer, but it can be a hassle sometimes. In this case the reason for the different SKU has nothing to do with anything physical to the product, but instead the market it’s meant for. In some countries people are a bit richer and thus prices are higher, but smart people know you can just buy the German product from a shop in Germany and even with a bit more shipping it can still be cheaper. So sometimes it’s worth the effort.
This is also done for certain shops (for example Saturn/MediaMarkt in Europe) who get special SKUs just for them. These are often just the exact same SKU as available for the general market, but with a different number. They do this because a lot of countries have sites to compare prices at different shops. MediaMarkt had this strategy where they would heavily discount one model and market the shit out of that. This gave the public the idea MediaMarkt always had great deals. While in fact most models they sold were much more expensive than elsewhere. But nerds figured this out and created websites to compare prices between shops. So it would be obvious when the price was good at MediaMarkt and they would all buy that one, but when the price was higher they would know and not buy it. This destroyed the MediaMarkt strategy, so they made a deal with manufacturers to create different SKUs especially for them. This made it harder for the nerds to compare prices, as they used the SKUs to differentiate between different models.
For the different SKUs available in a region there are often shops available that sell them. Some shops select a certain amount of SKUs to a have a good selection from different manufacturers and have a simple selection for the customers. However other shops just sell everything the distributors have to offer. These often employ systems to automatically enrich and publish products as soon as the distributors lists them. With drop-shipping directly from the distributors, this gets even simpler. So you can recognize these shops as they have a lot of products and often don’t have great filter and search options.
Another excellent place is for example sites like Ebay, where you can find all sorts of products from all different regions. And they even have shops on there that buy stuff the distributor meant to sell, but for some reason (for example delays in shipping) couldn’t sell. Parties just buy up the entire stock and sell it through places like Ebay.
But in some cases, the manufacturer had some very weird SKUs that they could technically made, but nobody wanted them, so they never got made. This can lead to hobbyists to having easy modification options. For example a feature could be completely available on the PCB and even in the software, but the parts not populated because that SKUs didn’t include that feature. In that case it’s easy to just populate the parts and get the feature up and running.
In case you want something like 500 - 1000 parts (depending on the manufacturer and what kind of device it is, could be at least 5000 - 10000) you can often get the manufacturer to create a SKU especially for you. When this is one of the SKUs they initially planned but hadn’t selected, the costs isn’t even that high most of the times. But they can even make completely custom products as long as you are willing to buy enough volume.
- Comment on Print Data Recorder concept 1 week ago:
Getting good data would be very hard, a dial indicator probably won’t work very well with 0.2mm layer height and smaller. Maybe a laser would work better, but the amount of noise would be pretty high since 3D prints usually aren’t as consistent to begin with.
A much better way this is done these days is an accelerometer on the print head. Then you can put the printer through a test program which wiggles the thing in different directions at different frequencies. The accelerometer can compare the expected result with the actual result and can pick out any weird oscillations or ringing of the machine. The data from this can then be applied when slicing, to compensate for the machine properties.
This is a pretty standard function on most high-end printers these days. And is even in reach for cheap machines, since you can buy USB accelerometers for this purpose. The downside of those is the USB cable skews the result a little bit, but if mounted permanently and the cable routing is done well it can work great.
- Comment on Why don’t brands make simpler names? 1 week ago:
The number advertised is not actually the name of the product, but the vendor code or manufacturer SKU.
I’ve had some experience in how these SKUs come to be for large brands. In a lot of cases the people developing the new models have like a whole list of monitors they could create. Out of these a selection is made for which they will create, which capabilities are good etc. This is done per region and even if the capabilities are exactly the same, it will get a different SKU for the different region. This is important because the labeling could be different, often different plugs and manuals are included. Sometimes different paperwork needs to be filed, so it’s important the SKU matches the region. From this list of product SKUs the manufacturer can create for a region local distributors choose which ones they think are good for their market. This can often be hard and different distributors can choose different SKUs (depending on the manufacturer). Out of this list of available SKUs in the channel the shops can select which ones they want to carry. Some shops just carry them all (especially when dropshipping), other shops carefully select which ones they like.
This leads the shops to have seemingly random SKUs and nonsense numbers. But that’s because those SKUs were figured out all the way back in step one. Those lists can be huge and all the numbers need to be unique. Normally there is some sort of internal structure used to generate the SKUs. But the end result is just a confusing mess of numbers.
When looking at for example distributor level at what they carry or what is offered, the numbers make a little more sense.
So it isn’t ideal, but there is reason to the madness.
- Comment on What's the problem sweetie? You've barely touched your eggsicle 1 week ago:
Yes the clear stuff being not plain water but somehow meat based surely makes it better
- Comment on Nintendo Announce Virtual Game Cards (Digital Game Sharing) 1 week ago:
I don’t think you can share with friends? Only if you have a Family account and all the Switches are signed into the same Family.
- Comment on What is happening with Tesla (TSLA) stock currently? 📈 1 week ago:
I think the March 24 jump was directly caused by stuff Trump said about Tesla and the protesters being terrorists.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
In my experience, all the Gen X people I’ve ever met were smart and kind people. It’s often the Boomers who are total assholes.
- Comment on Meep 2 weeks ago:
Somehow up 10% today and 20% for the past 5 days. And the price is still double it was 1 year ago. So whatever they are doing to inflate the stock is still working, even though any other company would be folding with the amount of backlash they have received and the utter crap their products and numbers are.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong updated Steam page with 2025 copyrights and cloud gaming jnfo 2 weeks ago:
Beep beep beep
Huh? What’s that? Oh it the COPIUM truck backing up!
- Comment on The internet used to come through the phone, now the phone goes through the internet. 2 weeks ago:
Well my first modem was. It was very slow and you used it by dialing the phone yourself and placing the receiver on the modem. This is called an acoustic coupler.
Later modems changed this by connecting directly to the outlet. This allowed for digital signals to be sent directly over the copper wires. This allows for much more bandwidth compared to just bleeping and blooping using audio. There were also in between variants which still used pure audio signals, but still connected directly to the outlet to improve signal quality.
My computer back then also had a tape deck and I would record data using the tape deck. This was also a pure audio based signal. So in theory you could use a regular old tape deck with regular old tapes. However I had a specialized tape deck, specifically made for the computer and special “data” tapes. Not sure if they actually worked better, but I had them so I used them.
Yes both my back and knees hurt.
- Comment on Dark Souls Remastered Seamless Co-Op Mod: Announcement 2 weeks ago:
I’ve been having a lot of fun with DS3 Seamless Co-op since it released recently.
It’s so much fun to play these games with multiple people. And it was surprisingly stable. We’ve had a couple of crashes, but not worse at all. The only boss that was too bugged to play was Wolnir. Luckily it bugged out so hard it beat itself.
Can’t wait to play DS with 2 players as well
- Comment on I’m new to Lemmy 2 weeks ago:
Alright I’m gonna need you to buy an older ThinkPad and then install Arch Linux on it. Then I need you to set some anime background, preferably uncomfortable close to hentai if possible. Then I’m going to need you to get some thigh high socks and put those on. Put your legs up on the desk and take a picture. Make sure something like neofetch is running, so people know you use Arch BTW.
Once you have done that, head on over to /c/unixsocks@lemmy.blahaj.zone and make a post.
If you could do that, that would be great
- Comment on Discord plans to roll out third-party ads on its mobile apps, starting with a mobile pilot for Video Quests, video ads that let users earn rewards, in June 2025. 2 weeks ago:
Maybe you should ask your mom
- Comment on New Portal pinball table may be the closest we’re gonna get to Portal 3 2 weeks ago:
For people that don’t know about this: If you want the unofficial Portal 3 check out Portal Reloaded. It’s a crazy mod for Portal 2 with excellent puzzles, new mechanics and a really polished feel to it. It’s probably as close as we are ever going to get to a Portal 3.
- Comment on Show top LLMs buggy code and they'll finish off the mistakes rather than fix them. 2 weeks ago:
In my experience it will write three paragraphs about the mistake, what went wrong and how to fix it. Only to then output the exact same code, or very close to it, with the same bug. And once you get into that infinite loop, it’s basically impossible to get out of it.
- Comment on It's weird that a room with just a toilet and sink is called a "half bath", when it in fact has zero bathtubs. 3 weeks ago:
On the other hand, if you say you are going to the bathroom, nobody expects you to take a shit in the bathtub
- Comment on Why aren't we all getting rich from compound interest? 4 weeks ago:
I have not gotten anywhere near 5% interest the last 15 years. Best I did was around 3% and there have even been years with negative interest
- Comment on Sadly, Athena toppled over on the moon. With a lunar eclipse coming shortly, why didn't they design in a secondary power source over solar? 4 weeks ago:
Meh that may be true in some ways, but not really in this case. RTGs were made using a surplus from production for nuclear bombs. As that production ramped down combined with better solar and batteries, the demand went down and it became more expensive to produce them. So not making them made sense.
An RTG is really only useful for missions that go far away from the Sun, making solar non-viable. RTGs are a pain in the neck all throughout the process, are heavy and expensive (even back in the day). The amount of electrical power an RTG delivers is also very low. This is because an RTG only gets warm, nothing more. So we put TEC (Peltier) devices on the sides to generate electrical energy from the thermal gradient. But TECs suck ass, they are super inefficient. For example the RTG the big Mars rovers use put out 2000W of thermal energy, but they manage to get only 110W of electrical energy out of that. So if you are near enough to the Sun, solar is the much better option.
- Comment on Sadly, Athena toppled over on the moon. With a lunar eclipse coming shortly, why didn't they design in a secondary power source over solar? 4 weeks ago:
Who has nuclear diamond batteries? Those are a total myth drummed up to get investor money. They don’t actually exist.
Sure the concept exists, in the form of betavoltaic batteries, those have been around for decades. They are tough and last dozens of years if not longer. The only problem is, they put out microwatts. You can use them in very niche applications, but those are few and far between. It’s hard to convey how little power a microwatt is, it’s basically nothing.
What you care about when going to space is energy density, and the proposed energy density of nuclear diamond batteries is very poor.
Rtgs are very useful for longterm missions, but are crazy expensive. They also aren’t being made anymore, so getting a hold of one is hard. The weight is an issue as well, they are super heavy.
These commercial moon missions are primarily demonstrator missions. They aren’t meant to last, they don’t really have a goal and often don’t do something useful. The idea is to show you can do it, so you can sell a product. Other people that do want to do useful stuff can then pay to get their stuff to the moon. So if the mission is over when the sun sets in two weeks time, that’s perfectly fine.
- Comment on The Simple Act of Buying a Graphics Card Is the Defining Misery of PC Gaming in 2025 4 weeks ago:
Well the B580 is a budget / low-power GPU. All the discussions going around are for flagship and high-end GPUs. Intel isn’t in that space yet, but we can hope they have a B7xx lined up which makes some waves.
- Comment on Riding the Ambien walrus 5 weeks ago:
do u think that yoshi gets embarrassed when he poos out eggs in front of mario??? sorry if this ofends anyone but i thought it was a funny thing haha. and i would like to know if any of you have any pics of yoshi pooping an egg while he looks nervous or embarrassed i just want to see it for a few laughs haha. another thing i am wondering is what do you think the eggs smell like haha im just curious for laughs haha i would like to smell them
- Comment on Heartbreaking 5 weeks ago:
I meant the TV series called “Ellen”, which is a sitcom so I think it’s intended to be funny.
- Comment on Heartbreaking 5 weeks ago:
I’m still amazing there are people that actually found Ellen funny or entertaining. I haven’t seen a whole lot of her, as she wasn’t as famous where I lived. But the TV show did air and I saw a couple of episodes people had on when I was visiting, back when linear TV was a thing. I didn’t like it and saw zero appeal, but figured I just wasn’t the target audience. The more I’ve learnt about Ellen over the years, the more I wonder what people ever found even slightly entertaining.
- Comment on Wasnt great orange leader going to end the war in 24 hours? 5 weeks ago:
“Of course, no one truly believed Trump would be able end the grinding, three-year conflict in 24 hours”
Three years? Are they on drugs, the war has been going on since 2014.
