cynar

joined 1 year ago
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hydrogen is a pain to deal with. It requires excessively thick walled containers to store etc.

A better solution is to do what plants do. Pin it to a carbon atom. Synthetic hydrocarbons would also be a lot easier to integrate into existing supply chains.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Milton Keynes, in the UK, seems to have nailed this. It's effectively a grid of roundabouts. When the roads are empty, you can race along at 60mph (legally). As soon as it starts to build, the road naturally slows to 40, then 30mph. No cameras etc needed.

It also has the red ways. You can walk most places, without having to cross a major road. It uses underpasses for pedestrians and bikes etc.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

I have a small child. It's not just mechanical failure. Then again, I've got a separate network for IoT things. They can't see anything by each other and their controller. Unfortunately, most of the IoT appliances do NOT like this setup.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago

As a fellow aspie, be careful. Chat bots are the equivalent of empty calorie junk food, or masturbation. They forfill a biological itch but don't produce the intended follow-on effects. In smaller doses, this is fine, good even. The problem comes when you overuse.

E.g. Junk food leave you short of vitamins etc. You tend to over eat, to try and compensate, and so gain weight.

As humans, we have a drive to socialise. When we chat with other humans, we get to know them, and also for bonds. These bonds are critical in life. The goal is 3 fold, mutual understanding, mutual investment, and mutual trust. The urge to talk to people is intended to assist with this.

LLMs offer none of these. They can be incredibly useful, but often only as a training aid. A LLM can't offer you a couch to sleep on, if your house floods. It can't put in a good word to get you a job. It can't invite you to social event, or wingman you on finding a date.

LLMs are socialising on easy mode. Just like masturbation is starting a family on easy mode. Have fun with it, but don't let it displace real relationships.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

There's still some various binaries. E.g. the expressif sdk generated code. However, it's far harder to sneak something nasty into it.

Codespace is at an extreme premium on microcontrollers. Kb, and even bytes matter. A big, complex bit of malware would take significant space, likely enough to be noticed quickly.

As for smaller, simpler malware, this is a possibility. However, due to their nature, microcontrollers get a lot more scrutiny of their outputs. Random data dumps to an unexpected external address would be caught VERY quickly.

This is compounded by the fact that it's not uncommon, at least in larger installs, to segregate IoT devices from the main network. It stops them cluttering it up, and slowing it down. This makes it easy to firewall off the network from the Internet. They can talk to each other, and the central coordinator, but only the coordinator can see the internet, unless explicitly allowed.

If my network were compromised via my smarthome setup, my first suspects would be the debian PC running home assistant, or my ubiquiti router. I've at least reduced my target area to business grade networking kit and a single Linux server. I'm not an impossible target, but far from a soft one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Hey, at least drugs will now be lacklustre, and unforfilling. The factory must grow to meet the demands of the expanding factory!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

A modern nuke is FAR from the "bang 2 rocks together" designs that were first designed. For a start, most are fusion devices. Fairly exotic reactions are used to make a small amount of fusion material to go critical. This creates a shaped charge on a fusion core. The compression wave sets fusion happening, which releases 95% of the energy. Most of Russia's arsenal is of this sort.

The downsides of these is the use of exotic elements. They often have a short half life, e.g. tritium, with 12.5 years. This means they decay. Even worse, some of the byproducts will actually poison the reaction. E.g. Rather than producing a flood of neutrons, they absorb them.

If any of this chain fails, then your fusion nuke becomes, at best, a low yield fission nuke. More likely, it becomes a dirty bomb. It's still nasty, but not the city destroying terror weapon it would be intended as.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago (2 children)

It's less being stripped, and more a lack of maintenance. Nukes have a shelf life. The elements inside then can decay, this means they need replacing. This is a highly specialist job. It's also expensive, and can only really be cross checked by the same people who do the work (or detonating it).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

It's been beaten bloody, but is still holding together. It's definitely in crisis though.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago

The tories are the conservative party. They are our right-wing, mainstream party. Politically, they are closer to the Democrats than republicans, but that's mostly because America is so extreme right wing compared to most of Europe.

A few years ago, they took a lurch to the right, as well as purging a lot of the less extreme and/or intelligent members. Thankfully, they got throughly bitchslaped out of power recently. We are now into the cleanup phase of their damage (including brexit).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

It was a dream in the UK too... until it wasn't.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago (2 children)

It's well worth fighting for. We pay less than half what Americans pay for better service.

My daughter was born in an nhs hospital, and had complications, they were in for over a week. The biggest expense was snacks (I might have been a bit stressed and feeling helpless). Even parking was cheap.

 

I need some advice, and the amount of marketing spam had made sorting the wheat from the chaff annoyingly difficult. Hopefully you can help.

I've a young daughter, who uses an old tablet of mine to watch netflix etc. unfortunately, it was old in the tooth when she was born, and it's now become extremely annoying to use.

She currently has a Samsung Galaxy Tab A (2016). The size (10") works well, but it's gotten slow as sin, and only has 16Gb of internal memory.

Preferences wise:

  • 10" screen (±2")

  • 64Gb+ storage.

  • Long expected lifespan (inc security updates).

  • Headphone socket (adapters are asking to get broken, Bluetooth go flat)

  • Decent WiFi (more than just 2.4Ghz).

  • USB C charging preferred.

  • Wireless charging would be very helpful but not required.

  • Lower budget preferred (£200 range).

What would people recommend?

 

For those of you in the UK, IKEA currently has a steep discount on their GU10 bulbs. I've just picked up several dimmable, colour temperature controlled bulbs for £5 each.

They play nicely with HA via a sonoff dongle and ZigBee2MQTT, even down to firmware updates.

 

I've been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a good few years now. Unfortunately I don't like the direction they seem to be heading.

I've also just ordered a new computer, so it seems like the best time to change over. While I'm sure it will start a heated debate, what variant would people recommend?

I'm not after a bleeding edge, do it all yourself OS it will be my daily driver, so don't want to have to get elbow deep in configs every 5 minutes. My default would be to go back to Debian. However, I know the steam deck is arch based. With steam developing proton so hard, is it worth the additional learning curve to change to arch, or something else?

 

I'm upgrading to a new laptop (unfortunately, a desktop is not viable for me right now). It's a VR gaming machine, with some potential work with machine learning (me learning about it). I've got a system option, but it's into price flinching territory, and wanted a once over, from those more in the know.

Are there any obvious flaws in it, and is it reasonable for the price?

  • Display: 1 x 16.0" IPS | 2560×1600 px (16:10) | 240 Hz | G-SYNC | 95 % sRGB

  • Graphic Card: 1 x NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop | 12 GB GDDR6

  • Processor: 1 x Intel Core i9-13900HX

  • Ram: 2 x 16 GB (32 GB) DDR5-5600 Samsung

  • SSD (M.2): 1 x 1 TB M.2 Samsung 990 PRO | PCIe 4.0 x4 | NVMe

  • Keyboard: 1 x Mechanical keyboard with CHERRY MX ULP Tactile switches

  • WLAN: 1 x Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211 | Bluetooth 5.3

It prices up at €2,809.31 (£2,484.57 or $3,130.80) including shipping and taxes.

It's worth noting the system comes with an optional external water cooling system, so the CPU and GFX are less thermally limit, when it's plugged in. It also has a proper keyboard, not the normal membrane ones.

What are people's opinions? It is a reasonable price, or am I way too far up the diminishing returns slope?

https://bestware.com/en/xmg-neo-16-e23.html

 

My Google-fu has completely failed me. I've got an RGB addressable led curtain. It has 20 strings of 20 LEDs in a square arrangement. I initially assumed it had a wire feeding led data back up, to go to the next drop. On checking however, they are T jointed.

Apparently the address is hard coded into the RGB controller in the LED. I've found a few places where others have talked about them. I've also found that adafruit had some available,, unfortunately they lacked any info on how they are programmed, or where to source them from.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/4917

Anyone got any info on what the chip name of these is? Even better if you have any info on how they are programmed etc!

 

Might not be the best place to ask, but nowhere else reliant seemed alive.

My old laser printer has given up the ghost. What are people's recommendations on a replacement. As far as I'm aware, Brother are about the only company both making reasonably priced printers and not playing stupid games. Beyond that though, I'm not up to date on what's good and what's not.

Requirements.

  • Colour laser.

  • WiFi

  • Works with both windows and Linux

  • No need for scanner etc.

  • CD/ID card printing nice, but not required.

  • Photo quality nice, but not required (we have an ink sublimation printer for photos).

I'm UK based, which can mess with availability.

Thanks in advance.

 

All hail the lemming of Lemmy!

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