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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s the last isometric Zelda game, and they made it a swan song. The main quest it pretty short, but it’s the sort of cozy game where doing the sidequests just feels right.

    In the game, you shrink down to the size of a mouse to traverse rafters and explore tiny temples and float on lillypads. It’s the sort of thing that would be no big deal in a 3D game, but is wildly ambitious in 2D. Not only do they pull it off, but they fill the environments with lush, lived-in detail that springs to life when you shrink down and look at it up close. The art style still sticks with me after 20 years.

    Also, forget all the “hey, listen” stuff, your sidekick Ezlo just sasses you the entire time. It’s great.



  • But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.

    It isn’t even about selling more cars at this point, it’s about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.

    The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.






  • I’d argue your SO might not be displaying neurotypical behavior.

    Between 50-85% of autistic spectrum people (plus a significant portion of people with PTSD or depression) experience Alexithymia, or significant difficulty in recognizing and analyzing their emotional state.

    When I’m feeling bad, my SO frequently assumes I’m withholding the reason from him in some sort of passive-aggressive mindgame, and I have to remind him that I barely know what my mood is, let alone what’s causing it.

    I’m getting better at it, but it’s a lot of work and I still regularly mistake stomachaches for anxiety.






  • Hard disagree.

    This week, I’m designing a circuit which would traditionally use relays, but I’m considering IGBTs instead. IGBTs weren’t designed for my industry, but they’re so cheap (thanks to quadcopters) that I can just overspec them and get the job done despite the lack of optimization.

    Grid scale energy storage was already being researched before the EV boom – remember when people stopped talking about vanadium-flow? EV batteries undercut stationary-optimized batteries in $/kWh because EVs are lucrative enough to drive the research that much harder. Without the EV industry as the incubator for competing battery tech, stationary storage would still cost what it did in 2010.


  • In the USA, out of every economic sector, transportation creates the most GHG emissions [EPA1], and the majority of that is from passenger vehicles [EPA2]. Significant portions of the industrial sector’s emissions come from refining automotive fuel [EPA3]. US total GHG emissions are down around 20% from their peak in 2005, but almost all of that has come from the electrical power sector [CBO1][CBO2]. Vehicular pollution has dramatic direct health impact on top of GHG emissions [HSPH].

    Transport emissions are the long pole in the tent for the US. Solutions to that will be the focal point of US climate strategy for the next decade. Barring the demolition of the majority of US housing to re-establish walkability, our two best solutions are EVs and public transit.

    EVs cut lifecycle emissions by about 55-60%. [UCS][ANL][MIT][ICCT][BNEF][CB][MIT][IEA]

    Public transit cuts lifecycle emissions by… about 55-60%. [IEA][AFDC][USDOT]

    Neither is a magic bullet. Both get their asses kicked by bicyles (and to a lesser degree, microcars). Both get better with increased passengers per vehicle. Both can be fueled with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both can be manufactured with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both take surprisingly equivalent amounts of raw resources and energy. EVs need batteries that are carbon-intensive under current practices, but rail needs large quantities of steel which is equally carbon-intensive under current practices.

    There are a ton of factors I can barely touch on here, so here’s a rapid-fire overview. Public transit offers unique advantages from an urbanist perspective and the liveability of cities [ST], but that’s objectively different from sustainability. The US has such low average ridership/occupancy that our busses have more emissions per passenger mile than our cars [AFDC1][AFDC2], and that was before the pandemic – it’s even worse now [NCBI]. Low ridership can be partly attributed to the incompatibility of American suburbs with public transit – which could be a major roadblock because 2/3rds of Americans own detatched homes [FRED], representing $52t [PRN] in middle-class wealth that they will likely defend with voting power. Climate solutions will need to maneuver around this voting bloc. I personally think individual EVs and intercity rail are complementary technologies – the more cheap (short-ranged) EVs are out there, the more people will lean on public transit for long trips. Heavy rail gets way better efficiency per vehicle mile than light rail or commuter rail and I have no clue why [APTA][ORNL], but I’m not as impressed by light rail as I expected to be. Since public transit and personal transport leverage different raw resources and face different challenges to adoption, we will achieve the most rapid decarbonization if we do both at the same time.

    TL;DR

    This is a huge, huge question, and anything short of a dissertation would fail to answer it objectively. My best answer is that the most effective solutions to climate change are diverse, engaging multiple technologies in parallel. EVs are a piece of the puzzle, but not a one-size-fits-all solution.


  • Fashion accessories. For most fashion (not workwear), the expensive stuff is made from the same material and in the same factories as the cheap stuff, they just market it harder.

    Body wash. It’s watered-down soap. Just buy a bar of soap.

    Amazon Prime. Amazon used to be space-age Sears. Now it’s just Aliexpress. Fake reviews and bribery are rampant, dangerously nonfunctional products get top recommendations, used and broken products get resold as new while untouched returns get thrown into landfills, Amazon Basics violates IP, and they’re putting ads in Prime Video now.

    Microwaves and space heaters. The boxes may try to convince you otherwise, but the amount of heat these devices can deliver is bottlenecked by the power outlet. Every 1100W microwave is just as effective as the others. If you’re paying more, it’s for looks and for features you’ll never use like popcorn mode.

    Electronics, for most people. Most people won’t get more use out of a new $1500 phone than a last-gen model from the same manufacturer for $500. Do you really want a $200 smart coffee maker, or a $20 dumb coffee maker with a $10 plug-in timer?

    Software. Obligatory FOSS plug. I don’t blame people for sticking to what’s familiar, but if you have the time and energy to spare tinkering, most software out there has a good free or open-source equivalent these days. At least for personal use. In my use case, LibreOffice beats Microsoft Word, Photopea beats Photoshop, and Google Sheets beats Excel.


  • Windows 11 needs Secure Boot and/or TPM workarounds, and while Linux is better than it used to be, but it still hates peripherals. Only 5% of Americans work in the tech industry. Fry cooks and forklift operators often lack the education needed to find these workarounds, and are too busy and tired making ends meet to seek out that education.

    In the modern corporate environment, most companies would rather replace their machines wholesale than risk unplanned downtime due to unforeseen glitches. They apply the principles of preventative maintenance to IT.

    I like Linux (Mint is good stuff), and I believe in what it stands for. But the human desire for simplicity, reliability, and familiarity should never be construed as a lack of virtue.


  • This.

    Last month, I installed Mint, which is my first ever Linux install. I chose it because people said it would be the most hassle-free.

    The bugs currently plaguing me include:

    • Steam’s UI scaling is off, to the extent that I practically need a magnifying glass to read it.
    • Bluetooth has now decided that it no longer wants to automatically connect to my speaker.
    • Discord won’t share audio during screen sharing anymore.

    But the big one, the one that made me stop and think, was the keyboard. Right out of the box, my function keys (brightness, airplane mode, etc) would not work. This turned out to be because the laptop was not recognizing its keyboard as a libinput device, but treating it as a HID sensor hub instead. To fix it, I had to:

    • Find similar problems on the forums and recognize which were applicable to my case.
    • Learn what the terminal was and how to copy code into it.
    • Learn that the terminal can be opened from different folders, which alters the meaning of the commands.
    • Learn the file system, including making how to make hidden files visible.
    • Figure out that a bunch of steps in the forum were just creating a text file, and that any text editor would do.
    • Figure out there were typos and missing steps in the forum solutions.
    • Learn what a kernel is, figure out mine was out of date, and update it.
    • Do it all over again a month later when for some reason my function keys stopped working again.

    For me, this was not a big deal. It did take me two evenings to solve, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy. But for someone with low technical literacy (such as my mom, who barely grasps the concept of ad blockers in Google Chrome), every one of these bullet points would be a monumental accomplishment.

    The FOSS crowd can be a bit insular, and they seem to regularly forget that about 95% of the people out there have such low technical literacy that they struggle to do anything more involved than turn on a lightbulb.


  • The absolute easiest way would be to 3D print the whole thing, leaving slots for steel rods to reinforce the frame.

    The cooler way would be to just 3D print the rim and make the back and front plates out of laser-cut aluminum. There are laser-cutting services if you don’t have one of your own.

    If you don’t have access to a 3D printer, you might consider brass. Unlike aluminum, brass can be folded or hammered into shape, so the front and sides of the tablet could be made from one folded and soldered/brazed sheet, with ports and vents cut with hand tools. I wouldn’t call this easier though – you’ll need some practice to keep it from looking sloppy.

    I’d recommend taking some inspiration from cyberdeck builds and other custom electronics enclosures. https://youtu.be/qzEd50uzdF0?si=6Bk1-QPlVcoNRcVO https://youtu.be/DrqdHVeBkp4?si=1sqfqUsp66He2bS5