• 14 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • cow farts

    Burps. Cows burp methane. Depends on their fodder, grass-fed ones produce less in the first place. We currently have fodder additives that are very good at reducing methane burps, and we have additives that reduce methane burps that are cheap, what’s missing is ones that are both very good and dirt cheap and it’s going to come but it’ll take another year or three.


  • Plenty of self-driving trains around, generally metros where frequency and 24/7 operation is a great boon to overall service quality – you don’t want people to look at schedules, you want them to go to the station knowing there’s going to be a train in a couple of minutes, tops.

    It’s way different for long-haul service, freight, passenger, doesn’t matter. Longer and less frequent trains with way more passengers in them, and you probably need other staff too, like someone needs to run the bistro. The tracks they’re running on are also way less predictable, with a metro you can have station screen doors everywhere (which btw necessitate automatic driving, humans aren’t accurate enough) try that with an international train: Regions much less countries can’t even agree on uniform platform heights. Much less door locations: Automated long-haul would require dedicated platforms at every station and while those could be served by trains with drivers, trains nowadays are all smart enough that including a button “stop at exactly that location, to the half-centimetre” isn’t an issue, those trains would have to have doors at the right location. Now go ahead and convince Germany and France that they need to replace all TGVs and ICEs to have doors in the same location as your regional trains.

    Oh and none of that automation tech used with trains uses machine learning, btw. At least not at the basic level, when it comes to actually driving the train. I do remember watching a documentary about Singapore’s metro, where they have an ML algorithm scheduling track maintenance, minimising not service interruptions as such but impact on people’s commute. First the workers complained that none of the orders made any sense, then the developers made the computer spit out context and motivation alongside with the orders, workers changed their tune to “that’s fucking brilliant”.

    …which, actually, brings me to the conclusion: Also with automated systems we’re going to need maintenance which isn’t going to be automated any time soon. If you automate a metro that currently doesn’t run 24/7 you don’t have that many drivers in the first place, and probably have other jobs for them to do. Automating really is about making “a train max. every five minutes, 24/7” possible without breaking the bank.



  • barsoap@lemm.eetoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldGoddammit Texas!
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    25 days ago

    I’m not too familiar with the specific legal status of the OSCE in American law, I bet there’s a treaty or the other, but generally speaking a) you’re a member and b) you regularly send out your own people as OSCE mission members into other countries to observe elections and c) Every member state gets observed (alongside non-member countries inviting the OSCE because it’s a stamp of approval and can help stabilise democracies, establish trust in the procedures). Cursory observations are done for basically all elections that aren’t strictly regional, more in-depth ones every couple of elections. It’s democracies holding each other accountable.

    If Bumfuck, TX, wants to make a statement against Canadians observing their elections that’s their god-damned right but it’s also the duty of Washington to shut them the fuck up. Not too filled-in on the details either but when you start arresting people with diplomatic passports accredited by the federal level I think you should maybe take a step back and make a phone call before deploying handcuffs.


  • You don’t need an ID in Germany to vote just, push comes to shove, a way to make your identity believable. Expired ID, student ID, personalised public transport ticket, perfectly sufficient. Generally you just vote with your election notification, a sheet of paper with your address, ballot location, and number in the voter registry on it. If you try to vote with an ID but without notification workers are going to roll their eyes because they’ll have to manually search for you in their lists, heck, you might’ve turned up at the wrong location.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldGoddammit Texas!
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    26 days ago

    I don’t need my ID to vote, also it’s valid for 10 years. Municipalities fill the voting registry from their citizens’ registry, then send out notifications to everyone. You literally cannot miss an election. You generally go voting with that notification, it’s sufficient, or use it to request a mail-in ballot.

    I’m sure administration is sufficiently different in the US than it is in Germany for the thing to not be able to work like that, but, big picture: The IRS can find everyone. Have them fill the registry, then.




  • Yes in principle to male plug, no to 240V unless the inverter sees a frequency to sync to. They won’t power anything during a power outage that requires the whole electrical installation to be set up for it so you don’t leak power to the outside and fry a lineman. Also that inverter attaches to one phase only which means that its power won’t even reach 2/3rds of your circuits. It does make the power meter go backwards though which is the point.

    That said, ideally you’re using Wieland plugs and not Schuko so you won’t have exposed prongs. The VDE certified Schuko for feeding in up to 800W though and that’s exactly the amount parliament said doesn’t require a permit or even talking to your utility. If you’re doing everything new going with Wieland is the sane choice those outlets don’t cost a fortune, if it’s an existing installation though a) your landlord might not like it and b) electricians will demand more in travel costs than the outlet is worth.




  • ROMs back then got erased by UV light, EPROM. EEPROMs are a bit newer (though still ancient) and can be erased electronically, nowadays it’s a very sane idea to just throw flash storage at the problem. I think you can get modern replacement for pretty much any ancient form factor.

    The way those things are used are basically big logic tables: Instead of using a bunch of logic gates, you store the output that’s expected given a certain input. Completely ancient technique, the limiting factor is storage space and sensibility – storing all addition results of two 32 bit numbers uses a lot more transistors than a 32-bit adder, but if what you want to put in there isn’t a thing that can be implemented few standard TTL components throwing storage at the problem makes sense even if you never plan to reprogram it because burning a custom set of transistors onto silicon is expensive.


  • Some more technical info.

    It’s an legit 8-bit CPU implemented with TTL chips, what makes it a different beast than what they did back in the days is that its microcoding isn’t kneecapped. It would absolutely have been possible back in the days to build exactly such a thing, even from precisely those components. At least the TTL part, that is, I bet there’s wibbles around VGA etc. And because I already hear the detractors yes, 8-bit CPUs were microcoded: They decoded single external instructions into a stream of “load from memory, fetch from register so and so, switch on the ALU, put what’s in the ALU output somewhere”. They kept it as simple as possible and it wasn’t reprogrammable but that stuff there, that’s microcode.

    Implementing CPUs in TTL chips also isn’t a new idea, that’s how early minicomputers were made (later on they got some specialised chips). And those things also used ROMs for their microcode. So you could say that this is a minicomputer capable of pretending to be different 8-bit microcomputers.

    FPGAs are a completely different technology, those allow you to arrange logic in a (more or less) arbitrary topology. That is, looking at that board with all those TTL chips, it’d be the equivalent of being able to re-route all the board traces as you please.


  • Replacing /usr/bin/firefox doesn’t fix anything if you don’t restart Firefox itself.

    On my box updating firefox and then restarting it won’t even launch the new version because NixOS knows I’m logged in and won’t just change things in my environment. But unless there’s a kernel update yes nixos rebuild switch followed by logging out and logging in is equivalent to rebooting as it will automatically shut down and restart all system services, I think even systemd itself. Modulo some wibbles around kernel modules but those fall under kernel updates in my book.

    Contrast Ubuntu, which really likes to prompt your for reboots. The difference between a distro primarily for desktop use and one that can also do desktop because also devops want a desktop. Hey I could spin up 1000 cloud instances of my desktop with a couple of keystrokes isn’t that impressively useless :)



  • Some of them had two distinct consciousnesses emerge due to their hemispheres no longer being able to communicate.

    Arguably we all have more than one distinct consciousness due to both hemispheres being able to sustain one on their own, but generally aren’t conscious of it. And in case we are, interpretations tend to be religious as (generally, in currentyear) the right hemisphere consciousness is thought of as an other. As in, nope, that wasn’t your guardian angel, it was your right hemisphere violently pulling you out of your oh so comfortable left hemisphere tunnel vision to finally perceive some traffic instead of how hard your Lambo’s sound makes your dick.

    Did you know that, evolutionarily, the interconnection of our hemispheres actually decreased with increased intelligence? Having drastically different takes on the world is very beneficial, likewise having them run concurrently: A wide angle lens for threat perception, a narrow angle lens to focus in on things. Iain McGilchrist has written two great books about the whole topic, but as a broad summary: The right hemisphere is the dominant one, having a holistic model of the world, while the left flourishes on detail and, if not in check, fabulates like a fisher – the right, as said, is supposed to direct its focus. Losing your left hemisphere is like losing your glasses, everything becomes fuzzy but you still know where you are, while losing your right is more like losing your eyes but being proud of how sharp your glasses make everything look. Symptomatically, you then see patients walking say through a door, noticing the hinge, getting drawn into it, really looking at it, and forgetting they were even walking. They’re stuck there, looking at the hinge. (That’s all modulo neuroplasticity, if damage occurs very early in life the brain can compensate). Excessive right-hemisphere dominance would be like dude, that’s all, you know, thoughts.


  • You can’t automate generation of shape keys. An artist needs to go over every single asset and make it work for every single extreme point on every slider, then make sure that the automatically derived in between points look good and fix those if required, in all slider combinations.

    And it’s probably still going to clip during some animations because going over absolutely everything is just prohibitively expensive.