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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Money is an emotional thing. Do I believe that this coin / bit of paper / number on a website is something that I can exchange for goods and services? If not enough people believe that, that currency will collapse.

    Mind you, not using money is inefficient at scale. Sending the bag of potatoes that I’ve grown in my garden this month to my internet provider for continued shitposting privileges only goes so far.




  • It’s one of those materials that has an almost complete list of superb properties, with one overwhelming downside. It’s cheap, abundantly available, completely fireproof and can be woven into fireproof cloth, adds enormous structural strength to concrete in small quantities, very resistant to a wide range of chemical attacks. It’s just that the dust causes horrific cancers. See also CFCs, leaded petrol, etc, which have the same ‘very cheap, superb in their intended use, but the negative outweighs all positives’.

    One of the ‘niche industrial applications’ was the production of pump gaskets in high-temperature scenarios, especially when pumping corrosive liquids. We’ve a range of superalloys that are ‘suitable’ for these applications - something like inconel is an absolute bastard to form into shapes, but once you’ve done so it lasts a long time. But you still need something with similar properties when screwing the bits together. For a long time, there was no suitable synthetic replacement for asbestos in that kind of usage.

    If you know that the asbestos is there, have suitable PPE and procedures, then IMHO it’s far from the worst industrial material to work with. It’s pretty inert, doesn’t catch fire or explode, and isn’t one of the many exciting chemicals where a single droplet on your skin would be sufficient to kill you. What is inappropriate is using it as a general-purpose building material, which is how it was used for so long, and where it was able to cause so much suffering for so many people.



  • If I believed that they were sincerely interested in trying to improve their product, then that would make sense. You can only improve yourself if you understand how your failings affect others.

    I suspect however that Saltman will use it to come up with some superficial bullshit about how their new 6.x model now has a 90% reduction in addiction rates; you can’t measure anything, it’s more about the feel, and that’s why it costs twice as much as any other model.


  • How’s the lag on one of those things? Doesn’t matter for an RPG, but playing some of the old platformers on a modern TV is an exercise in misery, and I just couldn’t get past the first couple of levels in Um Jammer Lammy without connecting up a PC monitor instead.

    Places where I’ve seen that live of projector are for eg. showing the football in a pub, and the sound and screen are noticeably out-of-sync.


  • A binary tree is one way of preparing data, usually for sorting. Each node can have a left, right, or both, children.

      A
     / \
    B   C
       / \
      D   E
    

    “Inverting the tree” means swapping the children for each node, so that the order that the nodes are visited is reversed. Depending on whether you want to copy the tree or swap it in place then the algorithm is different. C++ provides iterators too, so providing a “order reversed” iterator can be done efficiently as well.

    You’re going to have to visit every node and do at least one swap for every node, and an efficient algorithm won’t do much more than that. Bring unable to do it suggests that the student programmer doesn’t understand stacks or recursion yet, so they’ve more to learn.


  • addie@feddit.uktolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldPanik
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    1 month ago

    After having used Grub for about twenty years (eek) I was uncertain about the alternatives, but systemd-boot is absurdly better. Much better configuration, much better documentation, fixes a while pile of bugs that Grub team had as “won’t fix” for years and years. No reason to ever go back.


  • Does make me think about the story of Thales of Miletus; ancient Greek philosopher, got asked what use was philosophy if it doesn’t make you any money. Predicted good weather, and monopolised all the olive presses, made a fortune.

    For a modern example; shares in Rheinmetall (German firm who make, amongst other things, the turrets for tanks) have gone through the roof after the recent US debacle. I could have told you a year ago that Trump getting in would have meant the US abandoning Ukraine; obvious in hindsight that that would mean a boon for European arms manufacturers.

    I don’t think you need to be quick to take advantage. I think you need insight. If there’s a topic that you’re knowledgeable about and you can see which way the wind is blowing, then you can make your own boat.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Olive_presses






  • Man alive, all that time I wasted learning LaTeX in that case. Supports tables properly, “floats” pictures and figures about without messing up the flow of text, exceptional support for equations, beautiful printed output…

    Suffers from a completely insane macro-writing language, and its markup is more intrusive in the text than markdown’s is. Also, if you have very specific formatting output requirements (for a receiving publication, for instance) then it can be somewhat painful to whip into shape. Plain-text gang forever, though.


  • addie@feddit.uktoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldIt'll happen to you!
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    2 months ago

    Your classic VGA setup will probably be connected to a CRT monitor, which among other things has zero lag, and therefore running your sound separately to your audio setup, which also has zero lag, will be fine. Audio and video are in sync.

    HDMI cables will almost certainly be connected to a flatscreen of some kind. Monitors tend to have fairly low lag, but flatscreen TVs can be crazy. Some of them have “game” mode (or similar) but as for the rest, they might have half-a-second or more of image processing before actually displaying anything. Running sound separately will have a noticeable disconnect between audio and video; drives me crazy although some people don’t notice it. You would connect your audio setup to the TV rather than directly to source to correct this.

    Now, the fact that a lot of cheap TVs only have a 3.5mm headphone jack to “send on the sound” is annoying to me, too. A lot of people just don’t care about how things sound and therefore it’s not a commercial priority. Optical digital audio output would be ideal, in that cheap audio circuitry inside the television won’t degrade the sound being passed over HDMI and you can use your own choice of DAC, but they can be both expensive and add a bit of lag as well.