I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • And how if you share a file in Teams and then six months later you want to share a file with the same name to ANYONE else via teams, well that’s a big no-can-do. Teams just went ahead and uploaded that file to your “stuff to share” folder in OneDrive and didn’t put it in a subfolder unique to the chat, or add a unique prefix or suffix or anything because hey, you’ll only ever share a file with a particular name once in your life, right?

    And nobody would ever want to share a file with the same name, but different data, right? So Teams can just give the end user the choice between replacing the current file with the new one, or sharing the same one again to these new guys, because there’s no possible use case for actually having two files named the same with different information in the file, right?

    Nobody would want to share a README.TXT, or Photo001.jpg, or contact.ics, or a zip file of a folder they just downloaded from Teams’ SharePoint interface, the file that’s automatically called “OneDrive.zip” without the option to change it before saving, more than once, right? Right??

    Fuck teams. And fuck Teams(New) too, just for the shitty name.


  • Generally I bash together the one-off programs in Python and if I discover that my “one off” program is actually being run 4 times a week, that’s when I look at switching to a compiled language.

    Case in point: I threw together a python program that followed a trajectory in a point cloud and erased a box around the trajectory. Found a python point cloud library, swore at my code (and the library code) for a few hours, tidied up a few point clouds with it, job done.

    And then other people in my company also needed to do the same thing and after a few months of occasional use, I rewrote it using C++ and Open3D. A few days of swearing this time (mainly because my C++ is a bit rusty, and Open3D’s C++ interface is a sparsely-documented back end to their main python front end).

    End result though is that point clouds that took 3 minutes to process before in python now take 10 seconds, and now there’s a visualisation widget that shows the effects of the processing so you don’t have to open the cloud in another viewer to see that it was ok.

    But anyway, like you said, python is good for prototyping, and when you hash out your approach and things are fairly nailed down and now you’d like some speed, jump to a compiled language and reap the benefits.



  • Assumption:

    Someone crams a 300 watt solar panel onto the roof of their EV and manages to integrate it into the charging system so that it’s pretty efficient to use that power.

    Numbers:

    One hour of good sunshine on the 300 watt panel = 300 watt-hours (Wh).

    Average EV energy usage : 200Wh per kilometre these days. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, depends on how and where you’re driving.

    Result:

    One hour of perfect sunshine hitting the roof of your car equals 1.5 kilometres of extra range, or you can drive your car in a steady-state fashion at a 3-5 kilometres per hour because an EV is more efficient than the average usage at lower speeds.

    Conclusion:

    Probably better off increasing the storage capacity of the battery as a full day’s sunshine will get you about 10 kilometres of range.



  • You need silicon.

    The earth’s crust is about 25 percent silicon. Sand made out of quartz like desert sand is about 50 percent silicon. Beach sand is usually mainly calcium carbonate from shells and it doesn’t contain much silicon at all. Volcanic beach sand is more likely the same as the earth’s crust so 25-50 percent.

    So as long as you refine your sand/gravel/rocks/lava so that you’re left with pretty much pure silicon, you’re good to go.










  • Dave.@aussie.zonetoScience Memes@mander.xyzwe live in an explosion
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    3 months ago

    I prefer the H.G. Wells The Time Machine style of time travel , where you affect the flow of time instead of a discontinuous jump.

    You’re still attached to your current location, things just happen faster (in forwards or reverse). It also means that time travel takes time, which can be a handy plot tool.

    Edit: grammatical swipe keyboard errors


  • Flash chip cells are basically tiny electron traps, they consist of a tiny stored charge surrounded on all sides by an insulator. When writing to the cell you fill it with some electrons via (much handwaving here) a method of quantum tunneling. You can then read the cell by sensing the internal charge without disturbing it.

    When not in use eventually enough charge tunnels out of the cell via random quantum tunneling events for it to read nothing. This is worsened when things are hotter, so maybe keeping your flash chips in the freezer would help.

    Consumer flash memory, I probably wouldn’t expect more than 20 or 30 years of offline storage out of it. The older chips would last longer, because their cells are bigger, and you’re not trying to read multiple charge levels per cell like the newer stuff.

    Added edit:

    Magnetic media probably has a higher chance of surviving longer. Floppies from the 80s can still be read, for example, but they are low density media. You’d want something that separates the drive system from the actual magnetic media to stop bearing or motor failure from being an issue , so tape would be a good idea.

    The problem is, of course, that you could end up with media you can’t read as nobody makes the hardware for it. Tape drives have gone through a dozen revisions in the last 30 years as capacity has increased, but as long as you have the same physical tape cartridge you should be ok.

    M-Disc is a blueray compatible media that doesn’t use dye and should have a life of hundreds of years. But who will have a blueray reader on hand in the 24th century? I’ve got a USB M-Disc compatible writer for my backups, but in 30 years will I be able to pull it out of a drawer and plug it into a USB Gen 15 port and have it work with whatever software I have then?

    I think we’re going to have to do the manual duplication process for a while yet, until we finally settle on some universal petabyte storage crystals or something.


  • He was a tough nut to crack.

    “Computers are useless, they can only give you answers.” - also Picasso.

    But he was an artist. Technology was just a tool for him to make art, nothing more. I’m sure if you’d shown him an iPad with a modern sketching program on it hooked up to a dye-sub printer, he would have been at least a little intrigued. He might have disregarded it as a toy, but he also might have worked with a new medium to see what he could do.