Intralexical @ Intralexical @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

This thread has, predictably, devolved into a hugely disrespectful exchange given the linked post.

But as an aside, I shudder to think of trying to design an additively manufactured part that would reliably contain a propellant blast using anything less than an industrial $100k-$1m DMLS or at least really really good SLS machine. If the goal is to harm somebody using a 3D printer, you'd probably be better off bashing them over the head with it.

Maybe a pegboard with tens of thousands of tuning forks on it?

Eh, don't worry about it. I'm worryingly niche in the software I use, and it was a really niche joke and a bit of a stretch even for me.

Oh. Funny. I was actually wondering when I posted this if anyone would take me seriously— Though I was imagining my abusers pretending to take it seriously in bad faith in order to hurt my credibility, and then how I would then have to explain myself to well-meaning people who might just be less familiar with the Linux-side systems I mentioned.

I was joking. Saying cmd.exe uses WSL→X11→xdotool→GUI to operate is a bit like saying "Every Toyota is secretly powered by a tiny little Honda with a tiny little man driving on a treadmill that's connected to the wheels under the hood". (xdotool is basically just a keyboard and mouse macro thing— So maybe you can imagine how silly it would be if you typed in cd or ls/dir or whatever and it just took over control of your mouse and clicked on the "File Explorer" from the "Start Menu".) It would be such an absurd and Frankensteinian design that I find the thought of it intrinsically funny.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

It's a condensation surface on which vapours revert to droplets in a liquid state due to the colder ambient air-cooled temperature of the leaf compared to the gaseous medium and heat source below it (and therefore lower vapour pressure immediately next to its surface), allowing the condensate/distillate to be collected and funneled for disposal, recycling, consumption, and/or another stage of distillation, and, in this case, producing an increasingly concentrated azeotropic water-ethanol solution which you can sell for the big bucks.

…Slightly simplified, of course. You may in fact need multiple leaves over pots, or even a couple leaves bent into funnels/chutes, and possibly even one pot over another pot.

I.E., By definition, a leaf over a pot is a still, as long as you put it at a slight angle and leave a small hole at the edge so the distillate can be collected. ­— Again: Physics provides, money is mostly an illusion/labour optimization mechanism, and sheet metal might be convenient for this use case but literally everything is materials. … If your only thought on how to produce a technology yourself is "Who can I pay for this?", then, yeah, you're not thinking in the right lines to get there.

On another note, I like your username though. Did you know they do like pump jet lifting body action stuff in the air? Really cool.

"Science" ≠ Technology!

If you give them the technology without giving them stuff like empiricism and cultural acceptance of critical thinking, they'll just worship it like any other faith, and stagnate for the next thousand years.

Inversely, you don't even need to give them too much technology, because if you just give them stuff like evidence-based medicine, the printing press, rigorous experimentation and reproducibility, and a couple institutes dedicated to the craft, plus a couple starting points, then they'll figure it on their own soon enough (assuming an overall stable civilization).

And since the IRS wasn't formed until 1862, you're stuck paying at least a couple hundred years of interest on missed payments!

Surely you've got a pot or something to cook your food in, right? Stick a leaf or a hollow log over it or whatever. Seriously… Money is fake, and literally everything is materials.

Good luck convincing them when everyone is busy tending their crops to prepare for the winter.

Just sprinkle some bird poop or bat guano or whatever other nitrogen and phosphorus-rich gunk onto it when they aren't looking.

It's a constant symbolic reminder, and still a 10X scope increase.

If you want to be pedantic about making "the clock slightly longer", you might as well say "I don't see why they don't write their dates out in base 62. Then they could make the clock shorter by writing wD instead of 2023". The point is that everyone who sees "02023" can have a bit of an "oh shit" moment where they instantly understand what it means.

this is assuming you end up in a culture that would even value technological advancement.

People value their friends and family not dying, and the murdering raiders from neighbouring tribes being kept at bay. And people that don't value that don't tend to last very long.

You’d need the social skills to demonstrate technological improvements (say, a better axe) without causing everyone to freak out and call you a demon.

....Starting with an axe would be nice. The lumberfolk would appreciate it, surely. But then what happens when the old blacksmith blames your witchcraft for the crops failing next year, or for the village chief's child falling ill? So maybe teach the blacksmiths too, so they also benefit from you— I'm sure they'll love having some upstart come in and tell them how to do their jobs.

You're an outsider, no matter what, and you're never going to completely look like them or sound like them or act like them— Can we really think that any amount of social skills will be enough to keep you safe, when they might just be determined to hate you for what you are?

Maybe start with a combination of military and medical technology. Show them a crude crossbow; when they see the next raid of Goths or Aztecs or Mongols or Vikings or Peloponnesians or whomever being repelled before they even reach the gates, they'll come to appreciate it sooner or later… Their enemies are against their gods, so if you helped defend them from their enemies, you must be sent by their gods. Disgustingly, hating the same out-group is a great way to keep yourself safe in any given in-group, whether at work or at war. Medicine's probably trickier, because if you fail to save somebody then some people will probably blame you for their death. But if you make it clear that you can't stop fate from running its course, and you start with some basic stuff, they'll probably come to appreciate that their friends aren't dying as much from infections anymore too.

Fear of death has always been sadly the strongest motivator for embracing technological change. Modern aviation, computing, and nuclear science all came after WWII; and "anti-vax" movements only thrive in countries that have already essentially eradicated the concerned diseases. It'll be harder for them to crucify somebody whom they can see is standing between them and death.

Eh. Like 90%+ of everybody who ever lived in pre-Industrial civilization was a slave or a serf or something like that. What does that say about the other 1% that "owned" them? And if your goal is explicitly to bring lots of revolutionary technologies, you're probably going to disrupt a lot of established power structures. People in power don't tend to take kindly to that, and as the ultimate outsider, you'll be the perfect scapegoat for anything that goes wrong.

It's dumb to think only about fighting, and this specific scenario isn't something that you're ever going to be able to win through brute force alone. Also, using guns "to make them listen to you", as the original comment said, sounds pretty evil depending on how it's done. (E.G. Menace and threaten anyone questioning you: Evil. Gain favour with the royal army by providing guns, then ask for funding for medical research: Less evil.) But ultimately, it's reasonable to be prepared for other people to act in bad faith.

Monarchs cares about power. Give the ruler some more metallurgy or siege engines first, so you have their favour. Then split the Royal Court's physicians into two groups, one that washes their hands, and one that doesn't. Do the same for leeches, bloodletting, hydration, etc. It'll be hard to argue with the resulting death rates. And in the long run, you'll have a much bigger impact by introducing empricism/A-B testing/evidence-based medicine than any one thing specific thing you could have done.

Snarky anthropomorphization primarily serving clickbait and liability-limiting, I think, pretty clearly.

Really, the headline could just be "Microsoft To Allow Removing Preinstalled Apps", or "Bloatware Apps will be Removable After Windows 11 Update", or something like that. But the way they worded it lets them both sound more sarcastic to people who are pissed off by the scummy practice, and at the same time also sound plausibly less direct in calling Microsoft out.

Fun fact: Every Windows command line command actually just spams xdotool through the X11 server on WSL in order to do the equivalent action through the Windows GUI.

The kind of media I don’t have backup of is from my Handycam tapes since they no longer make the software and I don’t know how to digitize them in any other way.

Do this if desperate, but see below first: Magnetic tape cassettes? Are they standard? Then just stick them in an audio player and record the signal— Or actually, they're probably 8mm, or DV, or something— So then rip the reader head out of an audio player, scroll through the tape at a constant rate, and digitize that signal (for as many tracks as needed). Don't do anything silly, like using too much force or sticking too strong a magnet next to them, of course. As long as you've got the signal, you can worry about decoding it later if you lose the originals— Get some nerdy college student to figure it out, or wait for someone else with the same problem to post their GIT repository.

Easier: Check if the Internet Archive has a copy of the software. It looks like they have quite a few Sony Handycam CDROMs. Maybe you'll find a compatible model. Run it on an old Windows VM or computer if you need. "No longer make the software" sounds odd; Software like that is made once and then distributed.

(Or: Presumably you can still watch the tapes? Does the camera not have video output that you pass through some sort of capture box? — Though that of course would be lossy.)

Or: Wikipedia suggests the "Handycam" brand was used for multiple format standards, like "Video8" or "Hi8" or whatever. So just search Nile.com (or your personal favourite exploitation-powered online storefront) for "NameOfFormat Digitizer", and wait for the order to to arrive. Here's a couple articles from the first search results: IndieWire, VHSConverters. Here's a machine that supports a couple formats, and has licensed a very reputable brand KodakPhotoPlus. And here's a service that will apparently do it for you: LegacyBox. — Pricey, maybe, but how much time and money are you already spending, and how much are the tapes worth to you?

Crazy how a single event sometimes reminds people of bigger problems, huh?

Digital media, where we store basically everything we care about, is hugely, hugely volatile, unreliable, and fragile. But you never notice it until you're reminded of it, and then you really notice it. This story reminded people of it.

The reminder to stay grounded is probably also healthy, but I do think you're missing the point of this comment thread.

Definitely fly both at once, or overlay them tastefully or something, instead of going full pride-version.

Mutilating the country's flag in order to show your "patriotism", as certain groups do, is… Certainly an interesting symbolic choice.

Wearing or sporting an American flag gets all the wrong kind of attention. I really don’t want to deal with it. Frightening minorities and getting thumbs up/nods from racists isn’t really my thing.

Then stick it next to a rainbow flag, or a Statue of Liberty, or a peace sign, or the date of the Emancipation Proclamation, or any of the symbols that y'all actually do still have for actual freedom.

It's all about the messaging. Make it clear: "This is the flag of the nation, for everybody in the nation, and anyone who flies a mutilated version of it is a coward."

There’s a slim chance someone with a regular American flag isn’t a nationalist twat.

Y'all should really reclaim that. It's a good flag, and it's supposed to mean some things that are actually quite nice.