Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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5

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453

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yeah I even have... plans.

I've got some circuit boards for a particle spectrometer off at the factory. When they come in, it will probably be the first nuclear technology integration with Lemmy. Probably also the last, but if the user count keeps increasing, who knows!

Particle spectrometers make very good random number generators, and I have a Lemmy bot on my instance that does I-Ching divination that uses an inferior random number source (diode breakdown). I need a particle spectrometer for some science anyway, and it doesn't really cost more to make 2. How could I not, right?

In Vietnam, we call it khổ qua, maybe that will help identify if it's what we think it is with a quick search :)

We also use it to make a tea, but I'm not sure if it's actually good or just for supposed magical properties.

Bitter melon. Love the stuff. Stir fry with burned garlic and oyster sauce.

Betel leaves too. Stir fry them with beef slices and black pepper, and maybe some sauce.

Bone is piezoelectric -- not sure if this is due to structure or because apatite is also piezoelectric.

Some practical notes:

I haven't been able to use it in crystal oscillators at 5V and a naive setup (a standard hex inverter crystal oscillator circuit). Probably I'll need to use proper thin sections of it (to increase the electric field per mm), increase the voltage (e.g. 20V), and maybe stress it in the right direction (bone has a 'grain' to it).

Also : Fee fi fo fum. I'll grind some bones to make my... breadboards?

In hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have suggested using baby teeth as a novel piezoelectric material. If juvenile biomineralogical apatite turns out to be a better material to make crystal oscillators than quartz, I've literally just created industrial demand for the bones of children.

Oh well. Cat is out of the bag now. Turned out not to be an effective or humane way to store cats anyway.

Well, I've been tempted to cut them in thin slivers, press them between metal plates, and test for piezoelectricity (they ought to be piezoelectric). Them build a higher-than-normal voltage Colpitts oscillator around it. Higher voltage to compensate for lousy crystal performance, not "high voltage". Maybe tens of volts?

Then use them as a clock source for a CPU. Try to get one with fully static operation in case the frequency is not super stable.

This forms a good introduction to practical necromancy and necrocomputing for children. Happy Halloween!

Hey, I run my own instance and periodically forget to check if I'm running an out of date version. Would you happen to know if there is any 'version out of date' indication that I've failed to pick up on? Or do I just need to manually check? Or can I get new version notifications by email?

No need to go Google it, I'll make time to search myself eventually -- but if you happen to know, you'd save me some time.

I live in the developing world. I would not be quick to trust this kind of institution if I saw it here. In any case, our petrol and power usage is pretty low per capita in Southeast Asia, and the average person doesn't have much disposable income, so I'm not sure it would survive well as an institution or be able to do much. In the West? I guess it depends what their track record is. If it's good, I might be willing.

I am very concerned about climate change though. It's just that I live in a threatened coastal region, and need to spend my money mitigating climate change directly with more expensive construction techniques for flood resistance, not giving it to a charity. I have no choice but to foot the bill, if you guys aren't going to do it. I've estimated this will cost me an extra USD 50k or so over the next 10 years. Of course, most people make less than that here, and just lose their homes. I'm one of the lucky ones.

On a more positive note, our oyster farms do quite a bit of carbon capture. It's becoming a thing!

For the sort of thing you describe, unless it affects the operation of the company, I just ignore it. I don't feel the need to correct other people's beliefs unless it's getting in the way of my work. Or socialize at work, beyond a purely practical amount.

If it's mandatory that I socialize with them for some reason, and they cannot abide people who don't believe everything they do, I try to change the subject to something where there's more common ground. If they force the matter, and leaving is not permitted, I just lie -- if they're being that dense, it's not like they value my true thoughts much anyway.

I was poor in the developing world for years. Not begpacker fake poor. I had immigrated, put every dime into my business, and it took 3 years to make more than about 50 cents an hour after hard costs. There was no going back, so I went all in.

Let me tell you, it erodes at your humanity. One day, there's either nothing left, or something cold and hard and hungry. If it's the former, you're done for. If it's the latter, you are something else now, and it never stops being hungry, and it never goes away.

It just burns in you, like a flame, like an effigy.

Like a sacrifice.

Marge married Homer.

Here the intent is to commit fraud -- deception for the purpose of financial gain. It is deception because you have knowingly misrepresented your ability to predict games, and you have gained financially by selling the pick. So it would be illegal on that basis in most if not all jurisdictions. The actual mechanism by which you create the deception or profit from it are not that important.

Moreover if you accept the money by mail or by digital means and I really wanted to hurt you (and you were in the US), I would go after you for mail fraud or wire fraud, not the scheme itself. These have very harsh penalties in the US and powerful authorities with a vested interest in keeping it that way.

(I am not a lawyer)

If only that there were such a thing :D

Yeah human beings are pretty good at default mode :(

Often, I think our machines contain the best of us. Maybe that's the real reason people seem afraid of AI.

Eh, sometimes the IDE from a chip manufacturer is bad enough that I go back to using a text editor.

Glares at Microchip Studio

Their on-chip hardware is great though. In everything else I've found tons of bugs. Even the cables that come with their dev kit have bugs.

For B2B emails, "The invoice should be paid by Friday" means don't hold your breath, the invoice won't be paid by Friday and you need to set time aside to call and follow up like 20 times over the course of the next month.

I rather like KDE Connect.

I've got some form of open source sensors multitool that gives me the raw data from my phone's sensors. That helps me troubleshoot other sensors at work.

Oh and while not strictly speaking an app itself, I rather like Godot. Within a day I was writing my own android apps (it uses a Python-like scripting language). Mostly stuff to send/receive UDP networking packets to test various systems. So my next favorite android app might be one I write myself ;)

A lesson that took me a long time to learn, and at terrible personal cost, is that being smart doesn't matter very much. I was good at academic stuff as a kid, so tons of adults told me that was the most important thing ever, and I've come to realize that was wrong of them.

Let's say, as a fictional example, that I'm top 1% of the population in terms of some abstract measure of intelligence (IQ is an awful one, but let's not get caught up on that). If no one values time spent with people on a lower rung, not only can I not spend time with the people below me on the curve, but people higher won't spend time with me. That gives me such a tiny fraction of the population I can interact with, it's absurd! Meanwhile, people smarter than me are still common enough that I'd encounter several a day -- I'm hardly exceptional enough to be terribly important. What a lonely life that would be!

So three further lessons I've learned, and I think these are important, go something like this:

1. Intellectual challenges are not scarce. They are a dime a dozen, I can invent them myself inside my head, or pick any number of other problems online. Sometimes I can get paid to solve them, whatever. So I don't need more people to give me those. What's really valuable are the people that challenge you to grow, to become more. It doesn't take intelligence to look you in the eyes when you're being a smartass, and ask you "Do you want to be right, or helpful?".
2. Better to look for (and learn from) people who are kind and wise than who are smart. The opposite of a great truth is another great truth, the opposite of wisdom and kindness are substantially less desirable.
3. The harshest lessons in life are always when you trust the wrong person. Harsher still, is when this person was yourself. So it's wise to enter all relationships carefully -- with respect, I don't think the fact you are thinking about this beforehand is wrong, but your focus might be misplaced. I'm just a stranger on the Internet though.

I dunno. In the broader sense, I feel like I achieved many things in life with guides. The things I did without guides were significantly worse and are more embarrassing via their poor outcome, than they are satisfying through their sheer difficulty. For example, I learned broken Vietnamese out of sheer necessity by just staring at words long enough -- but the fact is that I'm an adult that speaks with the eloquence of a child. Overcoming difficulty sometimes masquerades as success, but it's not he same.

I don't see why video games would be different. If it helps you be the hero in your story, why not? That's what we all want, isn't it?

Or maybe the real accomplishment is writing guides, in guiding others to be the hero? It's dangerous to go alone ;)

If you divide the flavor by the cost, they come out as a compelling snack option for us working-class folk.

Most other nuts are better, but their superior flavor scales nonlinearly with the cost -- definitely worse than O(n), probably about O(n^x). So for people that enjoy peanuts at approximately the population median value, they achieve more enjoyment by buying more peanuts compared to a smaller quantity of other, more delicious nuts.

So sort of the same reason more burgers are eaten in the USA than steaks. Or more instant noodles than braised abalone, in my part of the world.

Inasmuch as it's hard to explain why I like anything, peanuts are filling, and taste like oil, protein and salt. They have a nice smell. A bit similar to roasted chickpeas, but richer and oilier.

Just for fun -- Professor Science says that none of the items we are discussing are nuts. Cashews and almonds are drupes and peanuts are legumes.