Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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5

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453

Joined

2 yr. ago

I like having better control over what content people can push at me. An issue on other platforms is they all want to force things on me -- things that they make money from, or things they think will annoy me (to keep me "engaged"). This makes them really annoying for me to use, and generally results in me giving up on the idea of sharing the things I study with others, and maybe also helping people with their projects.

I'm really mostly here to share science and engineering stuff, and maybe help other immigrants to Vietnam (I mean, there will probably be another one eventually...).

So really, I don't think it's a problem. I'm already painfully aware of the various weird things people think about me in daily life (yay, being an immigrant!). I don't need that to define every single thing I do. Sometimes I just want to log on and post some nice words about optimizing assembly language, without having to deal with a bunch of strange and often inappropriate requests from strangers.

Me too. I seriously go to The Onion for news. I started doing it as a joke, but then realized what people want to laugh about gave a much more honest picture of what people actually cared about on a daily basis. I live outside the USA so it's not otherwise obvious to me. It truly is America's Finest News Source.

The court jester is the only one allowed to tell the truth about the king, I guess.

Very generally, you use the central bank rate to control the money supply. You increase it to remove money from the economy.

Even money is affected by supply and demand. Too much money in the economy is one of several things that can cause inflation -- for example because a surplus of money means people value money less and goods/services more. As a result, the value of goods/services as measured in money goes up.

Sadly, these are macro-level problems. Personally having a surplus of money sounds great, but the actual amount of extra money I made during Covid was not that much -- but give that much money to 100 million people and you're going to have inflation (I live in Vietnam where the economy was not seriously impacted).

OK done! The ansible install never seems to work out of the box for me. Always got to find a slow day at work so I can troubleshoot a bit.

Oh, thanks for the reminder! I'll add that to the 'to do soon' list. Check back in a couple of days and maybe gently remind me if I still haven't done it.

I still need to get around to enabling registration, but enabling outbound port 587 for the registration emails causes the datacenter to grumble and complain. So that might take a bit longer. Well, at least we're not a spammer-friendly jurisdiction.

Ach, I build a lot of things. It's been a busy couple of years. I sort of had a lot of free time during Covid. It's a little embarrassing, I'm not specifically proud of anything, but here goes in the hopes you find some of it amusing.

I made a music box out of cut, etched, and painted brass inside a wooden box. It has a bit of custom clockwork, and I designed a sort of magnetic-friction drive so that the dancing figures on top are hot-swappable risk of damage to the mechanism. It plays traditional Vietnamese music (MP3), and the porcelain dancers have costumes from the different ethnic groups.

I've also designed and manufactured a sort of night-light for children that activates by turning it upside-down for a few seconds. The electronics are rated for 100 years, and a CR2032 coin cell can power it for 6 months of normal use. I got power consumption low enough that it does not need an off switch. I hate e-waste and thought maybe electronics could last long enough to be heirlooms, if we made different design choices. I also had autism in mind, where maybe it's comforting to have things that always work according to the same rules, never break, and will last from childhood into adult life (although maybe it is just comforting to me, when things work this way).

I also wrote an algorithm that plays (4,6) Mastermind that beat the record in the primary literature by 0.5% with a slight modification to the MaxParts strategy. So I might or might not have the world record on that one -- I never got around to publishing it except as a school assignment. Which oddly enough I received a rather poor grade on, which I thought was really funny.

Oh also I made a quantum hardware random number generator that lets you conveniently make various other electronics into a Schrödinger's Cat paradox. It takes one signal input, then presents one of two outputs to control the other electronics. This was part of an elaborate practical joke -- the nature of the device makes it impossible to accurately simulate, so it presents an unusual problem for whatever poor grad student gets tasked with running a simulated Universe.

I also made a device for recording tiny variations in the 50Hz (60Hz in North America) signal in main power lines. The original idea was to correlate the microsecond timing variations to space weather and use the power lines as a sort of radio telescope for space weather. It didn't work. I was able to track what was going on in the power plants though, like when they are turning on and off turbines.

Finally (and most recently), I wrote a Lemmy bot! If you message @kong_ming on my instance, an early prototype of my quantum random number generator will generate an I-Ching reading for you (the Book of Changes, sort of an ancient choose-your-own-misadventure fortune-telling book). It's literally a thing sitting on my desk in Vietnam held together mostly by my irrepressible optimism, so sometimes it takes a minute to get to your request or ah, takes a break from functioning correctly.

I guess there were a few robots and whatnot too. Those were pretty standard rover builds though. Not sure what I'll do next. There's a particle detector I've been meaning to get to. Also someone on Lemmy suggested a way to progress in my experiments making a CPU clocked by chicken bone (bone is piezoelectric) for Halloween.

Well, my first strategy has apparently been to sell all my belongings, immigrate to the developing world, lose every dime to my name.

A wiser person might have focused on doing a less harrowing (but still difficult) thing. If we can excel at something difficult, perhaps the world can forgive our mediocrity in other matters, and if it doesn't... well, at least we have something useful to focus on. For me, that thing is engineering.

I do own and operate a business. Owning the business means I get to invent my own job (which mostly amounts to 'mercenary science hermit'). I'm reasonably good at it, and have the correct legal paperwork to continue doing it, so it's hard to displace me -- I can just go find more customers. If that fails, maybe the problem is me :D

All that being said, I do use a variety of figurative cudgels on people who forcibly inconvenience me with their opinions (although almost entirely offline). Some of these tools are emotional, some are financial or legal, and many are technological in nature. I do this to defend my freedom to think freely about subjects that interest me, which sometimes people feel entitled to encroach on.

Mostly this pertains to 'people who don't want to pay me for work', or 'Asian superstitions', because I am nowhere near North America. The current political situation over there is puzzling and fascinating to me, although I am sad to see it causes so much harm. Maybe come visit Asia someday for a vacation from it?

Oh also I mostly avoid social media, especially for political stuff. I sign on primarily to answer questions travelers have about Vietnam, and help hobbyists choose components for electronic circuits (although Lemmy is not super active in these regards yet). I approach it as training to learn to be more patient with people, and in this sense it has been a rewarding activity.

Anyway, those are some of the habits I've cultivated to try and make peace with the modern world. Hopefully some are useful to you as well.

No, I stopped using YouTube overall.

The scams / weird aggressive marketing + politics / solutions that don't work for problems no one has... is part of it. The next part is it fails to suggest reasonable content. The last part is that video is a really, really slow way for me to absorb information. Text, please!

The are very rare exceptions. One is clickspring. Others are specific colleagues who engineer unique-in-the-world stuff (so... people like clickspring, I guess). If it's less good than that, I cannot bear to use YouTube, and refuse to post content there too.

Then again it would be really weird to show you videos of circuit diagrams and code. So it's not a great medium for the stuff I do anyway.

My mind automatically filters them out already. It's really weird. Sort of like banner-blindness.

Like, I know they're physically there, and I can see them if I stop and willfully look for them. Otherwise all I see are the words and the buttons though.

Hey weird. Me too. None of them know how to cut hair either. Are we neighbors?

Also a dozen empty hotels that have no vacancy.

OK, I'll give you that. I don't really use the whole feed thing often, and that didn't occur to me. It doesn't seem to be a problem so far, though.

If that changes, I'll write a Lemmy reader that strips out the democratic elements and just sorts by newest for me (if someone else doesn't do it first). Probably less work than managing an army of Lemmy bots. I wrote and manage just one -- a fortune teller that lives on my instance and does I-Ching readings.

Do other people use the feed a lot? I haven't really used social media prior to Lemmy. A lot of what people consider important comes off as a bit alien to me.

I don't see the point of voting on online content, and just ignore the feature entirely. My brain automatically edits out the voting buttons and results. I don't even see them!

Without offense intended... I didn't come here for your (or anyone's) approval. Other people's opinions have universally baffled me as a general rule (yours probably will too).

I came here to document my radical opinions about assembly language programming, post photos of stuff I build, occasionally help other people build stuff, and (of least concern) occasionally participate in conversation. I imagine very few people (other than myself) care about anything I have to say -- it's still a neat exercise to put it into words so I better define what I think.

So maybe people are downvoting you because they don't like you, or don't like what you write. Maybe they do it for no reason, or for fun. Maybe I don't like you, for an arbitrary or a good reason, or both. At some point I guess we just have to be comfortable with these things I guess and coexist here somehow. At least you can't pay money to a platform, to force me to read your opinions, I guess! That would be torture.

Anyway, no one actually needs to worry about me not liking them or username-stalking them. The depths of my indifference are fathomless, and eternal. To make me care about what you think is like bridging the void between the stars.

For some of us at least, the solution was just... to move on to another country. If there had been problems with guns and socioeconomic divide in Canada, I would have exited even earlier! (I actually left for the fairly boring reason of career progression)

Although spoiler alert: immigration is difficult, miserable, and a pretty massive commitment overall.

Usually some form of business plan that amounts to sanctions / regulatory avoidance presented with a straight face to a panel of VCs / investors / potential partners. Then the underlying structure is a Ponzi scheme.

My strategy so far has been to ask "how is your business plan different from just doing crimes?" with a voice loud enough that people outside the meeting room can overhear -- like in some cartoon where some character says all the quiet parts loudly and the loud parts quietly.

Hopefully with time, people will stop bringing this kind of crud to the table, or at least stop inviting me to the meetings.

I think most people expect me to say something about science or engineering.

In reality, I would be happiest if I was remembered for being a worthy partner to my wife.

Empires can only rise from chaos, and can only descend into chaos. This has been known since time immemorial.

That sounds... very familiar. I got through an alarming number of books in childhood through similar mechanisms.

I'm... more hostile about this one. If I'm going to do the lion's share of the work anyway, I'll often go the extra 10%, do it alone, and take full credit.

I've tried your strategy, only for the group to turn something practically publishable into a failing-grade undergraduate report. After that when I got a bad group, I just ask the prof if there's a penalty to go solo (often there is none!). If I estimate the penalty is less bad than my grade with the group, I'll just let them burn. If I get at least a mediocre group, then I try to make the group succeed.

This tactic has served me well in the workplace. If I'm part of an incompetent or lazy team, I move to a new team or do the work myself, and make sure they get no credit. I don't carry these teams forward, neither I nor the company benefits, and them I'm stuck carrying them again on the next job (a quick path to burnout). Pretty quickly I end up working with better colleagues and we can really get stuff done (after all, most people are OK).

Looking at the one in the top left... imagine if that was for an amplifier. Like, you have to pass through maximum to reach off. That would be the worst to live near.

Someone parked their motorbike in front of the door to my house (there are no yards in my country, your door is right up against the street), so I couldn't open the door or get in. The owner was nowhere to be found.

So of course they locked the steering, so you can't roll it out of the way. Being still on autopilot after driving through much traffic, I just sort of automatically tried to pick up the motorcycle and move it.

Surprisingly, I succeeded -- at least for a few seconds. After moving it only a meter or so, I lost my balance and fell over, with the motorbike landing on me. I earned some impressive bruises for my foolishness.

Thankfully though, this became the most interesting neighborhood gossip for some time, so the person responsible felt too ashamed to keep parking there.