Shurimal @ Shurimal @kbin.social

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Right. Now, please, an Expanse space sim where I can pilot the ships and engage in battles. Because that was the best part of the show.

Peter Watts: We're already deep in some bleak dystopian hellhole which isn't even imperialist. We tried to bring salvation via transhumanism and utilitarianism, but that shit backfired like nothing else ever has. All humans died and vampires (that humans created because why the hell not?) took over.

Oh, there are some alien eldritch horrors lurking in the fringes of the solar system. They present a threat even for the vamps.

Pellegrino & Zebrowski: The story, taking place in some deep dystopian hellhole trying to bring salvation, begins with alien eldritch horrors wiping out 99.99% of humans with r-bombs.

And then it gets worse.

1. Seasonic PSU-s.
2. Locally roasted coffee that hasn't sat in some dusty warehouse and on shop shelf for 3 years.
3. Sun Tzu's Art of War.

I've had good luck of finding very good concert recordings—many are recordings from the mixing desk tape outs as 24/94 .FLAC-s with excellent sound quality—from Internet Archive. The search system is tedious, though, and you probably won't find "big acts" there. But if your tastes include modern jazz, folk and indie rock, it can be a treasure trove.

The problem with this is, once you're doing everything you possibly can on your individual level, you quickly see that so many others won't bother to lift a finger, or even work actively to undo all the progress. This is extremely demotivating.

I don't drive, I don't fly, I don't buy fast fashion (or barely any clothes at all), I live in a small apartment, I changed all lighting to LED-s years ago, I don't eat meat, I'm starting to smarten up my home with automation to squeeze out a little bit more energy savings.

And it doesn't help jack shit since it is impossible to get even 50% of people in the developed nations to live like that and even if we could, one multinational megacorporation still manages to do more damage than an average European country.

Sure, we could start petitions—these will be simply ignored. We could come to streets in protest—just to be beaten up by class traitors and new legislation coming in criminalizing protests and throwing anyone who dares into jail for 10+ years. Nothing will change for the world.

From this point on, the only way anyone could change anything would be to actually blow shit up—not once, but all the time, everywhere, until no polluting industry is left. That's clearly not possible to do in the era of mass surveillance.

My feet are certainly not a feet long. More like 25 cm or so. But as another commenter already said, I can measure 175 cm using my arm's reach easily, matchboxes are standardised as 5 cm long, the width of my palm is about 8 cm, distance from my fingertips to my elbow is around 50 cm and the distance from ground to approx. my navel is 1 meter.

Plenty of ways to get an approximate metric measurements without a ruler or measuring tape.

And it's much easier to convert from cm or mm to m (or vice versa) than to convert between ft and inch or ft and 1/8 of an inch or whatever weird measuring standards the US-ians use.

Our hearing has no hard limit in low frequencies--sensitivity falls off at the extreme, but it doesn't mean you can't hear sounds below 20Hz. That 20 Hz limit is often quoted simply because the tests that were done in the past didn't measure lower. In reality, most people can hear 15 Hz and lower, just the threshold of hearing goes up. That's ignoring tactile effects of these frequencies, which adds a whole new dimension of sensing ULF.

Many movies have a crapton of LFE below 20Hz (for example Blackhawk Down has a scene with single-digit ULF effects), though you generally get it only on blu-ray or DVD releases, streaming services tend to have a neutered sound mix. Today's subwoofer tech has advanced to a point that even commercially available subwoofers can do 20 Hz and lower; bespoke sealed cab systems with 8 or more 18" or 21" drivers and a dozen kW of amplification can do single digits at 120+ dB in-room. Head over to avsforum.com for discussion and home cinema system show-offs :)

Why would anyone put these frequencies on a record? Well, sound designers and mixers tend to have very good sound systems, both at work and at home, and are generally very passionate about their work. Same thing as guitarists are very picky about their instruments and pedals, while the average concertgoer or radio listener couldn't make out any difference between a 500€ and a 10000€ guitar, never mind different pickups and overdrive pedals.

The JP movie (and book, too) took a lot of artistic license. Which is understandable; if the T. rex was depicted as having realistic senses, it would have been a quite short movie with a grizzly ending. And realistic velociraptors wouldn't have been as intimidating—they's been small and quite dumb.

What I really wish is that they'd done the vocalisations of T. rex more realistic—the high pitched screaming was not right. Imagine if the first sign of the rex wasn't ripples in the water glass but the barely perceptible sub-20 Hz vocalisations from the distance that grow loud and nauseating as it gets close. Granted, not many sound systems could reproduce it—mine can and it's glorious.

It's amazing how much you can infer from the shape and size of the various features of a bone.

For eyesight, simple physics: bigger is better. That's why we build huge telescopes, they collect more light and have better angular resolution than small ones, and the same goes for eyes. In addition, birds in general have very good eyesight and dinos are very closely related to birds. For T. rex, they also have narrow snouts allowing for excellent binocular vision.

Smell is similar—big nasal cavities allow for big olfactory organs, meaning a lot of receptors that can bind with airborne molecules.

Don't try to convince me that a 12 meters long, 8 tons heavy cassowary with mouth full of 20 cm long teeth and eyes that have better visual acuity than hawks or eagles, being able to see you from 6 km away, while also having excellent sense of smell, is not scary.

Fluffy or not, I wouldn't want to be closer than about 10 km to a hungry Tyrannosaurus.

Hasn't this been the case always? One excavator operator can dig a hole for house foundation way faster than 10 guys with shovels; one truck driver can deliver more cargo than a caravan of horse-drawn carriages; one electronic computer can solve math problems way faster than a room full of humans doing paper-and-pencil calculations; e-mails are faster and can carry way more data than telegraph. AI is just the next step on this path. AI is not the problem, our neoliberal capitalist economic system that seeks unlimited growth of profit is.

Having faced the same situation, here's my 2 cents:

• OMV is the best solution for reusing/upcycling old consumer grade PC hardware. Your storage pool is easily expandable using MergerFS, you don't need 16+ GB of RAM, and you certainly don't need server-grade hardware. But you won't have the bells and whistles the ZFS offers (yes, there is ZFS plugin, but at this point, why not just use TrueNAS?).
• TrueNAS if you intend to build a "serious" storage server with many GB-s of ECC RAM, multi-Gbit networking and all that jazz. And if you have the budget to buy 5 or 6 large HDD-s at once to start out your storage pool with a single vdev using RAIDz1 or RAIDz2 (or buy 2 HDDs for a single mirrored vdev with a whopping 50% of all your current and future storage going to redundancy). As I understand it, ZFS expandability is in the works, but not production-ready yet—which makes ZFS less suitable for ad hoc grow-it-as-you-go storage solution.

In the end, OMV won it out for me, the 10TB motley crew of various HDD-s has served me well and I can expand cheaply when my needs grow.

Best mouse prank I've heard of was from the time mice had balls, used PS/2 connection and drivers had to be installed manually. While the prankee was out for lunch, the prankster:

• Uninstalled the drivers
• Unplugged the mouse cable
• Jammed the ball so it couldn't roll
• Put a post-it note under the mouse

The prankee comes back from lunch, moves the mouse to wake up the computer. Nothing.

Looks under the mouse, removes the post-it, curses whoever did this. Nothing.

Checks the cable, curses louder, replugs. Nothing.

Wakes up the PC with keyboard, goes to device manager, sees that mouse does not show up, swears like a sailor, reinstalls drivers, restarts. Nothing.

Does a close inspection of the mouse, removes the ball and sees the paper that jammed it, all while cursing the prankster to hell and worse. Finally gets the mouse working.

Next day while the same prankee is out for lunch, the prankster does nothing more elaborate than puts a post-it note under the mouse, so that the edge of the neon yellow paper is just visible...

Plastic recycling was megacorps gaslighting consumers (hate that word) and pushing the blame to us from the very beginning. They don't want to fix the issue.

PNG compresses like nothing else when it comes to graphs, text, UI elements, digital drawings, comics, screenshots from apps etc. And doesn't suffer from "mosquito" artifacts and other .jpg nonsense. It was never meant to be used for photographs and other statistically "noisy" images for which .jpg works much better.

I have an older version of Office (and more importantly, Access) at work which doesn't want to hear anything about .webp. When I need to make a document containing product pictures for a customer, .webp is a huge annoyance and time waste. Luckily the Firefox extension that bans .webp and forces .png or .jpg saves the day.

Transcoding and serving images as .webp as default is fine for saving BW and all that jazz, but when I click "Save image as" I should automagically end up on my disk with the original image format whatever that might be. But since that doesn't seem to be a thing, I'll happily find a way to force the server to serve the original all the time since for me BW is not a problem, but I don't want to waste time converting every image before I can actually use it.

Something-something die as a hero or become the villain.

More like pulling this crap that would have people protesting in the streets in peacetime at wartime when people have bigger things to worry about.

I have a NAS working 24/7 either way to store large data (photos, Skyrim mods etc) and backups. Might as well use it for Jellyfin, Navidrome and qBittorrent, too, instead of idling 90% of time🙃

Apollo 18. It just has the atmosphere, sense of isolaton and impending doom.

Also Life which is thematically similar, but higher production value.

And in the same vein, Europa Report, though it has critic score of 80. One of the best hard sci-fi films ever.

Almost forgot Pandorum—that one was decent, too.

As was Prometheus (I know biologists and geologists IRL, studied biology myself—the films depiction of these folks is spot on!).