Thrashy @ Thrashy @lemmy.world

Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything

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2 yr. ago

Point me towards systems that don't have a human in the loop, particularly any that utilize fully-autonomous swarms, and I'll agree. Scary as the former are, there's a world of difference between a handful of FPV suicide drones, and a cloud of HL2-Manhack-esque things operating on face-recogniton-guided autopilot.

I've low-key started to think the only reason we haven't seen autonomous hunter-killer drones yet is that nobody's willing to break the seal, and I'm scared for what happens when somebody finally does.

If there were quick and easy pathways for that to happen, my family and I would be gone already. Unfortunately, for most places you'd want to move to, the options are pretty much:

1. Go to college on a student visa (that window of opportunity closed for me about 15 years ago)
2. Marry a foreign national (just have to break the bad news to my wife first...)
3. Get posted abroad by your employer (about as likely as winning the lottery, even if you do work for a multinational firm)
4. Already be a dual citizen by descent (my wife can get this for, uh... Israel and the Philippines, but neither are great choices right now if you're trying to escape conservative authoritarians)
5. Be fucking loaded already and buy a golden visa.

Past that, you can either take your chances overstaying a tourist visa or waiting for things to get bad enough to claim refugee status.

Bird flu isn't what circulating generally right now. That's just the regular seasonal flu. Avian flu is a whole other can of worms in that it's running rampant among birds, it hasn't (yet) shown the ability to readily spread in air between mammalian hosts. The longer it hangs around, though, the more chances it gets to evolve that capability -- and in fact if the leaked CDC papers that made news recently are to be believed, some strain of on it might have done so.

Yeah. We can quibble over the moral dimension of public servants getting out vs staying in to try and stop the coming insanity, but any HUMINT asset on assignment outside of friendly first-world nations would be stupid not to take early retirement ASAP. Even if Trump doesn't burn them like he did to so many last time around, there's a drug-addled oligarch in debt to several foreign countries who's leading a squad of college-age numpties from department to department on a mission to extract all their confidential data and put it on unsecured servers for nebulous ends. Somebody's gonna leak or lose or sell their names, guaranteed.

I was the last of my immediate family on Facebook, and I only stuck around to keep in touch with a couple hobby groups. I decided to cut the cord once Zuck went mask-off, and honestly I haven't regretted it. The family group text is still chugging along fine, and most of the people I actually want to talk to are on other platforms at this point.

I don't blame anybody who feels like they have to keep Facebook to stay in touch with loved ones... but man, it feels good not to have that spammy time suck on my phone anymore.

I design labs, and my current employer serves primarily higher ed and government clients. This is gonna blow a massive hole in our bottom line, and fear that something like this was coming is why I'm starting to look for employers with an international footprint and/or more private sector clientele. Even if this freeze is only temporary, it's going to kick off a massive wave of brain drain from universities and federal labs to private industry and foreign institutions, and I don't blame the folks making those choices, but it's also gonna impact how much demand there is for my services.

Nobara is just Fedora with a heavy layer of gaming-focused polish applied. In that regard it's quite a bit more familiar than something like Arch, which makes a point of not holding anybody's hand, and (just in terms of ease of use and overall userbase) feels a lot closer to what Gentoo was like back when I last was in this space.

I was heavily in the camp of Debian-based distros back in the day, but Debian proper has never been a great choice for desktop, and Ubuntu's star is much faded of late, so I decided to give an RPM-based distro a chance before jumping way off into the deep end. I don't have the time to fiddle that I used to, and (at least until yesterday's hiccup) Nobara was much closer to "it just works" out of the box than anything like Arch would have been.

I'm an ex-sysadmin so I guess I get to be the middle head, but blundering my way through the current distro scene after not having touched a desktop Linux install in, oh... twenty years or so, I feel more like the right. I suppose on the one had I had the good sense not to jump right into Arch or Nix, but even more familiar territory like Nobara has its pitfalls. Just today I had to clean up a botched release upgrade because the primary maintainer had left conflicting packages in the repository for an extended period. Not laying blame per se, that's what you get when you sign on to a one-man effort, but it was a real pain in the butt to diagnose and correct.

Say it with me now: model collapse! I think this approach is especially insidious in that rather than dumping obvious nonsense into the training corpus that can then be scrubbed, it pushes the downstream LLM invisibly towards spontaneously imploding.

Only in the world of scrappy "low-cost" commercial endeavors, AFAIK. The appeal of FRC-style reactors has more to do with lower cost of construction than any inherent physical advantages. Tokamaks are still where most of the nationally- and internationally-funded research is happening.

I was personally rooting for stellarators, but whatever operational benefits they offer over tokamaks seems to be outweighed by the incredible design complexity that they add, and they've stayed small-scale research projects relative to tokamaks.

737s don't have RATs. According to some 737 pilots I've seen commenting, the APU is operable in flight, but doesn't kick in automatically and would have required ~60 seconds to start. The main electrical generators don't automatically restart after tripping, either, so a scenario where electric power is hypothetically available, but a panicked or overloaded flight crew don't take the steps to bring it online, is plausible.

Hydraulics and electric system are independent in commercial aircraft -- hydraulic pumps are directly driven from the engines, as are electrical generators. Redundancy is provided via independent loops/buses from each engine. A bird strike on its own is unlikely to be energetic enough to sever one of those independent systems, let alone all four. Losing both engines could do it, -- but again, they had enough thrust to attempt a go-around, so they weren't a glider immediately after the bird strike. The 737 is an old-school design, too, so most critical components have full manual reversion -- as long as you have airspeed and altitude enough to get to the runway, you can fly and land the plane just with cable controls and manual releases in the event of total electric and hydraulic failure.

I did a bit of reading from other sources and this particular aircraft predates the requirement for battery backup of the FDR and CVR, and the APU does not start up automatically on a power failure, so the failure chain for that part of the incident isn't as long as I initially thought. Still, lots of questions, and I think the simplest explanation so far is the aircrew panicking and making a survivable situation into a bloodbath.

Everything about this incident is just so fucking odd. That a bird strike could take out both engines isn't unheard of (see US Airways Flight 1549) but I've heard reports that there was a failed emergency landing attempt before the one that we saw video of, so they clearly had thrust enough to stay in the air for a go-around, and from the video we saw they carried in a ton more speed than I would expect if there had been catastrophic damage to both engines.

Except that the lack of landing gear suggests loss of hydraulic power from both engines... Except there is an emergency release that drops the gear on a 737 with just gravity, and there's no evidence this was even attempted.

Now it looks like some electrical systems, including power to the data recorders, died right at the start of the incident, which would require not just double engine failure but failure of the APU and backup battery systems. That just seems incredibly unlikely.

Catastrophic electrical failure several minutes before the crash, though, would suggest that it wasn't just a case of a panicked aircrew making a chain of bad decisions, which was my initial read of the situation and maybe the best fit for the rest of the circumstances.

I just can't think of a chain of events that could reasonably lead to all the failures in evidence while still allowing the aircraft to remain airworthy for two landing attempts.

And then you get to the horrifying fact that a relatively new and modern airport had a giant concrete obstacle in what would be considered the Runway Safety Area at a US facility... Like, what the fuck? That seems like it's designed to create this sort of a disaster.

I'd been planning for a new HVAC system for a while when that video came out, and it gave me the idea to cross-check the thermostat data with the Manual J calc I'd already done. They were in general agreement, though the Manual J block load was more conservative than empirical data for a design day.

In your case, since you don't have data from a healthy system on a representative heating design day, I'd suggest using a web tool like CoolCalc to simply calculate an approximate Manual J total heating and cooling load, and use that to guide your choices.

A little headroom ain't bad, but it had three times the required heating capacity for my area's "design day" low, which meant that for most of the winter it was kicking on for maybe 5-10 minutes per hour and then leaving massive cold spots in the house, because the thermostat was smack in the middle and all the walls were bleeding heat.

My new heat pump is just about 2x the design day heat requirement, but that also means it's got capacity to handle extreme lows without resorting to resistance heat, and in any case it's fully modulating so the house has stayed quite comfortable so far.

My old furnace was hilariously oversized for the house.

One of the nifty things about smart thermostats like Ecobees is that you can pull usage data from their web portal. I grabbed a CSV file covering a cold snap last year that reached a 100-year record low, and using Excel I summed up the total heat output while we were at that low.

The furnace was only running 50% of the time, even when it was with a couple degrees of as cold as it's ever been where I live.

Needless to say, when I got a new system installed I made sure it was more properly sized, and given that I had a convenient empirical measurement of exactly how many btus I actually needed in the worst case as scenario, that was easily done.

hard disagree. The residential building code isn't terribly hard to adhere to -- especially in new construction -- and nearly every bit of it is written with the health and safety of building occupants in mind. I'd much rather deal with a bit of bureaucratic oversight to be sure my house and/or my neighbor's house doesn't collapse in a stiff breeze, or blow up from a gas leak, or kill all its occupants in a fire, or turn into a heap of rot after the first heavy rain, etc., etc. You might have the skills and ethics required to do the job right without somebody looking over your shoulder, but not everybody does, and I'd venture at least half the big home building firms would cut every corner they could in the absence of code enforcement.

There's no reason you couldn't still do that, as long as you pull the necessary permits and your work can pass inspection. Most jurisdictions make specific exemptions in the contractor licensing rules for homeowners working on their own properties.

Just got my late, not-so-great furnace and AC replaced with a new cold-climate heatpump setup, and in the process moved the indoor equipment from a too-tight niche in the main floor of the house into the basement where it really should have been to start with. Now I need to frame up a wall where the furnace access panel used to be, properly tie in the return ductwork, and (eventually, need to relocate some other utilities first) add a linen cabinet in the vacated space. Next big stage in the huge-slow-moving basement Reno I'm in the middle of is to get the 60-year-old galvanized steel water supply line replaced, and then I can start inside plumbing work.