nous
@nous@programming.dev
- Comment on Why are so many new programming languages being developed? 1 week ago:
Rusts big advantage is that its memory safe
Most languages are memory safe. It’s only really C, C++ and zig that are not (at least for more mainstream languages). Rust is special as it is memory safe without a garbage collector. Which is big for domains where the overhead of a GC is unacceptable.
- Comment on What is negative voltage? 2 weeks ago:
Nothing to do with the electrical grid. It is just that the positive lead of the output of the power supply is whatever voltage you select above the negative lead on the output side of the power supply. Those are the two relative points in this situation. You can call the negative lead ground if you want. Wiring diagrams for the device you connect it to will likely call it ground. It is not the same thing as the grounding wire in a plug socket.
Note that the grounding wires in a home have nothing to do with any live circuit in your house. They are to make faults in the system safer by giving a path for electrons to flow if a conductive casing ever gets into contact with a live wire. In normal operation nothing should be flowing through it at all. With doubly insulated devices (like that power supply) the grounding wire in the plug socket is probably not connected to anything at all in the device. The plug likely does not even have a grounding wire in it.
- Comment on What is negative voltage? 2 weeks ago:
I amusingly imagine a force “sucking” the current backwards. 🤭
If you think of a positive voltage as pushing then it is not anymore inaccurate to think of a negative voltage as pulling. At least if you think in terms of DC, which is what power supplies will typically give you.
Voltage is all relative. The sign just shows the direction of flow. If you plug a volt meter in backwards it will show a negative voltage. That means the current will flow from the negative to the positive terminals.
If you have three terminals, let’s say A, B, and C. If you measure 12V between A and B. Then 24V between A and C. Then you will also be able to measure 12V between B and C. Or -12v between B and A. Or -24 between C and A. The direction matters.
You could label any of these as ground it makes no real difference to the system. Only how you talk about it. Without a ground label then you would not say C is at 24V as it has nothing to compare to. If you pick A as ground then it is said to be 24V, but if you pick B as ground then it is said to be 12V. If you pick C as ground then it is 0V. So when we say a point is at a voltage then that is implied that it is that voltage relative some other point we decided was ground.
Things get a lot more complicated with AC as electrons move back and forth in the wire they don’t have the same direction as they do in DC.
- Comment on Am I just bad at games??? 5 weeks ago:
The time to beat a game is generally for the main story if you don’t take ages doing other things. Quite often with side quests or other non essential steps like collecting things or trying to 100% a game it will take way longer then the estimated time to complete. This is epically true for more open-world type of games with lots of places to explore.
- Comment on Why is America so surprised when they elected Trump? They bitched and moans how all politicians are liars, cheats, money hungry and so on. So now they got exactly that and they are surprised? 2 months ago:
- Comment on Is evolution only affected by mortality and birth rate? 2 months ago:
Death is not the only driver. Reproduction is by far more important. Death only affects evolution because it prevents reproduction. With modern medicine then sexual selection becomes a bigger driver.
And even then evolution will always happen as mutations will always happen. Even if it is mostly just random drift in features.
We see many aspects of this over and over. Birds on island tend to lose their ability to fly. Larger animals on islands tend to shrink over time. Even isolated humans in extreme places (like high up on a mountain or that do a lot of deep sea diving) show adaptations to their environment. Once isolated even small pressures on your ability to reproduce will affect the population over time. It just might take a lot longer.
- Comment on Boots stores ban for boy after £100,000 shoplifting sprees 2 months ago:
And a £400 fine.
I believe that is what corporations call a tax on doing legitimate business. Never stopped them from doing illegal things. But they do like to complain when others do it to them.
- Comment on Hot Take: most modern games are designed to purely kill time 3 months ago:
I mean all entertainment is really there to kill time. Thats really the main point of having fun. I would say things are worse then that. They (at least tripple-A games) are designed to extract as much cash as they can and get you addicted.
- Comment on What is this red Arch Linux logo? 4 months ago:
Think it is an old blackarch logo - an arch based pentesting distro.
- Comment on Steam :: About the New York Attorney General lawsuit against Valve 4 months ago:
Valve needs to win this. Or at least stop this part:
The NYAG also proposed to gather additional information (beyond what we normally collect in the course of processing payments) about each game user on the off-chance someone in New York was anonymizing their location to appear outside of New York, such as by using a VPN. This would have involved implementing invasive technologies for every user worldwide. Similarly, the NYAG demanded that Valve collect more personal data about our users to do additional age verification—even though most payment methods used by New York Steam users already have age verification built-in. Valve knows our users care about the security of their personal information, and we believe it’s in our and their interest to only collect the information necessary to operate the business and comply with law.
Loot boxes are overall bad for users and should be regulated. But not by getting valve to collect personal information on everyone in the world.
- Comment on UK launches consultation asking for views on under-16s social media ban 4 months ago:
In an open letter to the prime minister, Labour MPs said “successive governments” had done “too little to protect young people from… unregulated, addictive social media platforms”.
They are focusing on the wrong thing. The problem is not young people access it, it the unregulated and addictive parts. Those affect everyone not just the young. Regulate the addictive behaviours of these platforms and protect everyone. Don’t just force ages ineffective age verification that harms the privacy of everyone.
- Comment on Axe for Linton bus service that costs £98 per passenger to run 5 months ago:
It’s both. If busses are cheap and reliable more people will use them. If more people use them they are cheaper to run. Which creates a positive feedback loop to a point.
You can make busses cheaper for people by other means though - like council/government substitutes or running at a loss for a bit. You need to do something to get more people, you cannot just force people to take the bus before doing anything else.
- Comment on In the US we have Breast Cancer Awarnes month and a bunch of others. All we do is throw money at a problem and hope it goes away How come the Gov don't take care of people from starving? 8 months ago:
The US government does not like welfare programs because it gives money to the poor. They would rather give tax reliefs to the rich instead.
There is loads of evidence that welfare programs can save more money then they cost. But that does not funnel money to those in charge.
- Comment on Hollow Knight Sequel 'Silksong' Crashed Game Stores, as $20 Price Irks Competitors 10 months ago:
What are you talking about? Capitalists love the free market. It lets them do any underhanded tactic they want to crush competition and form monopolies. Capitalists have always been the ones pushing for a free market. The ‘free’ is free from regulations. That is not something good for consumers.
- Comment on Increase in vapes found on Britain’s coastline by beach clean volunteers 11 months ago:
Disposable/single use vapes have been illegal to sell in the UK since the first of June this year. This is the kind that the article is talking about litter everywhere as people just throw them away when done rather then refilling them. Vapes themselves are still legal to sell. It has only been a couple of months though so likely will still see people using them for a bit but I would hope to see their use start to tail off quite quickly now as you should no longer be able to buy them.
- Comment on Can magnet damage hard disk? 11 months ago:
Yes magnets can affect HDDs. But it needs to be very strong and close to the HDD. I wouldn’t worry unless you are directly attaching it to you HDD and even then it probably won’t do much if anything at all.
Remember HDDs already have strong permanent magnets inside them. Probably way stronger then the one on the bottom of that support.
- Comment on If you had 1 dollar and 24 hours what would you do? 11 months ago:
a everyday joe would do
Go to work, work, go home. Wait for the end of the week/month for their next paycheck.
Most people already have more then a dollar and more then 24 hours to earn money. If schemes like that really worked then why would so many people do anything else?
- Comment on What's a video game that can run on any sort of device?(besides doom and pong) 1 year ago:
Don’t think any game has the same support doom has. Doom has become a benchmark of sorts so gets ported to the strangest of places. Not normally places you would bother to port any game. It is done for the challenge of the port rather than any practical reason.
There are tonnes of games that could run in the same places as doom, many could run in far more places. But doom is complex enough to be an interesting challenge while being simple enough to run on very limited hardware. And has been open sourced while being a classic icon which makes it attractive to be a benchmark for getting to run in the weirdest of places.
- Comment on 3D Printing Patterns Might Make Ghost Guns More Traceable Than We Thought | 404 Media 1 year ago:
Also worth pointing out:
There are other issues too. All of Law and Blair’s tests were done with one kind of 3D printer—a Prusa MK4S. There’s hundreds of different devices on the market that all behave differently. Law also pointed out that brass nozzles warp over time themselves and may produce different results after hundreds of prints and that different nozzles made from different materials may work very differently. Law would also want an examiner rate study—a formal scientific inquiry into false positives and examiner bias.
- Comment on Why covering our shoulders with a mantle or blanket is so efficient at warming us? 1 year ago:
Cannot remember if the study was stupid or if peoples interpretations of it where. But when covered up else where you will lose a lot of heat through your head. More so then if just an arm or just a leg was exposed as with your arms and legs your body will slow down blood flow through them to try and converse your core temperature - it cannot do that with your head.
- Comment on The signatures are still coming and it's already making an impact 1 year ago:
once a developer enacts an end of life plan, their legal culpability is removed What legal culpability? If you are not hosting anything then you wont be liable for anything. It is not like if you create a painting and someone defaces it with something that you become liable for that… That would be insane.
- Comment on Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry 1 year ago:
But why won’t anyone think of the AI shareholders…
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
But there are more numbers between 0 and 1 then there are whole numbers. So are the countable many angles or uncountably many?
- Comment on When will all the folks complaining about loss of Snap and health insurance realize the GOP wants us to die and has ZERO empathy for fellow Americans? 1 year ago:
‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. - Adrian Bott
- Comment on Would you rather have a pet dinosaur or a pet dragon? 1 year ago:
Lizards are not dinosaurs.
- Comment on How Will We Know If The Trump Tariffs Were A Good Idea? 1 year ago:
I never argued that. Only pointing out its decent into fascism. All bets are off at that point as to what will happen to its industries.
- Comment on How Will We Know If The Trump Tariffs Were A Good Idea? 1 year ago:
They were a beneficial strategy. They made Trump and his buddies massive amounts of money from manipulating the stock market. They were even bragging about it after the fact.
Oh, you meant for the country and its people… Nah, that was never the point. If they were thought out at all it was only how it benefits Trump and his buddies.
- Comment on How Will We Know If The Trump Tariffs Were A Good Idea? 1 year ago:
Trump is supposed to be in office for only 4 years, at best,
That assumes America is still a democracy in 4 years. We are only a few months in and it is already not looking great.
- Comment on Coffeezilla does a third part of his CS:GO gambling expose...where he squarely puts the blame on Valve 1 year ago:
Or on the stock market or gambling which this is basically a mix of.
- Comment on Wanna play a game? (please don't call osha) 1 year ago:
That beaker does not look half full to me. Many like 1/3rd full, or at least somewhere between that and half full.
