grue
@grue@lemmy.world
- Comment on How do stunt people fall down stairs without hurting themselves? 6 days ago:
- Comment on Banning from social media 2 weeks ago:
👉 👉 banning social media from being owned by any single entity
- Comment on load bearing worm 2 weeks ago:
A Story About ‘Magic’, from ESR’s “Jargon File”
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab’s PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab’s hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don’t touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic’ and ‘more magic’. The switch was in the ‘more magic’ position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it’s a basic fact of electricity that a switch can’t do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone’s idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn’t affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don’t know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we’ll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I’m silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.
1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn’t necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.
- Comment on Aaaaaaaaaa 2 weeks ago:
Biochar is cool and all, but it’s still not as good as preserving the wood completely intact. The article you cited itself says “it is predicted that at least 50% of the carbon in any piece of waste turned into biochar becomes stable,” which is quite a bit less than 100%.
I suppose it’s good for the twigs and other leftovers that aren’t even good enough to be made into OSB or MDF panels.
- Comment on And toxic in large amounts! 2 weeks ago:
They’re the same picture.
- Comment on Aaaaaaaaaa 2 weeks ago:
You gotta sequester the carbon by harvesting the trees and then either building stuff with them or burying/sinking them in anaerobic conditions so they can’t decompose.
- Comment on Kitty 2 weeks ago:
Wake up babe, new pre-Columbian contact theory just dropped.
- Comment on The Trump Administration Is Coming After Birth Control Access in a Terrifying New Way 2 weeks ago:
Yet [contraception] doesn’t come up in the section spelling out the department’s top Title X spending priorities. What does? Addressing “exposure to harmful chemical and environmental toxins,”…
Meanwhile, they’re systematically dismantling the EPA in order to supercharge “exposure to harmful chemical and environmental toxins,” so you know exactly how (in)sincere thy are about this shit.
- Comment on Batteries 3 weeks ago:
It’s a dark pattern to steal your data.
- Comment on Batteries 3 weeks ago:
“Sorry for the convenience” – Mitch Hedberg
- Comment on Astronauts are funny 3 weeks ago:
I’m gonna need a link to that '80s sitcom intro video.
- Comment on Behold: A vibe-designed pcb 3 weeks ago:
Do you have to have them do the assembly too for that service to kick in? I’ve ordered bare PCBs a couple of times and wasn’t aware of it.
- Comment on Behold: A vibe-designed pcb 3 weeks ago:
Too thin as in “not suitable for the amount of current,” or too thin as in “exceeding the capability of the manufacturing process you chose?” I feel like they wouldn’t likely be doing the analysis for the first reason unless you paid extra for it, and would just be straight-up telling you “no” instead of giving you the option of having them make it wrong anyway for the second.
- Comment on People assume I can't speak Welsh because I'm not white 3 weeks ago:
I feel like this attitude is bigoted in more than one way:
- it’s anti-POC for obvious reasons
- it’s anti-Welsh because it implicitly assumes nobody who isn’t ethnically Welsh would have a reason to learn the language (because it’s dying or whatever).
- Comment on Anon runs into his boss 3 weeks ago:
And I suppose no one sober would choose to start drinking on the side of the road in a car.
And guess what: having an open container of alcohol in a car is it’s own separate crime, just to make sure all those bases are covered.
- Comment on The person who mounted a spice rack into the fucking studs so a fridge won't fit there 3 weeks ago:
If the battery for your impact driver (not drill, BTW) isn’t shared with a bunch of other tools from the same brand, you’re doing it wrong.
- Comment on Lmao 3 weeks ago:
Using what?
(Remember the premise of this subthread is that they’re doing this instead of rockets.)
- Comment on Tragedy takes many forms 4 weeks ago:
WHERE’S MY DAMN SAUERKRAUT TO GO WITH MY HOT DOG, COSTCO?!
- Comment on Real 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, but it’s still just a single pixel of light from the star. It just changes color slightly when the planet passes in front of it and the atmosphere gases absorb certain characteristic wavelengths.
- Comment on "Any update is a bonus not a right": Peak co-developer Landfall reminds impatient fans it's not a live-service studio 5 weeks ago:
I agree, assuming the game was released reasonably “complete” and with a minimum of bugs the first time. Or in other words, if the devs were held to the same standard as they were back in the '90s, when games got mastered to physical media once and routine, easy bug fix updates weren’t a thing.
- Comment on Why are there different region codes for discs? (DVD & Blu Ray) 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on Anon dips 5 weeks ago:
Got a link? I found one AJC article with a recipe for the tuna salad, which uses the ranch dressing as an ingredient, but it doesn’t include a recipe for the dressing itself.
- Comment on Anon dips 5 weeks ago:
Nothing wrong with thick, if it’s got good flavor. I wish I had gotten Po’ Folks (a southern food restaurant chain local to me) ranch dressing recipe before it went out of business during the pandemic. It actually had identifiable chunks of minced carrot etc. suspended in it.
I miss it so much, along with a few other things from that place, that I’m almost motivated to try to track down somebody who used to work there and remembers.
- Comment on Turbine go brrrr 5 weeks ago:
Best I can do is a convex lens.
- Comment on California father arrested after repainting crosswalk, adding stop signs near children’s park 5 weeks ago:
That’s typically one of the warrants. In addition to vehicle, bicycle, and pedestrian volumes, other warrants include things like vehicle approach speed, sight distance, and crash statistics.
- Comment on California father arrested after repainting crosswalk, adding stop signs near children’s park 5 weeks ago:
The city ultimately determined the intersection did not meet the required traffic volume for additional stop signs
For the record, this is 100% a lie. Every single warrant document (list of criteria) used by an engineer will have two magic words written at the bottom of the list:
“Engineering judgement.”
That means there is no such thing as a “required traffic volume” for a stop sign or any other kind of signal or marking. If the engineer, in his professional judgement, agrees that one is warranted, it’s warranted.
Engineers who hide behind things like warrants, pretending their hands are tied by them, are cowards and aren’t doing their jobs properly.
- Comment on It works better if you put it in your mouth first. 1 month ago:
What grid? It looks like the “power box” on the wall is generating power for that house all by itself, no transmission necessary.
Considering that the smallest operating nuclear reactor ever made was this big…
…and that critical mass is a thing, I can only assume the “power box” was some kind of RTG.
- Comment on It works better if you put it in your mouth first. 1 month ago:
I was pro-nuclear until Georgia Power stuck me with the bill for Plant Vogtle 3 and 4.
(Or rather, I was pro-nuclear until shortly after construction began on a 7-year plan that ultimately took 15 years, when it started to become clear that gross incompetence and corruption was going to make it an expensive debacle.)
Nuclear power from Vogtle 3 and 4 costs 16¢ per kWh (according to the linked document), by the way, compared to less than 0.1¢ per kWh expected by OP’s comic.
- Comment on Chelyabinsk liked your Post 1 month ago:
Motherfucker my globe doesn’t even have South Sudan on it and you expect me to have up-to-date males of the moon?!
- Comment on In the context of celebrities announcing a new thing they're releasing, what does "soft launch" vs "hard launch" mean exactly? 🤔 1 month ago:
Soft launch is when you make it available to the public for a while before advertising it.
