barsoap

@barsoap@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games is officially cool with the Internet Archive preserving early Unreal games⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm it also got pulled from gog.

  UT2004 Onslaught is still the best game mode ever btw. Haven’t played in a long while but like ten years ago there were still a good number of servers around. Not enough players for the big maps, though, those need like 20 people per team.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve must address swastikas and other hate on Steam, writes US senator in a letter to Gabe Newell⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a steam account. I write like half a review and maybe a handful of comments a year, talking mechanics. The amount of people who don’t even lurk because they are there to play games has to be absolutely overwhelming.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  OMG yes I said “blast furnace to reduce steel”. I meant “to reduce iron [to produce steel]”. Obviously: What else would you use hydrogen for in a blast furnace?

  But “reduce steel” is still actually correct for recycling steel: Scrap has rust on it so it also needs to be reduced. Which you would’ve realised instead of trying to turn this into a silly gotcha if you knew what you were talking about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  What makes iron is the lack of O in Fe~3~O~4~ (that’s magnetite, other ores are similar). Carbon for alloying is not an issue it can be easily covered by biomass, you smelt the magnetite by combining it with hydrogen resulting in iron and (very hot) water, no carbon involved, then you add carbon, something like 2% thereabouts, to get steel. Add too much and you get cast iron. The overwhelming majority of coke used in the coke process is not used for alloying, but smelting and reducing the iron. That part of the steel making process is completely decarbonised, and the carbon that’s used in alloying, well, it’s not in the atmosphere is it.

  You can rip the oxygen off iron with electricity but that’s less energy-efficient than taking a detour via electrolysis. It’s different with aluminium, there using electricity directly is more efficient.

  Sad to day I now understand your point of view. Natural gas wins.

  If you think that’s what I’m saying then no, you don’t understand my POV.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In essence, yes. And we need the hydrogen/ammonia/methane/methanol/whatever anyway to do chemistry with, so we’ll have to produce them in some renewable way anyway, and at scale. Using them in peaker plants is only a fraction of the total use.

  Even with fusion up and running we’re going to do hydrolysis. You can run a car on electricity, or domestic heating, also aluminium smelting, but not a blast furnace to reduce steel nor a chemical industry. Hydrogen, in one form or another, is the answer to all of those things. As things currently stand the market is in its infancy but the first pipelines are getting dedicated to hydrogen, the first blast furnaces made for operation with hydrogen are up and running… and the hydrogen mostly comes from fossil gas. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem you need demand to have supply but you need supply to have demand, so kick-starting the demand side by supplying it fossil hydrogen makes a lot of economical sense, that means that the supply investments can go big and be sure that they’ll have customers from day one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  When’s that going to happen? Right after the green hydrogen revolution?

  Already happening, on a small (but industrial) scale. You can buy that stuff off the shelf, but it’s still on the lower end of the sigmoid. Most new installations right now will be going to Canada and Namibia, we’ll be buying massive amounts of ammonia from both.

  Sorry, I didn’t think someone would deny the existance of dunkelflautes. It’s currently happening in Germany.

  Yes and elsewhere in Europe the wind is blowing. Differences in solar yields are seasonal (that’s what those three months storage are for, according to Fraunhofer’s initial plans), but reversed on the other side of the globe, and Germany would be better situated to tank differences in local wind production all by itself if e.g. Bavaria didn’t hinder wind projects in their state. The total energy the sun infuses into the earth does change a bit over time, but that’s negligible. In principle pretty much zero storage is needed as long as there’s good enough interconnectivity.

  …meanwhile, we’ll probably have the first commercial fusion plant in just about the mean construction time of a fission plant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Wouldn’t it be better to go fossil free. Given, you know, climate change.

  Gas can be synthesised and we’re going to have to do that anyway for chemical feedstock. Maintaining backup gas plant capacity is cheaper than you think, they don’t need much maintenance if they’re not actually running.

  That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.

  Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?

  It’s not technology it’s physics. It is impossible for there to be no wind anywhere, at least as long as the sun doesn’t explode and the earth continues to rotate and an atmosphere exists. If any of those ever fail electricity production will be the least of our worries.

  Technology comes into play when it comes to shovelling electricity from one end of the continent to the other and yes we need more interconnects and beefier interconnects but it’s not like we don’t know how to do that, or don’t already have a Europe-wide electricity grid. The issues are somewhere in between NIMBYism regarding pylons and “but we don’t want to pay for burying the cable earthworks are expensive”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The watthours is what gas is for. Germany’s pipeline network alone, that’s not including actual gas storage sites, can store three months of total energy usage.

  …or at least that’s the original plan, devised some 20 years ago, Fraunhofer worked it all out back then. It might be the case that banks of sodium batteries or whatnot are cheaper, but yeah lithium is probably not going to be it. Lithium’s strength is energy density, both per volume and by weight, and neither is of concern for grid storage.

  Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.

  That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IPhones' default photo format is HEIC, something that Windows doesn't open by default.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  3d not being required makes a hell a lot of sense and of course it wasn’t people have been drafting on paper for ages. They might’ve ended up on Mac or maybe Amiga, but an SGI workstation is quite an investment when you don’t even need to spin polygons. IRIS GL dates back to the early 80s, doesn’t seem so much to be a timeline but price and need thing.

  There apparently was an IRIX version at one time but with no user base preference, more likely they were thinking “where’s my C: drive” so once 3d acceleration hit the mainstream everyone happily switched back to Microsoft.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IPhones' default photo format is HEIC, something that Windows doesn't open by default.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean back in the days they should have been running on IRIX, and SGI switched over to Linux when they made the switch to x86 CPUs. Plenty of movie studios switched over to Linux workstations because of that, porting from IRIX to Linux is trivial compared to porting to Windows, why didn’t the same happen with CAD?

  Wintel-PCs for the longest time just weren’t suitable for 3d work, they were office machines.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IPhones' default photo format is HEIC, something that Windows doesn't open by default.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  AutoCAD

  It’s always funny with 3d. Graphics? You need Houdini? Of course it runs on Linux, it’s a UNIX-native program after all, first version ran on IRIX because what else would you use for 3d work but a SGI workstation and Linux is the commercial successor to IRIX. Blender, the same, just 5k bucks cheaper (and not yet everything is nodes, not yet). CAD? Everything’s suddenly windows-only because… how the hell did that came to be? Were they running 1990’s CAD software on Excel machines?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IPhones' default photo format is HEIC, something that Windows doesn't open by default.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  OpenEXR. Though it probably could use a spec upgrade, in particular add JPEG-XL to the list of compression algorithms. It’s not like OpenEXR’s choices are bad, the lossy ones are just more geared towards fidelity than space savings.

  Bonus: Supports multi-channel, so not just RGBA. Not terribly useful for your run off the mill camera, very useful in production where you might want to attach the depth buffer, cryptomatte etc and I guess you could also use it for the output of light field cameras. Oh there’s also multi-view so you can store not just stereo images but also whole all-around captures and stuff. There’s practically nothing pixel-related you can’t do with it though it might require custom tooling.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pocketpair reveals specific patents featured in Nintendo's lawsuit against Palworld⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason.

  In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.

  Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.

  If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘It gets more and more confused’: can AI replace translators?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  DeepL has always used machine learning, and they already switched to LLMs for some language pairs – not rebranded ChatGPT, but their own stuff. They’re also quite open about the model not being perfect, they’re advertising with things like “blind tests show our results sound more natural than the competition”, “our model output needs fewer edits than the competition”, etc.

  And yeah they definitely didn’t edit this one much from the English original. English sentence structure and American idiomatics all over the place, it’s tedious to read. Quite, but not entirely, as bad as this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Air fryers are simpler than you think, but still pretty neat [19:38]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Set a temperature, have an exhaust, the temperature inside will be within a wibble of your set-point because the air stream will completely dominate over any other source of temperature raise/drop. You’re way overcomplicating things. Forego subtlety, consider the air as a sledgehammer: If this was a closed system having feedback control would be a good idea but air frying is supposed to use fresh outside air so that the hot air is really dry and the intake air being a couple degrees hotter or colder won’t make a difference in practice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Air fryers are simpler than you think, but still pretty neat [19:38]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm. Diluting the air will be the hardest thing: A run off the mill heat gun will do 600C at 2000W in a concentrated stream, if you regulate it down to air frying temperature you’ll get very little total power so you’ll want to cool it down by pulling in additional ambient air instead. But with that out of the way… add a metal box and a timer? The heat gun already regulates the temperature.

  …and all that made me wonder and apparently there’s no culinary heat guns which would be a smart choice because they’d pay attention for all materials to be food-safe. But there are hobbyists reporting great results using standard heat guns instead of the usual torch. Not, to be honest, that you’d expect standard lighter gas to be food-grade, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Air fryers are simpler than you think, but still pretty neat [19:38]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not entirely against calling it frying, in both cases you have heat transfer by immersion in a dry liquid as contact medium, as opposed to heating with infrared radiation (e.g. toaster, many kinds of spits), direct contact with no or little contact medium (hot pan with no/minimum oil, waffle iron), using water (which is wet) as contact medium which invariably makes things soggy instead of crispy and thus very different, or directly moving the atoms in the food (microwave).

  That is: If you have a look at all the different ways to transfer heat into things then frying and baking are actually darn close to each other in the first place, compared to the rest. And air frying in particular brigs baking into the frying range of crispiness so I’d say fair is fair, you can fry with air as long as you make you air mean enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Orders Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to Halt All AI Chip Shipments to China⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The vast majority of sales are made to US based firms so they likely have a lot of sway.

  The sway is TSMC uses ASML EUV lithography machines and the US holds patents on those because they did foundational research regarding EUV lithography. Also, the EU hasn’t put China on the “it is illegal for EU companies to kowtow to US sanctions” list. Ironically ASML could sell to Cuba and Iran. If the EU were to tell ASML to sell to China the US would be free to not buy ASML machines any more and, doing that, kill off Intel’s fabs.

  None of this stuff has military relevance, you don’t need or even want to use small nodes (which require EUV) in military applications you want hardened chips instead. Run off the mill consumer chips go all frizzy if an EMP looks at them sideways. This is about the US protecting US fabs, foremost Intel. Not the chip design part but the manufacturing one.

  Europe hasn’t played the high-end end-consumer chip market for ages and I doubt we’ll do it any time soon. Having ASML, Zeiss etc. means that whoever actually produces that stuff wants to be friendly with us and strategically, both military and economy, our own production facilities are perfectly sufficient. Hence also why ESMC will only go as small as 12nm, it’s the most cost-effective node size and performance is perfectly adequate for a missile, a CNC mill, or a car infotainment system. Or the gyroscope chip in your phone (it’s almost certainly a Bosch), EUV doesn’t make a lick of sense when you’re doing MEMS. Where we have to catch up is chip design lets see how that RISC-V supercomputer chip turns out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Domination⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, sure, that’s a domination relation but it doesn’t really get at the core of domination, either, but tells us where dominance fits in the larger context. The core idea is much easier: f : A -> X dominates g : B -> X if there is an h : B -> A such that g = f . h. That is, if there’s a way to turn potato mash into food, and one to turn sliced potatoes into food (say, a hot pan with some oil) then frying mash dominates because there’s a way to turn potato slices into mash, but none to turn mash into slices. It can also be the case that two functions dominate each other, e.g. when you look at cooking tea with a teabag, and without a teabag: As bagged tea can be unbagged, and unbagged tea bagged, both dominate, in fact, they’re equivalent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Know Nut November⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mostly they’re dried, including pod, the rest is genetics.

  They are botanically nuts, though: They are indehiscent, meaning they do not open to release their seeds. They’re also fruit. It’s e.g. pine nuts which aren’t nuts.

  I guess making a distinction, in the culinary context, between nuts and peanuts makes sense because allergy considerations, legumes are a class of their own there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tiger Predators⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Tigers are territorial and solitary but quite social, they don’t usually get into fights when they meet, that only happens when they have an actual territorial conflict because there’s too many tigers on too little land. They’re perfectly fine with others visiting their prowling grounds, they might even hunt together, just don’t overstay your welcome. Actually not that terribly different from how humans treat their houses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Know thy enemy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Everything that comes out of a petrochemical plant can be made without oil, in fact BASF had recipes in place for decades now and is switching sources as the price shifts. Push come to shove they can produce everything from starch. It’s also why they hardly blinked when Russia turned off the gas.

  The carbon that actually ends up in steel is a quite negligible amount (usually under 1%, over 2% you get cast iron), you can get that out of the local forest, and to reduce the iron hydrogen works perfectly, the first furnances are already online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Know thy enemy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That implies that we can make electricity everywhere, which is technically true but not really the case because there’s countries with more and with less free space, with more suitable places and less suitable places to put renewables.

  Those ammonia tankers will happen. At that point btw we’re not just talking about electricity, but also chemical feedstock.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨your mom falls significantly faster than g⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Quick intuition boost for the non-believers: How do things look like if you’re standing on the surface of the bowling ball? Are feather and earth falling towards you at the same speed, or is there a difference?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨your mom falls significantly faster than g⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As to “what’s falling faster” my point is still that everything’s falling at the same speed, because the only non-arbitrary reference point to measure things from is the centre of gravity of the whole system, earth, feather, ball, all of them together.

  Well it may still be arbitrary, but at least it’s not geocentric or feathercentric or ballcentric. All three can be unhappy with the choice which means it’s fair.

  Flip that reference point to the earth though and yes the ball is approaching ever so slightly faster than the feather (side note: is our earth spherical or are we at least making it an oblong?). Flip it to the ball and the feather is falling a lot slower towards it than the earth is. Which is probably how I should have started explaining this: The mass difference between feather and earth with respect to the ball is so massive that it actually makes quite a difference while between feather and ball wrt. earth it’s negligible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨your mom falls significantly faster than g⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I understand and agree with red’s math, and I said no such thing as you put into quotation marks there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨your mom falls significantly faster than g⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Clarity of presentation is never a trivial matter. You can be right all you like if you don’t get it across then it will be for nought but inflating your own ego.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨your mom falls significantly faster than g⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You said it was movement, aka change in position over time, not acceleration, or you would have said “x will accelerate at”, not “earth will move at”. I already explained why it’s questionable as a term of acceleration.

  And this could’ve been over after a single comment of you saying “oh, yeah, misspoke”. Your math checks out, that’s not the issue here, it’s your presentation that went all haywire.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨your mom falls significantly faster than g⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not what you wrote, and not what I complained about. You wrote:

  BUT earth will move with gM/m1

  where it was previously established that m1 and M are masses, and I interpreted g to be G (Newton’s gravitational constant) instead of g as in “gravitational acceleration caused by earth” because… well, I’m not actually sure. The whole thing is already a mess of capitalisation but more importantly then it’d be acceleration, not movement, worse, the specific properties of the earth are included twice (once in g, then in one of the mass terms).

  the fact that i wasted my time on low iq person like you

  Maybe you should spend less time on insulting people and more on communicating your thoughts clearly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨your mom falls significantly faster than g⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  you idiot i was talking about accelwration,

  Then why did you say “move” instead of “accelerate”. And the units don’t match acceleration, either. Best I can tell it’s some fraction of a term. If you want it to be an acceleration then you’re missing a squared distance, and if you want it to be acceleration, why are both mass terms in there.

  For someone who throws around things like “that’s non-technical brainrot” damn is your prose fuzzy.