cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does sunlight through UV-blocking windows warm you less than unfiltered sunlight?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s false. You can literally not only feel heat from, but you can in fact set things on fire with, a completely monochromatic green laser with a wavelength exactly in the middle of the visible spectrum. No infrared, no ultraviolet. Lots of heat transfer. You could do it with an ultraviolet laser too if you were careful enough and could get around ultraviolet’s tendency to destroy molecular bonds completely before they even have a chance to burn chemically. Any light contains a large amount of energy and that’s still true whether it’s infrared, ultraviolet, or somewhere in between.

  Infrared has a special relationship with heat, yes, because of the distribution of blackbody radiation, but “No” is absolutely the wrong answer here. The right answer is “Yes, but… it’s complicated”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would there be any merit in the idea of NATO waging a "benevolent war" (for lack of a better term) against Ukraine?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Tell that to Bosnia. NATO can do whatever it sees fit. It’s an organization that operates entirely by consensus. If they have consensus, they can do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to install my own OS on a "smart" TV? Is that a thing?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh absolutely. Smart TVs are completely under the control of the technology and media companies with very little hope for freeing them, except that you can still plug a computer into them to bypass all the “smart” features and just use it as a dumb screen with a smart computer instead. But they always seem to put a few new stumbling blocks in the way of both those options every year. That loophole will eventually get closed, it won’t happen overnight, but they will keep eroding the functionalities and convenience of doing so until few if anyone wants to do that anymore.

  Cars are nearly a lost cause too, except where regulations say they must use some standard like OBD2 for “emissions reasons”, although that is obviously a limited scope and manufacturers try to find any ways they can to sabotage it or otherwise avoid it. Appliances and “smart homes”, all the way down to the light bulbs and LEDs, have plenty of proprietary, locked down, unrepairable technology in them too despite reliable open standards being available. The war for total control over our digital devices is in full swing and there’s no area of our lives from large to small that isn’t a battleground. People need to keep prioritizing the freedom of their devices because once they get these technologies and features entrenched it’s going to be very hard to work around them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to install my own OS on a "smart" TV? Is that a thing?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, they did it with phones too. Android is just Linux. That was one of the main attractions, for me at least.

  At first, many people and groups supplied their own phone OSes. There was a whole thriving community ecosystem. Then they started to make it really hard, locking bootloaders and including critical pieces of hardware that didn’t or couldn’t have open source drivers (look up WinModems for a very early example of this technique, it remains really effective) or otherwise required extremely convoluted methods to access and the phone might function marginally without some of these fully functional, but at least you could still install a custom ROM on it if you were stubborn enough.

  But even that wouldn’t last. Nowadays they’ve made it literally impossible to defeat the security on most phones, in the name of keeping hackers and criminals out, but really a big part of their motivation is blocking these pirate OSes that let you actually control the hardware and software in your phone, doing criminally nefarious things like stopping them from downloading ads (the horror!) and preventing them from funneling all your data and activities back to Big Brother (how rude!) and worst of all updating it with modern functionality after they’ve declared it “obsolete”. The goal going forward is to sell you things that you don’t and can’t control, so they can shut them down or make them gradually more and more useless and make you buy new ones forever. They want you to have a subscription for everything including physical objects without realizing that you’ve been forced to subscribe to their regularly-scheduled-disposable-device-replacement-plan for no actual reason.

  They’re coming for computers too, or at least they’ll try. They want control of everything we interact with. For profit, mostly, but I wouldn’t rule out other motives. It’s a powerful thing when you have control of everything people see and do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I got a stainless steel one on Amazon, it’s relatively thick steel, I have no idea how you’d be able to break it with only your hands and feet. I agree the plastic ones are shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why I Haven't Seen Any Trump Supporters In Fediverse (Lemmy and Mastodon)?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the hard-right people have mostly self-exiled to their own echo chambers like truth.social and other places that are Donald-used-and-approved. I think he’s also active on Twitter again now that Musk has destroyed all content moderation on the platform. They follow their great leader and unless and until he starts posting his demagoguery on Lemmy they have no interest and no reason to come here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the secret to making LED light bulbs last as long as the package says?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most cheap non-dimmable LEDs have drivers that use resistors to determine the current to drive through the LEDs. As a rule, these are always set too high to overdrive the LEDs for marginal brightness gains and to burn out the bulb prematurely. I’m obviously unable to actually see directly into the operation of the great minds that design LED lightbulbs but logic leaves me with only those two plausible conclusions, I’ll let you decide which motivation you think is a bigger factor for most manufacturers.

  Conveniently, most manufacturers carefully fine-tune this value to prematurely destroy the LEDs at just the right time, which requires careful balancing of resistors, and even MORE conveniently (for us) the cheapest way for them to do this is typically to use two resistors. And MOST conveniently (for us), if you were to carelessly break one of the pair of resistors they use, and leave the other one intact, the current would immediately drop to a very reasonable and appropriate level, generating much less heat, drawing much less power, making LED death extremely unlikely, and only modestly reducing brightness in many cases, because LEDs have non-linear brightness and the heavily overdriven ones are typically FAR beyond the point of diminishing returns. In some cases the reduction in power results in basically no visible difference in light output. In some cases it can be argued they’re literally stealing extra power from your electricity bill and using it for no purpose other than to burn out your own light bulbs prematurely so you have to replace them.

  The good news is, like I said, removing one of the responsible resistors is usually quite easy even without any special tools or electronics knowledge. BigCliveDotCom calls this “Doobying” the bulbs after the Dubai bulbs that were mentioned in other comments. If you watch some of his videos about LED bulbs you should be able to see the pattern of which resistors to remove, if they are on the board they will basically always be right next to each other and relatively small values (typically in the 20 ohms to 200 ohms range). The only modification I make to his procedure is that I prefer to remove the HIGHER value of the two resistors instead of the lower one, which results in less power savings, but more brightness, and is usually adequate for my purposes. I also use sturdy tweezers to remove the resistor instead of a screwdriver which seems to me that it would have a higher risk of collateral damage.

  Is it a lot of work for a single light bulb? Kind of, yes. But once you get it done a bunch of times, you’ll probably rarely have to do it again, as these bulbs last almost forever. In fact, I have yet to have one actually fail, I am mostly just replacing the occasional old unmodified LED bulb from time to time.

  This will not work with dimmable bulbs or certain fancy high end bulbs. Also some are much, much easier to modify than others. Clive calls the ones that are relatively easy “hackable” and it’s really a crapshoot to find them. Some have covers/bulbs/diffusers that are nearly impossible to remove without catastrophic damage to the bulb and/or your hands. Others simply use a different circuit design that doesn’t have resistors. Some only have a single resistor, meaning to change the value you need to solder a new one in its place. In my experience, the bargain-basement, junkiest, least reliable bulbs tend to be the easiest to hack this way and often skimp on things like “gluing the lens on” so it’s easy to get off. But you’ll have to experiment to find a brand and style that works well for this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So it’s not really FOSS at all, it’s just a loss-leader to draw you into the network, trap your data, and then enshittify and monetize as per standard practice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AiTracker.art: A Torrent Tracker For AI Models⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I tried to download one and it accused me of being a bot and looped me through a capcha twice in a row and I gave up. *shrug* Otherwise seems like a good idea. Good luck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is the current temperature sometimes lower than today's low temperature? For example right now it 13F with a predicated low today of 16F!⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  a) Forecasts are very resource-intensive, they are performed on a specific schedule using a computational forecast model. Updating the predictions would require inputting new data and running the model again, and by the time they do that, the next forecast will already be out. b) Do they know it’s wrong? Where did you get the temperature? From an official weather station? If not, there is no reason to imagine that someone is noticing that this one particular model run was wrong in one particular spot across the whole country and trying to fix it in real time. c) If you did get the current temperature from an official weather station, that IS your update for it. Real time data from official weather stations is always going to trump the forecast model. What would be the point of updating the forecast when the current measured data from the weather station is now available? That’s like driving down the highway and saying “I was predicting my speed would be close to 65mph, but due to the heavy traffic I’m seeing today, I’m going to re-estimate my speed to be 45mph” when you have a perfectly accurate speedometer right in front of you telling you exactly what speed you are going at all times. Forecasts are only useful for the future, and they can be wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where have all the websites gone?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is. The web was eventually corporatized and the corporations sucked all the air out of the room suffocating anything too small to compete. The fediverse is, if not taking it back, at least opening a space for those who don’t want to consume from a fully corporatized web. These include many of the people who used to make “websites” instead of “apps” or “platforms”. When people complain that it doesn’t have as much content as say, Reddit, I look at that as a benefit, it’s helping solve the (massive) discovery problem by self-curating thoughtful people who can curate content intelligently and provide real opinions and meaningful thoughts. The signal to noise ratio is much higher, and it’s refreshing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A 2 way micro USB connector. Never thought they existed⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Magsafe is a really great idea, it’s just a shame Apple came up with it first and I can’t wait for it to be the universal standard for all types of external connectors forevermore. It’s as close as we can get to wireless without being wireless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Military Time vs 24hr?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s veeeeery not standard in Canada. I use it on my phone and most people who see it on the lockscreen treat me like I’m an alien, and it’s about a 50/50 mix of people who simply think 24 hour time is weird (but at least recognize it) vs. people who seem genuinely baffled by the digits they see appearing on my phone and don’t even seem to recognize it as a time at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why a ton, and not a megagram?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  No good reason, just historical inertia and resistance to change. People stick to what they’re familiar with, either the imperial system or to common metric units. Making a “metric ton” similar in size to an “imperial ton” arguably helped make it easier for some people to transition to metric.

  Megagram is a perfectly cromulent unit, just like “cromulent” is a perfectly cromulent word, but people still don’t use it very often. That’s just how language works. People use the words they prefer, and those words become common. Maybe if you start describing things in megagrams other people will also start doing it and it will become a common part of the language. Language is organic like that, there isn’t anyone making decisions on its behalf, although some people and organizations try.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are batteries in phones always measured in mAh instead of Wh like for example notebooks?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think they know about metric prefixes, Pip.

  Imagine if the marketing people discovered that they could advertise that it has 19 million uWh (in Doctor Evil voice). Don’t say it too loudly though, someone at Apple might hear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Totalitarianism. What are the good things about it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If you can prove beyond any reasonable doubt that someone is ignorant of facts, and then sure you can call it obvious and good. But when nobody can agree what is reasonable, why is your perspective of good the one everyone must follow? It’s not always obvious. Don’t pretend it is. And things that are reasonable and obvious to you aren’t necessarily reasonable and obvious to others. You aren’t willing to embrace the diversity of human experience and opinion, so you won’t get the benefits of that diversity. Just because someone else has a different idea doesn’t make it wrong. If you think literally every idea that isn’t exactly the same as yours is wrong, then we’re wasting our time here anyway.

  So again, why is your path the one we’re picking? Even if I do agree with it, I am not willing to agree to it blindly, I want to know why we’re supposed to follow your advice/instructions/demands. At gunpoint or otherwise. And that’s why I’ll never follow a totalitarian, because totalitarians never have to explain themselves, and generally won’t. I hope you brought enough bullets if that’s your plan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Twitter/X really going to shut down anytime soon?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Musk is the richest man on Earth, give or take a few billion here or there. He can keep it running as long as he wants. It’s nothing but a toy to him. The problem will start when he finally gets bored of it, because he has already broken it to the point that nobody else will want it. He has killed it, it’s just not dead yet as long as he keeps swinging it around and paying its bills. But one day he’ll stop doing that, maybe once he finds a new, shinier toy. We just don’t know when.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's good in small concentrations, but lethal in higher? What's a glaring red flag you're encroaching on a lethal concentration?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Does the change in gravity gradient across your body kill you right now? No? You are currently orbiting the supermassive black hole in the center of the milky way.

  It was implied by “accretion disc” and by the fact that we’re talking about gravitational gradients at all that we’re talking about a close orbit. Gravitational strength gets smaller with distance according to the inverse square law, so by the time you’re a few light years out from the galactic core the gravitational gradient is already extremely insignificant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's good in small concentrations, but lethal in higher? What's a glaring red flag you're encroaching on a lethal concentration?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  brb replacing all my bodily fluids with LSD, will let you know how it goes

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's good in small concentrations, but lethal in higher? What's a glaring red flag you're encroaching on a lethal concentration?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d argue against that. For one thing it is impossible to imagine a situation where there is no change in the gravitational gradient across your body over time. Your orbiting a black hole situation is a perfect example of a situation where the gradient alone would tear you apart. The conditions you’ve specified are tautological. There’s no way to maintain a zero gravitational gradient while also simultaneously having extremely high gravitational field. The two are mutually exclusive in any conceivable scenario.

  It’s like saying a human being in a hypersonic wind stream won’t necessarily hurt you, burn you alive and rip you to pieces (not necessarily in that order) as long as there is no turbulence and you have a sufficient boundary layer – but you’re a non-aerodynamic human body in a hypersonic wind stream, so of course there will be turbulence and the boundary layer will not protect you at all, you’re going to die, basically instantly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Managers Exist (It's Not Why You Think) - Second Thought⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  But does it make you want to buy shaving supplies? Oh. How about that, me neither!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Dumb answers are just the first step in iterating your way to the right answer, if you could see all the dumb answers that go through my head you wouldn’t feel so bad. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It does not need to go to earth. Take a 1.5v alkaline battery, connect one end of the battery to the other end – a large amount of current flows, no earth involved. The electric charge that a neuron can produce is basically like tiny cells of a biochemical battery. The problem is unlike a useful battery, the voltage difference between all the individual cells is not (and realistically cannot be) carefully organized in a series or parallel path from positive to negative, instead all the positive and negative connections are jumbled together into a complex network, meaning there’s no way of getting billions of volts out of it. It’s just not wired that way.

  Theoretically if you carefully constructed a series of hundreds of billions of neurons connected end-to-end-to-end in the right pattern you might end up with billions of volts (although end-to-end it would probably be the size of the solar system, so the billions of volts potential wouldn’t seem so impressive anymore on an astronomical scale) and you probably can’t pack it your neural-battery into a small space without the neuron’s insulator (myelin sheath) from breaking down and shorting out that voltage. Also it wouldn’t really be a brain anymore at that point. The complex maze of connections are what makes the thinking happen. If you make them all single-connected you’ve basically just got a really big, low capacity and relatively inefficient battery compared to better chemistries.

  Flowing all that current at once will certainly create a lot of heat though, you’re right about that. That heat is normally heatsinked by the intracranial fluids and conducted away by the relatively rapid bloodflow through around the brain to be dissipated in the skin and lungs. The brain is basically liquid-cooled and it’s a very efficient and tightly regulated system that rarely has issues. Such a high neutral output would probably overwhelm even the relatively robust cooling that bloodflow provides, though, leading to a condition called brain hyperthermia, which is part of the reason drugs like methamphetamine can be dangerous or fatal, as it can result in cell death, and in this case, probably brain death and overall death.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are ways Renters (of a house) can get into alternative energy?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is you have no safe way to connect them without building a totally separate electrical system, since they have to be separated from your grid connection. Let me suggest an alternative “alternative energy”: LiFePo battery packs/banks are available in a wide variety of sizes, they require no outdoor connections and don’t have to be interconnected with each other as they can operate independently and standalone. What you can do is charge them from the grid at low-power-usage times (typically overnight, when the wind farms are spinning, dams are flowing, and nuclear is nuclearing with nobody to use it). Then unplug them during the day and run stuff in your house off battery power, potentially all day long if they’re big enough. Technically this is only energy storage, not energy production, but it’s an important part of the alternative energy landscape, as energy is very hard to store and renewables like wind and solar depend on the grid’s ability to do so, which you will be helping it to do.

  They are sometimes sold as battery “generators” for RV/camping as the modestly sized ones can fill a portable role similar to small gasoline generators. Many of them include charging ports for solar too, so you can add solar modules on as well if you want to go that direction, to further increase runtime during the day and provide backup power if you ever need it. They get big and expensive really quickly though, so you can either get lots of small independent ones or a few big ones, but either way you’re going to be spending many thousands of dollars.

  If we ever end up replacing the supermajority of our power generation with solar, we would need the extra storage at night instead of during the day, but that’s likely a long way off and requires a LOT of other load shifting like EVs charging overnight, electric heating at night, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's a good torque wrench to get?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  As usual, Project Farm to the rescue