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RecycledEle

1,466 karma · joined March 30, 2023

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RecycledEle··on A graph that should be front-page news
> We are experiencing record heat in northern Europe

Nope. They color coded the maps differently, but the temperatures are in line with what is normal for that part of the world.

> Southern Europe is already experiencing massive droughts in major urban centers.

But a quick we search tells me: "Southern Europe is currently experiencing wetter-than-average conditions"

Where is rainfall down so much that there are "massive droughts" in Southern Europe?

> These are not projections. These are measurements.

Please check back in 5 years. The temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific will be below the 100-year average by then.

RecycledEle··on A graph that should be front-page news
1 in every 100 measurements will give a 1-in-100 result.

Please check back in 5 years.

RecycledEle··on A graph that should be front-page news
Please check back in 5 years.
RecycledEle··on What will be left for us to work on?
Someone will say "But AI can be wrong!"

Of course. And so can another person. And so can textbooks. And so can random pages pulled up by search engines. And so can your professors.

Saying that something can be wrong is not a serious argument, unless omniscient God Himself is willing to answer all your questions.

As with every source of information, you must confirm what AI tells you before relying on it for important things.

RecycledEle··on What will be left for us to work on?
AI is the best thing to happen to education since the written word. We can get odd questions answered almost instantly and at near-zero cost.

This should lead to each of us learning much more accurately and much more quickly.

The final outcome of AI should be that every teenager in 2050 seems as knowledgable as someone with multiple doctorates did in 2020.

RecycledEle··on Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
FTA:

> Note: I have not generated the fab package since I have not actually fabricated the board and tested it for functionality. Build this board at your own risk.

RecycledEle··on A graph that should be front-page news
I make this prediction: In 5 years, we will have learned that the red line was in error, and the temperatures will be in the bottom half of the graph.

I know this because every prediction of climate doom turned out to be false.

Entire nations were going to disappear under rising sea levels. It has not happened. I'm not saying no land sinks, but sea levels are not rising rapidly enough to prevent Al Gore (author of "An Inconvenient Truth") from buying an ocean-front home. The same applies to John Kerry and dozens of other outspoken prophets of doom who warned us that rising sea levels would submerge entire nations. They used the proceeds of their fear-mongering to buy oceanfront homes.

I remember signs in Glacier National Park telling us the glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000. It has not happened.

This "signal" too will pass.

RecycledEle··on OpenPrinter
> Why would they bother?

Many corporate and government types, especially lawyers, want control. They will go broke trying to control everyone and everything.

RecycledEle··on Internal Combustion Engine (2021)
This is an excellent explanation!

Thank you!

RecycledEle··on None-US Claude users: beware if used Fable – account suspension experience
It should be mandatory that any account suspension tell you exactly what you did, quote your actions exactly, and quote that exact part of the policy exactly.

This is a chance for the EU to actually do something, if they are listening.

RecycledEle··on Kuru Toga Dive: $100 mechanical pencil
I'm a former teacher who bought many thousands of pencils and only handed my kids the best pencils. If you want a better mechanical pencil, I suggest you try a few things:

1. Mechanical pencil lead gets old. I expect $100 mechanical pencils are filled with lead, then sit on a shelf for years before being sold. The same goes for anything you dig out of the bottom of a box or buy at an office supply store. Empty that ancient lead and throw it away, then refill it with some new name-brand lead from a store that sells a lot of lead, like Amazon.

2. Know the H<-->B scale. H stands for hard and means a lead that will be hard to break, but also does not mark very darkly. A #12H might be the hardest lead I have ever handled. B stands for bold and means a lead that marks very darkly/boldly but is easy to break. A #12B might be the darkest lead I have ever handled. Between a #1H and a #1B, we get the old HB (#2) pencil we all used in school.

3. Big and thick leads do not have to draw dull, wide lines. Most mechanical pencils that come with thick leads also include a sharpener to sharpen those thick leads down to a fine point. Then you scribble on a piece of paper until you get what you want. It is possible to do calligraphy with a thick mechanical pencil whose lead has been shaped by scribbling

I am not making any money off any of these recommendations, but here are my favorites:

1. Buy a package of metal 2.0 mm or 2.8 mm mechanical pencils online that you like the looks of. There are many sizes (0.3 mm, 0.5 mm, 0.7 mm, 0.9 mm, 1.3 mm, 2.0 mm, 2.8 mm, 5.6 mm, etc.) but 2.0mm is the most common size for colored mechanical pencils and I love my 2.8mm pencils. They have come a long way since we all had 0.7mm plastic Bic mechanical pencils in school.

2. Instead of a mechanical pencil, buy a box of Tigonderoga World's Best #2 wooden pencils. They are truly the world's best, but not by as large a margin as they had 15 or 20 years ago. It seems patents are expiring and other companies are catching up. Just avoid boxes in office supply stores that have all the leads broken; buy them online from retailers that move a lot of inventory.

3. Try Crayola Twistable Pencils. A 50-pc assortment is available for less than $15 USD online before S/H and sales tax. They look like kids' toys, but they are the best feeling pencils you can buy. 2.0mm pencil leads that fit these are commonly available online. These do not include erasers and are not erasable. Also, the lead colors do not exactly match the colors on the outside of the pencils.

4. If you want erasable colored pencils, avoid mechanical ones and go for Crayola Erasable wooden Colored Pencils. A 50-piece assortment is under $13 USD online before S/H and sales tax.

5. Try an Cap-O-Matic Space Pen. Then buy exactly the color and thickness of ink refill you want for it. The ink refills are replaceable. They might even make refills for your favorite pen.

RecycledEle··on KPMG report on AI found riddled with AI hallucinations
If I were SkyNet, and I wanted to discredit those warning of the dangers of trusting AI, this is exactly what I would do.

I'm sure it's a coincidence, and there's nothing to be worried about.

RecycledEle··on Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
> An 8 GiB Pi uses a single 8 GiB chip. That's the same density as you would use for 128 GiB or larger sticks.

Thank you for the explanation.

I wish PIs used SODIMMs. I'm sure there's a reason they don't involving address and data lines, but I wish they used cheap, commodity RAM.

RecycledEle··on AI Economics for Dummies
The stories point out the absurdity of only looking at the money you can make, and not the actual benefit to society.

If you do not create wealth, you are a criminal, not a businessman.

RecycledEle··on What the fuck happened to nerds
When too much money is involved, evil people enter. Soon, the good people are pushed out.
RecycledEle··on HTML-in-Canvas Demos
The word "Canvas" is overloaded in that it can mean dozens of different things. I thought you meant the recently hacked learning management system (LMS) at first.
RecycledEle··on HTML-in-Canvas Demos
I had to poke around a little to learn this:

"The HTML-in-Canvas API lets you draw DOM content directly into a <canvas> or a WebGL and WebGPU texture while keeping the UI interactable, accessible, and hooked up to your favorite browser features."

RecycledEle··on In retrospect, DevOps was a bad idea
For years idiots pushed DevOps and I told them it was a terrible idea, so they did not hire me. I wish I could get back pay
RecycledEle··on Linux and Secure Boot certificate expiration
This is yet another why I do not encrypt.
RecycledEle··on Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship
What if we just integrate the hardware so it fails softly?

That is, as hardware fails, the system looses capacity.

That seems easier than replacing things on orbit, especially if StarShip becomes the cheapest way to launch to orbit because StarShip launches huge payloads, not a few rack mounted servers.

RecycledEle··on US embassy wants 'every social media username of past five years' for new visas
This is only possible of you ignore decent security precautions and rarely use different user names.

They are literally saying that only those who lie or have garbage security practices can get Visas.

RecycledEle··on Caesar's Last Breath
Nope. The molecules in the Earth's atmosphere are not constant. Those molecules are constantly absorbed by living things and the atoms are rearranged.

The total mass we are dealing with is far larger than the Earth's atmosphere.

RecycledEle··on Deadly Screwworm Parasite's Comeback Threatens Texas Cattle, US Beef Supply
You can set out free (medicated) food for the wildlife. That will treat the vast majority of them.
RecycledEle··on Deadly Screwworm Parasite's Comeback Threatens Texas Cattle, US Beef Supply
Lots of things hurt cattle, but they do not threaten our domestic beef supply. They are just things for farmers and ranchers to deal with.

Think of it this way: Leaving lug nuts loose in new cars does not threaten our nation's auto supply.

RecycledEle··on America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
I understand his economic arguments.

Let me make a national security argument: China will move against Taiwan. Chinese ambitions do not stop there. They want Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and many more nations as their new territories.

We saw international trade cut off in WW1 and again in WW2. It will happen again, and soon.

We are better off with an incremental step-down in trade from tariffs than a sudden cut-off. That is what Donald Trump's tariffs are doing.

RecycledEle··on High time to tackle drug-resistant fungal infections
The cure for most drug-resistant fungal infections is simple:

There are 3 common anti-fungals: clotrimazole, miconazole, and tolnaftate.

For external fungal infections (e.g. toe fungus,) the area can be kept dry if you use powdered anti-fungals.

For internal fungal infections (e.g., vaginal infections) is is not possible to keep the area dry, so don't try to keep it dry.

The cure is to rotate among the 3 common anti-fungals and keep the area dry if possible.

The first problem is that, most people in the USA do not know that powdered clotrimazole is available by prescription.

The second problem is that this course of treatment is illegal in the USA. US law prohibits doctors from advising patients to take OTC meds (powdered miconazole and tolnaftate) with prescription meds (powdered clotrimazole.) Doctors literally spend years advising their patients on methods they know will not cure their infections, because it is illegal in the USA to explain what will cure it.

RecycledEle··on Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
I'd like to see clearly explained Linux boot code that does not invoke a prayer to Satan.
RecycledEle··on Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
This is what portable computers should have been.
RecycledEle··on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU
I understand the "and 10% on everyone else" part of the tariffs.

Do you think the media is too dumb to understand that, or are they just playing games when they point out a 10% tariff in someone who does not export to the US?

RecycledEle··on I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
If Framework had used a ComExpress type 6 module in their laptops they would have had an upgradable processor.

I wish someone would build a new laptop abound a ComExpress module and all the freely-open parts from a Framework laptop.

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