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fsckboy

8,216 karma · joined November 7, 2019

work-work balance is paramount
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fsckboy··on Pirating the Pirates
what's the title/author or some other identifying info?
fsckboy··on We’re forgetting what darkness feels like
there are tons of places in the US where it's dark enough you can see the milky way shining brilliantly, just not in the heavily populated areas. Washington, Oregon, Idaho Montana, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Maine, Vermont. even more places in Canada, Alaska, Norway...
fsckboy··on U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve Falls to Lowest Level Since 1982
>It looks like it started to plummet in April 2022, which was on Biden's watch. It apparently was in response to supply chain shocks spiking oil prices due to the start of the war in Ukraine.

it wasn't simply supply chain shocks, it was supply chain shocks in a time of rampant inflation caused by the endless stimulus checks and programs after Covid.

Supply chain shocks cause "legitimate" price increases, it's not "too many dollars chasing too few goods", rather the value of each dollar simply doesn't stretch as far any more, and while trying to hold the line on prices is a fool's errand, trying to make that case to the public in a time of rampant inflation is not going to succeed either

fsckboy··on U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve Falls to Lowest Level Since 1982
i don't think extracting water from gasoline would be difficult at all, but probably plenty of other contaminants possible.
fsckboy··on Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees
>Apple doesn't see individual transactions when Apple Pay is used at retail stores' tap-to-pay terminals.

when I added my credit card to ApplePay, transactions made with the bare card would show up on my phone even though the phone was not involved: you're saying my phone has access to that transaction and Apple does not?

fsckboy··on Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees
if apple wallet works on android and I have a choice, that's competititon

if apple wallet requires apple phone, and google wallet require android phone, that not competition.

competition is good. no competition should be regulated out of existence.

fsckboy··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
>MAXC (maximum access computer), which was a complete emulation of the Tenex machines.

Compuserve also had a software dependency on the PDP-10 and Decsystem 20, and when those machines were no longer available they bought a company making clones so they could continue to manufacture them for themselves. The company they bought, Microsolutions, was Mark Cuban's first startup.

making clones of mainframes (IBM's) had been a big area of intellectual property litigation, but also facing monopolization investigations, IBM had to allow them. They were referred to as "plug compatibles".

fsckboy··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
>Then their ancient Honeywell(?) mainframes...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-600_series from the 36-bit era which turned out to be a sweet-spot for Lisp; also "famous" for running Multics (old joke flipped: "which was many of whatever unix is one of")

GE sold it's division to Honeywell, and from there to Group Bull (French) and then to NEC (Japan)

fsckboy··on The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy
my argument pointed out a flaw in the previous argument which was pointing out a perceived flaw in the previous argument: where did you get lost?
fsckboy··on The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy
that doesn't mean the early signs aren't here that that commitment is headed for the ash heap.
fsckboy··on Allow babywearing carriers on planes
>Worst comes to worst

I only ever heard/said this. Seeing it in print, I suddenly realize it must be "worse comes to worst"

there is a use for the other phrase (but nobody uses it this way), should the worst (thing) come to the worst (people), then... just desserts?

fsckboy··on Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliteration
fsckboy··on Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy
the Mediterranean has dried up several times in history and it will dry up again, as the African continent collides with Europe. Currently, water flows in at Gibraltar with a very strong current to try to keep up with evaporation, making the Mediterranean saltier and saltier (than the Atlantic) over time. When the strait closes because Africa and Spain push together, the Meditteranean will very quickly dry up.
fsckboy··on The mystery animal on an ancient god's head
if you right click and open the images in new tabs you'll be able to see them because the unfortunate blue background will be gone. in B4 "i don't see that in reader mode"

the Set animal has a snout that is more bird/reptile-like. the ears are a cipher.

fsckboy··on Montreal adopts bylaw banning insults against police, municipal employees
>and the US Supreme Court struck it down as a clear 1st Amendment violation

you do realize that Montreal, Canada is not in the 51st state, correct?

fsckboy··on Aging may be a program, not a breakdown
most of human evolutionary history was hunter gatherer and survival was subsistence level, and your arguments don't work.

birthing was necessary at least to maintain population, but preferably to expand it. it's only now that we consider "too many" a possibility, and we didn't evolve for this moment.

our history does not show potentially perpetually compounding gains that our children would evolutionarily need a genetic defense against, we already had looting, stealing, and killing.

I think the answer, if there is a programmed obsolesence, is because the genetic admixing of the next generation through sexual reproduction is so useful and important.

fsckboy··on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices
performance soooo degraded a child died?

when people talk about how healthcare needs to be better and better and more and more, I say "tell me under your plan what diseases/injuries to what extant will not be treated: who do you say "no" to? Every country could spend every collective nickel they have, and some people still would not live to see the next morning, but in a way that's ok because there probably wouldn't be any breakfast either, that money was spent on healthcare.

What exactly are you calling for? I thought millenial and genz home ownership was the problem we need to fix. Are we going to sacrifice hipster housing for healthcare? Since most healthcare today is probably needed by boomers, think carefully about your answer.

fsckboy··on English: A vs. An
thanks for the confession, you are simply guilty of ignorance. I on the other hand am guilty of thinking the English and the French both sound pretentious about pretty much everything: they are both always judging people.

here you go, some straight facts:

https://www.dailywritingtips.com/a-historic-vs-an-historic/

including "The Google Ngram Viewer provides an interesting look at the progress of “an historic” vs “a historic.” In 1800, “a historic” barely shows. It begins its rise in the 1820s. In 1869, “a historic” is neck and neck with “an historic.” The two travel along fairly close together until the First World War when “an historic” pulls ahead and dominates until 1938. After that, “a historic” becomes the clear winner, although “an historic” and “an historical” remain in use. Here are two recent examples of the use of “an historical” in the context of educated English..."

fsckboy··on English: A vs. An
"an apron" used to be "a napron"
fsckboy··on English: A vs. An
but not, apparently, the haitch
fsckboy··on Warren Buffett Steps Down as Berkshire Chairman, Names Son to Replace Him
>there's nothing wrong with leaving things to your kids to run.

where that's true or not, that's not what happened. this is more like "there's nothing wrong with trying to help your son in his career and getting him a job."

Berkshire Hathaway's market cap is a trillion, and Warren Buffet's net worth has never been close to that, i.e. it's not his company so he's not leaving it to his son to run.

You might admire Warren Buffet's acumen and think he'd be good at picking people, but all (for varying values of all) parents believe in their children so it's not easy to tell if you'd be getting his best advice in this case if you were another major shareholder in Berkshire.

fsckboy··on T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97 Degrees
is it you, metal guru?
fsckboy··on Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds
addendum, in fact by attaching the smoke cannon cone to the bass port, he is changing the resonance of the entire system, and you can no longer be sure he is reinforcing or cancelling particular frequencies.
fsckboy··on The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind
NYers dine on fresh local produce without subsidies or government interference.

Farm fresh vegetable produce is perishable and goes from fresh to wilted/rotten very quickly. It is in the capitalist interest with no regulation to move fresh produce as quickly as possible to the supermarkets and onto the shelves. Every day trucks bring fresh produce from NJ and LI and upstate NY into the city and it immediately goes onto the shelves for sale. No communist system could do it as well.

Produce is an extremely profitable segment of supermarket sales. The markups are very low (no communist could compete) but the turnover is very quick. While a can of beans might sit there a few weeks, customers love fresh produce. So hypothetically, they could make a 0.5% markup (you going to take public transit to NJ to buy produce a half a point cheaper?), but that's every week, so in a year it's a healthy 25% markup for the supermarket's annual investment. I made up the numbers to explain the concept, but that in a nutshell is supermarket economics. Maybe they mark up 2% and the annualized profit is 100%. Tiny margin, healthy profit, point made. Very efficient, happy customers, happy supermarkets.

Trucks bring produce farm to table, maybe a distribution stop. Trains are for bulk stuff and not route flexible, so it's not clear they contribute any advantage to the mix, but I love me trains too.

And it's not just NYer's, that's just an urban extreme example, every supermarket chain the the country operates like this.

fsckboy··on Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds
came back and read, to late to edit. "privates" was supposed to be "provides"

and I wrote another long comment to a separate reply, you should look for it.

fsckboy··on The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind
Growing up as I did in an old seafaring town, quite near Ahab's ports of call, I love the romance of the sea and I listen exclusively to sea chanties.

For low-value and bulk cargo, ships make sense, and modern computer-controlled sail trim and wind energy harvesting probably makes a great case. But high value cargo is largely today shipped by air. Nvidia wants money for its chips ASAP, too valuable to sit around non productively while being steamered. Maybe with surplus wind energy they could mine bitcoin while en route?

A sort of related topic, about 20 years ago during peak farm-to-table "buy local" fashion, the NY Times pointed out that lamb shipped from New Zealand (where is that on a map, I can't find it?) to New York City arrives with a lower carbon footprint than lamb delivered by trucks from nearby upstate NY farms, such are the economies of scale in shipping.

But now, blow me down me hearties, I look forward to dining on New Zealand lamb carried to my door by the winds of fortune!

fsckboy··on Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds
with a bass reflex port, the design tunes it acoustically to work with the chosen speaker (and cabinet size blah blah). Given how acoustics work, that means you could tune it to be out-of-phase at the resonant frequency, or you could tune it to be in-phase at the resonant frequency. It would not surprise me at all if modern boom box speaker design was tilted to the in-phase mode in order to get a BOOM-BOOM room sound for hip hop, EDM etc. It could be a cheap way to achieve boominess that skateboarders or whoever would find appealing.

my information comes from the past where I come from. In the 1960s and 70s, bass reflex port design (which had only just bugun to be understood) was tuned toward out-of-phase tuning to accomplish the taming of the resonant frequeny hump in the frequency response, and the audiophile goal was generally regarded as recreating the classical music concert hall experience in your living room without sound coloration, and which music does not have boom-boom elements, except for the occasional timpani thump. The subwoofer had not even been invented yet.

as to the efficiency claims, see the cousin-to-this-comment i just made. In brief, wikipedia is talking about comparing different designs, and I (and the original youtube video) were talking about the efficiency effect it would have on the self-same system, not compared to other different systems. You can surely see that out-of-phase resonance might be likely to decrease the sound level, and in-phase reinforcement would be likely to increase the sound level. That is what I was talking about.

(it's not actually as simple as what it seems on its face, the acoustic feedback of the sound waves (bass reflex) will be transmitted back through the electronics to the feedback loop in the amplifier itself. Think of it like a conservation of energy type argument, shifting gears on your bicycle does not give you more energy but it can increase the efficiency-kind-of-sort-of of the transfer of energy from you to your bicycle, so comparatively speaking shifting gears on your speaker. I say kind-of-sort-of because what energy gets wasted where (in the form of wasteful heat) isn't completely intuitive. systems have their lowest impedance at their resonant frequency, thus highest energy transfer, but feeding back to change the behavior at the resonant frequency will change the impedance rather than simply "hey free efficiency" or something, because we are changing frequency dependent impedance rather than removing resistance/friction.)

the musical problem with choosing a "resonance reinforcement" technique is that it works at the same resonant frequency all the time (same for that speaker, different for other speakers). What's pleasing about music is the artists choices of musical notes. Different songs have different note choices, but the speaker's resonant frequency is always the same so a song in the key of, e.g., G will always be emphasized in the key of C which does not make musical sense.

the opposite is not the case, if you use bass reflex to demphasize the resonant frequency, you are making all songs sound better.

in the particular case of the youtube video, he would still be wrong because he is measuring/testing right at the bass port, which for bass notes with a long enough wavelength would still be reinforced by the sounds from the front of the speaker, but not in the directed way that he is trying to capture with the smoke ring cannon because the reinforcing waves would be arriving from elsewhere and not coherent with the (hypothetical) smoke rings. also the smoke ring cannon is tuned for a much lower bass note, if you pumped 20Hz through it (an extremely low note, the limit of human hearing), that would imply 20 smoke rings a second. Does anything about the smoke ring cannon seem to indicate that it could put out 20 smoke rings a second? highly doubtful, they would interfere with each other. notice that the bass port is much smaller than the smoke ring cannon, probably a bad impedance match, though I doubt the smoke ring cannon is operating at all on frequency, just simply the turbulent movent of air (and smoke)

fsckboy··on Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds
my statement was that the bass reflex design decreased the efficiency of that system itself (as in "it could be more efficient in itself, which is what the youtube video was saying). Cancelling some frequencies decreases the efficiency of it's own components, but that it did so by choice in favor of accuracy of sound and beneficial compromises toward space-efficient form factor.

I did NOT say it was more or less efficient than any other design, nor did the youtube video, which is what wikipedia has successfully attempted to delude you into talking about, and unsuccessfully at being correct because it conflates infinite baffle with acoustic suspension which with absolute certainty have vastly different efficiencies and tonal qualities and therefore the wiki simply wrong.

On another dimension you have left out, different loudspeaker acoustic cabinet designs are optimized by coupling with completely different drivers (I'm using the term driver to refer to the metal-frame/paper-cone structure itself, not any wooden enclosure) With acoustic suspension, the air in the cabinet privates a taut springiness, and thus the spring built into the driver is more or less eliminated making the speaker cone on its own "floppy". You can't use that driver in a different design, the components must be designed together to work together, matching impedance, so it is silly to naively compare efficiency, and as I already pointed out, any 5% efficiency difference is dwarfed by other considerations.

I'm happy to educate you, but you don't know what you are talking about, so arguing against your uninformed reading of wikipedia is tedious.

fsckboy··on A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals
do you realize that the Israeli population is far far more secular than the US's? the Israeli government is not "Judaic" which would refer to the religion.
fsckboy··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
>I'm not sure what Twitter's specific reasons are

as I recall it was the large number of bot accounts not scraping but commenting.

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