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ftrobro

221 karma · joined March 28, 2021

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ftrobro··on Is moderate drinking healthy? Scientists say the idea is outdated
> allthough one would think they'd get 0% alcohol related cancers

I assume "alcohol related" in this context means that alcohol consumption increases the risk for those types of cancers, but you might still get those types of cancers even if you have never consumed any alcohol. And "less than once drink per week" is assumed to be almost the same as never consuming any alcohol at all, so 17% is the risk for women who never consume any alcohol.

ftrobro··on Astronomers confirm the existence of a lone black hole
Perhaps a reference to Pangea Proxima?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea_Proxima

Life might very well exist on earth even through those conditions, but not to the extent we have today.

ftrobro··on Intel RealSense Stereo Depth Cameras
Unreliable as in noisy in a way that I could not fix with temporal averaging. I tried to guide a robot arm to pick up the top object in a bag of evenly colored objects, but RealSense gave me randomly fluctuating values and rather large undefined areas (areas that were blocked from the view of one of the two sensors). The ToF sensor gave solid values even outside when it was snowing. Of course the ToF sensor had other problems, high requirements for power and cooling, and perhaps worse performance in very strong sunlight.
ftrobro··on Intel RealSense Stereo Depth Cameras
I've tried to use Intel RealSense in the past but found the output to be unreliable. I had much better results with Chronoptics KEA:

https://www.chronoptics.com/products/kea

ftrobro··on Ereader Easy Swedish
Is "ateljé" (meaning art studio) really the correct Swedish translation here? I suspect "etta" (meaning one-room apartment) would be more suitable.
ftrobro··on I built an open source AI tool to find my autoimmune disease
Unfortunately sometimes even experienced people make mistakes that a recent graduate should not do (but in practice sometimes does). AI models can help avoid mistakes that in hindsight were obvious and should never have happened.
ftrobro··on The dogs of Chernobyl: Populations in the nuclear exclusion zone (2023)
Domesticated cats survive so well in the wild that they have eradicated several other animal species:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-kill-a-stagg...

ftrobro··on What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch
Privacy is a safety concern. If some government agency can control your car remotely, chances are that others also will find a way to do that.
ftrobro··on C++ String Conversion: Exploring std:from_chars in C++17 to C++26
Integers are simple to parse, but from_chars is a great improvement when parsing floats. It's more standardized on different platforms than the old solutions (no need to worry about the locale, for example whether to use comma or dot as decimals separator) but also has more reliable performance in different compilers. The most advanced approaches to parsing floats can be surprisingly much faster than intermediately advanced approaches. The library used by GCC since version 12 (and also used by Chrome) claims to be 4 - 10 times faster than old strtod implementations:

https://github.com/fastfloat/fast_float

For more historical context:

https://lemire.me/blog/2020/03/10/fast-float-parsing-in-prac...

ftrobro··on Mozilla fixes Firefox zero-day actively exploited in attacks
Rust was created at Mozilla and currently 11.7% of the Firefox source code is in Rust:

https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/

That's down from 12.49% at the peak in July 2020 so I assume the conversion work was halted after the layoffs in 2020:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1flUGg6Ut4bjtyWdyH_9e...

ftrobro··on Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years
Roughly the same as the difference between a country and a business.
ftrobro··on Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years
I assume the charter issued by the king in 1347 declared limitations of liability for the owners of the company.
ftrobro··on Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years
Stora Enso has 20000 employees and roots in the 13th century. In the 17th centry Stora produced two thirds of all copper in the world.

"The oldest preserved share in the Swedish copper mining company Stora Kopparberg (Falun Mine) in Falun was issued in 1288. It granted the Bishop of Västerås 1/8th (12.5%) ownership, and it is also the oldest known preserved share in any company in the world."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Enso

ftrobro··on Server Setup Basics for Self Hosting
This and possibly unknown similar flaws is a good reason for not advertising ssh:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/regresshion-vulnera...

ftrobro··on Linksys Velop routers send Wi-Fi passwords in plaintext to US servers
Don't most websites send passwords in plaintext for login and rely on the connection being HTTPS for having any security at all? I don't like that, but seems to be very common, so I'm not surprised about the plaintext part of this article. But that the passwords are at all sent to a server, that did surprise me, good to know.
ftrobro··on The War on Estonian Forests (2022)
Indeed, not many facts in that article. For example it claims that "Estonia is unique in the amount of land still covered in trees" (50%), and yet that is only 5th highest in Europe [1]. Finland has a tree coverage of 73% [2]. A hundred years ago Estonia had a tree coverage of only 30%, so forests have expanded a lot in Estonia since then [1].

Sure it looks ugly when a forest is cut down, but some types of plants are waiting for just that chance to sprout (adapted for forest fires), and in western countries forests normally grow up again after being cut down.

[1] https://www.eramets.ee/forests-in-estonia/

[2] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7750867ad5cf467998492fc...

ftrobro··on Batteries: How cheap can they get?
In southernmost Sweden, just above Germany, solar production is only 5% in December compared to June. In northernmost Sweden the sun doesn't even rise above the horizon for most of December.
ftrobro··on Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features
Prices were high two years ago, but that is no longer the case. A lot of solar power came online last year. Currently the price is negative:

https://www.eon.se/el/elpriser/aktuella

ftrobro··on Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features
GeForce Now works great. I subscribed for a while to play Cyberpunk 2077 on a remote 4080 and it felt like playing on a local computer. But with much higher settings and framerate than I get on my local GeForce 1080.

> Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day.

Don't make the assumption that everyone live their lives exactly like you do.

ftrobro··on Show HN: Open-source GeForce NOW alternative with Stadia's social features
Interesting that electricity prices are so different than in southern Sweden even though the distance to Germany is less than 100 km and our grids are somewhat connected. Here in southern Sweden the cost has been negative during daytime for the past week, a trend that will probably continue over summer thanks to solar energy. The net cost for buying electricity is still a bit over 0 though, because of taxes and transfer fees.
ftrobro··on The Performance Impact of C++'s `final` Keyword
I assume it could be or is part of link time optimization when compiling an application rather than a library?
ftrobro··on Descent 3 Source Code
I used to get nausea when playing Doom in the nineties, it never got better. But I never get nausea from fps games with slower movement. I suspect the problem with Doom is how quickly you can change direction while running. You can run quite fast and a 90 degree turn doesn't slow you down at all.
ftrobro··on Homemade 6 GHz pulse compression radar
Isn't sun burn damage and nuclear reactor damgage the same type but at different magnitudes? If your skin becomes red and hot a few hours after being exposed to the sun it's because your immune system is killing off cells that had their DNA damaged. The damage is not caused by heat but by radiation.

https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/why-do...

ftrobro··on Dali owner file petition to cap liability in Baltimore bridge collapse at $43.7M
This train tunnel below Malmö in Sweden was finished in 2010 six months earlier than planned and at a cost 10% below budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Tunnel_(Malm%C3%B6)

ftrobro··on Swedish data brokers claim journalists' legal protection to evade EU law
If the only idea was to help home-owners keep their homes warm then companies would not have gotten the same tax returns. This page lists the reason for the tax returns as "För att stödja elkunderna ekonomiskt och för att mildra effekterna av de höga elpriserna har EU infört en tillfällig möjlighet att använda de så kallade flaskhalsintäkterna för ekonomiska utbetalningar till elkunderna.". So general stimulation of the economy seems to also have been part of the reason for the tax returns.

https://www.regeringen.se/regeringens-politik/energikrisen/e...

ftrobro··on Swedish data brokers claim journalists' legal protection to evade EU law
Regarding electricity tax returns, not making the names public was a very good idea because of course some newspapers had headlines like "Look at how high tax returns some rich bastards got, it's a scandal, they could never use that much electricity just in their private homes!" the day after the anonymized sums of the tax returns were made public. Which just showed the ignorance of those journalists, because private taxes are much higher than corporate taxes so why would anyone want to pay privately for electricity used by a company? Nobody applied for tax returns, the sums were based on how much they had paid in electricity taxes. And companies got the tax returns too, just a few months later.

One of those who got high private tax returns came out publicly and explained that his company was of the type "enskild firma" which means that it uses his person number, it's not a limited company. And apparently Skatteverket had treated all companies of that type as if they were private citizens. But of course most people just remember headlines, so if the headline had been "Look at person XX, that rich bastard got this much in tax returns!" you had probably remembered that but not the later explanation that it was his company that got tax returns.

ftrobro··on Swedish data brokers claim journalists' legal protection to evade EU law
The Swedish government doesn't check that the registered address is correct, and if someone you don't know chooses to register at your address then you won't know about it, and even if you did there's no way for you to get rid of that registration. There has been cases of police breaking down doors and rushing in to apartments just because some criminal had registered himself on that address, even though the people who lived there had never heard of that person.
ftrobro··on New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
I probably can install Linux, but I'm fairly certain Xcode would still refuse to install... The upgrade from Win 7 to 10 was seamless, replacing MacOS with Linux would be like replacing the computer.
ftrobro··on New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
I'm still using this beautiful 12 year old Samsung series 9 laptop. Unlike my 9 year old Macbook it still receives official security updates (Win 10) and can run any new application (Xcode refuses to install on the Macbook, too old).

https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/16/3160289/samsung-series-9-...

ftrobro··on RAD Debugger
I suppose one reason is that images can be stored in many different ways in memory. For OpenCV images in C++ the Visual Studio extension Image Watch is quite nice, I think it's been around for more than 15 years:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualCP...

There's also a recent extension called Image Preview for path references:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/working-with-ima...

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