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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Man, I really don’t like this study.

    First, this is 44 people, 22 pairs of twins, followed for 8 weeks. This in not enough to be meaningful and the researchers knew this at the start. A sample of 44 people is so small you would only use it for a pilot study to show your study design and get funding.

    Second, 8 weeks? That is an insanely short time. Again, pilot study, not real study.

    Third, they didn’t measure heart disease, they measured LDL cholesterol. This is a proxy marker, not a measure of heart disease. It would be like measuring how many fires a city has by counting firefighters. It doesn’t measure how many actual fires there are, just how many resources are available to fight them. What if there is low funding? What if there is an issue with training? What if there is another disaster which is more urgent than the fires? LDL is not a good measure on its own for heart health.

    There are lots of other issues but they all boil down to this being bad science. We know what questions should be asked and how to ask them. They chose not to ask questions correctly and get meaningful answers. This is not worth the paper it was printed on and means close to nothing.



  • What is crazy is this was actually a huge problem for frontier settlements. Tonnes of people would meet the indigenous population, be exposed to their society, learn enough of their language to communicate, and then go “fuck this” to all the European culture and just move in with the locals. They brought whatever skills they had including metalworking and so on and joined up and for the most part it went really really well for them, until the westerners came and killed everyone. Behind The Bastards had a great episode a few years ago about it, through the lens of one particular bastard, and yeah, faced with a culture where individuals were not exploited for every last shilling of value to the shareholders people wanted out.



  • rowinxavier@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldOpenWRT router
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    16 days ago

    This. I looked at a bunch of options and these are the best for OpenWrt and are very reasonably priced. Mine did torrenting, VPN, and a few other small services before I got my proper served up and running and now it is less loaded and more relaxed without that workload. Absolutely awesome, very high quality for low price, and it comes with a very slightly modified OpenWrt firmware which is unlocked by default.




  • I can see why you would feel that way but I came to a different conclusion. I agree with much of what he says given his position and circumstances.

    The project is open source and anyone is welcome to fork it. He is not making something which will make money, provide a living, and secure his station as an open source guru. He is making something because he thinks it should exist and because he finds it interesting. He is not making something for end users, it isn’t for them, it is for people who have enough interest and knowledge to figure it out given the massive leg up he has provided already.

    This means he does not do a bunch of things that would pull beginner users in. For example, there is not a simple GUI installer for this. He doesn’t sell kits to root your device. He doesn’t sell little server boxes based on a raspberry pi. He doesn’t have an app for quick discovery and configuration. All of these things would entice beginners and therefore induce them to install unsupported firmware on their several hundred to over a thousand dollar robot vacuum.

    This would be hell. Each user with a new and unique way of not understanding the instructions would come up with new failures in an area where bricking your very expensive machine is easy. Can you imagine how much of a dick he would have to be to say “Nah, this is super easy, come give it a go” when the outcome would definitely be causing at least some people to lose hundreds of dollars in a few minutes? That would be him acting like a dick.

    What he is doing has a second function. I have just ordered my first custom PCB. I have some components on the way and will be doing my second major electronics project once the parts arrive. I am much more experienced on the software end of things so I get all of the basics around using a terminal etc but now I am learning about using the UART interface and while it is a little bit sink and swim I am at a level where I understand how far outside my knowledge base this is and can take a reasonably informed risk. I am learning and growing and I am actually really excited. If it doesn’t work I will know enough to be helped through by the community but my expectation is I will fail at first and maybe take a few weeks to figure it out. Because of that expectation I am not doing this after my last vacuum broke and now I just desperately need this to work, that would add so much stress, instead I am doing this in the least stressful and most enjoyable way possible.

    If I had been correctly scared off early I wouldn’t have lost a bunch of photos accidentally wiping a drive while installing Linux for the first time, so I would have used virtual machines for longer, but I also would have eventually gotten there. I got there by losing some data, but if I had a community around me it would have been better. He actively encourages community building and sharing knowledge. I think that is cool and would be an awesome outcome. I know I will be posting about my spare adapters once I am done making them to see if anyone else wants to learn how to do it.





  • Yeah, it is always fun having a climate destroying lie machine ruin the market for consumer products with an inevitable bursting of the bubble in a matter of months to years followed by a glut of products entering the market destabilising prices and likely killing smaller manufacturers, leading the further consolidation in the hands of the few remaining companies responsible for the bust in the first place. Capitalism is great. I love it. /s


  • Honestly, I haven’t tried backing up and restoring but it seems likely to work. I have however brought game files across and after copying them over I added them to Steam and the verified the files. It seemed to fix the permissions and ownership quite well, though that could have been luck.



  • Yeah, but there are many good options. Magnetic alignment can keep things from touching most of the time, maintaining very good movement without friction. Graphite is a great lubricant and works even in very cold environments, not to mention it will not be all that cold given the heat passing through the system. Redundancy is also a big part of the design, making failures much less impactful. And using sterling engines for the highest draw part of the lifetime of a probe with peltier style generators there for later would allow a failover to a solid state system at lower efficiency.


  • Perhaps more modern ones, but the ones in my last and current laptops are both 18650s. 6 cells, 9 cells, you stack in series to increase voltage, parallel to get more capacity, so a 3s2p would have ~14V which is more than the required 12V for internal components, no boost converters needed. That said, now they do a lot of pouch batteries which are actually multiple internal pouches run in series to get the same sort of voltage but made with the chassis fitting them perfectly, no wasted space.


  • 18650 is awesome, a good balance of weight to capacity. They are the standard cells used in laptops, vapes, small powerbanks, power tool batteries, and so on. They can also go into a fairly standard charger for AA and AAA batteries and give a lovely nominal 3.7V.

    That said, pouches are better for inside a device like a controller. The weight of a battery is significantly influenced by the casing. A pouch is almost entirely capacity, a cell like an 18650 or AA is largely the metal of the casing. If you have the pouch inside the plastic of the device you can save that weight.


  • Honestly, more than a year ago nVidia drivers were absolutely nightmarish. It used to be such a frequent issue that I stopped updates for nVidia drivers until I could take a full system backup. Btrfs has been a game changer, allowing backups to automatically happen on updates and allowing you to boot into a previous state. And given the level of Linux growth through Steam/Valve pushing it nVidia seems to have been trying harder. Only one update issue this year so far and it was a simple roll back, make a change, apply updates again.



  • To be clear though, the two defined states are separated by a voltage gap, so either it is on or off regardless of how on or how off. For example, if the off is 0V and the on is 5V then 4V is neither of those but will be either considered as on. So if it is above thecriticam threshold it is on and therefore represents a 1, otherwise it is a 0.

    An analogue computer would be able to use all of the variable voltage range. This means that instead of having a whole bunch of gates working together to represent a number the voltage could be higher or lower. Something that takes 64 bits could be a single voltage. That would mean more processing in the same space and much less actual computation required.