I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Mainly the issues are about providing ~600 kilowatts for 8 minutes to charge your typical size EV battery.

    A row of 5 chargers of that size soaks up 3MW if they’re all in use, and that’s not something that can be quickly or easily shoehorned into a suburban electricity grid.

    It’s about 500 houses worth of electricity usage, for comparison. For just 5 fast chargers.

    Not to say it’s impossible, but infrastructure doesn’t come cheap, and so it’ll cost quite a bit to cram that 80 percent charge into your car’s battery.



  • What I’m asking is how tf did text messages and whatever in the walkie talkies ignite a spark strong enough to ignite the PETN?

    Pager with firmware that activates an output on date/time X/Y and triggers an ignition signal. That signal is sent o an actual detonator in the device, which sets off the explosive.

    Radio with DTMF receiver that activates an output when, for example, touchtone 4 is received over the air, or alternatively if the radio has GPS, another date/time activation via firmware.

    Both of these things are relatively trivial for a nation-state to pull off.

    So yes, in both cases it’s possible that faulty devices are still around. However, if all the rest of your group has had exploding pagers and radios, most people in the same group would have dropped their still-working pager or radio into a bucket of water by now. There’s probably a few, and they’re probably being carefully taken apart right now to see how it was done.

    Afaik such an idea was nonsense previously.

    It’s not nonsense, it just takes planning and resources. And now that people know it is possible, buying and using any sort of equipment for your group without having the nagging concern there might be a bomb in it is impossible. And that’s a pretty powerful limiter.




  • I’ve got photos in Flickr dating from 1999 onwards. Ten thousand or so of them, and a couple of the early ones are now corrupted.

    But they are my “other backup” for Google photos so I don’t mind too much. I also have a USB Blu-ray drive at home that I use to periodically burn M-Discs that I hand out to a few relatives.

    That’s about as good as I can conveniently do for backup, and it’s probably better than the single-point-of-failure box of negatives that my parents have in their cupboard.



  • Most times what I get when asking it coding questions is a half-baked response that has a logic error or five in it.

    Once I query it about one of those errors it replies with, “You’re right, X should be Y because of (technical reason Z). Here’s the updated code that fixes it”.

    It will then give me some code that does actually work, but does dumb things, like recalculating complex but static values inside a loop. When I ask if there’s any performance improvements it can do, suddenly it’s full of helpful ways to improve the code that can make it run 10 to 100 times faster and fix those issues. Apparently if I want performant code, I have to explicitly ask for it.

    For some things it will offer solutions that don’t solve the issue that I raise, no matter how many different ways I phrase the issue and try and coax it towards a solution. At that point, it basically can’t, and it gets bogged down to minor alterations that don’t really achieve anything.

    Sometimes when it hits that point I can say “start again, and use (this methodology)” and it will suddenly hit upon a solution that’s workable.

    So basically, right now it’s good for regurgitating some statistically plausible information that can be further refined with a couple of good questions from your side.

    Of course, for that to work you have to know the domain you’re working in fairly well already otherwise you’re shit out of luck.



  • Excuse me, “UXers” is not the preferred term any more. You should be using “HXers”, as per the article.

    In my opinion, replacing “users” with “humans” feels wrong in much the same way as when incels replace “women” with “females”.

    They are reducing the accuracy of the description. All users of computers can generally be assumed to be human. All humans cannot generally be assumed to also be users.


  • Me: “This binary file is merely an approximate mathematical and statistical transform of the complainant’s “Deadpool 3”, your honour. If you care to glance through a few A4 pages of the binary representation of both items, you can clearly see that there is no direct copying involved, thus, no copyright claim can be upheld.”

    Result: $250k fine, two years community service in anti piracy groups.

    NVIDIA: “Each copyrighted work was ingested and a statistical model was generated that leverages that information for our own profit. We have no intention of compensating copyright owners for their information.”

    Result: Oh you! Get out of here, you scamp! Ruffles hair



  • The US system is broken. I have a tax file number in Australia, which is the broad equivalent of a US SSN, and you know what someone can do with it if they also have my name and DOB? Fuck-all, except file my taxes for me, because you can’t use it as an identifier anywhere else than the Australian tax office.

    If I want a loan or a credit card or to open a bank account or any number of things , I need enough verifiable documents including photo ID to satisfy the other party that I am really them. Basically it’s a points system where any form of government photo ID gives you about 80 points and any other item of identifiable data gives you 10-20 points and usually you have to clear 100 points to be “identified”.

    So my passport plus my driver’s licence is enough. My driver’s licence plus my non photo ID government Medicare card or my official original copy of my birth certificate is enough. My driver’s licence and two bank or credit cards is enough. About 5 or 6 things like my birth certificate, electricity bills in my name or local government rates notices and bank cards is sometimes enough, although photo ID from somewhere is usually required, or you need a statutory declaration from someone in good standing saying that you are who you say you are.

    This kind of thing, while slightly more inconvenient, requires a number of physical items that can’t be easily stolen en-masse. I carry enough of them in my wallet that I can do anything I need to do, as my driver’s licence provides photo ID. People who don’t drive or have a passport can scrape together enough bits and pieces to usually get by.

    So it’s time for a change. But it doesn’t have to involve technology or a huge shift in the way of doing things. It just requires a points system similar to what I describe. Whether the US can effect that change now with the millions of systems that rely on a SSN for a trivial key in a database in some small retailer somewhere, I don’t know.



  • Yeah if you’ve got home charging it’s not a real issue. We use 240v here in Aus so you can pull quite a bit out of domestic outlets before having to get serious and generally overnight charging to top up the day’s commute would be fine.

    So it wouldn’t be a fast charger on every street, and you could always enforce limits by time of use pricing to put a dampener on peak loads.

    I just wonder if utility planners might get caught with their pants down on this one. Like, could you say 5 years ago chargers might run to 800kW?