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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • TAPR or CERN OHL, probably— Kit cars do already exist, though are apparently aimed at hobbyists, and usually just partial cosmetic customizations. “Metal box on wheels with motor” ain’t exactly rocket science, although quality could be challenging and that’s especially important when it comes to safety.

    That said, surely the production costs of modern vehicles needed to do their basic job— Efficient-ish and safe-ish transportation from point A to point B­— Can’t possibly be worth their increasingly inflated costs? There’s probably something to be said about the marketability of a sub-$10,000 basic OHL car that you can choose to scratch build or kit-build or buy fully built.





  • Current uranium reserves are expected to be depleted by the end of the century, at current use.

    More like somewhere between 200 years and a couple million years, assuming we fire back up and finish developing some 60-year old technologies.

    Fission as a serious replacement for just coal plants is a pipe dream without asteroid mining.

    pipe dream without asteroid mining

    …Yeah, no. At least, not yet. Plus, the energetic and engineering challenges to just throw “asteroid mining” into the conversation are insane— So you’re burning either fossil or synthetic/biofuels for the launch, electric ion (which is itself insanely difficult and expensive) I presume (so, I.e. nuclear or solar) for in-orbit maneuvering, for rocks that aren’t even that that big and which you don’t even have the technology to do anything with.

    We have most minerals in sufficient quantities in the Earth’s crust. And more importantly, we have the industrial processes to extract them efficiently. Fission is viable, has been for a long time, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

    contrary to what people pretend we still don’t have a good answer for the waste.

    It’s rocks. Processed “nuclear waste” is literally just rocks. (Well, technically it’s solid glass covered in welded steel.) It’s not like air pollution that we end up breathing in, and it’s not like the chemical waste from other industries (including from batteries and rare earth extraction) which finds its way to the water cycle where it then bioaccumulates. If you’re picturing a glowing green river, or a barrel full of leaking sludge— Well, that’s not it.

    It can’t hurt you unless you powder it and huff it or build furniture with it or do something insanely stupid like that. And there are other much easier and more dangerous ways for malicious actors to hurt you too, that don’t involve breaking into secure facilities to steal the some of the heaviest elements known to exist.

    Dig a big hole and toss the waste a kilometer or two down the Canadian Shield, and it will sit there inert for a billion years long after it’s burnt through all its dangerous levels of residual radioactivity.

    We need a global fusion research project

    We already have a couple of those. If everything goes perfectly for them, they might become commercially widespread right around the same time the hard-to-reverse effects of climate change might become truly apocalyptic in the second half of this century. If the past history of this field of research is any indication, they quite possibly won’t really work, will work but only a decade or two behind schedule and several times over budget, or will lead nowhere except for some media coverage that’s good for military-industrial stock prices or whatever.

    This isn’t Sid Meier’s Civilization, where you can click “Global Fusion Research Project” and get a +100% boost to production after 20 turns. To quote Randall Munroe, “Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell’s equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations”. Fusion is hard, or else we’d already be doing it, and though we know it’s definitely possible, there’s no guarantee of anything when it comes to actually engineering it.

    orbital solar.

    Uhh… No. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to blast photovoltaics into an incredibly hostile environment, where they can’t even be cooled by dissipating into the atmosphere, is not probably going to bring energy costs down, at current or near-future technology levels.

    Plus any system capable of precisely beaming terawatts of power from space into localized collectors on the planetary surface is (1) probably by definition an omnipresent death ray and (2) probably at least going to fuck up a lot of migrating birds and components of the atmosphere.

    Simple as that.



  • There’s probably some programs that you always want to run with the dedicated GPU, though.

    Copy the launchers for those from /usr/share/applications to ~/.local/share/applications, and edit the Exec= line to include prime-run?

    Or, assuming prime-run is inheritable (since otherwise apps that need renderer subprocesses wouldn’t work), run an application launcher/menu itself with prime-run?

    Actually, it looks like prime-run just sets a couple environment variables anyway. So set those however you want for each program.

    What does “NVIDIA Control Panel” look like these days? It’s been a couple years since I’ve seen it. No options in there?

    I’m assuming you still want the IGPU and not the discrete GPU for rendering the desktop/simple programs, for power consumption and performance reasons, so you’re not willing to just turn the IGPU off or stick your entire session under prime-run or export its environment variables in ~/.profile or whatever.


    It looks like there are also GPU switcher taskbar applets for both KDE and GNOME. This sounds like it would be easy enough.

    …I think back when I was setting up a NVIDIA laptop, I might have just put a toggle for optimus-manager somewhere, or something.


  • My point was its all a separate tool which defeats the point. […] Just makes no sense.

    Ah, well, “UNIX Philosophy”, maybe. Each tool does one thing, and does it well, and it’s up to the user to figure out what they want to accomplish by using multiple tools together— Though it probably made more sense in CLI than in the GUI realm. I think it works for 95% of cases. I don’t want to need an entire office suite just to be able to make a mark on a page. But when you’re working a lot on one particular document (be it a PDF, video edit, source code, digital illustration, or whatever), then yeah, having a “complete solution” with an efficient workflow can be hugely important as well.

    I honestly willing to pay for a complete solution I dont want it for free.

    You could check if CodeWeavers Crossover, the money behind the WINE project, can run your preferred Windows applications but do it on Linux:

    https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility

    Or maybe WINE will do it for free:

    https://appdb.winehq.org/


  • Other than the 3.5mm still being universal basically everywhere except for phones, it’s also universal in a purist physical sense.

    Any old piece of scrap copper wire connected to a 3.5mm jack, wrapped vaguely into a coil, and placed next to something magnetic, should form a working speaker compatible with the 3.5mm jack. It won’t sound hi-fi, but it will work, because unlike Bluetooth or USB-C where you have to read hundreds of pages of standards and do a bunch of engineering just to figure out how to understand the signal, the signal in the 3.5mm jack basically is the sound.

    This has direct practical implications as well: The transparent simplicity vs opaque complexity is why wired headphones can be so cheap and yet so reliable, or as hi-fi as your DAC and the speaker cone will allow, whereas Bluetooth devices are comparatively expensive, a mess to connect, fragile, bandwidth-limited, and environmentally and ethically dubious.

    Bluetooth, and even USB-C, is basically black magic— Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s also glitchy black magic. And this remains true regardless of device availability, because it’s determined by the physics of the technology itself is implemented.


  • Let us not forget that S7 and S7 Edge had headphone jack and were waterproof.

    Not user-disassemblable, much less Lego-style modular, though. Easy to make something “waterproof” when you can just seal it shut with “gooey black adhesive”.

    I personally think the headphone jack is a wonderful truly universal and effectively completely open standard that’s very good at what it does, and which furthermore is doubly useful as a generic power and analog signal delivery mechanism, while mandating its supposed successors like Bluetooth and USB-C needlessly and massively inflates the technical and material cost of just playing a dang sound file. You could get serviceable wired headphones that last forever for like $5 if you were lucky; Nowadays, you pay at least ten times that for fragile lithium batteries and circuitry that will break in a couple years, and I really don’t like this trend of taking away capabilities for less robust alternatives while portraying it as innovating.

    But I also actually use my Bluetooth headphones way more than my wired ones, and I appreciate the potential engineering and market challenges in what Fairphone is trying to do here.