frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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frezik,

I have a relatively new house (built 2006). I came to the conclusion that the extra money spent on triple paned windows would be more effectively spent on improvements elsewhere. Like a heat pump or hybrid water heater.

In the end, we weren’t able to swing the windows at all, but did replace our crappy doors.

frezik,

I did something like that once, but it was at a gangbang. Men can do it in certain contexts where some level of sexual activity is expected.

frezik, (edited )

That reminds me of an old paper about how to create a compilable C program out of old game ROMs. Decompile to assembly. Implement a bunch of #define statements that implement all the ASM statements. Now compile it to a native binary on whatever platform.

Won’t likely be faster or more accurate than regular emulation methods, but it’s a neat idea considering that the source code on all this stuff was lost a long time ago.

frezik,

Nah, I’d rather data get sent out to external servers and then come back. This is efficient and very smart.

frezik,

The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:

Housing as an investment.

My city has a rental vacancy rate of <4%, and a homeowner vacancy rate of <1%. Flippers leave a house empty while under the process of flipping it, and that’s not what the numbers show. Landlords do increase the cost compared to ownership (they have to cover all normal costs of ownership, plus have profit for themselves), but they don’t reduce the number of shelters being occupied. Not when vacancy rates are this low.

In other words, my particular city may have costs driven up by flippers and landlords, but the number of dwelling units would be short even without them. Getting rid of them would be an insufficient solution, even if there are some benefits on costs. It does not address the problem that we need more dwelling units.

frezik,

Back in the 90s, I was asked to critique a local business web site. I noticed a picture wasn’t loading correctly on Netscape Navigator when it was working fine on IE. Turned out, the designer had stuck in a 5MB BMP image. This when a whole lot of people were still on 56K modems.

frezik,

Jokes on them. WPA2 length limit is 63 characters. It might let you put in one longer than that, but it doesn’t use the extra characters.

frezik,

Maybe that skill is how they end up with suspiciously high amounts of money.

frezik,

There’s a few different techniques. The crudest is to check what cell tower you’re connected to and use its location as your location. Good enough to find what sandwich shops are in the area, but not precise enough for driving instructions. That takes GPS satellites.

Flat earthers sometimes confuse these modes to say your phone only connects to local towers. Most people don’t know the details and don’t know how to refute it.

frezik,

It’s known that the original guy mined a whole bunch of coins to start with and has never cashed them in. He doesn’t seem to care about money much and just wanted to work on something interesting. Bitcoin is really a garage project that’s gotten out of hand.

Now, everyone who picked it up after that on a Greater Fool theory, sure, absolutely.

frezik,

That’s Christopher, and he died in 2020. Now it’s a few different members of the family plus their attorney.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_Estate

frezik,

There’s a guy out there who made a reversible NES emulator, meaning it can run games backwards and come to the correct state. He made a brilliant post on Reddit /r/programming linking his ideas for the emulator to quantum mechanics.

Then he was asked why he didn’t distribute his program in git. He said that he didn’t know git.

To me, that’s a pretty good example of the difference between computer science and software engineering.

frezik,

Surface area of the fin stack matters. An air cooler will always be limited by the space available around the CPU. A water cooling radiator has more flexibility to be placed in around the case.

That said, having less than a 360mm AIO is probably a waste. Also, higher end Intel chips these days are so power hungry that they can’t be physically cooled properly with the surface area available on the package.

frezik,

BIOS.

They recognized that PCs were the next big thing and needed one of their own. Large companies don’t move fast, and IBM is certainly no exception, but they had to move fast now. So they took a bunch of off the shelf components that anyone else could have bought and called it their PC.

Everything except the BIOS. It regulated how the OS interacts with the hardware. Almost to the point where you could argue DOS isn’t an OS at all, but just a thin command line layer over the BIOS, plus a simple minded file system.

Anyway, some people at Compaq make a cleanroom implementation of the BIOS and release an “IBM PC compatible”. This quickly becomes the basis of everything we call a PC today. But IBM doesn’t get to profit off it in the long run. They sold off their PC division decades ago.

The show “Halt and Catch Fire” has an excellent fictional example of the reverse engineering process.

frezik,

There was this other time they discovered a whole fucking Dyson Sphere, and then promptly forgot about it.

frezik, (edited )

Nonsense. It’s a simple continuation of something that has always been around. They would have needed to actively and purposefully changed it. The first company that tried to sell “1 Megabyte/s” instead of “8 Megabits/s” is shooting themselves in the foot because the number is smaller. If it was going to change, you would need everyone to agree at once to correct the numbers the same way.

Modems were 300 baud, then 1200 baud, then 56.6k baud. ISDN took things to 128k baud, and a T1 was 1.544M baud. Except that sometime around the time things went into tens of k, we started saying “bits” instead of “baud”. In any case, it simply continued with the first DSL and cable modems being around 1 to 10 Mbits. You had to be able to compare it fairly to what came before, and the easiest way to do that is to keep doing what they’ve been doing.

Ethernet continues to be sold in the same system of measurement, for the same reasons.

frezik,

That metaphor is . . . not entirely wrong.

frezik, (edited )

I’ll take DS9’s first two seasons over TNG’s first two any time. Yes, even Move Along Home. TNG also peaked around season 5, and was somewhat more mixed after that (but never going quite so low, either).

frezik,

I wouldn’t cite LTT for much, but IIRC, that was only true to a point. The NHD-15 is great, but a lot of cases can’t fit one. Same with many other high end air coolers. It might also cool to the same temperature, but is also running the fans harder to get there.

frezik,

The for-profit portion doesn’t have stock like that, either. Not in a publicly traded way where we can actually say the price dropped.

This whole thing is crazy, and it’s hard to know as an outsider what the fuck is going on.

frezik,

No, no they didn’t. Run through the alt.startrek Usenet archive throughout the '90s and you’ll find plenty of bitching about every series.

frezik,

Yup, that’s their whole outline of the end days. Supposed to happen in the lifetime of people alive in 1914, and there’s a whole thing about how they’ve managed to extend that deadline.

frezik,

I’m still disappointed in the relative lack of orgies since getting out. I WAS PROMISED ORGIES, DAMMIT!

frezik,

Out of curiosity, I ran through some sample quizzes of the A+ exam a while back. Managed to pass, but I had to dig out a lot of my old knowledge about IDE master/slave setups and COM port settings and the like. That may be partially due to A+ being a silly, meaningless cert, but it’s pretty clear there is a need for that crap still.

frezik,

Most of the criticisms that come from the right are solvable problems, such as lack of chargers, electricity coming from dirty sources, or lithium mining. We pretty much know how to solve all those at this point. Just a matter of doing it.

Criticisms that come from the left tend to be more fundamental. Things like car-based cities being too spread out, infrastructure costs spiraling out of control, or having the average person operate a 2 ton vehicle at speeds over 60mph and expecting this to be safe. None of those are specific to EVs, and are only solvable by looking at different transportation options.

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