megopie

joined 2 years ago
[–] megopie@beehaw.org 8 points 1 day ago

I mean, the reality is that they’ve mostly just cannibalised the conservative voter base.

The election results show that they’re not exactly sweeping labor strongholds, a lot of labor’s losses coming from SNP, the greens, lib dems and Plaid Cymru. Which is to say, that the voters aren’t pivoting to the right, they’re just pivoting away from labor.

If anything, it seems like media efforts to shove the voter base to the right, and labor’s effort to chase the media narrative, has just driven traditional conservative voters insane, while making left wing voters pissed at labor for moving so far rightwards.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 8 points 2 days ago

“Solves 40% of customer issues”

Or, 40% of users give up after being stonewalled by a bot.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Thermo dynamics, in short.

In long, because adding some heat recovery system to the engine block would mean decreasing the cooling efficiency of that block, thus making the block hotter, and decreasing the efficiency of the engine. Since the engine makes power based on the differential of heat/pressure from the top of the stroke and the bottom of the stroke. If you make the system hotter, then less energy can be extracted per unit of heat produced from burning fuel. Any energy generation from the waste heat of the block would be offset by efficiency losses in the engine it’s self.

Now, most engines don’t actually extract all the energy they could from that differential, which is why turbo chargers are a thing. They use excess heat in the gas exhausted out of the block, expand it to ambient pressure and temperature over a turbine, that turbine then runs a compressor, and that compressor raises the pressure at the air intake. More air entering the engine in the same volume allows for more volume of fuel without having more fuel than oxidizer to burn it, thus increasing the energy density of the charge, increasing the differential in heat between the top and bottom stroke, increasing power and/or efficiency depending on it’s tuning. But that’s not utilizing heat from the engine block, but heat in the exhaust.

In reality, an internal combustion engine and a turbine operate on the same principle. Make gas hot, it expands and makes a thing move. The difference is just that in a steam turbine, the gas being expanded with heat to do work is steam, and in an internal combustion engine it’s the exhaust gasses of the combustion it’s self that are expanding to do work. In a piston engine that expansion is acting on a linear reciprocating piston, but in a turbine it’s can’t on a spinning set of blades in a continual flow. In the middle there is the gas turbine, where the working fluid is the combustion gas and it’s working on a spinning set of blades, this is what a jet engine is.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 6 points 5 days ago

It’s not just Reddit, so many companies try and shunt you off a mobile web page and on to their app, despite many apps being little more than a pre loaded mobile web pages.

Why? Because users can modify how they interact with a web page, they can install extensions that modify how the code from the website is run, or just deny web pages access to some other process. There is very little a company can do about that, they have no control on how the user chooses to run the page. But… with an app, users can’t modify how the program is run. No plug ins, no web extensions, no choosing not to run some part of it, just the software as distributed by the company. Meaning full fat ads and complete access to any information the OS will let them have, way easier to make money on users that way.

Technically, it’s possible to alter any program, but it’s very hard if don’t have the source code, and it’s illegal to do so in many cases thanks to section 1201 of the DMCA, especially if you try and distribute that modification or tell others how to do it.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 9 points 1 week ago

Ginkos are crazy because like, they were the last branch of a dead tree of life, secluded deep in mountain range in central China, likely to go extinct next time there was a significant climatic shift in the area.

And then humans were like “damn, I like this tree, I will plant it literally all over the world” and in all likelihood this just massively improved their chances of surviving a few more million years, since now they’re not liable to get one shot by a single event in the area they’re native to.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 2 points 1 week ago

I don’t mind phone calls, but do not fucking do a video call. Like, I’m and not done up properly, I am probably walking around doing a chore, also, the quality will be shit because my connection will be questionable.

Audio is fine, you don’t need to see my face to catch up.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Realistically, to alter culture, it is required that the structure of an institution must be modified as well, the personalities and priorities of those who end up leading are selected for by the incentives and structure of an organization. The people who “play the game right” so to speak, end up in leadership and leadership reinforces and defends the structure that got them where they are. But just swapping out leaderships without altering structure and incentives will lead to little change in the long run.

Ultimately nasa does have to play politics to receive funding from congress, that’s always been the case and always will be, there is no space exploration without public funding. That means doing stuff that is exciting to the public and convinces them to pressure congress to support it. I’d argue the flawed issue that has lead to some problems is them playing “job creation” politics which forces them to commit to wasteful facilities and companies that have outlived their usefulness to space exploration.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Completely irrelevant to a discussion of trumps ability to alter election outcomes using the federal executive.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

There have been several elections recently that they’ve lost, and there isn’t really anything the federal executive can do to alter those outcomes. The federal executive (trump and his people) can sue to challenge results on grounds of violating some federal law, but they have to actually win the case for that to effect anything. There is no pathway for them to unilaterally block or overturn election results.

The SAVE act was attempting to change that by moving a lot of oversight and management up to the federal level and under the executive branch, but that failed to pass.

In all likelihood there will be a flurry of legal challenges from trump’s people after the midterms, but those won’t stop people taking office while they’re being fought in court, and realistically they will lose the cases since they’re not based on anything.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 10 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Lmao, you could also just… not instinctively call people slurs during a confrontation? Like, so many other expletives you could use?

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A lot of the “meat imitation” products that got lots of press and media attention were highly engineered products with a lot of unique processes involved, as well as a lot of unique technologies. The raw soy protein input wasn’t the expensive part, it was all the additives to make it more “meat like” that required expensive new production lines, in addition to all the marketing and R&D (paying off the VC investors who funded it really).

There is also the grocery store distribution side of things. These products were niche and didn’t sell particularly large volumes, so grocery stores marked them up a lot to justify the opportunity cost of using shelf space on them rather than something that would have sold at a higher volume.

The reality is, you can get plenty of cheap as hell meat substitutes, they’ve been around for decades (millennia really), you just have to go to speciality stores, or order them online, where enough volume is sold to allow for low margins. meat imitations sold as speciality products in mainstream stores are expensive. An example of a substituted as supposed to an imitation would be textured vegetable protein (often abbreviated to TVP)which can be used in the same way as ground meat. It won’t be the same, you will be able to tell the difference, but, it won’t be worse(assuming it’s seasoned properly) just different, like substituting ground pork for ground beef. And TVP can absolutely be found for much cheaper than ground meat, if purchased from the right place.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Also, like, it wasn’t just a “decision to stop” it was the end of a coincidence of factors. The mid century climatic conditions that led to several years of poor grass growth, with the combined hunting efforts of European American settlers on rail roads supported by the army’s policies against the Great Plains Indians, south eastern Indians displaced in to the great planes, and Great Plains Indians intensifying hunting via sophisticated methods they’d developed using horseback and fire arms, all driven by a demand for buffalo hides for use in industrial machinery. The end of the bad climatic conditions and the collapse of the hide trade due to development of other industrial materials is what stoped the over hunting.

With the pressures of hunting decreased and a historic climatic event over, the population was able to rebound somewhat, but, due to the encroachment of farms and ranching never really recover. Also the genetic bottleneck of the population probably hasn’t helped things but that’s not super well studied.

 

I’m aware of things like framework and they’re a cool system, but they’re limited in what chipsets can be used by the mother boards they offer.

I’m thinking in the context of a cheap low spec system that can be handed out for use by a group. Most of the options available are just very pricy.

Maybe something like a SBC would be a better fit since there are plenty of cheap options out there and they can be mounted in a custom built shell with the other needed elements.

A thought that crossed my mind was ordering printed circuit board and just soldering on the sockets and the like, but that’s a very involved process with a lot that could go wrong. Especially for someone with very little experience.

Short of custom ordering from a company that does such things, are there any systems for building a mother board?

This is more out of curiosity about what options there are out there. Any other thoughts people have about custom built laptops or interesting things in that space?

 

I’m looking at various single board computers ( think raspberry pi) to host a server on. Namely for hosting media, an email, and perhaps a web site/fediverse instance/blog/forum on.

I’m under an assumption that a SBC and some hard drives could handle this on the hardware side. Am I totally off the mark? And what kind of os and other soft wear should I consider using?

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