I have a quandary.

Suppose there is a coin that, when flipped, it lands head’s side up on a table.

Without picking the coin up to confirm the side that is down is tails. Could you ever know that it is tails ?

Assume in this world that the coin has a heads side and tails side when held in your hand.

Assume you cannot view the coin’s two sides in any other way than picking it up.

Is this just a variation of Schrödinger’s Cat ? Or is it more “does a tree make a sound if no one is around to hear it” ?

On another platform a female journalist warned other women not to use menstrual tracking apps.

I worked in a co-op during college that sold very nice paper journals for tracking menstrual cycles. I replied to that thread mentioning that very nice specialized paper journals still exist.

Someone ( a man ) replied back to tell me that ADHD women have enough to deal with these days and proceeded to list all the ways something like that could fail.

I suggested sending emails to one's self along the lines of "update your diary" which someone could then read at home and take care of things.

Since I don't have ADHD my question is if people who do have ADHD really do find it to be that incapacitating?

I know it is an Internet thing to keep replying without a reason, even if it is only out of momentum. I'm wondering if that was the deal in that thread.

Okay, so this is getting really long, I'll put the ask up front: I have a strategy, I think it is reasonable. Now is a point where I can easily change things, and it won't be so easily later. So I'm looking to see if anyone has trod this road before and can recommend any of:

1. a different build system that will be easier to manage for this use case
2. a different strategy for using cmake that will be easier to manage
3. any gotchas I should be aware of, even if you don't have better solutions.

Background

I have a project I'm working on where the ultimate deliverable will be a hardware device with 3-4 different microcontrollers coordinating with each other and interacting with a PC-ish platform. This is a clean rewrite of a C++ codebase. Due to the microcontroller (and some of the PC APIs) being C++, the language of choice for most of it is likely to remain C/C++.

I'm succeeded in setting up a build system for embedded code. The old code was arduino, so it relies a lot on those libraries, but I've managed to set up enough custom cmake to get off of the ardunio tools altogether, even if I am borrowing their libraries and some of the "smarts" built into the system about setting build flags, etc. So far, I have a dockerized toolchain (cmake + make + gcc-arm-none-eabi) that can successfully build ARM binaries for the target platform.

The thing that I'm up against now is that I'd like to have a robust off-target unit testing infrastructure. My ideal case is that everything in the embedded system will be broken down into libraries that have clear interfaces, then to use unit tests with mocks to get high coverage of test cases. I'll still need some HIL tests, but because those are harder to set up and run, I want to use those for integration and validation.

In terms of OSes available, we're mostly working on Windows systems using WSL for linux. I'd like things to be as linux-based as possible to support CI on github, etc.

Goals and Cmake limitations

I started out using cmake because I hate it least of the tools I've used, and I am at least pretty far up the learning curve with it. But a limitation I'm hitting is that you can't do a mixed compile with two different toolchains in one build. The reasons why cmake has this limitation seem reasonable to me, even if it is annoying. You can easily change the toolchain that your code is built with, but that seems to be largely targeted at cross-compiling the same binaries for different systems. What I want to do is:

• build my code libraries with embedded settings for linking to the embedded binaries and build those embedded binaries (the end product)
• build my code libraries with linux-ish tools and link them against unit tests to have a nice CI test process
• (eventually) also be able to build windows binaries for the PC components -- when I get to that point, I'd like to get away from the MSVC compilers, but will use them if I have to

Current strategy

My current plan is to configure a library build like this (pseudocode):

add_library(mylib sources)
if (BUILD_TYPE STREQUAL BUILD_TYPE_EMBEDDED)
<embedded config>
elseif (BUILD_TYPE STREQUAL BUILD_TYPE_LINUX)
<linux config, if any>
endif()

#unit tests are built for each library
if (BUILD_TYPE STREQUAL BUILD_TYPE_LINUX)
add_executable(mylib_test sources test_sources)
target_link_libraries(mylib gtest etc.)
endif()

For the rollup binaries, I make the whole target conditional

if (BUILD_TYPE STREQUAL BUILD_TYPE_EMBEDDED)
add_executable(myembedap sources)
target_link_libraries(mylib)
endif()

Then the build script (outside cmake) is something like

cd build/embedded
cmake <path to src> <set embedded toolchain> -DBUILD_TYPE=embedded
make
cd ../../build/linux
cmake <path to src> -DBUILD_TYPE=linux
make

Things I like about this strategy:

• It's relatively simple to do all the builds or just one of the builds (that control would go in the shell script)
• I have one source tree for the whole build
• It lets configuration be near code
• It lets tests be near code.
• I think it's extensible to cover the PC component builds in the future

Things that worry me:

• It feels like a hack
• Support for off-target tests feels like it should be solved problem and I'm worried I'm missing something

Thanks for reading. If you made it this far, you have my gratitude. Here's a video with funny out of office messages that I enjoyed.

I hope this question will become clear by the following example:

When I state "Mother's Cooking," As a native English speaker, to me the sentence fragment is read kind of "in order" so to speak, each word being read in the order it is presented for me to understand the sentence.

However, when this sentence fragment is translated to Chinese, it becomes:

妈妈 做 的 菜
māma zuò de cài

Which I literally translate to:

"Mother's cooking of Dish"

and in practice I begin to learn to look for the phrase after "de" then "go back" to the "māma zuò" to figure out the whole sentence. Does this make sense? I have to go to the end of the sentence and then refer back to the part "in front" of it so to speak?

What is going on here, and is this perceived as such by native speakers? Do all native speakers feel like their language flows linearly ? I think I read somewhere that some languages start their sentences with the verbs at the front of the sentence (Arabic?)

I'm hoping that a linguist will be able to explain to me what phenomenon I'm experiencing.

Thanks in advance!

Source for sentence/grammar

This is a question I've been wondering about for a while as a home baker and amateur food scientist. Why do recipes for whipped, fluffy desert components like whipped cream or buttercream icing always seem to call for powdered sugar? If I want to add sugar to a something, why would I also want to add the anti-caking agent (usually starch I think) for powdered sugar as well? Is that starch actually something beneficial for a whipped desert? Because as far as I can tell, the only time powdered sugar makes sense is when it's dusted on top of something or incorporated into a desert that is being mixed by hand and doesn't have the shear of a mixer to dissolve or emulsify the granulated sugar. And I've never had any issues just using regular granulated sugar and honestly prefer it to powdered sugar for icings, whipped cream and the like. If a recipe calls for powdered sugar, but it's being combined with a mixer or beaters I just use regular sugar and the results are great.

Anyone have any thoughts or experience as to what I'm overlooking? Or is it just a hold over from a time when electric mixers weren't common and you needed a finer sugar to incorporate the sugar by hand?

Need to apply lacquer on a mild steel product that is zinc plated and has some vibratory surface polishing on top of it, which wears the zinc down a bit.

Need to pass 500 hours on a British Standard salt spray test (BS EN ISO 9227: 2017)

If anyone has any sources on a good lacquer supplier please let me know. Tried one by LVH coatings but it didn't pass more than 300 hours.

It's 2024 if I remember correctly and budgeting is a fairly common practice. Companies are obsessed with data. Yet when I got to the store and buy a videogame, dap drywall joint compount, and 3 avocados the transactions is just the store and the amount. It'd be nice if I could track what I've been buying, categories them into entertainment, home improvement, and groceries respectively.

I'm guessing this information actually is tracked but is only used for marketing purposes. But I'm curious, does anyone have more information on why transactions can't at least optionally support extra metadata about what was actually bought?

I've been having issues with powdercoating on top of zinc plated mild steel sometimes. Have issues like small dots visible instead of a smooth texture.

It looks like how a zit or pimple looks on the skin.

After zinc plating, it is pre heated for 15 mins at 150 degrees celsius. Then sand it with some 80 no sandpaper. Finally powder coat it and cure it again for 20 mins.

Amy inputs would be appreciated. Thanks guys.

Attached some images below:

https://cubeupload.com/im/Temporalator/Screenshot2024061610.jpg

https://cubeupload.com/im/Temporalator/18bScreenshot2024061610.jpg

Edit:
Hi guys, I posted recently about facing issues with powdercoating zinc plated mild steel. And I'm really thankful for all the responses I got. The zit like small dots I had last time were pretty much solved with outgassing.

I am now facing another issue where the product has sort of tiny indents or pinholes. I can get my nail in them. Shared some photos below. If you guys could shed some light on what these are and why this is happening despite outgassing, it would be great.

Currently outgassing the parts at 250 degrees celsius for 30 mins. The curing temperature after that is 200 degrees celsius for 20 mins.

https://cubeupload.com/im/Temporalator/WhatsAppImage2024062.jpeg

https://cubeupload.com/im/Temporalator/f15WhatsAppImage2024062.jpeg

https://cubeupload.com/im/Temporalator/15eWhatsAppImage2024062.jpeg

https://cubeupload.com/im/Temporalator/9caWhatsAppImage2024062.jpeg

Thanks everyone.

So I continued to wet the bed way past 7 and I have no idea why.

different family members chalked it up to different reason:

1. I am lazy
2. I am a very deep sleeper
3. I have a very anxious personality
4. bladder issues

Amongst other things.

One thing I can see being a cause was that I was not raised in a peaceful household. It was a very violent household. not in the sense of physical violence like broken arms and such, more as in lots of yelling and screaming and things like that. My family really didn't know how to communicate well.

But I was not the only child raised in my household and I was the only one who wet the bed.

Anyways, different thing were tried, things to supposedly "fix" my bladder. shaming, etc. Growing up, my family had to always wake me up at around 4 or 5 am and take me to the bathroom, otherwise there was a good chance I'd wet the bed.

I personally was getting worried that it was a problem I'd have forever and it'd be an impediment to my social life (as in no sleepovers and etc (not that I had had friends at that age anyways)).

But I did start to notice that once I got into high school, it started happening less and less. Still did happen, but just wasn't as common. Then, I remember the last time it happened was when I was either in grade 10 or 11 but I am pretty sure grade 10.

Then that was it.

It just stopped on its own.

Weird thing is, I changed nothing about myself.

I'd still classify myself as lazy and a very deep sleeper and I still have an incredibly anxious personality.

The only thing that changed is that when I am asleep, and as my bladder is filling up, something in my bladder (or my brain) instead of just releasing, would instead block the urine until I wake up in pain and go to the bathroom. The change really caught my attention when I woke up with a really full bladder like 2-3 years ago and I remembered how a little over 10 years ago (I am in my 30s), no way my body would've reacted to it by holding it in involuntarily until I woke up.

I tried doing a bit of googling to figure out what parts of the body are involved in the process of holding in one's pee overnight to try and see what are the possible reasons for the change to occur so late in me to no avail.

I am forever curious what happened in my body to make that change happen so late but not sure I will ever know.

I bought a Timex Expedition North Titanium Automatic a few months ago and have been enjoying it, but it gains about 10s a day that I have to correct. Nowadays we have incredibly accurate and precise clocks that can tell us exactly what time it is, but all mechanical clocks and watches have some amount of inaccuracy.

How did people account for inaccurate clocks in the past? Even if time didn't need to be standardized outside of a community until the railroads and a central clock in town could act as a reference for the entire community, wouldn't the central community clock drift? Eventually the central clock could say it was midnight at sunset. While people can tell that is incorrect, how could they say to what extent it was incorrect?

I am looking for practical ways to prove the Earth is round using materials accessible to the average person. I have zero interest in disproving Flat Earth folks.

I am inspired by Dan Olson's (Folding Ideas) excellent video where he is able to do this measuring the curvature of a lake near his home that has a very specific geography that lends itself to this sort of experiment. I've seen all sorts of ways to prove this measuring shadows and poles, using gyroscopes, etc. and wanted to know if there are any practical guides for proving once and for all that the Earth is round for yourself relying on nothing more than experimentation.

What I'm not looking for:

• Math relying on flight times/charts
• Video/picture evidence
• Deductive proofs built on agreed upon premises
• Expensive tests
• Extremely time consuming projects
• Underwhelming results (relying on a probabilistic argument for a round Earth from the evidence.)

What I am looking for:

• Practical experiments
• Things I could potentially do without spending much money
• Tests that aren't largely comprised of accepting someone else's research
• Potentially math-heavy evidence
• Results that are strong and conclusive

I've thought of finding some easy to test version of Eratosthenes' proof using two poles. I've also thought about using a balloon and sending something to space like what is done in this Tom Scott video. Nothing seems well documented in such a way as for me to be able to follow it at home.

TL;DR: I think it would be a meaningful experience to have the power to prove the Earth is round by myself, for myself. I can only compare this desire to the desire a child with a telescope has when wishing to observe Saturn or Mars themselves for the first time. It's not to prove anything or to settle doubts, but for the personal value of independently observing this astronomical fact oneself.

This is probably a niche subject, but here we go. The album version of Protect Ya Neck is censored and I hate how it was done. Luckily we have Protect Ya Neck (The Bloody Version) from the single. I don't like all of this version, so I took my European remaster and edited it all to replace the >drrrrtttt< with the swearing.

Today I got the Music on Vinyl release from 2009 and liked it enough, I figured I'd patch it. When I brought it into Audition I noticed that the audio was inverted.

Is there any reasoning behind this?

Savannah Locke’s “Oh Holy Night” has a vocal quality that I’ve heard many times before in other songs and I was always curious what it was called, as well as the general EQ settings to reproduce it.

I name this song because I feel like it’s a very over the top example that I first heard over the holidays on a random playlist. I can only describe the vocals as “paper-like”. The style is folksy but it’s that particular sound of the vocals I’m interested in identifying.

Also, if there’s a particular nomenclature to these different types of styles or a glossary of some kind I’d appreciate it.

Full disclosure: I’ve sat behind a mixing board as an enthusiast but am no means educated beyond lows, mediums, highs.

Many thanks in advance!

I live in the EU. I recently applied for a credit card, and the banker asked me (about my job): "Is it a management role?"

I realized that it is a question I have been asked several times in the past by banks. I tried a cursory google & Reddit search, but I haven't found anyone being curious about this.

I'll try here then. Does anyone know why bankers ask this question? How does it matter? Are "individual contributors" seen as worse/riskier customers than managers?

I have my own informal, anecdotal opinion, but I'm hoping to hear some more informed answer.

We are a household of 5 people with 2 little ones. That means we get to experience the joy and pleasures of viruses the little ones tend to bring home. After a few of those I've noticed a pattern, each viral infection within the household tends to last 2+ weeks.

1. Patient zero brings the virus home and has symptoms
2. One of the adults starts developing symptoms shortly after. Everyone else is fine.
3. Each other person goes down like domino's but with few days in between. By the time the 3rd or last person is ill the 1st and 2nd person are recovered and healthy. In some instances there my be 1 person that never develops any symptoms, or has no symptoms but is very tired/weak.

This got me thinking, and for context I know nothing about viruses or medicine in general. What is happening here?

• Do all people get infected but not everyone develops symptoms?
• Do some peoples immune systems successfully fight off the viral infection completely or partially?

I'm ruling out anyone being able to avoid contact to escape viral infection due to the size and social dynamics of the household.

Greetings Folks, I apologize if this is the wrong spot for this but I'd like to cast a net to see if I can get any additional thoughts or help.

I recently started a new job as NGS Library Prep Tech - sadly I had only begun training on this briefly at my last position but only got an introduction to Speed/Mag Bead clean up. I was hired because the lab is growing quickly and has had issues with organizational stuff in the past and that is my strong suit (my last position I did a lot of clonal DNA / miniprep stuff as far as the wet work went).

The person I was replacing at my new job was only there for two days and didn't really help a whole lot other than hand me a haphazardly written protocol and said "practice by cleaning ladders at different bead concentrations and running them on a gel."

Did that and was told they look good.

Fast forward to using actual samples: There were a set that needed to be redone because the final pool was lost. When I did my first qubit quants after the post PCR speed bead clean up I noticed that the quant concentrations were ~80% less than what they had been previously.

Today I have some remaining sample that I can push through PCR, my plan is to quant 8 out of the 53 samples of the pre / post PCR plate and then again after I do clean up.

As far as clean up goes I had been trying to do the whole plate at once, but I'm going to go back to just completing a column at a time to ensure my timing is better.

Are there particular spots in the Speed / Mag Bead clean up process that I should be aware that I could be washing away / losing DNA?

Do people have any tips on how to be more 'sure footed' in this process?

Ways that I can better practice and say "yup, I've got this!"?

Thanks for the help, and if this should be posted somewhere else please let me know, but as this is 'science' related I thought it fit best here.

I've been trying to set up a dev enviornment for Tildes, mainly so that I can actually test my MR (!136), and I've been running into a few issues.

However, since we also have a new influx of people who might be interested in contributing to Tildes, it seems like a good time to collect resources on setting up the dev environment, as well as helping anyone running into issues.

So, if you have issues or advice, post them here! I'll be adding my questions in a comment shortly.

Relevant wiki pages:

• Development / Initial Setup
• Development / General Development Info

Edit: A more recent post on setting up the dev environment on Apple Silicon / M1 Macs

Merrily abusing my piano with my horrifying lack of skill, I keep noticing songs beginning with the notes C-F:

• Moonlight Shadows
• Auld Lang Syne
• Es hatt ein Bauer ein junges Weib
• Der sad to katte på et bord
• Forest Green

It sorta feels like the melody exists in the area around F, while C is used as kind of special effect. Are there some connection or tradition behind those C-F openings, or is it just me seeing patterns where there is none?

I know this is a weird thing to ask, but google is failing me and I don't have enough agricultural knowledge to know where to start looking. I'm hoping this isn't another food thing I'm the only one who thinks about.

I love carrots but I'm increasingly irritated by the tiny long carrots that I can find in the markets. I just bought a bag of carrots that had a number of them thinner than my pinky finger. In the meanwhile whenever I look at cooking shows on Youtube that are made in other countries they have thicker, longer, or otherwise more substantial carrots. The ones in Japan seem huge; some of them look like they have a 2" diameter!

Is it just that they are using a different variety? If so, why would they be using those tiny ones here?

Why aren’t electric vehicles fitted with an alternator that can charge the battery while one drives; similar to how a gas engines recharge their batteries? With all the advancement in technology it would seem that they have figured it out and won’t implement it to force people to pay for electricity or my own lack of knowledge on the subject.

Hello!

Some of you may know that I have been developing an iOS client for Tildes.

I’ve seen other devs like @wababa and @talklittle also working on awesome apps, and have seen some discussion there around collaborating on some of the core parts (scraping the website, etc.).

I’ve also been in touch with @efraimbart, who is working on the awesome Everything protocol project.

I’m sure there are other devs out there that I haven’t seen, and this post is a call-out for all of you.

Until an API is available, any similar project will face the same initial blocker: needing to scrape the website for data.

Is there any interest from the community on collaborating on that part? For example, developing a public library that encapsulates all of the interactions with Tildes and any client can talk to with a consistent API. Or, even better, collaborating on an official API for Tildes (which is, of course, itself an open-source project).

To that end, I’ve released some of the code I use to accomplish this in Surfboard. Maybe it can help someone build an iOS client, or inspire some of us to build a more generic solution :D. It’s far from perfect or complete, and isn’t even an actual package you can just import and use at this time, but at the very least it documents many of the endpoints and interactions.

Have a great weekend :)

I’ve just heard of the new BBS style forum for Gemini space and wondered if the properties of Tildes could adequately translate to Gemini space. In other words; could Tildes become accessible in Gemini space?

gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/

I’m also curious if there are other Gemini users here but that might be better off as a separate post on a different section of the site.

I used to work with a guy who had three PhD's. (two in Europe, one in the US). He had them in math, chemistry and biology. He said a few fairly outlandish things over the timeframe that I knew him, but every one I ever dug into it turned out was basically accurate.

One of the things he mentioned in passing, but which I haven't been able to confirm to my satisfaction is that when plants reach certain high temps, they start producing H2O2 instead of H2O. (around 45 Celcius)

I've read a few papers that seem to indicate that part at least is true, but I've never found anything that says whether or not this puts plants into the 'consumer' column for oxygen.

Anyone here able to point me to something that has this answer? or anyone here know the answer, even if it's not specifically been published yet?

Before all else, I want to point out that this is a sensible topic and it is easy to go off the well-meaning path — my motives are strictly curiosity and I believe this site can actually have a fruitful discussion around it. I would also like to mention that I have a quite limited, and very Europe/West-centric history knowledge, so please acknowledge my bias/ignorance. I don’t even know enough about the Western part, let alone enough to compare it with other cultures’ respective systems at the time.

I have talked about this topic numerous times with friends and while we had some theories why it might have started there, none of them were particularly convincing. Nonetheless, here are a few reasons we could come up with (of course it is multi-faceted), please expand/argue about them if you feel, or write new ones as well (I try to be brief here, partially due to hitting the edges of my knowledge in many cases, but also to not bias people to any particular topic):

Religion, Philosophy

Christianity is/was the predominant religion of the region. Plenty of important discoveries/inventions came from monks “learning about God through the natural world”, and many branches of Christianity believed in sharing not only their religion, but knowledge as well - Jesuits being particularly famous for teaching, and collecting vast amounts of knowledge. (Obviously, the Catholic Church had plenty of wrongdoings as well, and was not opposed to keeping people in the dark)

Another notable religion which deserves a mention in this topic is Jewish. I am unfortunately even less knowledgeable about it, but the number of Jewish scientists and discoveries is staggeringly high. From what I gathered, they have a strong culture of arguments/discussions regarding the Torah, and blind acceptance is not the way (as opposed to the Bible), which might have some relevance.

The Arab world had an important relationship with Europe, but from this perspective it may not be as important.

With that said, I really can’t argue whether these are significantly different than, say, Eastern religions. Maybe the Abrahamic three are a bit more individualistic, which might have a bigger relevance here in the direction Western philosophy has gone.

Economic system

I know even less about this topic. One important point I do know a bit about is the question of loans, which were forbidden by the Christian Church (for a while) and Islam, but not for Jews (so loans could be obtained in Europe). Not sure if there is a difference between different parts of the world here that is of relevance.

Capitalism itself is also a result of these philosophical ideas, so there might be more to this financial aspect.

Society, societal norms

A prominent theory might be the existence of universities. While different kinds of school systems have existed earlier - to my ignorant knowledge - Europe was ahead in terms of education. This is quite self-explanatory, accumulating smart people and ideas together greatly improves their “productivity”.

Colonialism

Self-explanatory, but if this is the answer, I would also like to extend the question to why the Western world was the first at that at such an extent? That also required technological innovation and a motivation for it. Though it itself has plenty possible explanations like good geographic location.

Climate, geography

Europe has a generally mild climate, well-fit for efficient agriculture and animal husbandry. It also has numerous rivers. It is not the Biblical garden where you have fruits all year long, so you do have to rely on your own work to survive winters, but it is definitely not the desert neither. But that is not a convincing answer either, because plenty of regions are similar, and early scientific advancements come from the more desert-y Arab word, with perhaps harsher conditions.
Europe is also well-connected to other regions.

War, Politics

I quite liked this answer one of my friends came up with (within our circles that is) — due to many, small political entities being so close to each other, there were lots of conflicts, many of which resulted in wars — which are significant drivers of “innovation” even today. Pardon my ignorance, but other regions were mostly ruled by huge empires, that later fall apart and were conquered again, or small settlements with little outside contact. This necessitated less novelty in those conquests.

But even non-war conflicts themselves could have had positive effects, the aristocracy of Europe had strong connections with shared events - besides the more “romantic”/formal aspects, it was also a hub for many intellectuals from different countries to engage in deep discussions. Add to it that most research/discovery/philosophy came initially from people of aristocratic backgrounds.

I could write many more, but I am afraid that would have even less substance. I would be very interested in your input on this, what unique context allowed this intellectual growth that resulted in many aspects of our modern lives we take for granted?

So it is 80 degrees fahrenheit here today which usually would not be an issue for me but today I was too hot and sweaty. I am perimenopausal (49 years old) and I knew that could mess with heat tolerance. What I had not realized until today is that heat intolerance is also a side effect of many blood pressure medicines, antidepressants and allergy meds. And I am on all of those now.

I have just ordered some gadget that is a fan that goes around my neck and can be recharged via USB which seemed worth trying. And of course I will drink plenty of water, and try to stay in air conditioning whenever I can. Any other advice on how to deal with increased sensitivity to heat / higher heat intolerance? It is still early enough in the summer that the worst summer heat here is yet to come, so having some more tips might help me. Thanks!

Do you guys think they're using rate increases to kill off all the overleveraged homeowners in an effort to create a sell-off and thereby lower housing costs?

Could someone smarter than I please explain what is going on... or is our inflation that bad? Seems like some of the inflation might be what I've read as greedflation. I didn't realize we jumped almost 3.75% in less than a year last year...

I recently learned about the Wooting two HE, a keyboard with analog input. The interesting feature is something they call "rapid trigger", which defines the actuation point as when the key changes direction (up or down), rather than the key reaching a specific height.

I'm wondering how much faster this could let someone press or release a key. I tried searching online but I can't find anyone who has measured the average time for typists to reach the actuation point, or even the average velocity of a key-press.

Hello ~tech,

I have a Mi Power Bank 2C (PLM06ZM) and wish to upgrade it to able to charge or be charged with a 65W USB C port, with minimal damage, harm and according to USB C PD standards.

My chargers use 9V, 12V, 15V and 20V, the last one which my ThinkPad X280 uses.

Online searches for a 65W power bank enclosure without the batteries yield no suitable results, so I might need to use a PD Decoy board.

Are there any advice, links to guides and resources I could use to accomplish my objective?

Thank you.

I currently have a setup using Google Workspace, StableBit DrivePool, and Cloud Drive.

I recently received notification from Google stating that I will no longer be permitted to exceed their allotted storage limit of 5TB. However, I am currently utilizing over 50TB of storage.

In just one month, my service with Google will be transitioned to read-only mode. Considering my familiarity with DrivePool, I am concerned about the potential for drive corruption if I continue using the service until I find a suitable alternative.

I need help to determine if my drive would be at risk of getting corrupted during this transitional period?

I've been a computer scientist in the field of AI for almost 15 years. Much of my time has been devoted to classical AI; things like planning, reasoning, clustering, induction, logic, etc. This has included (but had rarely been my focus) machine learning tasks (lots of Case-Based Reasoning). For whatever reason though, the deep learning trend never really interested me until recently. It really just felt like they were claiming huge AI advancements when all they really found was an impressive way to store learned data (I know this is an understatement).

Over time my opinion on that has changed slightly, and I have been blown away with the boom that is happening with transformers (GPTs specifically) and large language models. Open source projects are creating models comparable to OpenAIs behemoths with far less training and parameters which is making me take another look into GPTs.

What I find surprising though is that they seem to have only experimented with language. As far as I understand the inputs/outputs, the language is tokenized into bytes before prediction anyway. Why does it seem like (or rather the community act like) the technology can only be used for LLMs?

For example, what about a planning domain? You can specify actions in a domain in such a manner that tokenization would be trivial, and have far fewer tokens then raw text. Similarly you could generate a near infinite amount of training data if you wanted via other planning algorithms or simulations. Is there some obvious flaw I'm not seeing? Other examples might include behavior and/or state prediction.

I'm not saying that out of the box a standard GPT architecture is a guaranteed success for plan learning/planning... But it seems like it should be viable and no one is trying?

I'm having some trouble getting the local developer environment set up on Apple hardware, specifically it seems because Virtualbox, which is used as the provider, is not properly functioning on Apple hardware.

Is there anyone here who has managed to get it up and running?

I understand how distributing bond etfs could work, you get part of the coupons when the etf distributes profits, which compensates somewhat for the price changes of the etf. Interest rates would affect the price of the etf but that would be partly compensated by the distribution.

But how does this work on accumulating etfs? If the profits are always reinvested in the fund, shouldn't the price of the fund always go up? Assuming all/most bonds dont default, interest rates would affect the price but that would be compensated by the reinvested profits?

I am missing something here, dont see the point of a bond etf if the price can change so much.

As the title says, could someone explain the Fediverse or this whole concept of federated instances?

I looked at Mastodon a few months back and recently at Lemmy and read a few articles and I still don't quite get it. I joined a Lemmy instance but didn't see any content from other instances. (God this makes me feel old)

To me, a non techie (who is reasonably computer literate), the problem with all these federation based platforms is that they don't seem immediately intuitive to laypeople.

It also seems to have the problem of individual instances being quite parochial in that there seem to be a lot of niche instances but few that are necessarily generic for an international audience, or conversely instances that are too vague ('this is an instance for humans') whereas with something like Reddit you just sign up and post in subs just like vbulletin based forums and subforums back in the day. Tildes is essentially similar in principle.

Please feel free to tell me, if I'm an old man yelling at the Cloud.

I use Firefox for Android. One thing I love about some web apps are when they designed to be a "installable" Progressive Web App (PWA). It looks like Tildes doesn't support that. Perhaps it's a silly question, but does anyone by chance know if this can be forced to some degree? (Beyond adding a shortcut to one's desktop.)

Without an app available yet, that's my next go to normally. (Yep, I said yet. I'm eager to see your first release, @talklittle. 💜)

And ye

This type of game seems to be the new hotness right now, and there are now enough that I feel like they’ll need their own genre identifier.

Is there a broadly accepted one? If so, is it good?

And, if not, what do you think games of that type should be called?

I’ve see a few suggestions here and there, but none of them have felt right to me. I’m interested in almost theorycrafting the optimal genre identifier (in the vein of “procedural death labyrinth”). What are the unifying traits of games of these types, how do we best identify them without simply stringing together other genres (e.g. “reverse bullet hell idle action roguelike”), and what can we use that has “stickiness” as a term?

As I recall, about 2-3 years ago I had experimented with what is called the npm install xyz through some tutorials, etc. The objective was to improve my tooling or toolchain at least with things like css/js minification, etc. along with Bootstrap customization. The idea was to then move on to other newer learnings like react, etc.

But I was soon disgruntled by the whole process! Neither bootstrap turned out to be an easy horse to tame, and NPM was like this astronomical universe of packages that keep on downloading into your folders! I soon lost taste of the whole thing and kept using my tried and tested stack of PHP scripts and using stock Bootstrap through CDNs.

But today, I want to give it another shot. Has NPM improved than earlier days? What is the best way to go about building a toolchain using it? Are there any useful guides that make the whole process easier to digest?

Asking for a friend. 😉

In all seriousness, the question was inspired by the news out of Google and specifically @Whom's comment here.

What should non-technical laypeople know about AI?

The info doesn't have to be limited to just this particular news item either. What information would you want included in an AI 101 rundown? What is it currently used for? What will it do in the future? What are its limitations? What are its potentials?

And, of course, how should people interpret stuff like today's big news item?

I know there are some Germans on Tildes, figure at least one of y’all might know. How does a typical Autobahn differ from a typical Interstate in design and construction? How often is repair work done and how long does it last? What work would be required to upgrade an Interstate to Autobahn standards?

A project I'm working on requires me to cover a bit of comedy targeting Lennart Poettering as it's tangentially related, and I'd like to have more context even though it's not strictly necessary. I'm a nontechnical Linux user who used the OS before systemd came around, but really the only impact on my life it's had is that I occasionally use systemctl to control services.

Though I wasn't paying as much attention to the community around the time major distributions switched, I've been casually exposed to criticism of it ever since I came back, and I'd like to make sense of it all and form an opinion beyond "I like Fedora and GNOME and it seems to go hand-in-hand with those". I've read The Biggest Myths, the Wikipedia article, some stuff on freedesktop.org, and of course absorbed the venom slung back and forth over systemd in every FOSS community, but it's hard to get a full picture. And a picture from 2022, for that matter, as a lot of this information comes from its early days. Help me out?

The English word 'crane' means a large bird or a giant lever-thing for moving heavy stuff. The Hungarian word 'daru' means both of the same things.

English and Hungarian are about as unrelated as languages get ... and yet, I keep bumping into parallels like that.

Thoughts, anyone?

I thought about asking this over here but didn't want to potentially derail the thread.

As a lay user, I honestly don't know what Electron is and couldn't tell you whether or not a particular app/program uses it. However, hanging out in techy spaces has helped me understand that people have some very strong opinions on it, often viscerally negative ones.

Think of this like an r/ELI5 thread: what is Electron, and why is it so polarizing? Many companies seem to be choosing it, so it seems like there's some major benefit to it, but many well-informed people, including lots of people in software development, seem to absolutely hate it. What's going on there?

I don't know where to put this question, if here or in ~tech, but I chose here due to I want a response for someone who doesn't know all about internet.

So my question is: why there is a trend of removing the www of every web address? why it was standard in the first place and not now?

There are a handful of popular web pages that don't use a triple w in their link and they have replaced it or removed it. Tildes, for example, doesn't need triple w. Why?

What is an NFT and what makes them valuable?

I know I can just Google this, but Tilders are smart and will provide an accessible, nuanced and complete comment on the technology that I won't get elsewhere.

Besides the technology itself, I'm interested in knowing why it drew so much attention recently. What prompted NFT's sudden notoriety?

Judith Butler has some influential pieces that talk about performative or performativity.

I see online lots of people seem to think there's no difference between "performance" and "performative".

So, in philosophy, what do theyean when they say performative?

I've always wanted to be able to run probabilities when considering doing something that could infect me with coronavirus. I know how many people test positive, how many are dying and how many are getting tested. But what I really want to know is what are the odds that a mask-less interaction with one person will infect me.

I promise this is a genuine question and not a Windows hit piece.

Every Windows computer I've ever had has slowly gotten laggier over time until my impatience has forced me to reinstall the OS to get the speed boost that comes with a fresh copy. In the schools I've worked in, computer labs and carts full of Windows machines have slowly sunsetted, becoming wholly unusable over time. I think Chromebooks have taken over education in part because they have a snappiness to them that sticks around for a long time, unlike the decay demonstrated by Windows computers.

In my current job, I was issued a Windows computer and a Chromebook at the same time, when I was hired. The Chromebook is still chugging along just fine, but the once fresh and quick Windows computer is now ramping down. I know it's not because of startup or background programs latching on over time because I don't have admin rights and thus can't install anything! I'm not a power user either. I really only ever run a browser with minimal tabs, along with the very occasional instance of office software and/or PDF reader. That's it. And what used to be instant and quick is now like... trudging... through... sludge...

Is there some fundamental design flaw in Windows? Am I finding a pattern where none exists? Do I not have enough experience with other OSes to know that this is true for them too? I'd love someone's insight on this topic.

So I’m just sitting here wondering why they returned so soon, 2 months Doesn’t seem like a very long time considering the money and preparation involved.

I did a quick search to try and find the answer without any luck, so wondering if anyone on here can shed some light on the reason.

Admittedly that's 90 years of history but I've always wondered about what was the politics of the US back then, because I've never really known about them.

The parts I'm most interested in are:

Why did it take until 1832 for the state legislatures to reach a consensus on how to elect people to the electoral college? I know states' rights are a big theme in US politics, but it seems really strange that it would take them 55 years to figure out how to pick the president, even if early on, that role was a lot less powerful.

Why were there so many parties before the US settled on the Democratic and Republican parties (although they have changed plentifully thanks to the US's 2-party political system where everyone needs to bundle up into 2 large coalitions or risk turning the US into a 1-party state.)

Why did they switch so often? From my count there are:

4 main parties being:

The Democratic-Republicans vs the federalists

The Whigs and National Republicans vs the (Jacksonian) Democrats

3 3rd parties being:

The anti-masonic party

The know nothing party/cult according to wiki apparently

The free soil/anti-slavery party

(Also in 1820 there was effectively no election, in 1824, 4 people of the same party all ran for president at once, in 1836 the same thing happened and 4 Whigs ran at once, but with Democratic opposition and 3 actually won votes while one just coasted off south Carolina. Why?)

Why were there so many large parties and what were all these parties about?