Badabinski

joined 5 months ago
[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think they're all top-level responses too. I took a random sampling of their comments, and they never respond to anyone else's comment. That smells like someone being lazy and not bothering to iterate through comments when writing their dumb AI commenting script.

Like, just, what the fuck is this shit? There's one comment from 8 months ago that looks real. Everything else is from the past week and reads like LLM drivel. Why would you bother? Is it just someone who is bored and wanted to see how long they could convince people?

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I love Simple Audiobook Player+. The UI is super minimal (and really maxes out the whole OLED black thing if you choose it) without compromising on features that are kind of essential for audiobooks (e.g. delayed pause/sleep timers, speed settings, volume boosting, an EQ). My favorite thing is the "undo seek" button. I'm an oaf who is constantly inputting accidental touches. When I was using Audible, I'd have to manually find where I was after accidentally hitting the next chapter button or moving the dot on the progress bar. SABP lets me just undo that shit.

It hasn't been updated in a while, but it doesn't need updating when it does its job so well. There are no ads, no marketing notifications, just books. It's like a program from coreutils in app form. It might be a bit ugly or outdated looking, but I'm about that.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 2 points 1 month ago

Same for Utah. The politics are as ugly as the land is beautiful, and it sucks.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 49 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Thank god for projects like Valetudo thar let you break your stuff away from the cloud.

Semi-related story time. I bought a Midea Cube dehumidifier for my laundry room. My dryer has been broken for years, and I've found that air drying clothes makes them last a lot longer. It's hard to air dry inside, hence the dehumidifier. My plan was to control the dehu automagically with Home Assistant along with some fans, so people could just click a button to turn all the shit on to dry their clothes.

After buying it, I realized that the dehumidifier could only be controlled via the cloud, and the cloud control was unreliable as fuck. With the exception of tech people, nobody is willing to deal with my flaky bullshit. If the button doesn't work consistently, my partner, her other partner, and my FIL aren't going to bother. Luckily, a very industrious person made this thing that let me rip out the hardware responsible for cloud connectivity and replace it with a cheap microcontroller. Now, my dehumidifier talks to my Home Assistant server directly via MQTT and it just fucking works.

Give me local-only control or fuck off, I'll take control myself. It's not much to demand, and shit like what this article describes absolutely deepens my conviction around local-only control.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 7 points 1 month ago

I feel like this has been a bad year for this shit. Boars Head had to recall 3500 tons of meat earlier this year, and 10 people died from listeria. Like, that's 17 million pounds or 7 million kg of meat that had to be thrown away. That's just from these two companies, so the real number is probably much higher.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 24 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I hate that it's so hard to get these people to agree to capex. My current company runs a few datacenters, and we have some teams that use them for their base load. It saves a shitload of money! Like, I don't get why this is a concept that MBAs reject. You don't have to go all in on capex for your infrastructure, just find a nice mix of capex/opex. If you're afraid that you won't use the shit you bought later on, then you should probably make sure that the market is there for whatever you're selling before you dive in headfirst.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

lmao fuck off Amazon. I already hate their stupid fucking AI because when I want to search reviews and the Q/A section for a word like "watt", it makes me wait 10-15 seconds while it tells me that it can't help me with that and that I need to give it more details.

I'm not trusting anyone or anything with my purchasing decisions that doesn't, say, reference the SDS for a product that's being cagey about exactly what the active ingredients are. I did that, and that's why I paid like $5 for a bag of citric acid powder instead of $20 on some citric acid descaling goo that comes in a pretty bottle. That's a very specific example though. I do some variation of that shit any time I buy something, so I'm sure as shit not going to let Amazon spend my fucking spondulix based off of AI hallucinations.

EDIT: Man, I need to deal with my anger towards bullshit AI usage because this shit isn't going anywhere and I spend way too much time being pissed.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No worries, I didn't think you were trying to mislead! I'm also very hopeful for fusion and I like to read about it. I don't know if magnetic confinement systems will be able to reach the temperatures and pressures required for ignition (versus those just for fusion) soon, but technological progress certainly has a tendency towards jumping forwards unexpectedly!

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Ah, okay, that's what I was referring to with NIF. They absolutely have generated more power than they put in, but only in a way that is scientifically interesting. If you only consider the energy flowing into the hohlraum, then more energy was produced, which is crazy cool! They also achieved true ignition which is great. We've never been able to get things hot enough and squozed enough for long enough to be able to directly observe that in a controlled setting. The fact that they can now just do that means they can experimentally probe where the boundaries are and find the cheapest way for us to get to ignition.

However, they got the energy to the hohlraum using lasers. Those lasers (and all of the equipment around them) required (I think) three orders of magnitude more power to generate the laser impulse that triggered fusion. A productive fusion reaction did occur, but it absolutely wasn't productive enough to make up for all the power required to generate the laser pulse. Making lasers that can output at the required power levels and frequencies without all of the waste (i.e. 2.5 MJ of electricity to laser results in 2 MJ laser output) is a Hard Problem™ and is probably impossible with our current understanding of physics.

When you made your comment, I wondered if someone had achieved breakeven using a tokamak or some other form of magnetic confinement setup. Inertial confinement fusion is great for research but not practical for power generation, whereas magnetic confinement fusion is probably where the future is.

ICF is really good at putting the squoze on stuff, because the things you want to fuse are all stuffed in a tiny hohlraum and you're zorching it with a shitload of giant friggin lasers. Magnetic confinement fusion used in tokamaks occurs much more gradually by magnetically heating and containing plasmas. The nice thing about tokamaks is that they just constantly generate heat. With modern superconducting magnets, the infrastructure efficiency is also pretty decent, giving them a chance at truly generating more power than they use when you take the entire reactor into consideration.

Jesus that's a lot of words. I should go do my damn job instead of distracting myself talking about fusion. Sorry for the brain dump.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 5 points 1 month ago (7 children)

Question for you, when you say that we've accomplished fusion, do you mean fusion that produces more power than took to generate it? Or simply the act of fusing atoms together in a reactor (vs the uncontained fusion present in thermonuclear bombs)? If it's the former, then like, holy shit, that's actually been accomplished‽ Like, I know NIF had their whole thing with breakeven fusion a couple of years ago, but that was only counting the energy that made it to the hohlraum, not all the energy that was lost powering the lasers and shit. When you factor all of that in (like you'd need to for realistic power generation) then it's very far away from breakeven generation. It's still an incredible breakthrough and will help us figure out fusion energy, but it's not a practical means of energy generation at this time. Did something else happen that I missed‽

If it's the latter, then we've actually been fusing atoms together in reactors since the 1950s. In fact, there's a community of people who build small fusion reactors as a hobby! I learned about this a few years ago when a 16 year old made the news by being the youngest person to build their own reactor. The main site I know of is https://www.fusor.net/

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 26 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you replace fandom.com with breezewiki.com in the URL, you'll either get an unfucked version of the page, or you'll get a redirect to a new wiki site that the fandom actually updates. It's crazy how fandom doesn't let communities remove a fandom site, so there are all of these unmaintained and out of date fandom wikis out there.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 12 points 1 month ago (3 children)

If you replace fandom.com with breezewiki.com in the URL, you'll either get an unfucked version of the page, or you'll get a redirect to a new wiki site that the community actually updates. It's crazy how fandom doesn't let communities remove a fandom site, so there are all of these unmaintained and out of date fandom wikis out there.

EDIT: as a demonstration, here's what happens when you use breezewiki with the Noita fandom page: https://noita.breezewiki.com/wiki/Noita_Wiki

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