Alt account of @Badabinski
Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.
It makes me happy to see Rama mentioned here! I read the first book in the series when I was 8 or 9, and it’s what really hooked me on science fiction. Like, I had to read it with a dictionary open because some of the language was way too technical for me, but I was absolutely enthralled.
Game: Noita
Book: The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (RIP, you deserved more time)
TV show: Cowboy Bebop, I think
Movie: Honestly, I can’t think of one.
In order of priority, I’d put The Player of Games at the top by a wide margin (seriously, it’s an amazing book by a brilliant author), followed by Noita, with Cowboy Bebop at the end.
Time to see if this comes across properly without escaping:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I do, but certain Android browsers don’t support plugins. I have to use a specific browser for compatibility reasons with some work shit (I do on-call stuff). I need that to just work, so I can’t use, say, Firefox for Android. I use multiple browsers on computers, but I just can’t be bothered on my phone. That leaves me with DNS-based ad blockers. Those work almost as well, but only when I’m home or VPNed home. I don’t want to use a hosted service for privacy reasons, and I don’t want to expose a DNS server on the internet. This means that when I can’t VPN or I forget to, I get fandom rage. I’m sure I could do something to address this, but I have bigger fish to fry right now. The nice ad-free fandom frontend sounds like a great compromise to me.
You’re an absolute hero. I’m easily irritated by ads, and fandom has driven me to genuine rage a couple of times when I’m on mobile and only have DNS-based adblocking some of the time. It’s a wiki, for Christ’s sake, so why does it need so, so many ads‽ It’s just static content most of the time!
edit: to provide more context, this is a frontend for fandom wikis that strips out the bullshit.
To the tune of “Pop Goes The Weasel”:
x equals negative b /
plus or minus the square root /
of b squared minus 4 ac /
all over 2a!
I cannot believe that stupid fucking song is still in my head, but good God damn it worked. It’s there for all 0 times I’ll need the quadratic equation in my daily life.
Honestly, I kinda love the whole “lawyering with God” thing that Jewish folks have going on. For any religion with restrictive beliefs, there will be adherents who will try to find loopholes. I’ve been lucky enough to have an upbringing almost completely free from religion (except for a year drinking hot chocolate at a Unitarian Universalist church, which is almost not religion), but I also grew up in a super Mormon part of Utah. I’ve spent my whole life as a bit of an outsider, seeing people pick and choose which rules to follow and try to discretely find and exploit every little loophole there is. I’ve always found the hypocrisy a bit unsettling.
I think I’d really prefer it if the Mormons took the same argumentative stance with their god. It would make the picking and choosing a bit less hypocritical (which might lead to more Mormons ditching some of their religion’s shittiest and most regressive teachings), and there’d be a lot less shitty sneaking around.
He’s got 3000 subscribers, but I really love Brother Jauffre. This video lives rent free in my head: https://youtu.be/ERfhHK8zBdE
He just makes absurd little videos about whatever. If you like silly nonsensical things (which I do), he’ll be great for you.
I’ve always heard that seismic activity makes hyperloop-style transit effectively impossible.*
† Impossible given the constraints of current materials science. From what I’ve read (which may be garbage, but it seemed well researched), making a vacuum chamber that’s hundreds of thousands of miles long on top of a big wiggly molten goo ball isn’t something we can even see a way to realistically achieve right now.
The other person may have responded with a fair amount of hostility, but they’re absolutely correct. I run Kubernetes clusters hosting millions of containers across hundreds of thousands of VMs at my job, and OOMKills are just a fact of life. Apps will leak memory, and you’re powerless to fix it unless you’re willing to debug the app and fix the leak. It’s better for the container to run out of memory and trigger a cgroup-scoped OOM kill. A system-wide OOM kill will murder the things you love, shit in your hat, and lick your face like David Tennant licked Krysten Ritter.
God, I’m so tempted. I do not need to spend $90-100 on one of these and a Game Boy Camera…
Ahhh, I’d love it if I could tie that in with a Bluetooth OBD dongle and Home Assistant. It’d be awesome if I could set up a BLE proxy in my carport to automatically update stuff. It’d be especially handy if I could get alerted about check engine codes.
I imagine that part of it comes down to motivation. I pretended to be an adult on a special-interest forum when I was twelve years old because I needed an escape from my miserable existence. At that time, I had no control over my life and every morning I woke up meant I had a new chance for traumatic shit to happen. I desperately needed to be someone else, so I took my time, researched shit, and avoided any conversation where I might be outed. I’m sure I didn’t fool everyone, but I got some shocked responses when I went back as an adult and owned up to it.
Kids doing it for the authority boost or just as a childish fancy will be easier to spot. Kids doing it as a coping mechanism for their horrible lives will probably blend in a lot better.
It’s definitely been life-changing for me. I never had the “touch”. When I’d do stuff around the house, I’d put in screws at crazy angles and drill holes in the wrong places on walls. I never felt like I could fix or build anything. Machine tools let you build crazy shit without relying on your visual reasoning or coordination. You want a hole at a spot? Move the handwheels to that spot and you’re there. There’s no fucking around. That built up my confidence, and the stuff that does require spatial reasoning (like using a file to turn a round hole into a square one) happens slowly enough that you can make mistakes and still be okay.
If you decide to get into it, I’d recommend getting a lathe first. if you can’t afford a mill, a drill press is still very useful. You can do almost anything on a lathe if you try hard enough, and a drill press makes some things a lot easier. Blondihacks will have a lot more to say about it, but I believe that’s her recommendation.
I have a small machine shop where I make little doodads out of metal. All of my equipment is manual. If I want to cut metal on my lathe or mill, I’m spinning handwheels and engaging power feed levers. I then have to sit there, watch the beautiful blue steel chips fly, listen to the sound of the cut, and wait for the cut to be finished so I can turn off the power feed. Then I turn off the machine, get out my micrometers, carefully measure my cut, and do it again until I’m done. Then, I take the work out of the vise or chuck, grab my file, debur all of the sharp edges (I love the sound of a good file knocking off metal burrs), and get to work on the next part.
It’s intensely peaceful. Machining tools are relatively quiet and stately (power woodworking tools scream like evil demons). Small hobby tools are slow, so you always have plenty of time to enjoy yourself. It requires a lot of planning and thinking, and it helps you develop a much more attuned mechanical touch. You get to make really cool shit out of the best material (i.e. metal), and it’s a genuinely useful skill. I do software development, and I spend way too much time sitting at my desk. Machining is my escape.
One downside is that it can be expensive. Good tools cost money and good metal costs money. I’d guess that I have $20K invested in my shop, but I’ve also been doing this for 7 years now. The initial investment isn’t that high. You can save a lot of money by making your own tools, which I didn’t always do. Used tools are also a really great option (except for measuring tools, sometimes you have to buy those new). To get metal for cheaper, go to nearby machine shops and ask nicely if you can buy scraps from their offcut sections. If you tell them that you’re learning machining, they’ll be very likely to oblige!
The other downside is that it requires you to be careful. Human flesh is soft compared to metal. Machining is only dangerous if you’re incautious, but I feel like it’s important that I bring up safety when I recommend machining as a potential hobby.
If you’re interested, check out Blondihacks on YouTube. She has some great videos on how to get started with your own hobby machine shop. I also really like Clickspring and This Old Tony. Clickspring has some good project videos on his channel, and TOT is hilarious and educational.
Here’s the thing I’m most proud of making. I adapted the design of a 3D printed yarn winder to manual machining and built it from scratch. All of the metal parts started out as raw stock (everything is 4340 steel, except for the base plate which is ductile iron). The base is black walnut. The little feet are brass, with sorbothane feet on the bottom.
As a child, I greatly preferred the original. A lot of the emotional subtext from the sequels went over my head (since I was raised in a very emotionally repressed environment), but I could totally grok the cold, somewhat impersonal nature of the first book. It was easier to imagine myself in this huge alien structure when I could understand the characters. Nowadays I think I’d probably prefer the sequels since I derive a lot of enjoyment from interpersonal drama and conflict. I’ll admit that it’s been ages since I’ve read them, so I can’t say for sure.