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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Before the introduction of daylight savings, people and companies were perfectly capable of adjusting the productive hours according to the sun - if they needed to.

    Farmers who are usually (wrongly) used as an example were against the clock changes, because it really isn’t relevant to them and only creates problems for their schedules with live stock.

    The actual reason for the daylight saving was saving energy and coal. This is not an issue anymore, because the energy used for lighting is negligible today.

    The only sane thing to do is to stop changing the clocks and then focus on making working schedules more flexible.




  • Although it doesn’t compare to modern systems, the computer systems on Voyager is a computer by all means. It’s even the longest running computer that ever existed, having never been shut off. It runs Fortran code.

    The image data that the camera made didnn’t have to fit in the computers memory. It was written directly to tape, which was then transmitted by the computer. The resolution is 800x800 pixels with only one colour at a time. The colour images or in larger resolutions were combinations of several images. The camera has been shut off by now.

    Speaking of not wanting to touch the code, it did have an issue last year, where the code seemed to have stopped or gone into a loop for unknown reasons making it inaccessible for the operators on Earth. Thankfully another part of the computer was instructed to periodically overwrite the main code, so it managed to correct the error by itself. At least that’s what I remember reading.


  • Well it isn’t 6.

    From Wikipedia:

    In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England from May 1 to June 22, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter “S”,the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine

    Mike Phillips, director of the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They’re more complex than that


  • forced into an echo chamber.

    Yes, it does that.

    Using YouTube on a new account or through one of the alternatives will result in a wildly different feed. I was recently shocked by seeing the default non-curated feed on YouTube.

    Absolutely none of the content was interesting to me; most of it was directly anger inducing political crap or just plain brainrot. I would definitely not visit that shit page ever again if the default feed was my first impression. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a right wing breeding ground by now, but it sure isn’t as balanced as I would have expected.

    My regular YT feed is obviously much more interesting to me, and I can use it to find new content, but since I don’t want to wait for the ads, I now only watch my own subscriptions on a different frontend, which of course will create an even smaller echo chamber.

    I get how a curated feed can benefit the user, but YouTube is just not making it possible. It will only show (rage) engaging content and without the dislike function, you can only decide not to watch the crap or get shown more crap until you do like it.





  • Yes it’s country specific, but more about old houses.

    In my case the building code says the ground should have an impedance of maximum 1666 ohm. My installation was already grounded and had about 400 ohm.

    The charger guidelines says 200 ohm, however the car refuses to charge on anything over 100 ohm. I had an electrician add a new ground spear, bringing the impedance down below 1 ohm.

    The building code in USA already recommends 25 ohm, so it shouldn’t be an issue if the installation is up to date.


  • No regrets, but I do acknowledge that it’s very different and has different challenges. The usual worries before buying about range, mileage, battery drainage, top speed, maintenance fees, towing capability etc, do not actually exist. I understand why people worry, but no, they are not actual issues.

    In reality: Software. That’s an issue. Car mechanics do not know how to service software. Doesn’t matter if it’s a subscription to a service or a mandatory but malfunctioning pressure valve, it’s software and they don’t know about it. It usually not a serious issue, but it might be, especially for cars with a lot of gimmicks and shit. This issue also exist with new fossil fueled cars as well. For most part, it can be ignored.

    The charger at home may be an issue. (Maybe i. Europe mostly?) Some cars only accept voltages with a very low resistance. Both Renault and Tesla require a better grounding than the building code in most countries. It’s not costly to fix, and it’s a one time fix, but it may be a surprise…(that you need to expand on your electric circuit just for this), but you should have done anyway).

    I will acknowledge that range is a downside. Not in everyday use, but for longer trips, you will have to plan your trip according to charging. It has never been an issue for me, because I generally never drive that long without pause anyway. Time it to to your breaks is all there is to it.

    For a comuter car with home charging, you will have absolutely no issues in switching. It does have many more surprising positives than negatives. Like, never having to set foot on a gas station. Never mind the cost, but the time spent on going there or stopping on your commute to do it, or holding the nozzle in the cold, or being tempted to buy stuff in the convenience store etc. In comparison, I go home and plug in to charge my car, exactly the same way that I charge my phone, so it’s ready for the next day. It’s not difficult at all. It might take 30 secons and more often than than fueling but it’s still much faster than stopping on the road, gas or not.

    Only actual real downside for me is that I’m also a cheapskate. I prefer to time my charging to the variable electricity prices, but not everyone has that option and it’s completely voluntary… I’m not sure if it’s worth it. Sure, i save a few bucks, but the hassle of it is real. I am considering changing to a subscription model instead, just to avoid worrying about it.

    The best advice that I got before buying was: “Just drive it”.

    Don’t think about it: It’s a tool, use it. In a lot of ways an EV is much better suited for that, because you only need to worry about it being ready to use. You probably never thought of that for your ICE car, because you’d do refueling and other fluids on the road. If you fuel at home, you’ll also have to refill your sprinklers and remember to wash it every now and then… Maintenance is home based, not on a station.

    There’s a whole lot of benefits to it as well, but you didn’t ask for those, and I think you should just go test drive one to see for yourself.



  • I bet those 40 hours are more stressful than before.

    Efficiency has increased,so you’re probably doing a whole lot of more tasks with the same time, but the bureaucracy still exists. It’s just a different kind of bureaucracy.

    While we no longer need to stand in line to get a rubber stamp on a paper from some rude clerk just to pay a bill, we now need to download apps, keep the systems up to date, manage user accounts and input the data exactly how the app wants it. While the individual task might be somewhat easier than before, it is now expected that you do a whole lot more of these bureaucratic tasks yourself. All the tech bloat creeps up and makes every little task a little more difficult than before.






  • Except for school I never went to any institution as a kid. No nursery, no kindergarten, no after school programs. Both my parents worked part time, so there was always an adult at home. For most my life I felt sorry for the kids who had parents working 9-5 and having to be in institutions and getting institutionalized.

    I was well into my 30s before my wife explained to me why I was wrong. She was studying for these kind of pedagogical jobs, and while following her education on the side line, it really turned on a light bulb in my head: I was wrong.

    While the home-raised method might have worked decently when I was a kid when more people did it, it would absolutely not work today. Most of my own issues throughout childhood and later basically also comes from not socializing enough as a kid. My own kids have been through the whole institution process because both my wife and I have had 9-5 jobs. Due to this, my kids are much better developed to tackle the world that they live in, and they have not lost any off the ability to think freely or anything that I previously believed was the negative effects of being raised in institutions. Of course there are some institutions that are better than others, but overall, their personel are a lot better educated to handle it than someone who has no education on this and only believes in “what was good enough for me…”

    Even today, I sometimes meet people who want to home school their kids and such. While that might be a good idea in certain cases, it’s almost always done for the wrong reasons and without regard to how difficult it actually is if you want the best for your kid.