batmaniam

joined 2 years ago
[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I love this. I have a box I've been wanting to move to a family members place because they have fiber and I don't. They're heavy users of the plex server I have on there, so they're happy to host it, but if I ever had issues around anything boot related I'd be down until I could physically get there.

This would also be awesome for troubleshooting some RasPi stuff where I kind of want the DE every now and then but mostly let it run headless.

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month ago

I don't get the panic. It worked great for 50% of Venture brothers.

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 17 points 2 months ago

Not going to lie, despite loving the stories about the monkey king, I skipped it entirely because of the notes they sent to content creators. Which would also be why I skip movies and games that take the US' DoD money. I'm glad it got passed over.

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I loved FC5. Ubisoft gets a lot of crap because they make the same game over and over but there's a reason they started doing that. Good characters, and the pacing is pretty solid unless you're a completions (which is your own fault). There's some weird mechanics that progress the story that kind of break immersion that they chose because of the open world setting, but it's a solid game. Enjoy!

If you like it, "new dawn" is pretty OK. Wait for it to be cheap, it's basically really meaty DLC.

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago

No but it's got a demo for free

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

Somewhere, some patent lawyers are going to make millions debating about whether or not this constitutes "public disclosure".

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 28 points 5 months ago

Dude, they flubbed this so damn hard by over reaching. A few years ago, when they mentioned there would be a button in word that you could use to make a slide deck of your word dock, I was so excited. The teams meeting part where it will summarize meetings is honestly fantastic in doing Roberts rules of order type stuff. My response was "I hate what this means in terms of privacy, but godamn that sounds useful".

In turning into an everything all or nothing they massively screwed up. I have a self hosted instance of llama-gpt that I use to solve the "blank page" problem that AI was actually great at.

I have a lot of issues with AI on principle, like a lot of folks. But it blows my mind how hard they screwed up delivery (and I don't just mean the startups, that's to be expected). There's plenty to be said about uber at a principle level, but it's still bloody convenient. The entire roll out of a AI-ecosystem reeks of this meme: "but we made plans!".

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

how much you can build without a complete understanding

We've never actually never had one. I'd have to check the timelines but Tesla was almost certainly working on a functional, but inaccurate atomic model (Bohr). Medicine is actually a great example of all this. We are so used to just kind of knowing "there's a bad bug or bad gene that's making me sick". Like you may not know the details, but you've got some loose concept a bunch of cells in your body are pissed off. For the vast, vasssssssst history of medicine, it was all empirical, and the thing is, it kind of worked... sometimes.

My favorite example of "knowing without fully understanding" is Mendel and his peas. If you do a 4x4 punnet square (that gene cross thing), and look at the frequency of co-inheritance, you can track how far genes are from on another (because the further they are, the more likely there will be a swap during the shuffle). Thing is... because DNA is an integer thing (no such thing as 'half a base pair') it works DOWN TO THE SINGLE BASE PAIR. Mendel was accurately counting the number of freaking base pairs separating genes without knowing what a base pair, or indeed even really a molecule, was.

Tesla would have lived to see some absolutely nutty stuff in physics. Boltzman, Einstein with relativity, it must have seemed like pure madness at the time.

So yeah, we discover new and interesting stuff all the time. I personally think that some of the weird quantum stuff is going seem as rote in the future as germs do to us now. As in, the same way any lay-person shoved into a time machine would at least be able to give the basics to a medieval European, someone from the future would be like "well I don't remember much about quantum tunneling, but...".

And that's all before getting into some of the bizarre things going on in math itself. Be careful if you look into that stuff though, it's easy to fall into the "Terrance Howard" style rabbit hole. Suffice to say there is some really interesting and unexpected implications we're discovering, but if you don't have a solid grasp of theory, it is easy to be led astray but sources that want to gloss over details to talk about a conclusion that isn't actually supported. It's like if you tried to explain time dilation to an ancient Greek, and they excitedly hopped on their fastest chariot thinking they could "fast forward" to the future, because time moves "more slowly" for you when you're going faster, right?

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago

oh I'm not shortchanging it, I work in the field. It's crazy how "simple" it is in concept and hard to deliver. But it's on par with antibiotics with how many lives it's changed. Like you said, it's like a lot of civil stuff. A solid highway system, for instance. Just some dirt with fancy rocks on it right? Righhhhhhht?

And don't get me wrong, wastewater has tons of complications. Any plant is operated in equal parts science, engineering, and art. It's a living, breathing, bioreactor. They've each got their own distinct personality.

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 18 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Thrilled you asked! So yes: Treatment is always required, but the final destination of the treated water can vary. For instance, in a lot of places they may have municipal water TO a home or business, but that may be discharged to septic, as opposed to the river. Also in a lot of areas, water may be taken out of an underground aquifer (either by private well or a municipality) but when treated it may be discharged into a river or ocean. That can create problems because if you're near the coast, the empty space in the aquifer may be filled by salt/brackish water that can lead to salinity rises in the aquifer. To solve that some places turn to "ground water recharge", which is just a fancy way of saying "we built a big well to put it back in the aquifer".

Increasingly, you're seeing some places essentially sell their treated water. Santa Rosa CA, for instance, built an entire pipeline that goes from their treatment facility to another municipality to be injected into their groundwater.

So yes, everywhere treats it, but the final destination makes a difference. Las Vegas (or anyone else on the river) only gets credit for what goes back into the river, so any evaporation etc is a problem. It sounds trivial, but there is a reason those other strategies exist. It essentially doubles every pipe, limits where you can park a treatment plant etc. Vegas also does some great grey water re-use. That essentially means it doesn't go "back" but can get used many many times, limiting the initial draw.

Wastewater is funny because it's far from rocket science, but the numbers to implement any of it get staggering very quickly.

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 55 points 7 months ago (8 children)

I don't know about power, but Vegas is actually incredibly water efficient. Due to the way the water rights work with the Colorado river, they're not allowed very much, but it doesn't "count" if you put it back in. So nearly every drop they use is treated and put back (probably cleaner, tbh). Boggles the brain, but somehow it's actually a fairly sustainable city. More than any other other major metro, in any event.

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 10 points 7 months ago

Yeah like... Netflix has peering agreements and whatnot but.. It's not 2005.

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