Oh, fuck off.

No, that is not what he said at all.

“real” is subjective.

I taught myself QuickBasic as it was the only thing I knew that was related to copying C64 BASIC out of magazines. (QBasic was packaged with DOS 3.11 I think and I was able to get a full copy of QuickBasic somehow. That was about +30 years ago? Dunno. I was about 12 at the time.) I didn’t know what other languages were out there besides TurboPascal. I did learn simple Pascal, but that was a short chapter.

I actually met someone else in the area that was learning to code, and of course, we wanted to write a game. The only way to code for a mouse at the time was to write an INT33 handler, so it kicked off our interest in asm. (I still use asm for MCU stuff on occasion, but it’s limited.) I quickly diverged into writing some really nifty… eh… “boot sector code” so that kicked off my career in security.

And yeah, it’s the same phenomenon for me: I just think in terms of bits and bytes getting shifted around and I still refuse to believe in “magic”. (Slight jab at Rust coders there, but in good fun.)

Fast forward to today, I train “kids” fresh out of college as part of my job now. The first thing I do is start giving them weird tasks that require they actually understand how something like an fopen() actually works.

(Funny story. I refused to “show my work” in math class for simple f(x) problems as I viewed it as unoptimized code. Lulz. I was such an autistic dork.)

That, 200%!

When I started in computers, years ago, I transitioned from QuickBasic directly into assembly. Ever since then, I can kinda “read the Matrix” (Blond, Brunette, Redhead…) and forget about how confusing a raw binary or how a mess of a dmp looks to someone else. (To me, I really just see patterns and nothing massively complicated.)

“It’s just data.” - You would be surprised how fuzzy that statement is for some people. It’s almost exactly like telling someone who doesn’t speak any English that “the sky is blue”. It’s totally cool though! Learning about the internals of any computer is really just a very long chain of “aha moments” as many concepts aren’t intuitive.

I dump memory more often than you would think. It’s usually not obfuscated or encrypted in any meaningful way even though it is fairly trivial to do so.

It’s good practice to scour through any bloatware installed on windows laptops. Since bloatware is generally written by the lowest bidder, you can find all kinds of keys and phone-home urls (sometimes with all the parameters) and other weird things. Just fire up a decent hex editor and search for strings in the dump file. You don’t need to know jack about reverse engineering either.

Mostly by Indian and Vietnamese slave labor: https://www.androidauthority.com/where-are-samsung-phones-made-3251712/

Neither am I. However, I have seen one or two people on ca that claim it’s an instance “for Canadians”, but that isn’t the majority view.

Canadian news is mild compared to other instances and their admins rock. They just did some good hardware updates and the instance is fairly reliable. 10/10, would recommend. The author of my client (Connect) is also on that instance, and I contribute a bit to that community as well.

I could see some downsides if the occasional post in French would piss you off.

'Madame, if that’s the way you see it, so be it. ’ - M.C. Escher

.ca is a bit more sane and not as authoritarian as .world or .ml. I don’t mind .world, but their admins are inconsistent, IMO

I am confused now. I was just called a “leftist Nazi” and “liberal right wing nazi”. Lulz.

My point is that I think the terms “leftist” and “liberal” have been redefined again, just as a heads up.

Well, I was banned from ml because of a conversation on another instance. It was something about reporting all ml posts as a rule 1 violation… I guess that could be considered inciting unrest against the CCP and Mother Russia.

Many (not all) ml users are fairly rabid when it comes to their own flavor of propaganda. If you ever casually chat with them on Lemmy, just understand that they have a completely different world view so don’t mention things related to politics, country borders, history, government structure, major battles during WW2, sparrow populations or what color the sky is and you should be fine.

Cool. For my electronics work, IPA works wonders with silicone-based adhesives. (I’ll generally use a syringe and strategically drip it between the adhesive and the surface.)

If, by chance, you run into any PET/PETG plastics, i think pure IPA can start to chew at those if enough heat is involved. It’s not nearly as dramatic as ABS/acetone though.

Edit: I just noticed this is a Lego community. Derp. Can anyone quickly identify the plastics that could be involved and I can correct or remove any words below. (I think acetone just got bumped into super-risky.) I am guessing Legos are going to be ABS in many cases, and acetone vapor tends to melt ABS.

High purity isopropyl alcohol (99%) is generally my go-to solvent. It’s a small enough molecule to get in between most surfaces and glues. I wouldn’t know how <90% works since I just don’t use it. (Test first!)

Another option is D-limonene.(commonly sold as Goo Gone) It’s another small molecule that works well.

Acetone is the highest risk for plastics but is another good solvent. (Test first!)

Otherwise, a razor blade, time and elbow grease is about your only other option.

Solar panels are more efficient closer to the equator because of the most direct light from the sun. At higher or lower latitudes, there is more atmosphere for the light to pass through. The actual distance from the sun is basically irrelevant without an atmosphere. There might be a measurable difference based on distance alone but not much.

Efficiency does not generally equate to optimal power generation. There are probably hundreds of other variables that directly translate to maximum power production.

This is my opinion, but yeah. It’ll take some time.

The biggest issue is that money has moved to safer for investments. Those new investments may take time to mature and/or avoid tax penalties.

Another component is that hedge funds are likely the ones taking money out of the market in a huge way right now. Hedge funds normally specialize in short selling and there is no better time to close or massively reduce those short positions. (They have other strategies, but their main function is in their name.) They can’t close their positions rapidly, or it will trigger a faux rebound in stock prices. (Short sales are weird like that. It may be one of the reasons you see short bounces in price as a stock price is cratering.)

Unfortunately, the tarrifs are shifting investment policy against the US now from other countries. This will take years to recover from.

What will really suck is that I have always speculated that these tarrifs are just the worst kind of insider trading strategy you will ever see. If the intent was to temporarily dump stock prices for the benefit of a few, I really don’t think it’s going to work like it did during COVID. COVID didn’t force massive global policy changes against the US the same way. Even if orange man decides to reverse course and lift tarrifs tomorrow, the damage has been done and there is no reason to restore previous investments. The risk is too high.

Instances don’t have to be federated and instances federate and defederate from each other often enough. The goals of instances may not align, and to keep conflict low(er) it’s better if some instances cut ties.

TBH, this sounds like a technical issue between ml and nl or just a typo in the way you are posting.

While I thought it was basically an on/off switch for defederation, I suppose there could be a way to block updates from instances without fully defederating.

I am not going to get into the drama, but ml is defederated at a little higher frequency, but it’s not as high as some others. It’s because reasons, and is not relevant to this particular thread.

It’s not a horrible write-up but it doesn’t do much to simplify things. If I had to explain these concepts as close to an ELI5 as I could, I would use less words.

Photons have characteristics of both a wave and a particle. In many ways, it’s easier to think of a photon as an interaction point. As a wave propagates, any collision point could be thought of as a photon. You shake some electrons in one antenna, they create a wave through the air, the wave propagates until it hits another antenna and the photons are where that wave starts to shake another bunch of electrons.

I am not quite sure what they were trying to explain about waveform collapse, TBH. There is just a probability curve about where a photon will “exist” at a specific time. You can’t predict the location of a photon, but you can observe it. There isn’t really a physical “collapse” of anything. The probability curve “collapses” into a single point once observed. There is no probability once something is observed. It’s there or it isn’t, so the math function has “collapsed”: There isn’t a need to calculate probability at that time.

This is far from perfect, but it’s probably easier to digest. I don’t even want to know how much physics I broke with my descriptions, but I do know it’s easier to visualize.