Posts by ilmari 293 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2012
Thanks for the history. I retired an S5 PLC last year, I was tasked with making some small changes. After discovering the programming software was CP/M, I decided it would be better to just replace the whole thing. Not that I have anything against CP/M, but the effort required to get a working programming environment setup seemed a bit large..
To me it sounds like the statement has gone through too many layers of journalism to retain any useful fact.
However, my thought would've been a dead thruster le stuck thruster contributing to the situation. That could cause orbit to shift.
Answer from a 7B (iirc) llama based role-playing optimized model running on a phone:
Here are the typical sizes for eggs from different bird species:
1. Chicken egg: Approximately 50-60 grams, length 5-6 cm, width 3.8-4.5 cm.
2. Goose egg: About 120-150 grams, length 8-9 cm, width 6-7 cm, often larger.
3. Penguin egg: Varies by species, but generally around 30-50 grams, about 4-5 cm in length and 3 cm wide. Emperor penguin eggs are the largest at about 120g and 7 cm in length.
4. Ostrich egg: A very large egg, typically weighing 1,200-1,300 grams or more, with a length of around 15 cm and a width of about 13 cm. Ostrich eggs are often larger than a grown man's fist.
Please note that these are general size ranges as eggs can vary slightly depending on the breed or individual bird.
How much of the traffic is crawling for training materials, and how much is AIs searching on the user's behalf?
For example, I might wonder before a purchase, whether the tape deck on the Aiwa BBTC-550MG boombox detects different IEC tape types. Before AI I'd spend an afternoon searching through hundreds of web shops who copy paste the same useless marketing material, hundreds of review sites that don't actually review and don't actually know anything about the subject. With AI, the LLM churns through 150 web search results a minute, much much much faster than I could search.
Is that the traffic that I causing problems?
On a side note it would be nice if there was some way of organising the web so one could reliable bundle all the copypasta together.
I think the tolerance for customer service reps who are both blind and powerless is the highest for reps of the same ethnicity as the customer, somewhat lower for reps who barely speak the same language, and lowest for robots that speak the language expertly but are still blind and powerless to fix whatever foul-uo the system has most recently done.
I seem to remember reading that the astronauts on Apollo 13 tried to sleep in the deactivated command module. First it was cold, then slightly warmer as the air they breathed out enveloped them like a blanket, but after that they woke up gasping for air as there was eventually also a blanket of CO2.
For most users the most important thing to back up would ve their usernames and passwords to various services, and especially important would be the backup of the username and password to access their usernames and passwords, because that one, and the password to the recovery email is lost first, and at the same time as their phone number changes.
Solve that.
I haven't seen them in action, but I've always wondered if anyone is seriously using those AI meeting minutes generators?
To me it would seem that since speech recognition is only a minor step up from a random word generator, that AI summary of garbage would result in garbage? Or is it just that most meetings don't actually have any useful content anyway, so nobody notices if transcripts or meeting minutes are just random fluff?
Problem: There are only 4 non-overlapping WiFi channels
Solution: 5GHz WiFi with 20+ channels!
WiFi: Hold my beer while I tie 16 channels together for more cat videos
Problem: There's s only one WiFi channel
There's no point adding more spectrum, WiFi expands and eats everything, your neighbours will jam entire spectrum again regardless how much spectrum is given to WiFi.
A truly Smart thermostat would learn how this "water-bound underfloor heating with thermostats in each room and only a couple of radiators which themselves have thermostats" responds, for example underfloor heating typically has more thermal inertia, so a truly smart thermostat would loon at weather forecast and preemptively use less underfloor heating and more radiator heat towards the morning if forecast predicts warm sunny spring weather following a cold night.
But that would take some actual algorithm and programming, and Google seems to have given up.
Also they don't have low impedance grounding, so things like filter capacitors on PSUs or inverters in heatpumps and other appliances can easily energize every chassis in the house. Which is why industrial kit comes with special instructions for Norway, usually telling the electrician to open up the device and list of components to remove from the circuit boards.
Those radiator thermostat valves come in do many shapes and sizes, but there are "smart" thermostats available, should one be so inclined.
The oldschool radiator thermostats are fascinating technology. Inside they have a wax motor, that is, more or less a piston and cylinder filled with wax. When the air gets warm and the wax heats up, it expands, which makes it press down on a small needle sticking out from the valve, closing the valve progressively the warmer it gets. When it gets colder the wax shrinks and the valve opens more. If the system is otherwise tuned correctly, so that the circulating water has an appropriate temperature relative to outside temperature, the radiator thermostat performs the final fine tuning of room temperature, compensating for minor perturbances such as solar influx, human activity, or giving a boost after the window has been open.
When you twist it from 0 to 4, it adjusts how far away the wax motor is from the needle.
They're not standardised at all.
Some homes will have a boiler that maintains a constant high temperature, followed by a shunt that mixes return water with hot water to feed out the appropriate temperature based on outside temp, and sometimes also an indoor sensor. Then, each radiator will have its own thermostatic, and every underfloor heating circuit will have its own valve.
The mixer valves are available in numerous sizes, and the actuators for residential applications are not standardized in the way they work or in their operating voltage. Moving up to commercial or industrial, the actuators are often a more standard 0-10V control, but not for residential.
There are about a dozen thermostat valve standards, and "smart" thermostats for radiators often come with about half a dozen adapters, with the inevitable outcome that the right one is missing.
Whatever primary heat source the boiler uses, there may be additional ones as well, such as solarthermal to complicate matters further. Often times there will also be backup electric cartridges in the boiler, which depending on the country will be 230V fed from s single phase, or 3-phase 400V. Sometimes neutral will be available, sometimes not. And don't get me started on Norway, it's the definition of special case when it comes to electricity.
Moving away from central heating, you might have electric underfloor heating which requires yet another model of thermostat, direct convective wall mount electric heaters, which delightfully have plug and play interface for thermostats straight on the heater these days, although nobody seems to actually make any except the OEM. Easy enough to hide a relay in a box somewhere though, although some of the original thermostats don't take kindly to external power cuts.. There are houses where primary heating is through air/air heat pumps, probably the only sensible way to control those is copy the infrared signals from their remotes.
Moving onward to passive house designs, the control of shades, windows, and ventilation becomes centerpoint, which introduces a whole new drove of interfaces to interact with.
I've noticed that the current crop of arm laptops all have massive batteries. If you compare battery time per Wh, it's at best an incremental improvement over x64.
It helps that all manufacturers are on board making laptops with good battery life, but once that fades and the race to bottom starts, battery life will fade away again.
On that topic, it would perhaps be a blessing if they can't run x64 well at all, it could serve as a warning to the user that they've installed some old lardware app that's going to eat battery, and serve as a push to running modern software that is typically more well behaved and battery friendly.
Steam hardware survey from ca 2012 shows 4G ram as most popular, so rpi had 16 times less! And originally out of that tiny ram, only half was usable for the CPU. PCs had 32 times the usable RAM.
Today, Steam hardware survey says most common ram size is 16G. The raspberry Pi has grown from having 32 times less RAM than contemporary PCs, to having half the RAM of contemporary PC.
So it seems to me Raspberry pi is catching up rather than falling behind?
I think crippling start menu was still passable for experienced users, as most of them don't use the start menu.
For me, crippling the taskbar was a much bigger inconvenience in W11.
Lately, disappearing settings and the culling of control panel has been a source of annoyance. I actually like file history, but the "modern" settings UI has disappeared and doesn't show up in search, but does still exist in control panel..
I would've thought it would be the regular computer illiterate adult for which whatsapp was a blessing. At least in my experience with previous services like Skype, it usually went like:
-:"I can't log on, i don't remember my password"
- "What's your Skype username?"
- "No idea"
- "What email did you use to sign for Skype?"
- "Uh..."
- "Do you have email?"
- "I have Google/Hotmail/Microsoft/Outlook "
- "Oh okay let's go look in email what your Skype password is"
- "What's my email password?"
(And when trying to log in to email they actually accidentally go to Skype web and log in successfully and get angry I didn't immediately tell them Skype was same as email)
Whereas with WhatsApp one can usually figure out the users's phone number without too much hassle, and the user can usually receive SMS to the phone.
In local news, Yandex says Ilmatar started providing energy from First of January, but canceled the contract "on a technicality shortly after". Yandex says it offered to pay higher rates for the contract to continue.
The energy sellers they've contacted have given "formal excuses" for being unable to sell energy.
As a local it amazes me that there wouldn't be even a single supplier willing to take a PR hit in exchange for a large electricity sales contract. There would be concerns about payment, even in best of times russian companies have a reputation of being tardy at paying bills. The local energy distributor Nivos did comment that Yandex has always been punctual when paying their bills, and Yandex itself said they've opened up their books to potential energy sellers to give assurance of their financial stability and ability to pay electricity bills in the future too.
The detail that their previous PPA was canceled "shortly after" makes me wonder if they meant before the war, which would make the whole event more interesting. From the point of view of a seller wanting to make a quick buck, they could offer hourly market price plus a margin, putting most of the risk on Yandex. The DC power consumption should be extremely predictable, making it financially a very risk free sale.
I think there's something more going on than a spontaneous boycott of Yandex by energy firms.
Many current routers have USB3 ports and advertise hard drive support through smb1. I've seen a lot of people use this feature to plug in usb flash or hard drive for inexpensive backup destination.
The reason routers never upgraded and are sold with smb1 even today is because the branch of samba with smb3 support is way too bloated to fit in a router. Smb2 results in half the performance of smb1, so most often it gets disabled even though the router's software could otherwise support it.
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