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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Ya know that for sure? I don’t mean some lithium chemistry. The simpler solution is obviously to use a traditional chemistry. I’ve been speculating recently that it is likely possible to make a single use battery from an explosive. A battery is just exploiting oxidation like reactions with the galvanic potential of metals. Explosives are basically unstable stuff with lots of potential combined with a rapid oxidiser. The two uses have quite a lot in common. I bet there is a bunch of untapped potential in this space where little research is done in the public sphere.





  • It honestly sounds like you’ve got deeper issues with your boss. I would just shop for another job.

    I’m quite introverted and have learned to only respond to questions when asked. I have no issue sharing any information. However, I have a major issue with understanding the scope of information worth sharing and when to stop. I do not let myself feel awkward in silence or the need to carry any conversation. If a person piques my curiosity, I can talk with them for days. I can find something curious to talk about with almost anyone. People that lack depth become a repetitive conversation that I will avoid.

    Personally, I don’t like to be actively manipulative with people. It goes against my nature. However, if someone annoyed me like this, and I had no other outlet. I would subtly use their psychology against them about like how a psychiatrist turns a conversation to introspection and analysis. Once a person is made vulnerable through unexpected introspection they are easily dominated. I can get away with a lot of things like this because I am a big dude where people expect me to be assertive and dominant in many ways that I really am not. Your results may vary.


  • I wouldn’t start with python. Just do bash scripting. Python is inaccessible still if you do not use it regularly and it still has the ridiculous complexity problems of all languages.

    I think the scope of all computing is hard for anyone to take in effectively. It really takes something like Ben Eater’s 8-bit breadboard computer project (YT) for a person to really start understanding fundamental computing.

    My favorite microcontroller experience is Flash Forth. You can put it on an Arduino with an ATMega 328 too. The simplicity of FORTH can teach a ton in a short amount of time because it gets a person straight into access to bits, registers, and assembly, along with the hardware documentation. Once FF is on the microcontroller, it is running the FF interpreter natively. At that point, you only need serial access through USB. It is quite easy to flash an LED, read the ADC and setup basic I/O. Branching and loops are a bit more difficult. This eliminates the need for a language that uses a lot of arbitrary syntax. It does not require a lot of documentation, and you do not need to fuss with an Integrated Development Environment.

    I would focus on the ideas, that anyone can count to 1 and anyone can break down logic into if statements. It might be bad code, but bad code is better than no code when it comes to someone getting started.



  • Don’t underestimate the stupidity curve. There are always more people at the bottom. Just because a candidate is a worthless criminal, does not mean an inevitable outcome. Squeaky wheels get the attention the others deserve. He has already proven that people follow him anywhere like headless zombies.

    I’m sure there is a contingency plan with the weirdo party. There is no shortage of criminals without any ethics ready to boost their cronyism clown posse.


  • We are at a phase where AI is like the first microprocessors; think Apple II or Commodore 64 era hardware. These showed potential, but it was only truly useful with lots of peripheral systems and an enormous amount of additional complexity. Most of the time, advanced systems beyond the cheap consumer toys of this era used several of the processors and other systems together.

    Similarly, now AI as we have access to it, is capable, but has a narrow scope. Making it useful requires a ton of specialized peripherals. These are called RAG and agents. RAG is augmented retrieval of information from a database. Agents are collections of multiple AI’s to do a given task where they have different jobs and complement each other.

    It is currently possible to make a very highly specialized AI agent for a niche task and have it perform okay within the publicly available and well documented tool chains, but it is still hard to realize. Such a system must use info that was already present in the base training. Then there are ways to improve access to this information through further training.

    With RAG, it is super difficult to subdivide a reference source into chunks that will allow the AI to find the relevant information in complex ways. Generally this takes a ton of tuning to get it right.

    The AI tools available publicly are extremely oversimplified to make them accessible. All are based around the Transformers library. Go read the first page of Transformers documentation on Hugging Face’s website. It clearly states that it is only a basic example implementation that prioritizes accessibility over completeness. In truth, if the real complexity of these systems was made the default interface we all see, no one would play with AI at all. Most people, myself included, struggle with sed and complex regular expressions. AI in its present LLM form is basically turning all of human language into a solvable math problem using regular expressions and equations. This is the ultimate nerd battle between English teachers and Math teachers where the math teachers have won the war; all language is now math too.

    I’ve been trying to learn this stuff for over a year and barely scratched the surface of what is possible just in the model loader code that preprocess the input. There is a ton going on under the surface. All errors are anything but if you get into the weeds. Models do not hallucinate in the sense that most people see errors. The errors are due to the massive oversimplifications made to make the models accessible in a general context. The AI alignment problem is a thing and models do hallucinate but the scientific meaning is far more nuanced and specific than the common errors from generalized use.





  • Intent matters.

    Do you want to claim you found master of the universe? You better have evidence of the cosmological constants that are the building blocks of the entire universe.

    No religion on Earth has ever possessed ontological knowledge prior to the scientific discoveries of these fundamental building blocks. These are the true signature of origin. Every bit of information contained within religions can be explained by direct human observation and meddling. It would be very easy to prove divinity by relating such ontological information.

    In terms of history, it is always written by the winner. The accuracy is only found in aggregate.

    The best times to live are the times when there was nothing of note. The worst times to live are always eras with memorable names of individuals. Only the worst of humans stand out from the fray and plaster themselves on the wall of history. To say Genghis Khan did not exist is not a measuring of the man, but a fool that claims the giant shit stain on the wall does not stink.




  • As someone that has learned FreeCAD/slicing/printing and someone that can set feed, speed, and sizzle bacon with a side of chips, I’m not as proficient/experienced with machine tools as I am with design and printing, but for the time I’ve spent doing both, the total learning curve is about equivalent in my opinion.

    See, the thing is, with 3d printing functional stuff, you can’t just grab a file and print like this. It sounds plausible in theory, but it is honestly a recipe for a Darwin award when handling tiny explosives (primers technically are) like ammunition for firearms. This can be difficult for many people to grasp, but consumer 3d printers are accurate, but not precision machines. This constraint of accuracy without precision is important. In the most basic explanation, the movements of the printer begin by assuming a 0 (x) and 0 (y) position. All movements assume they are relevant to this 0,0 location and absolute. There is always variance in this 0,0 location.

    If you get deep into the weeds, there are also several factors that make every 3d printer’s motion system unique to where two files will never print exactly the same between two machines. It does not matter at the tolerances of most parts people share, but this is usually at least 0.1mm-0.5mm tolerances. For something like a gun, or other precision mechanism, you really need a design tolerance of 0.01mm to 0.05mm. This kind of tolerance is beyond the capability of most cheap machines and beyond the kinds of tolerances that can be shared in files with other people and have any kind of relevance. The reason this matters is because the printed parts need to interface with external toleranced parts like the steel barrel. It is very possible to print these parts, but the technique requires skill. One could start scaling a part to try and solve this issue. However, in almost all cases, the X Y and Z axis will have different tolerance ranges that need to be accounted for in the design.

    The actual functional way to do this requires designing your own parts. Most people that are sharing stuff like gun prints are really just showing off their chops. A fool might try and just print the stuff, but fools rarely get very far on their own. I might take such a file as a baseline to further play around with in design, but I am far more likely to place the part in FreeCAD and use it as a visual reference only while I rebuild the item from scratch. I can easily dial in 0.01mm tolerances, but I do so in reverse. I print many unit tests and adjust my design measurements until the test prints match my real world measurements. I’ve spent thousands of hours in CAD learning to design well. I can easily design something like a functioning gun. I do not support others doing so or showing off such content because I think it is irresponsible. This is why the general community consensus, and I banned (real) gun related content from !3dprinting@lemmy.world. I love functional printing and design at these levels, but the subject of guns is not conducive for a healthy general 3d printing community. Not to mention, it is the kind of thing some foolish kid might try without a full understanding of design, and accuracy versus precision.

    Systems like a CNC mill use absolute position motion systems. With these, there is no assumed relative position; if the motion command fails to produce the specified movement there is direct feedback and error handling. Closed loop linear motion systems are far more expensive and/or difficult to realize. These are the basis of any real concern. The ability to print something truly robust enough to function like a gun is a matter of quite skilled learning and practice in the real world.



  • I find these articles funny. A glock switch can be made out of almost anything from a bit of bent metal sheet to carved wood. 3d printing one is irrelevant. When it comes to guns, the arguments are usually idiotic. I can making nearly anything with a small lathe and mill. The gun problem is a multifaceted cultural problem. Their misuse is largely the result of hopeless disenfranchisement of the poor and average person, along with politically leveraging ignorance and corporate capitalist abuses.

    How you doing Squid? Any progress on the food health front?




  • That is not how real point of sale systems and stores operate in practice. I actually managed a retail chain of bike shops as the Buyer and back office manager. I was the one maintaining the point of sale connections and system. There are always errors in these systems largely due to new and incompetent sales staff that sell/return/enter duplicates of the wrong items. They can enter almost anything wrong, from gender to color, from model year to brand. I’ve seen them all.

    Connecting these systems online is an absolute nightmare. I tried it with shopify, but had to limit the sku’s to items I could completely control with minimal intervention from other staff. Generally speaking, the POS system in a local retail store can be more loosely managed where the staff can make up the gaps and mistakes when the POS system numbers do not perfectly match the local stock. If you want to track inventory like is required for online retail, you need a whole different kind of micromanagement and responsibility from staff. You also need something like quarterly inventory audits. These are quite time consuming and are a total loss in the labor time involved.

    For online retail to be competitive, the margins with e-tail are absolutely untenable trash for brick and mortar retail. They are not even close. The biggest expenses are the commercial space rent and labor costs. With e-tail, the labor is less skilled, and the space is a cheap warehouse somewhere remote. General retail margins must be 40%+ while e-tail is 15-20%. The two are completely incompatible. This is why real quality brands do not sell e-tail. It has to do with how distribution and preseason wholesale buying works. There is more complexity to this, but overall the two are not compatible. In fact, most high quality brands will not allow most of their products to be listed online except under certain circumstances. This is to keep things fair to all parties and prevent undercutting based on whomever has the lowest overhead cost.

    Selling online is only for low end junk and certain circumstances. If you are a high end consumer, you will likely understand this already. It is hard to produce high end goods and distribute them successfully. It takes local Buyers that know their niche market and can do massive preseason spending to collectively give the manufacturer an idea of what they need to produce at what scale. Otherwise, the business will not last long, or they must produce lower end and more reliable/limited products. This strategy will likewise fail due to over saturation of the market segment. It is far more complex than most people realize.



  • I think, printing more money under the same conditions is the primary inflation/devalue, while the federal interest rate determines the baseline for loan interest rates. If the federal rate of return is high, it makes no sense for anyone to buy loans for a lower rate as the US gov has a longer upstanding record of paying back those debts/returns. If the fed is paying a high baseline rate, so is everyone else. Why would a bank or anyone buy your debt if they can put that money in government bonds and get a higher or the same rate of return. So money is expensive because the federal rate is high. At least that is my most simple understanding.