• 2 Posts
  • 81 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • If I’m not mistaken, inserters will always take from either the first or last occupied slot in a container that matches their filters. I’m not in front of my PC so I can’t check, but I’m fairly certain it’s not random at all. From your description of your setup (miners -> recyclers -> train) I suspect the “randomness” you’re seeing is due to how the train wagon gets filled up by the recycler output - which is itself definitely random.

    As another comment says, you’ll need to use filters to have the inserters do a “balanced pull”. If you want maximum throughput then you’ll need to wire up some combinators to dynamically adjust the filters over time. If you don’t care about achieving max throughput and just want to be sure you don’t clog up the unloading, you only need to spread out the ten-ish scrap recycling outputs across the filters for the 6/12 inserters that interact with a given train wagon.




  • You buying at a grocery store is out of convenience, the alternative is learning how to hunt like a survival hunter.

    At some point that was an alternative, but today the natural ecosystems have been so encroached upon by human civilization that we can’t just decide to become survival hunters - we’d simply starve. Grocery stores are all you have if you’re living in a high-rise apartment in most cities, for example. Most suburbs can’t support enough wildlife to then be hunted for survival by the humans living there.

    Vegetable gardens might be a better analogy than survival hunting. There are even some initiatives being taken to break the cycle of dependency that grocery stores encourage, which I suspect is what @[email protected] is getting at: collective effort is needed beyond just letting the techies do their thing in their own corner, otherwise we all suffer. Everyone needs to move beyond their comfort zone at some point, for some amount of time - be it the techies teaching others, or the others learning a bit more about how their tools work.

    the average user wants the convenience of easy to use software, because they don’t want to learn the alternative […] If everyone was like you, then easy to use software wouldn’t be selling so much.

    I can’t tell if you are simply stating how the world currently is or claiming that it is destined to always be that way, but in either case I don’t see how “people prefer convenience” is a good argument against trying to help them get over that preference. I don’t think convenience is nor should be the end-all-be-all of existence, in fact it can be actively detrimental to life when prioritized.

    Unless I’m mistaken, the average user wanted asbestos in their walls, lead in their paint, and asked their doctor for menthol cigarettes instead of regular ones when said doctor was prescribing them for stress. The average user in the USA couldn’t tell that their milk was full of pus and mixed with chalk to the point it was killing their babies, all for the convenience of still owners and milk producers. Their society had built up so much around the convenience of drinking milk in places that couldn’t produce it locally, that it took an Act of Congress as well as the development of technology to safely transport milk long distances before the convenience stopped killing people.

    Don’t get me wrong, convenience is great when it doesn’t come at the expense of our well-being - in those cases it tends to dramatically improve our well-being. I tend to agree with @[email protected] that currently the software market is overly delivering convenience to the point that it is negatively affecting our collective well-being - with regards to software, at the very least.







  • I don’t think anyone can host a relay right now aside from bluesky.

    People can host their own data / Personal Data Server, which is somewhere between self-hosting a mastodon instance and creating an account on someone else’s instance. The actual equivalent would be self-hosting your masto account separately from any instance (which is just not a thing with the current state of mastodon nor activity pub).


  • I don’t see it mentioned anywhere in this thread: OP, in case you aren’t aware, you can read the platform’s speed off of it’s hub, and use that to control a pump supplying the thrusters. Only one of the fuel/oxidizer duo needs limiting, so you only need a single pump to do this. Set the pump’s condition to [speed] < [your target speed], and your platform will hover around the target speed.

    This will over fill the thrusters when stopped (notably when orbiting a planet) but in my experience as soon as the platform resumes travel it burns through the excess in a matter of seconds before returning into the regular “regime”.




  • Succinctly put, though I got some cognitive dissonance when the author wrote about bluesky being their choice of decentralized network to get involved with without even mentioning the hosting costs involved with running a bsky relay (or whichever component of the ATP network actually holds the data “firehose”).

    According to this article it took a server that costs around $150/month over 4 days to spin up a working relay, most of which was spent ingurgitating half a terabyte of data (that’s what ended up on disk in any case). Far from exorbitant, yet if I want to self host for my own personal needs it’s still gobs more data and compute than any activity pub software needs.

    Maybe my view of “decentralization as in democracy” is just fundamentally different from the author’s. I get the feeling that to them, as long as each friend group has 1 self-hoster in it then democracy through decentralization is preserved. This would make sense that they orient themselves towards something like bluesky and the AT protocol. Personally, I don’t think we should be satisfied with that level of decentralization/democracy - it’s a nice start, but we should strive for reaching at least 50% of people self-hosting an activity pub instance to truly achieve the type of decentralization that serves democracy. Of course, I’m not aware of any activity pub software that can be selfhosted by even 10% of the population, currently, so there’s definitely a lot of work to do before my vision is feasible.