Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Thrashy@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldRust is Eating JavaScript
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    5 days ago

    Look, I’m in no position to talk seeing as I once wrote a cron job in PHP, but the profusion of JavaScript in the late aughts and early teens for things that weren’t “make my website prettier!” feels very much like a bunch of “webmasters” dealing with the fact that the job market had shifted out from under them while they weren’t looking and rebranding as “developers” whose only tool was Hammer.js, and thinking all their problems could be recontextualized as Nail.js.




  • I was the last of my immediate family on Facebook, and I only stuck around to keep in touch with a couple hobby groups. I decided to cut the cord once Zuck went mask-off, and honestly I haven’t regretted it. The family group text is still chugging along fine, and most of the people I actually want to talk to are on other platforms at this point.

    I don’t blame anybody who feels like they have to keep Facebook to stay in touch with loved ones… but man, it feels good not to have that spammy time suck on my phone anymore.



  • I’d been planning for a new HVAC system for a while when that video came out, and it gave me the idea to cross-check the thermostat data with the Manual J calc I’d already done. They were in general agreement, though the Manual J block load was more conservative than empirical data for a design day.

    In your case, since you don’t have data from a healthy system on a representative heating design day, I’d suggest using a web tool like CoolCalc to simply calculate an approximate Manual J total heating and cooling load, and use that to guide your choices.


  • A little headroom ain’t bad, but it had three times the required heating capacity for my area’s “design day” low, which meant that for most of the winter it was kicking on for maybe 5-10 minutes per hour and then leaving massive cold spots in the house, because the thermostat was smack in the middle and all the walls were bleeding heat.

    My new heat pump is just about 2x the design day heat requirement, but that also means it’s got capacity to handle extreme lows without resorting to resistance heat, and in any case it’s fully modulating so the house has stayed quite comfortable so far.


  • My old furnace was hilariously oversized for the house.

    One of the nifty things about smart thermostats like Ecobees is that you can pull usage data from their web portal. I grabbed a CSV file covering a cold snap last year that reached a 100-year record low, and using Excel I summed up the total heat output while we were at that low.

    The furnace was only running 50% of the time, even when it was with a couple degrees of as cold as it’s ever been where I live.

    Needless to say, when I got a new system installed I made sure it was more properly sized, and given that I had a convenient empirical measurement of exactly how many btus I actually needed in the worst case as scenario, that was easily done.



  • Intel’s problems, IMO, have not been an issue of strategy but of engineering. Trying to do 10nm without EUV was a forgivable error, but refusing to change course when the node failed over and over and over to generate acceptable yield was not, and that willful ceding of process leadership has put them in a hole relative to their competition, and arguably lost them a lucrative sole-source relationship with Apple.

    If Intel wants to chart a course that lets them meaningfully outcompete AMD (and everyone else fighting for capacity at TSMC) they need to get their process technology back on track. 18A looks good according to rumors, but it only takes one short-sighted bean counter of a CEO to spin off fabs in favor of outsourcing to TSMC, and once that’s out of house it’s gone forever. Intel had an engineer-CEO in Gelsinger; they desperately need another, but my fear is that the board will choose to “go another direction” and pick some Welchian MBA ghoul who’ll progressively gut the enterprise to show quarterly gains.


  • This feels like complaints over asset flips bleeding over into first-party asset reuse, because the people complaining don’t understand why the former is objectionable. It’s not that seeing existing art get repurposed is inherently bad (especially environmental art… nobody needs to be remaking every rock and bush for every game) but asset flips tend to be low effort, lightly-reskinned game templates with no original content. Gamers just started taking the term at face value and assumed the use of asset packs was the problem, rather than just a symptom of a complete lack of effort or care on the developers’ part



  • I’ve got two big sycamores in my front yard, and they both are currently dropping leaves the size of dinner plates in enough quantity to completely cover large portions of the yard. If I don’t rake or mulch them, they will smother whatever ground cover that’s underneath them. I know this because I tried leaving them one year and it took the next three years to get all the mud pits left behind in the spring to fill back in.


  • In that case (as is the case with most games) the near-worst case scenario is that you are no worse off trusting Valve with the management of item data than you would be if it was in a public block chain. Why? Because those items are valueless outside the context of the commercial game they are used in. If Valve shuts down CS:GO tomorrow, owning your skins as a digital asset on a blockchain wouldn’t give you any more protection than the current status quo, because those skins are entirely dependent on the game itself to be used and viewed – it’d be akin to holding stock certificates for a company that’s already gone bankrupt and been liquidated: you have a token proving ownership of something that doesn’t exist anymore.

    Sure, there’s the edge case that if your Steam account got nukes from orbit by Gaben himself along with all its purchase and trading history you could still cash out on your skin collection, Conversely, having Valve – which, early VAC-ban wonkiness notwithstanding, has proven itself to be a generally-trustworthy operator of a digital games storefront for a couple decades now – hold the master database means that if your account got hacked and your stuff shifted off the account to others for profit, it’s much easier for Valve support to simply unwind those transactions and return your items to you. Infamously, in the case of blockchain ledgers, reversing a fraudulent transaction often requires forking the blockchain.


  • The idea has merit, in theory – but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the “code is law” status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it’d be preferable if they didn’t need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.

    If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that’s insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.





  • I agree, this is a good use of the live service model to improve the gameplay experience. Previous entries in the Flight Simulator series did have people purchase and download static map data for selected regions, and it was a real pain in the butt – and expensive, too. Even with FS2020 there is a burgeoning market for airport and scenery packs that have more detail and verisimilitude than Asobo’s (admittedly still pretty good) approach of augmenting aerial and satellite imagery with AI can provide.

    Bottom line, though, simulator hobbyists have a much different sense of what kind of costs are reasonable for their games. If you’re already several grand deep on your sim rig, a couple hundred for more RAM or a few bucks a month for scenery updates isn’t any big deal to you.