Yeah, I do apologize - I’m somewhat simplifying my explanation because when you start going into the full detail, it just brings up more questions.

So yes, like the other comment says, the particles are constantly bouncing into other things.

• If they’re bounded in by something - walls of a container, or even just more gas surrounding the specific sample you’re looking at - they’ll bump into that, and transfer some of their energy to that.
• If they don’t have something to bump off of and the particles are free-floating, they’ll take off in any given direction. If they only have something to bump off of in a limited number of directions, they’ll take off in the other direction. (For instance, in a rocket engine, we make a lot of molecules really, really hot and then surround them with barriers in every direction except the one we want them to zoom out in.)
• In some cases, the molecules have electromagnetic bonds with each other, which take more energy to break than the energy contained in their “bouncing around”. So they’ll stay stuck, just bouncing off each other, even in a vacuum, (Or at least, until they radiate away their heat via electromagnetic energy… another whole story.)

Yes, and no. Heat and kinetic energy are fundamentally all just energy. What we call heat is, technically, the kinetic energy of molecules vibrating around.

When exhaust gas passes through a turbocharger, it is both slowed and reduced in pressure, resulting in it coming out slightly cooler than when it entered. This device is using a different method of getting energy out of the exhaust gas, but it’s fundamentally still the kinetic energy of those very energetic exhaust gas molecules bouncing against one side of the thermoelectric generator and giving up their energy into it. I would still expect the exhaust gas to come out of it slightly cooler and slower.

Now this is the good stuff I look for in a Tech community.

Subjectively, I’ve been seeing a lot of high ping/packet loss in gaming and sites loading tonight. Can’t help but wonder if something more fundamental is going on.

To be fair, Star Trek always had its fantasy element as well. They dressed it up with Treknobabble a lot, but many of the episodes had fundamentally fantasy elements as well. Like, remember the time Kirk gets beamed down to a planet where the inhabitants use literal, actual magic and it turns out the Salem witches were actual witches?

Y’know, I was just browsing earlier and thinking that there wasn’t even any technology stuff in my feed anymore, it’d all been subsumed by the political churn…

Anyhow, to answer properly: I like Star Wars’ aesthetic better, but Star Trek also had some incredible stuff. I’ve also been increasingly burned out on Star Wars since the Disney takeover, to the point I barely follow it anymore. Back in the day I was neck-deep in the community of nerds who loved analyzing how the technology in the setting worked!

But the real love of my science-fiction life is Babylon 5. Something about how they planned the show’s myth arc out over multiple seasons leading to huge payoffs for both characters and the overall story.

Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library.

WAIT WHAT.

Does this happen even if the game wasn’t on Steam at time of purchase so long as it has a Steam version now? Because that would be amazing.

And to the shock of literally no one…

Really glad I’m not the first to come here and say this. We’re “firing” programs now? Come on.

This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, “Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community…?”