• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Besides the first all electric train bit, which is nonsense, it also touts the capacity of the train. It has 120 seats, which may be mind blowing to car heads, but for a train is rather on the low side. Regular passenger trains often have over 200 seats and many have more seats for the same length. For busy pieces of track 600 seats per train aren’t unusual.

    It really is like the author has never heard of trains before and has his mind blown by the concept.

    Personally I think putting in batteries is kinda dumb, trains need so much infrastructure already and it’s fixed in location. Adding a power delivery system (like overhead power lines like most electric trains have) is really easy. That way a lot of weight is saved, thus making the whole thing more efficient. You also don’t need any special materials to make it, compared with huge batteries. And the wear components are a lot less expensive to replace.



  • Yeah but this is referencing the movie trope where the person has a fully stopped heart and they shock it back to life. In reality applying cpr is just keeping the blood pumping to supply the brain with oxygen in the hope the body restarts the heart itself. That’s why modern defib machines check the nerve impulses to see if shocking it would help. Of there is no heartbeat, it won’t help and will refuse to shock. Once the body restarts the heart but the rhythm isn’t correct shocking can help. The shocks also aren’t huge shocks where the person violently lurches up and putting in more energy won’t help either. The machine checks the rhythm and applies a series of shocks to help the nerves regain their normal pattern and thus tell the heart to pump in the right sequence and speed. Just randomly zapping will probably do more harm than good.

    It’s pretty nice the emergency defib machines we have all over the place these days are smart enough to help without needing to know how it does their thing. Because 80s and 90s TV and movies have muddied the water quite a bit.


  • Really I’m gonna need a source for that old timey radio claim. Because that sounds like it’s made up and even if it’s not, correlation does not mean causation.

    There is no known mechanism for non ionizing radiation to have ANY effect on the human body or individual cells besides from a warming effect. And even the warming effect is quite small, there are normally a lot of other factors that have a way bigger effect on the temperature. See the Mythbusters episode where they tried to warm a chicken on a radar emitter. The turning of the radar cooled it down more than any warming from the radar did.

    If there is any truth to claims that non ionizing radiation harms humans, physicists would be all over that. That would mean new physics in an area where there hasn’t been any new stuff for a long time now.

    But it turns out we understand it pretty well and see no mechanism for any harm to occur. In that context all of the studies that find no relation are meaningful. If there seems to be no relation and there isn’t a mechanism to do anything, why would anybody think there is anything to find? Turns out it always comes down to FUD, to further some kind of an agenda.


  • A cancer on humanity? That’s a bit dramatic.

    You know you don’t have to have it dancing in rainbow patterns right? You can choose any color you like and even have it be static. I have most of my keys in blue, with the function and numpad in a soft white. This is a relaxing layout for me that helps me focus. But if you hate it so much, simply turn the lights off, that was always an option. Plus I think you are overreacting a bit, there are plenty of good keyboards out there without rgb that don’t cost much.


  • The whole mixing colors is white is kinda misleading.

    Colors only exist inside our mind, they don’t exist in physical reality. We have three receptors for wavelength information in the em spectrum in our eyes. They are S, M and L type and they are sensitive to a different range of wavelengths. The M and L range overlap quite a bit and are sensitive to a wider range of wavelengths. The S is apart on its own and quite focused. The receptors turn that wavelength information into signals our brains can read out. Simply speaking the eyes tell our brain for a given part of our retina we have x amount of S energy, x amount of M energy and x amount of L energy. That’s all the information we get.

    So our brain combines this information and decides what color it’s supposed to be. As a child we learn what the different colors are. So we correlate those energy levels to the colors we are taught. This is highly subjective as each brain and set of eyes is different. Most men for example have less sensitivity to colors compared to most women (exceptions exist, this is generally speaking). Thus men see different energy levels, but still can see colors just fine for the most part. However women are on average able to distinguish between more shades of the same color, because they have more information to work with.

    In the modern era however we found out our brains aren’t very picky and will just guess what color something is. In sunlight there is a broad range of wavelengths, which we associate with white light. However when making white leds we found out you can just output some spikes of light in the correct ranges and our brains will say jup that’s white. You can also output shit outside of the wavelength of our three detectors and we don’t notice or care. This makes cheap energy efficient white leds possible.

    In the early days the peaks were very narrow with not the best wavelengths. We would see this light as white, but it wouldn’t be comfortable. Without saying exactly why, we would experience the light as harsh or get headaches after a while. Modern white leds are very comfortable for our eyes and available in a whole range of whites to suit our needs.

    So while a whole lot of wavelengths combined like the light from the sun is white. A bunch of random spikes is also white. It doesn’t have to be all colors.

    Also because colors only exist in our minds, things like grayscale colors, impossible colors and metallic colors are also a thing. There’s a whole lot more to colors than just em radiation at a certain wavelength.


  • I did the exact same. Google Play Music was actually a good service back in the day. I hated it when they turned it into YouTube Music. I complained about all the broken stuff, so they gave me a home speaker for free and upgraded me to YT Premium for a year. After that year I stuck with YT Premium, since it was less than $2 extra. They also fixed a lot of stuff I complained about. Not everything, but a lot of it. I think YT Music was released a bit before it was ready. Now it still has some issues, but is mostly fine.

    Usually I watch 1 or 2 YouTube videos a day and without Premium I would most definitely not. I opened a YouTube video on a computer I wasn’t signed in the other day and it started with a 2 minute unskipable ad about crypto stuff (an obvious scam). So I closed it real fast, no video is worth sitting through that. Even with Premium I still need SponsorBlock. But with that combination watching videos is actually fun.

    Still listen to YouTube Music all day at work, so that’s a good value for money for me.




  • I know a lot of folk that work at MS or have worked there, they are all very good people. They are highly motivated professionals that are top in their field. MS is a rich company and they recruit the best they can. However those are not the people making any kind of decisions. And it’s a cut throat company, if the budget gets cut, you are out on your ass. At least in most of the world, where strong employee protection isn’t a thing.

    Don’t get me wrong, MS has a lot of bad apples just like any other company. Useless managers who say dumb shit and take praise for other peoples work. A leadership that doesn’t care about anything except their bonuses and the bottom line. But at least as far as the engineers go, there’s plenty of really good folk.

    People also seem to forget how huge MS actually is. And a lot of the time the different branches within the company are as far away from each other as can be. Even within the same branch one can only talk to so many people.