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

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  • Thanks for the clarification, pipes look like copper but might be cast iron.

    Still doesn’t fit with the explanation, aluminum has more resistance than copper, but not that much more. The resistance of cast iron is an order of magnitude higher than aluminum. So it would still be the lowest resistance in the circuit and thus the coolest part.

    And cast iron is pretty good at conducting heat. Not as good as copper or aluminum, but still pretty good. We’ve been using the material to make pans and pots for cooking because of it’s thermal properties. So the heat wouldn’t just stop at the fitting, but continue on at least some ways.

    Moreover it’s physically impossible to get aluminum hot enough to glow like this and still keep it’s shape. It melts at 600 degrees C, well below the point where something gets red hot, let alone yellow like this. If the aluminum were to be this hot, it would be in a puddle and at risk of burning.


  • This makes no sense at all.

    Why would only these two specific pipes get hot, so hot to glow, but not the other lines connected to it? And not the fittings around it? It’s all copper, so even if the power itself doesn’t heat them up, why would being connected to an extremely hot pipe heat it up. Since it’s you know copper and being good at transferring heat is what it’s known for.

    And why would the lower resistance part be the part that get hottest? Low resistance means less loss, so those parts would in fact be the coldest of all.

    Plus thin walled copper pipes can’t get so hot they glow without melting or at the very least lose all structural integrity and break.

    And a downed power line with a short to ground would almost immediately turn off. It’s when there isn’t a direct line to ground those things are dangerous. As soon as it shorts, it gets turned off at the source to prevent further damage, fire and not cause issues upstream.

    Either it’s Photoshop or someone has wrapped led lighting around some pipes. Also those aren’t gas pipes.



  • Most of the bots on Lemmy have been well meaning, but ultimately annoying.

    The issue is there isn’t really a lot of traffic on Lemmy. And from the people that are here a lot of them are lurkers, just consuming, maybe upvoting once in a while, but that’s it. This leads bots that reply to a lot of comments/posts to become a large part of the traffic and thus the experience for the users. There isn’t enough for the bots to get lost in the noise. This also leads to the user experiencing the feeling of only interacting with bots, instead of other people. Most people commenting are looking for people interaction and get annoyed when they think they have such an interaction only for it to be a bot.

    Lemmy is also very focused of an audience at the moment, which leads to bots not really being necessary. People here are usually very tech savvy and know how to do most of the things. A bot that explains how to do things people already know how to do comes across as unneeded.


  • It’s just an electric field man, we create those all the time. The interesting part is that we figured out how this field is created that causes the outflow of particles at the poles. That outflow has been known for a long time, the field has been theorized to exist for a long time (how else would the outflow occur?), they’ve now just confirmed it does in fact work the way they thought it worked.

    While this is cool science and very interesting for people that study for example geology, it isn’t changing the world or anything. Don’t let your head be turned by sensationalist media. This isn’t new physics, the field is very weak and it’s a normal EM field just like the ones we use every day all day.

    In principle it’s possible to launch something into space using an EM field. That’s called a rail gun and the military has prototypes that shoot projectiles at hypersonic speeds. However due to the forces and currents involved, the thing is massive, requires a whole lot of power and cooling and as a bonus self destructs after one or two shots. The acceleration also mean that it’s great for shooting at stuff and destroying it, but not that useful for transport.

    A rocket on the other hand can be very small (the Electron rocket is only 14 meters and can put 300kg into LEO), easy to transport, easy to maintain and fuel and with a much smaller chance of self destructing. Thus we use rockets to put stuff into orbit.

    Beyond the solar system is totally impossible with our current tech. Voyager 1 and 2 might be considered interstellar probes, but they are tiny and took 50 years to get there. And they are going so slow, that while they have left our solar system, they aren’t really going anywhere. It will take them tens of thousands of years to even make it to the Oort cloud of our solar system, which by some metrics is still inside our solar system. We are currently struggling getting humans to the moon for a few days, so beyond the solar system is firmly in the realm of fiction.




  • Yeah I’m thinking of a system like this:

    A user opens a session to watch a video, the user is assigned a token to watch the requested video. When the user isn’t a premium subscriber and the video is monetized the token is used to enforce ads. To get video data from the server, the user needs to supply the token. That token contains a “credit” with how many seconds (or whatever they use internally) the user can watch for that video. In order to get seconds credited to the token, the user needs to stream ad content to their player. New ad content is only available to stream, once the number of seconds they were credited have been elapsed.

    One way to get around this is to have something in the background “watch” the video for you, invisible, including the ads. Then records the video data, so it’s available for you to watch without ads. But it would be easy to rate limit the number of tokens a user can have. There’s ways to get around that as well. But this seems to me well beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, this would require a dedicated client.

    The idea is to make it harder for users to get around the ads, so they’ll watch them instead of looking for a way to block ads. In the end there isn’t anything to be done, users can get around the ads. Big streaming services use DRM and everything and their content gets ripped and shared. With YouTube it would be easy for someone to have a Premium account, rip the vids and share them. But by putting up a barrier, people watch the ads. YouTube doesn’t care if a percentage of users doesn’t watch the ads, as long as most of them do.

    My point was, there’s ways to implement the ads without sending metadata about the ads to the client.


  • I’m not talking about the player or the controls being server-side. I’m talking about the player being locked into a streaming mode where it does nothing but stream the ads. After the ads are streamed, the player returns to normal video mode and the server sends the actual video data.

    This means no metadata about the ads are required on the player side about the ads.

    Sure you can hack the player into not being locked during the streaming of the ads. But that won’t get you very far, since it’s a live stream. You can’t skip forward, because the data isn’t sent yet. You can skip backwards if you’d like, with what’s in the current buffer, but why would you want to? You can have the player not display the ads, but that means staring at a blank screen till the ads are over. And that’s always the case, one can simply walk away during the ads, that’s always been the case.

    Technically I can think of several ways to implement this, without the client having meta data about the ads. And with little to none ways of getting around the ads. Once the video starts it’s business as usual, so it doesn’t impact regular viewing.




  • Oncoming drivers? I’m getting blasted by “cars” behind me. Fucking trucks or even lifted trucks with their headlights at my eye level. And it seems like lights are getting brighter as well, or people drive with their high beams on. My rearview mirror is auto dimming, which helps a lot. But since I drive the speed limit these trucks are swerving back and forth behind me, blinding me via the side mirrors.

    Man we really really need restrictions on size and weight of cars. It’s getting ridiculous out there.





  • Yeah this is the biggest issue.

    The way most housing gets built where I live it works like this: A company handles the project management, buying the land, getting the permits, hiring the builders, doing the marketing/sales etc. This costs a HUGE amount of money, which they don’t have. So these projects get designed on paper and then sold to investors. These put in a big amount of money, with the expectation of the project making money in the sales of the housing in the end. This means they can often double their entry in a couple of years, which is really good in terms of investments. As the investors want to make as much money as possible, the company designing the housing have incentives to not only make the houses as dense as possible, but also as expensive as possible. Their margins in percent are about the same no matter the house, so a more expensive house makes them more money. This leads to really big expensive homes crammed together in either high rises or plots. It’s really dumb as well since detached homes are worth more, they build homes with like 2 meter between them. The biggest issue is, only rich people can afford these homes. Even though more homes are built, the majority of people looking to buy a home can’t afford these. Homes also get sold to investors again, to rent out as the house itself appreciates in value. These expensive homes also have the effect of driving up property prices in the area, which leads to more expensive houses and higher taxes.

    In the end, it’s only the rich that profit. They get the good investment projects, making them even more rich. They get to buy the expensive new homes to live in. They get to buy the homes to rent out and use as an investment vehicle.

    Some places have made them build cheaper homes as well, if they want to get the permit. But it’s not enough. We need to be building practical affordable homes, but we don’t cause the people putting up the money to build stuff don’t want to.



  • 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.