• 22 Posts
  • 234 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I’m one of those people that has the technical knowledge to repair most electronics. I still buy new sometimes.

    A while ago, I had to repair a faulty pellet stove. It was obvious that the main control board was bad (there was a single small circuit board connected to a handful of relays and sensors, all of which tested as good). This board contained a small cheap microcontroller, a few MOSFETs, and a handful of discrete components. A replacement was $500. Maybe $10 in parts at the most, and they wanted to charge me half the cost of the entire appliance.

    I was able to isolate the problem to a bad MOSFET and order a new one for about 50 cents. Had this been a complex circuit, there’s no way in hell I could have found the problem without a schematic.

    So in my opinion, the problem is twofold. Manufacturers want ridiculous prices for replacement parts, and no documentation exists to repair the parts themselves. They obviously have schematics from when they designed the board. They should be forced to release them.





  • I won’t deny the fact that gun violence happens here in the US, but statistics can be deceiving when you’re dealing with very small numbers. The article you linked gives a rate of 4.5 per 100,000 people in the US. That would put your country at around 0.13 per 100k.

    Out of 100k, the difference between 4.5 and 0.13 is still exceptionally small. So small that your chances of being shot if you live here your entire life are negligible. If you visit for a week or two, your chances are statistically insignificant. If you look at homicides by any means, not just firearms, this becomes even closer.

    So while what you say is accurate, you have to look at what it actually means. The United States is not “dangerous” by any stretch of the imagination. 35 multiplied by almost nothing is still almost nothing.









  • Personally, my problem was always that math concepts were never presented in a way that actually made sense in the “real world.”

    I was taught that complex numbers were real numbers with imaginary parts that had something to do with the square root of -1. Yeah, I get it, but… why?

    Fast forward a few decades and I’m writing code that processes a digitized waveform. Now it makes sense. Math isn’t hard when you have a frame of reference. Learning math concepts solely for the sake of learning them is very hard.







  • This is also true of Jellyfin, though. I have apps on my Windows PC, my Android phone, multiple Nvidia Shield boxes on my TVs, plus the web interface if I need it.

    I switched over from Plex several years ago, and while it takes a bit more time to configure, compatibility for clients seems just as good for Jellyfin as it is for Plex.

    Most importantly, Jellyfin is strictly client/server, no “cloud” bullshit and no remote account is required; I don’t want Plex phoning home with a list of the media on my file server.