monotremata

joined 1 year ago
[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Basically this: https://imgur.com/a/VjUTVaq

The blue sections have no support material below them and are printing as bridges, but in the default behavior, PrusaSlicer just uses the single, global "bridging angle" setting to decide which way to print layers on top of these sections. The perimeters on these sections are printed correctly to make the shortest path across the gap, but the rest of the lines making up those bridge layers are printed to match the "bridging angle," which here means that two of the bridges are printed so they are supported only by those two perimeter bridges themselves.

Please ignore the details of the print itself, as I'm a little braindead today and this is a print that won't actually fold together correctly as designed. But the issue of bridges orienting poorly is more general than this particular design.

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sure, I mean, anything you need a spacecraft to do but that you can accomplish without adding extra equipment, you should probably do it that way, because it means less mass to accelerate and less equipment to test and certify and so forth. It's definitely not hard to imagine getting this functionality without adding equipment. The question is whether the ability to do this in the rare scenarios that call for it offset the drawbacks of having a system in which the protections against such failures can be disabled. Which means you then have to include a bunch of interlocks and crap to ensure it's as unlikely as possible that the ship can get into that mode without someone being very sure they want that. I think OP is probably right that on, say, a cargo ship, it's pretty unlikely that "also, the engine can explode!" would be seen as a feature rather than a wholly alarming bug.

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 15 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I think this is the best answer. It also technically means that the Aurora Borealis is just the solar wind bouncing off our deflector shield, which is a pretty badass way to talk about that.

The other example that's arguable at this point is the magnetic confinement systems inside fusion reactors, which use powerful magnetic fields to constrain the hot plasma, to keep it away from the walls of the reactor. It's basically the same principle, but in that case it's actually a human-made field. It still only affects ions, though, which is pretty different from most sci-fi force fields.

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

That would make sense for a cutting edge spy plane, but it's a little weird for something like the Nostromo, which is just a standard cargo ship. I guess if you sometimes carried secret cargo, though, you would want that equipment standard, since otherwise installing it custom for one trip would be a dead giveaway that there was something secret on board.

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 12 points 8 months ago

"Judean People's Front!? We're the People's Front of Judea! And if there's one thing we hate worse than the Romans, it's the bleeding Judean People's Front!"

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I really don't think it's that stupid. Your particular machine has a lot of ports, yeah. But there are plenty of machines out there, like the 12-inch non-pro macbook, that have ONE USB-C PORT and absolutely no other ports. That's clearly limiting. Like, you can connect it to ethernet, if you buy an additional USB-C ethernet adapter, but if you want to be able to ethernet and have it connected to power at the same time, you need to buy a special power brick that combines the two functions, because they didn't include any other ports.

Plus, there are a bunch of things that still use USB-A. I've got a bunch of old thumb drives that work like that, especially for transferring video files to my TV, which only supports USB-A itself. Wireless dongles for mice and game controllers, which still offer a latency advantage over bluetooth, tend to be USB-A as well. I've also got a wearable pulse oximeter that requires a special cable to load data, and the other end of that cable is USB-A only. Again, you can get an adapter dongle, but that's never as convenient as just having the right port in the first place.

I went a bit out of my way to get a laptop with a decent collection of ports (and it's a bit of a less portable laptop as a result, maybe more like a desktop replacement), but even it has for some reason dropped the SD card reader, which I would have used a lot. I had to get a dongle for that. And I had to get one that used USB-C in particular, because my USB-A ports are usually both filled.

Basically the selection of ports used to be something that laptops used as a point of differentiation and pride in a crowded market; but Apple managed to invert this, making the prestige marker having a slimmer laptop with as few ports as possible, and that was a dumb change. I do think the pendulum is swinging back, as with your Pro macbook, but I don't think it's unreasonable to be frustrated with the way this element of the market went in such a consumer-hostile direction for a while.

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago

I've been seeing that one mentioned a lot lately because the sequel just came out.

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

I dunno, I think you may be underestimating ARM here. I've heard that the overhead from translating the machine code is a lot lower than you might think, because so much X86 code is optimized down to a RISC-like subset of the instruction set already. And if that overhead isn't too daunting in the common cases, the more robust power management on the ARM side of the chip market might be able to make up the difference in a handheld environment for most users. Obviously it's a huge amount of work to nail the software, and it would be on top of the work they were already doing on Linux, so I'm not saying it'll definitely be in the next iteration, but I could definitely imagine it happening eventually.

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 6 points 10 months ago

Same with The Mysterious Benedict Society. I did find a site that would sell it to me on a disc, but once I received it, it became clear to me they didn't actually have a license to do so and just sold me a bootleg. Oh well. I dunno why Disney just didn't want my money in the first place.

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 20 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Capitalism is already a superintelligence, and its goals are misaligned with those of humanity.

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

Kinda feels like moving out of America ought to be covered by my health insurance, really

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 14 points 11 months ago

Sound doesn't travel as far through warm humid air, so the world feels a little more muted and calm. (Contrast this with the dry, dense air of a frigid winter day, when the sound of cars carries for miles as a dull growl.) The light is almost entirely diffuse thanks to clouds, rather than the sharp glare of a sunny day; your skin isn't dried out and burned in the same way either. Public spaces aren't as crowded. Indoor rooms are often lighted more gently as well without sharp sunbeams drawing lines. Add the sound of rain itself and the faint smell of petrichor, and the improvement in the air quality as the rain washes particulate and pollen into the gutters, and you get a perfect day to curl up with a book, a cup of tea, and a cat on your lap.

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