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jk700

53 karma · joined August 25, 2020

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jk700··on USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess
No, $10 for a cable with significant amount of power is unreasonable. If you ever dealt with some power cables, you'd know that 1 meter of the highest quality copper power cable for continuous delivery of say 15 amps (3 x 1.5 mm^2) shouldn't cost more than $0.6. And that's enough for 300 watts of power given 20 volts. But you probably will never see that much copper in a USB-C cable, at best you'll see third of that and with a flimsy insulation, which costs two orders of magnitude less than $10.
jk700··on USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess
It's not magic when step down DC-DC converters take as much space as power negotiation crap and all that's really needed is single 20 volts. Look at new ATX standardization development with proposals to leave only 12 volts, dropping 5 and 3.3 - that's the right way to standardize on power delivery. What USB-C is doing is not standardization, but an attempt to undermine standardization to profit from selling expensive cables and locking people into brands, just as device manufacturers did with non standard ports for mobile phones in the past and were eventually fined for it and forced to use standardized USB power delivery.
jk700··on YouTube is shutting down crowdsourced captions
Some people and orgs upload videos with subtitles, especially those targeting international viewers.
jk700··on YouTube is shutting down crowdsourced captions
I'm pretty sure crowdsourcing subtitles in different languages is the primary use of the feature precisely because machine generated translation of machine generated captions produces gibberish.
jk700··on YouTube is shutting down crowdsourced captions
Maybe in both cases they did some A/B testing and found out ads were more effective without either feature. Like isn't it obvious that text boxes interfere with ads, take some attention away from them. Not as obvious with subtitles, but I can see how pushing people to watch something else without subtitles rather than letting them stay on videos and read subtitles is better for ads designed for being viewed in watching context, not reading context.
jk700··on The N95 mask shortage America can't seem to fix
You won't be able to produce materials neither for M1 Garand nor for masks. But at least for N95 masks there are plenty of substitute materials available in abundance if any of the commonly used ones isn't available and complicated stuff is only testing filtration properties of the material with cheap test equipment (you can even make test equipment yourself, it's relatively simple for such purposes, "dust sensor" kind of stuff). Everything else is way more primitive than lathe and mill.
jk700··on The N95 mask shortage America can't seem to fix
Yep, it's more like a post justification bullshit. I believe the more realistic reason is that N95 masks are produced by a monopoly that doesn't want neither expand production to satisfy short term rise in demand nor give up its monopolistic position for others to do it, hence the shortage of masks in the country where it has monopoly. (There isn't a shortage of masks in my country and hasn't been for months.)
jk700··on The N95 mask shortage America can't seem to fix
Keep in mind that polypropylene meltblown material (main filtering material) is used in surgical masks just as much, as well as polypropylene spunbond, but somehow they are produced in enough quantity everywhere in the world to satisfy demand of the whole world. The only extra material that surgical masks don't use is probably just "hot air cotton", but it isn't a filtering material, it's a spongy form making material and I doubt there is a shortage of it, given that KN95 and other FFP3/FFP2 masks that use it are available in many countries today and were available all summer.
jk700··on I no longer build software
It's likely not as common as it seems. Personally I only ever heard of some mythical software engineers from the US pursuing woodworking, but not from anywhere else. Maybe in the US it's a lucrative field and it's common for software engineers in the US to live in houses with plenty of space to do woodworking and where the products of woodworking might actually be useful, so it's something they can play with at home and consider a nice skill to have in case they get fed up with software industry.
jk700··on Ultra Safe Nuclear
In Ukraine, which lived through Chernobyl, public is mostly pro nuclear. Turns out solar and wind isn't actually competitive and nobody likes to pay rich "green energy" investors for no reason, so as long as they have no influence in the government and most mass media, it's pretty hard to convince people of the opposite - that they need to pay a lot more so that a tiny percentage of electricity could come from solar and wind [1].

[1] And even that is misleading and not in any way "greener", since solar and wind can't be used on demand it has to replace some energy, which in this case is nuclear energy, but it can replace only a small part of it, the rest will have to be replaced with something that can be generated on demand, like coal and gas.

jk700··on Six months in, N95 mask shortages persist
Meltblown isn't that limited in supply and from all the masks it is wasted mostly on surgical masks, not N95, since surgical masks use the same sickness meltblown layer, but are produced in much higher quantities.
jk700··on Large-scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers [pdf]
In the paper they were still able to cover 100% of US numbers for Signal and discover all of its users, but less than 0.02% for Telegram and discover only 908 of its users due to simple rate limits, how is Signal better at this exactly? On top of that the paper purposely chose unrealistic threat models and assumptions about privacy, as if letting other people know your phone number is somehow acceptable for privacy in the first place (it isn't and never was).
jk700··on Windows: The Dread of Updates
Yeah, you need to be very cautious with megacorp software these days. Disable internet access before putting your laptop to sleep or better don't even give it access to the entire internet in the first place, as the OS, the drivers, everything working in background will abuse it.

Although if you just want to control updates wumgr [1] still works, check it out. I use windows laptop pretty rarely, like a few times per year maybe and it helps a lot.

[1] https://github.com/DavidXanatos/wumgr

jk700··on Classes are a way of writing higher order functions
> OOP won against functional because OOP is easier to understand and leads to more maintainable code.

If by functional you mean higher order as in the title and not what is commonly known as FP - it's never been true. For example, a function that has no outside side effect and that calls an anonymous function provided as an argument is way easier to understand, reason about and maintain than its OOP equivalent of creating an object and calling three methods in specific order mixed with your code.

> These days people are taking a second look at functional because functional avoids state, which makes it easier to write concurrent code with no locks.

Avoiding state doesn't make it easier to concurrently touch shared memory without locks. Event loop style concurrency simply doesn't touch shared memory concurrently, so it doesn't need locks and doesn't have all those multithreading problems. It can still mutate state left and right, higher order programming just allows to map intent better to the code, making "sequences look sequential" and all that.

Actually solving problems concurrently with high performance today generally requires ditching shared memory based synchronously communicating concurrency models, leaving async communications of isolated entities where locking problems and overhead don't exist. But it has nothing to do with functional programming, OOP, higher order programming.

jk700··on Home Office Projects Series: Air conditioner setup
A common form of central heating, like burning fossils kind that delivers hot water over insulated pipes to each building, is more efficient in pretty much every way and is cheap to add during building construction than doing it individually. But it's not the case with a "central AC", it's less efficient, more expensive to add during building construction and operating costs are no better. Just think about it, you can't just deliver cold over a pipe and rely on air convection, like with heat, you need to literally move cold air into each room and make it individually adjustable. It's a ridiculously inefficient complicated expensive system requiring extra space and with installation costs higher than that of all AC units individually installed.
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