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roelschroeven

1,800 karma · joined January 17, 2019

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/roelschroeven; my proof: https://keybase.io/roelschroeven/sigs/Nz0IX54-mcSFTECmlPQdnSc7uQmAIDijnfOugQ4B5xk ]
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roelschroeven··on Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars [video]
Yes, but specifically about the Toyota's hybrid system. Other systems are more complex, they have a traditional engine and transmission and an electrical system on top.
roelschroeven··on HantaWatch Real time hantavirus outbreak tracker
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/opinion/hantavirus-compla...

An interesting view on this. No need to panic, but we should take this outbreak, and others like it, more seriously and not leave things to chance, crossing our fingers and hoping for the best.

roelschroeven··on Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
For scrolling large distances in large documents, that's an important use case to me. As an indication of progress is another important use case, but also as an indication to show the size of the document relative to the viewport.
roelschroeven··on Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
Absolutely, but there are many programs that don't use that accent color, making it less useful than it should be.
roelschroeven··on SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites
Also some, or even many, people think that intercontintental communications use satellites rather than cables.
roelschroeven··on HantaWatch Real time hantavirus outbreak tracker
I don't really think so. Already in the first stages of this outbreak we're not doing any quarantine, instead we're infecting airline passengers and personnel and let them spread the virus uncontrolled. That doesn't indicate a proper prepared response.

Official knowledge is that Hanta transmission required prolonged close contact, but there are increasingly indication that Hanta can be transmitted through the air. That is going to be ignored in favor of the official but possibly outdated mode of transmission, leading to wrong or insufficient response.

Also I feel like people will be more hesitant than in 2020 to adopt behavior that avoids virus transmission.

If mutated Hanta variants turn out to be very effective at transmission, and if we don't have the luck of a quick vaccin as we did with Covid, we're cooked.

Hanta is a lot more deadly than Covid, and that can possibly be a good thing because that's the one thing that could lead to proper effective response. It has the potential to lead to rigorous measures to stop transmission instead of allowing it to spread to the whole population, leading to fewer cases and fewer deaths.

roelschroeven··on SpaceX rocket set for unintentional moon landing – well, a piece of it anyway
"If there were air". Air at which temperature though? Th sound of speed, and hence what Mach numbers mean, depends on the temperature of the air. The temperature air would have at the moon's surface? By day or by night? Or the air at Earth's surface? Or at some other altitude?
roelschroeven··on Your hex editor should color-code bytes
When you're going to color-code bytes in a hex dump, I would expect each ASCII character in the right column to have the same color as the hex byte in the left column, making it easier to pair them. I wonder why that wasn't done here.
roelschroeven··on Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin
I found some more information in this other article: https://www.dw.com/en/teen-discovers-first-ancient-greek-art...

""After we understood where it came from, I had the task of figuring out where this coin was found exactly. Fortunately, the boy was very precise and showed me exactly where he found it on a map. Then we went into our findings registration and found that this agricultural site was actually a well-known place," Henker explained.

Berlin'sMuseum for Pre- and Early History has been systematically conducting surveys on empty land in Berlin since the 1950s to determine where possible excavation sites might be.

In this particular spot, explains Henker, the upper layers of the soil were surveyed in the 1950s and 70s and again later. "Every time, they discovered a few distinct finds that made them say 'ok, there's probably more in the ground here'."

Over the years, fragments of ceramics, Slavonic-era knives and a bronze button have been unearthed on the site, as well as burnt human bones, leading researchers to conclude that this are was used as a burial ground dating as far back as the early Iron Age — and has been in use throughout the centuries."

roelschroeven··on Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin
"At first, archaeologists wondered if the coin was a “modern loss”—perhaps dropped by a collector in recent years. However, a professional excavation of the discovery site suggests a much deeper connection.

The field was found to be a multi-layered historical site, containing Bronze Age and Iron Age burial remains, Roman-era artifacts, and even a medieval Slavic knife fitting. This “archaeological context” suggests the coin likely arrived in the region centuries ago, rather than falling out of someone’s pocket last week."

If I get that right, the student somehow managed to find the coin in a field, and after archaeologists started digging and found a whole historical site.

Since the location is a field, I imagine the coin had come to the surface when the farmer was plowing the field, or something like that. Still, why was the student walking in a field? Germans are known for going on walks, but why in a field? Was he or she in the field with the express purpose of trying to find something interesting, maybe even using a metal detector? Or was it a purely accidental find?

roelschroeven··on Veracrypt Project Update
There are different types of trust, but at the very least with such a signature you can trust that the piece of software is really from Veracrypt and not from a malicious third party.
roelschroeven··on Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]
No worries. I played Kerbal Space Program so that shouldn't have surprised me but it did, and it took me a few seconds before the penny dropped.
roelschroeven··on My Google Workspace account suspension
I think their "Don't be evil" was pretty close to the truth, as much as it can be for large corporations, until around the time Google purchased DoubleClick. That was in 2008, so that seems to match your experience.
roelschroeven··on Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]
Have a look at the tracker at https://issinfo.net/artemis.html

They're already at a point where they see the moon from a different angle than we see it from Earth, enough to see a bit of the side that we can't see from here.

roelschroeven··on European alternatives to Google, Apple, Dropbox and 120 US apps
Does Italy use Peppol, or something home-grown?
roelschroeven··on Which European countries have the best salaries after taxes?
I don't know the exact situation in the Netherlands, but if it's anything like in Belgium the employer pays taxes on top of the employee's gross income. The total cost to the employer is therefore significantly higher than what the employee gets, even gross.
roelschroeven··on Which European countries have the best salaries after taxes?
If you click the link to Eurostat in the article, you can see the numbers are "Wages and salaries (total)". So yes, that's the cost to the employer, which is much higher than the employees net income.
roelschroeven··on Artemis II is not safe to fly
Let's not forget that, much more recently than Challenger and Columbia, NASA showed signs of launch fever in the Starliner program.

Starliner was not safe to fly either, thrusters couldn't be trusted, but Boeing and NASA managed pushed on and decided to fly anyway. The flight demonstrated that the problems were bad indeed. NASA communications pretended things were not good but not disastrous.

Turns out things were much worse than NASA and Boeing wanted to admit: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/nasa-chief-classifies-...

“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. “It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”

Still, after astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams eventually docked at the station, Boeing officials declared it a success. “We accomplished a lot, and really more than expected,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, during a post-docking news conference. “We just had an outstanding day.”

The true danger the astronauts faced on board Starliner was not publicly revealed until after they landed and flew back to Houston. In an interview with Ars, Wilmore described the tense minutes when he had to take control of Starliner as its thrusters began to fail, one after the other.

One thing that has surprised outside observers since publication of Wilmore’s harrowing experience is how NASA, knowing all of this, could have seriously entertained bringing the crew home on Starliner.

Isaacman clearly had questions as well. He began reviewing the internal report on Starliner, published last November, almost immediately after becoming the space agency administrator in December. He wanted to understand why NASA insisted publicly for so long that it would bring astronauts back on Starliner, even though there was a safe backup option with Crew Dragon.

“Pretending that that did not exist, and focusing exclusively on a single pathway, created a cultural issue that leadership should have been able to step in and course correct,” Isaacman said during the teleconference. “What levels of the organization inside of NASA did that exist at? Multiple levels, including, I would say, right up to the administrator of NASA.”

Some of NASA’s biggest lapses in judgment occurred before the crew flight test, the report found. In particular, these revolved around the second orbital flight test of Starliner, which took place two years earlier, in May 2022.

During this flight, which was declared to be successful, three of the thrusters on the Starliner Service Module failed. In hindsight, this should have raised huge red flags for what was to come during the mission of Wilmore and Williams two years later.

However, in his letter to NASA employees, Isaacman said the NASA and Boeing investigations into these failures did not push hard enough to find the root cause of the thruster failures.

And so on. Lots of parallels with the Artemis program, though in Artemis Isaacman doesn't seem to be following his own conclusions from the Starliner failure.

roelschroeven··on The First Video Game Was Just a Box in the Corner of a Bar
> It came across arrogant with an attempt at being high-brow, and included too much fluff.

Seems consistent with the name of the website: "Literary Hub"

roelschroeven··on Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
Same here. Afterwards I got more fat again, and again I don't notice a difference in how people threat me.
roelschroeven··on Migrating to the EU
AFAICS the cheapest option is 250€/month. That seems geared towards businesses, not individuals.
roelschroeven··on Migrating to the EU
But their servers are in the US.
roelschroeven··on The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)
This is an issue in many audio players. Maybe not as bad as in iOS (I don't know, can't compare), but the steps when the volume is low are nearly always too large. I like to play audio on low volumes, especially in quiet environments, and it seems designers/developers don't cater to that use case. One step is too low are even complete silent, one step louder is too loud.
roelschroeven··on Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)
The point is: when I was a kid, all Lego sets consisted almost completely of general bricks. You could, and would, start building different things from the moment you got your first set, and the possibilities would increase exponentially once you got a few more sets. Any set contributed to your collection of building blocks to create new things.
roelschroeven··on Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it
I know this is just one data point, but I don't notice any latency when typing code in VS Code. It takes a while to start up, and that is annoying especially for quick short editing jobs, but other than that I never notice any sluggishness. Is this something many people experience?
roelschroeven··on Physics Girl: Super-Kamiokande – Imaging the sun by detecting neutrinos [video]
Dianna got better sometime last year as well, just in time to fly home to Hawaii for her father's funeral (yeah ...), but she got a lot worse again later. I really hope things will keep going well for Dianna now.

Props for her husband who's been incredible of taking care of her.

roelschroeven··on Disable Your SSH access accidentally with scp
tl;dr: I you scp -r to your homedir, expect scp to copy not just files and directories but their permissions as well (which I think isn't all that surprising).
roelschroeven··on Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
Samsung isn't exactly a Western manufacturer either though.
roelschroeven··on Windows: Prefer the Native API over Win32
> > Won't this get flagged by anti-virus scanners as suspicious?

> Unfortunately, yes. We consider this a problem for the anti-virus scanners to solve.

I don't think the anti-virus scanners consider Zig important enough, or even know about. They will not be the ones experiencing problems. Having executables quarantined and similar problems will fall on Zig developers and users of their software. That seems like a major drawback for using Zig.

roelschroeven··on Airfoil (2024)
You are correct in that the deflected airflow exerts an upward force on the wing (or at least a force with an upward component; there's also a backward component (called induced drag if my memory serves me well)).

The way the airflow exerts that force is through pressure differentials: air under the wing having higher pressure than the air above it.

Momentum change can describe physical interactions, and it's often easier to calculate things that way, but actual physical forces still exist, and can also be used to describe the same physical interactions.

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