Prusa has at least built up some credit with the community. Bambu came in planning on locking people in.

Not even playing lip service to supporting the open source stuff they built upon. They’ve also recently been trying to lockdown and paywall (or just drop) features. Including legal action against people trying to undo the damage.

The general sniff test is they are trying to lock people in before milking them for all they can.

Both of those have a lot of bang for their buck. I had also missed both completely. 👍

QM isn’t insane to understand. It’s main issue is that it doesn’t map well/at all to our normal experience. You need to dive into the maths, and accept what falls out.

The main deeper level here is how the blurring happens. The photons explore all possible paths. The result is an integral of them all. In general, vast areas cancel out, leaving classical (ish) behaviour. This makes sense mathematically, but has no classical analogy to compare to.

It’s quantum mechanical, so the maths gets complex. It can be simplified in a useful way however.

Basically, atoms can absorb photons and then re-emit them. You can think of the photon flying past at C, but getting absorbed and emitted along the way, adding delays. In QM however, neat particles don’t exist, it deals with quantised, probabilistic waves. The above effect gets blurred over the waveform. No one atom definitely absorbs it or doesn’t, it gets blurred together into a general slowing of the wavefront.

I’ve taken to refering to it as “going grey”. It’s like the chroma on my emotions has been turned down. The shape is still there, but the colour is leached out of it.

It’s particularly nasty when paired with ADHD, since it robs you of drive, which is already in short supply.

What coping mechanisms do you use?

My main one is ‘anchoring’. I have core activities I aim to keep up, no matter what. Otherwise, when what colour I get comes back, I can be left with a ruin of a life (particularly social life) structure to rebuild from. It might not help much in the moment, but it at least speeds up the recovery phase.

I’ve got a ulefone 27T pro. It carries a lot of weird functions, despite being a modern phone.

It’s frustrating. My phone is fairly new, but also has the IR emitter. In a perfect world, I would set it up as a “TVbGone” type setup. Unfortunately all the apps have disappeared from the play store. Also, all the GitHub repositories are so old they don’t work with modern android.

Have you found an app that still works with an IR blaster? My phone has one, but none of the apps work anymore.

I live in the UK. At this point, most of the polite smokers have moved over to vapes. Those left are almost entirely rude wankers who don’t care where their smoke goes and who it affects. The smoking ban came in because 1 smoker can affect dozens of unwilling people.

I have zero issues with vapes. The effect on others is quite minor, outside a few fog machines disguised as vapes.

Most home storage is Lifepo4, rather than lithium ion.

It’s a bit more expensive, and only has 80% of the capacity. In tradeoff, it gains 3-5x the lifespan, and an inability to burst into flames.

Bigger brands tend to be more reliable in capacity and lifespan. Cheap ones are more hit and miss. It might be fine, it might fail after 3 years, rather than 10.

He just really likes pressure.

Assuming 1MW of transfer, and a 10m diameter beam, your looking at 12.5kW/m^2 . Not instant vaporisation, but dangerous in seconds to humans. The penetration was also mean the energy is delivered internally, where it’s harder to deal with (short term).

Any viable power transfer beam also, inherently, makes a good anti personnel weapon.

While the maths is slightly better for short range transfers, like drones, it would still definitely not be something you want hitting your body.

Imagine you have a paper balloon setup. It randomly takes hits from a high powered rifle. In theory, you could harvest the energy. However, it’s delivered in such powerful, random bursts that capturing it is difficult.

Gamma rays punch straight through the structure of the craft. The actual energy is small (around 1/1,000,000 of a joule), but it’s so focused that it damages anything it hits. If it hits the atoms in a transistor, that transistor gets ripped up at an atomic level.

Plenty. Unfortunately it’s mostly the nasty damaging kind, rather than the sort that can be turned into power. It also doesn’t take much damage to add up, when you’re dealing with large millennia time scales.

The UK is still a lot more multi party at the lower levels of government, compared to the US. Unfortunately it’s erring towards the US system, rather than away from it.

We are in a media bubble. Basically all our media is owned by a few rich arseholes and they bury a lot of anti right messages.

The BBC used to be remarkably honest and independent from government. The conservatives getting their claws into it was the beginning of the real problems. Even worse, the BBC’s impartiality has been so sacrosanct that a lot of older people just believe it.

A mild bit of light. The green party seems to also be making significant advances. Labour have often played the “don’t split the left vote” card on them. Now it looks like green is overtaking them in some areas. It just doesn’t show up well in a FPTP voting system.

The Brexit crowd have gone conspicuously silent about it. Their lack of crowing says a lot about it.

Even before Brexit, the tide had turned, and that’s only gotten stronger. Unfortunately, the government had their vote and hammered it through. (The fact there was an EU rule change, on tax transparency, the next day, and would have embarrassed a lot of rich UK toffs had NOTHING to do with the timing)

Unfortunately, the reform party is far too strong, and trying to drag us to the extreme right. Our “left wing” primary party (Labour) is now further right than the conservatives (center right party) traditionally sit.

It’s… frustrating.

I’d recommend foiling it, rather than clipping. A grounded (0V) metal wrapping will become a Faraday cage. It’s a bit more effort, but is reversible, if you so choose. E.g. when selling it. It is also less likely to trigger a fault sensor condition, and doesn’t void the warranty if the computer craps out.