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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • Not only that, but managing wifi channel congestion in a dorm is a pita.

    It’s tough enough when you fully control the airspace, to have nice clean coverage and overlapping cells.

    But then add dozens or hundreds of individually managed APs in a tiny space…with DFS and/or 160MHz channel widths?

    Ops best bet is to get their own 5g home internet and plug in.

    You’ll be hard pressed to get a router to talk to a captive portal sign in…but if OP wants to get creative, this can easily be fixed with a dumb switch and a Linux PC with two NICs. You could use windows for this, but why would you?





  • I’d been meaning to try out atomic distros. I’m not an expert on Linux by any means but I’ve been using it on-and-off for about 25 years, and exclusively (at home, at least) for about 7. So I’m a bit more than a noob.

    I do worry if I’d feel restricted inside of an atomic distro. Might throw kininite on a laptop I’ve been meaning to give to my kid, tho.


  • Y’all also use PINs. Americans freak out if they have to enter a PIN.

    Here it’s only used for debit transactions (that is, taken directly out of a checking account). PIN for credit transactions is incredibly rare here.

    This is probably because the merchants are responsible for fraudulent credit purchases. Credit companies kinda have them over a barrel in that regard…they have no incentive to enforce PINs, and users just want convenience.

    Meanwhile Sally the Walmart clerk gets written up because some knucklehead in her lane swiped a cloned card. She has no power here either…card readers rarely ask for signature anymore (not like they are trained signature analysts, a pseudoscience in itself) and I can’t remember the last time I was asked for ID for a credit purchase (aside from booze, smokes, or Sudafed, but that’s a different reason)








  • Given these ratios it sounds like it’s more energy dense and less mass dense. That’s impressive. Hope it is commercially viable.

    In other words, I think “9 times more energy dense per gram” is probably far more laudable than “twice as energy dense per liter”, especially in EV applications, where battery packs are significant weight, and weight reduces “efficiency” (obviously they are just as efficient, but it takes more energy to move the added weight. You know what I mean)


  • They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out.

    For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?






  • Private equity is shit. But credit is a vital part of the economy, and creditors are investors no matter how you look at it.

    So without investors you rely on banks. Do you think more power to banks is the solution to all of our problems? Because I sure as hell don’t.

    Without investors or creditors, the alternative is being able to self-finance everything. That means sitting on money until a large project can be paid for up front and in full. That means even larger amounts of money staying idle.

    But performing those projects is vital to the motion of the economy. Spending $50 mil to build a new factory, for example, means lots of work for tradespeople and everywhere in the supply chain for all materials.

    You all bemoan the super wealthy. Do you think the world would be a better place if Musk had 230B stuffed in a mattress doing nothing? Because that’s the world you’re describing.

    Private equity is a bullshit industry that shouldn’t exist. You have my agreement there. Companies that exist solely for the purpose of buying and selling control of companies, or artificially inflating the value of commodities are evil, full stop, 0 disagreement. But barring private investment means centralizing power in banks. Even co-ops, I think, at large scale would be dangerous. Everyday people are far too risk averse to gamble their livelihood on long-term investments in their business.


  • I’m sorry do you have any understanding of how the economy works at scale?

    A fundamental part of it is that money has to move. Lots of money that sits is really, really bad.

    That’s where investment comes in. Big projects come in (beit R&D, or production, or expansion) and they cost more to start than there is in cash reserves. You could consider a loan an investment as well. And that would be the same, making the bankers the investors (this also applies to mortgages and any other consumer loan).

    They must, otherwise companies taking on multi-million dollar projects would have to have more multi-millions sitting dormant in cash reserves. And at the scale of global economies, that is a bad thing.