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Dave.

dgriffith@aussie.zone
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1 posts • 138 comments

I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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I’ve commented on this previously, but this is essentially either a hit piece, or very poor reporting on Reuters’ part.

Basically nobody looks at raw numbers for injury statistics. It’s normalised to injures per million man hours worked, and when you take some conservative estimates on the size of SpaceX’s workforce and the time periods involved, you find that they land pretty much in the middle of current “heavy industry” injury rates.

But it surrrre does look bad if you look at the raw numbers, just like if you looked at the combined raw numbers of, say, 10 steel mills across the country.

Permalink to my previous, much longer, comment

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Blocking children from online communities

These are adult online communities. They are not communities for children. My Facebook feed is not something I would like a child to see or interact with, and I would consider it pretty tame. Algorithmic feeds that amplify minor / random views into a torrent of reinforcement is not what kids - or adults, actually - need.

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I don’t think there’s anything commercially available that can do it.

However, as an experiment, you could:

  • Get a group of photos from a burst shot
  • Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
  • See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
  • See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.

You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.

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Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.

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They need to learn how to use their tools better. Winscp does all that transparently for you if you press F4 on a file on a remote system. Or maybe they did and you just didn’t see it…

It’s quite a handy function when you’re diving through endless layers of directories on a remote box looking for one config file amongst many.

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Most times what I get when asking it coding questions is a half-baked response that has a logic error or five in it.

Once I query it about one of those errors it replies with, “You’re right, X should be Y because of (technical reason Z). Here’s the updated code that fixes it”.

It will then give me some code that does actually work, but does dumb things, like recalculating complex but static values inside a loop. When I ask if there’s any performance improvements it can do, suddenly it’s full of helpful ways to improve the code that can make it run 10 to 100 times faster and fix those issues. Apparently if I want performant code, I have to explicitly ask for it.

For some things it will offer solutions that don’t solve the issue that I raise, no matter how many different ways I phrase the issue and try and coax it towards a solution. At that point, it basically can’t, and it gets bogged down to minor alterations that don’t really achieve anything.

Sometimes when it hits that point I can say “start again, and use (this methodology)” and it will suddenly hit upon a solution that’s workable.

So basically, right now it’s good for regurgitating some statistically plausible information that can be further refined with a couple of good questions from your side.

Of course, for that to work you have to know the domain you’re working in fairly well already otherwise you’re shit out of luck.

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If library devs do versioning correctly, and you pin to major versions like “1.*” instead of just the “anything goes” of “*”, this should not happen.

Your unit tests should catch regressions, if you have enough unit tests. And of course you do, because we’re all operating in the dream world of, “I am great and everyone else is shit”.

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The problem with stack overflow is that you need to know enough about the domain you’re working in to describe it accurately enough to search and find that previous great answer.

If you have no clue, and then naively ask the no-clue kinds of questions, because you have no clue, then you get beaten over the head about not searching for the existing answer that you don’t know how to search for.

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If you’re interested in the systems behind Apollo, go find and read “Digital Apollo”.

It goes all the way through the project and describes in good detail everything, how they developed the control systems, the computer hardware, how the software was designed, how they implemented one of the first real computer systems project management, all the interactions between astronauts/test pilots who still wanted to “manually fly the lander”, the political back and forth between competing teams, the whole thing.

It’s a great read if you have a technical mindset.

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Horn switches switch to ground. Power for your original horn relay is supplied from a fused battery source, passes through the horn relay, and when you press the horn button the button completes the circuit to earth, triggering the relay.

So, you need to wire your relay coil like this -

12 volts from a fused battery source to:

Your relay coil, to:

The horn switch, which then switches to:

Ground.

Just like how your current horn relay works.

This also works for older cars that do not have the really. They supply power to the horn, and then a single wire runs from the horn back to the horn button, which then completes the circuit to ground when pressed.

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