“Maybe one of the smaller countries… like the Vatican! … Wait.”

Yeah… This maybe isn’t the nicest way to phrase it, but I’ve seen similar situations. Usually people are just kind of talking behind people’s backs, but sometimes it gets nasty :(. Frankly people kind of get bullied all the time everywhere. It’s maybe not as violent as playground bullying but people will be shitty to people at work, school, whatever. Do your best not to be a part of it, try to be self aware if you might hurt somebody else’s feelings, and try to stand up for people.

Or maybe… How is discord any worse of a privacy nightmare than IRC? I love me some IRC, but it ain’t exactly a bastion of secrecy.

That sounds cool…

God, did you ever hear about core wars? Very different thing but another weird programming “game”

http://corewars.org/

Redcode is kind of a bonkers assembly language too. I never really got into it because it’s kinda boring, but I could see this being crack for the right person.

It sort of lived on as Apache wave which I think you could self host, but it died in 2018. Never used it… Vaguely aware of what it did and kind of want it now :(.

Unfortunately your statements should be past tense :(. They died kind of tragically.

I feel like if you don’t know any different assembly will look like any other programming language. Just a bunch of words on lines that you don’t understand.

Wow. I’m sorry to hear about your illness, but I’m really happy you seem to have thoroughly enjoyed living and have made your peace. I have such a hard time enjoying life sometimes, so I really do appreciate hearing your perspective.

I think the best thing you can do in life is appreciate what you have, and not worry so much about the things that are out of your control, and you seem to have this all figured out.

I hope you do go through with these notes and don’t decide to delete them or anything. Genuine perspectives from people are a rare treasure in this world, and I think if you’re comfortable sharing them you really should!

If you want to hold yourself accountable, maybe the easiest thing is to upload to a GitHub repo or something, and I’m sure some of us would be happy to download it and mirror it. I’m sure many of us will happily run a script to fetch it every hour or so, and then you wouldn’t be able to delete it from me and other volunteers. If you gave us contact information we could make sure it gets to whoever you wanted. Might be a bit of an awkward email to send, but I guess it would be for the best 😅

You can use unalias, or you can use a backslash in front of an aliased command or surround it in double quotes to ignore the alias temporarily.

Yep! Hell, there’s probably a non-zero amount of arsenic in any pool…

Unfortunate in the sense that it just feels kind of gross is all I mean :). Of course this stuff is unlikely to cause any physical harm to somebody.

This is sort of how everything works, unfortunately! Guaranteeing 0% of something is really hard. Your flour probably has a small percentage of bugs in it, for instance. Urea is a relatively small molecule that I imagine you can find tiny amounts of pretty much anywhere. I would be unsurprised if there was at least one molecule of urea in literally anything you eat!

That said, dear god I hope I’ve never been in a pool that’s 10% urine :(. Those kiddie pools at the water park are probably like 90% urine, though. Sometimes I wonder if by volume adults pee in the pool more than kids, though. I have a suspicion a good chunk of adults think it’s fine or will do it secretly anyway.

I’m really more into 24-hour programming, which sounds unhealthy… Uh, military programming?

Journey is one of my favourite short games.

I image that is why people play old games that have poor mechanics when viewed with modern eyes.

Sometimes! But I think sometimes you play old games for the mechanics… Heck, sometimes you even play old games for the art direction / atmosphere. I think I can get a lot out of old games just by kind of appreciating them in the context of the year that they were released… In that sense I think I can also be impressed by the graphics in some old games, because I can be impressed with what they managed at the time.

But yeah, I think games have a lot of aspects that can make them worthwhile (and different people will value different things). Nethack doesn’t have a lot going for it in terms of graphics or story, but it’s still worth picking up and it’s not impossible to sink hundreds of hours into.

Am I the only one super unimpressed by most “it can run doom” things? It’s either some beefy arm CPU or a total hack where it isn’t really running doom and they shoved a raspberry pi in it or something.

Average toilet flush is 5 litres which weighs about 5kg. The amount of potential energy depends on the height difference between the source and the turbine. If it’s right in the toilet you maybe have a meter of height, so you could potentially generate 5 kg * 9.81m/s^2 * 1 m = 49 Joules of energy from a single toilet flush. The average house uses about 1000kWH of energy every month, which is 3.6 billion joules. If you could capture the energy with 100% efficiency you would need about 73.5 million toilet flushes to recuperate the amount of energy for one household in a month. If each toilet is used 10 times a day you would need 7.35 million of these devices. If they cost $1 each this would be a $7.35 million dollar project. If a kWh is 25cents, the average monthly power bill for a house is roughly $250, which means in order to see a return on this investment in terms of energy costs these devices would have to work without maintenance for about 294 thousand years. You can gain more energy with a larger height difference, so if you used a turbine further downstream, say 100m down, it would generate more energy… For 100m it would take 2940 years. This is not factoring in the costs to build and ship these devices, and naturally such devices would probably cost more than a dollar and break down and they would also not recover 100% of the energy (maybe 30% if you’re lucky!)

In some sense this would be recuperating energy rather than generating new energy because we use energy to pump water to your toilet in the first place. So it’s not really a power source on its own (at least in most places), it’s more akin to regenerative braking where you can capture some of the energy you spent before.

If this was something that you were going to do it would not make sense to have small turbines in every toilet. Likely the energy used to manufacture every turbine and ship it would dwarf the energy output.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/91/

Not only that but maintenance would be a big concern! Millions of devices with moving parts subject to solid waste would be hard to keep running (and there’s a good chance it would plug your toilet more often). If this were a valuable source of power you would want to do it downstream and use a single larger turbine for harvesting energy from many houses. This would likely be more efficient as the larger turbine would likely have less friction proportionally, and there would only be one point for maintenance.

You can of course collect energy from lots of sources to generate small amounts of electricity but generators are expensive devices to produce and the amount of energy you would get out of these in the device’s lifetime would not offset that initial energy investment! That’s where things get really tricky.

Your initial idea of putting a wind turbine on a car is potentially something that can work, but with an important caveat! You won’t get more energy than you put into the system, and if the wind turbine is generating energy it’s taking it away from the car’s kinetic energy. It would basically be a form of regenerative braking where you would use drag to slow the car down but recuperate some of the kinetic energy from the car for use later. Regenerative braking on an electric car will be more efficient for this because wind turbines can’t capture energy as efficiently as an electric generator directly connected to the spinning axels, and the other factor that’s a huge win for normal regenerative braking in electric vehicles is that you don’t need many additional parts for the car. The wind turbine idea means you have to build a wind turbine, but you know what’s awesome? When you spin an electric motor it becomes an electrical generator instead, so you can just use the electric motor you already have for it!

Also for what it’s worth… The wind turbine for regenerative braking mind not be a thing, but in Formula 1 they have used fly wheels to store kinetic energy instead! So basically instead of spinning a fan, they have a big heavy wheel that they can use the momentum of the car to spin up (while slowing down the car at the same time), and this wheel can later be used to speed up the car again later.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy_recovery_system

With all of these regenerative systems it’s important to note that you don’t get more energy than you put in. There are losses and due to conservation of energy you’ll never be able to recover more energy.

That said wind power is also a thing and there’s all sorts of cool ways to take advantage of that… Like sail boats, and these cool things!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship

It’s just going to be pulses of an 8khz signal. Why would an MP3 not encode this just fine?

Right, but artifacts in the ~8khz range will be detectable by human hearing. mp3s are going to be perfectly acceptable for many sounds in that frequency range… The fact that this works is evidence of that.

Plus, you know what else is lossy? Radio. If the signal is that fragile there’s a good chance the locking mechanism wouldn’t work in the first place.