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Cake day: June 23rd, 2025

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  • A lot of the same issues VR has that relegates it to a very niche hobby, as well as VR itself becoming more of a thing.

    Basically, it’s twice the cost at a minimum. Want 3D movies? Well, that’s 2 cameras, double the storage, and all of the added workload in alignment, effects needing to be done for each eye… Basically double everything and add some to stitch them together.

    3D games? Same thing, but with calculations. You have to render each eye, plus the calculations to keep them aligned and in the right place.

    3D screens? You have to render each eye, so you have to either do glasses or funky screen tech like the 3DS to get that image to each eye at the right time, so the usual minimum is a screen that refreshes twice as fast plus a bit extra with the glasses to tie it all together.

    See the pattern? It’s twice as hard, twice as expensive, plus a little extra.

    Which begs the question:

    Is it twice as good, plus a little extra?


  • Penicillin isn’t just growing some mold, it was selected for out of literally tens of thousands of strains of mold that were sent in from around the globe to find one that wouldn’t kill the patient. You would, at a minimum, need: microscope optics, glassblowing equipment to perform extractions and purifications, a source of solvents (ether will only go so far), assaying equipment (even old school stuff needs indicators), and enough industrial progress to make and machine steel to be able to scale any of it up.

    Just finding the correct strain of mold to begin to produce any form of antibiotics would need a pretty insane amount of hardware to make what we would consider a rudimentary lab in modern times, let alone isolating it in a way that’s safe for human consumption.








  • despoticruin@lemmy.ziptomemes@lemmy.worldTNP
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    1 month ago

    That gets into some of the first principles of engineering a flying machine though. The hydraulics are your control for stuff like flaps and gear deployment. These things need to work consistently against pretty impressive forces, and you can only extend mechanical advantage so far before you start to run into issues with weight. Even having a backup hydraulic system would be a considerable amount of weight, and how else do you propose moving flaps and ailerons requiring hundreds or thousands of newtons of force to budge in the air?



  • despoticruin@lemmy.ziptomemes@lemmy.worldTNP
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    1 month ago

    It’s not completely hollow, it has channels between the various holes that open and close selectively. The way hydraulics work requires everything to hold the hydraulic pressure, manifolds are where all of the various pressurized points meet up and get distributed to the various mechanics. If you can break that pressure seal at the manifold you can usually cripple the whole system at once. Most of a plane is run off of hydraulics, especially flight control systems.


  • despoticruin@lemmy.ziptomemes@lemmy.worldTNP
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    1 month ago

    One of the windows would be better. There aren’t a ton of places where a single bullet will take down a plane, if you can get a window you can at least depressurize the cabin and force a really sketchy landing, but guaranteeing the plane crashes when it’s full of people capable of keeping it in the air is no small feat. Maybe if you have access to the maintenance cabins you can pop one of the hydraulic manifold blocks, I’m not sure if the main ones have redundant fail-safes if the whole manifold spontaneously opens a new outlet.


  • A car without a clutch could also just be a funny car. They don’t really have a clutch, it’s more a bullseye looking thing that drops in stages. Basically if you try to dump 3000+ horses into first gear metal tends to explode, so you dump multiple stages that just roast until you get speed. You still have gears, but it’s less of a clutch and more of a time delay friction welding system attached to the crankshaft.



  • The magic comes from hardware more than software, as others have mentioned you want a good burner to do the rips.

    Sorry for the rabbit hole, but media archival is its own can of worms that would take hours to dive into, so in general you want an Asus DVD drive that’s internal, manufactured between 2004 and 2010, supports 52x CD speeds, doesn’t have light scribe, and has the DVD-RW logo on the front bezel. Those are usually the magic drives, and you are generally going to need modified firmware to do some of the more bizarre reads. The Asus BW-16D1HT does Blu-ray and multi region discs, for just DVDs look for one of the DRW-**** drives without light scribe (they have a laser assembly that is higher power to write with, but usually doesn’t have as clean of a signal in exchange, not the best for rips)

    From there the software depends on your specific workflow. If you are just trying to recover clean disc rips then dd or ddrescue are going to be your friend. Get a disc image, mount it, use the data from the image instead of the disc. For archiving just the media look into MakeMKV, FFMPEG, and Handbrake for ways to encode the DVDs and audio into friendlier formats. Ffmpeg specifically can be scripted very easily and does audio just as well as video, it is the gold standard for transcoding media.



  • Reddragon, and just pull parts from goodwill mice, they send you extra Teflon pads with the mouse so you can open it and keep the pads nice. Switches are just switches, they are standard sizes, and the cords usually use standard plugs, worst case you swap some pins around to match. Insanely easy to take apart, and cheap enough to not worry about breaking.

    They are cheap as hell, but they have good tracking sensors and are really comfortable to use.


  • Second best. The best is actually the reddragon one that’s $20 on Amazon.

    I have used every mmo mouse on the market (currently on a scimitar elite, it’s the one op has but silver not yellow) and they are all decent mice, but each has a fatal flaw except the reddragon.

    G600 click switches are awful and double click after weeks of use, I had to replace them twice, the final time with the switches out of the red dragon. That was fine for close to 10 years, but the side key caps fall off, they are barely glued on.

    The scimitar has an awful encoder on the scroll wheel, I had to open the mouse to pack it with Vaseline to get it working properly, and disassembling the scimitar is a nightmare.

    The reddragon has bad software, but it’s also supported by open source options for remapping and RGB, so it’s one flaw was by far the easiest to fix.

    The g600 was the most comfortable to palm, but the side keys are in an awkward spot to palm the mouse, the scimitar is nice for the adjustable keypad, but it moves with time and tightening it too much will break the mouse. The red dragon has an odd texture on the far side, very rough, but otherwise the best for a claw grip.



  • Honestly you can just remove the ambiguity and put the number right at 1 billion dollars of net worth. Up to that point is obscenely wealthy, but a billion is the line that guarantees the majority of your wealth came directly from the exploitation of the masses.

    You can’t ethically make a billion dollars as an individual when the working class sees 1/10,000th of that in a year as doing fairly well in most areas.