Notices by Graham Sutherland / Polynomial (gsuberland@chaos.social)

genuinely wondering if the cheapest and most effective ESD control you can do in a home lab space is a humidifier, given that ESD flooring costs a fortune and nobody ever remembers to ground themselves with a strap.

I feel like we're getting to the point now where we've really heavily optimised the peak efficiency, power factor, size, and cost of AC-DC conversion, to the point where it doesn't cost much to build these things in the <1kW range. I suspect that next on the chopping block is going to be area under the efficiency curve at different loads, since there is more we can do in that space. I wonder if we'll ever end up seeing parallel phase-shedding designs.

this is interesting and explains why I've been seeing GaN BDS ICs popping up from various manufacturers. low cost AC-DC conversion with a PF of 0.99 and >95% efficiency is impressive.

https://youtu.be/9CETZbYKbps

if someone buys me a curve tracer I will post the IV plots of as many vegetables as you like

@ryanc practically a tautology on here lol

when I saw the @weirdunits post yesterday about carrots per ohm I spent about 30 seconds trying to decide whether or not to actually go measure a carrot for a laugh, and I'm glad I did because the results were actually way more interesting than I expected. so there's a lesson. always go do the silly thing.

https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115149719242982295

have I mentioned that I hate SD cards? because wow do I hate SD cards. awful awful storage format.

poor physical resilience, poor data integrity and retention at both rest and in flight, a mix of standard and proprietary protocols, a massive standards shitshow, utterly uninteligible branding on speed grades, and a market for fakes and bullshit claims that makes buying them a miserable gamble

microSD in particular is a product category that I find baffling. it is so physically small that it becomes useless as a portable storage medium because you 100% will lose it, and if you need any appreciable density or performance on the thing it's also very expensive, which makes losing it all the more terrible. so most of the time it's only getting used for expansion storage, which would be far better served by the device just having more native storage using a far better device type.

@weirdunits to a first approximation, 10 microcarrots

yesterday's weird discovery is that every regular sized carrot I have tested is almost exactly 100kΩ end to end with sharp probes stuck in it. a couple of them come out at 100.0k on the dot.

inb4 NIST carrot-based electrical resistance metrology reference

ok serious time: don't EVER rig equipment or lighting more than a foot off the ground without a secure clamp and a safety cable. I don't give a fuck what the context is, you just don't do it.

shitty YOLO safety culture is what gives someone a life changing traumatic brain injury.

the reason we get to keep doing crazy shit at hacker events is because behind all the jokey façade of danger there's someone who unwaveringly gives a shit about the safety of people around them and does things right.

hot take: regex is fine, actually, and most of the jokes about it being a problem are just Regex Strings Look Scary disguised as technical complaints.

docker is really the "solve a problem with regex, now you have two problems" of the modern age

ugliest mass-production car ever, hands down, is the Fiat Multipla. the fuck were they even thinking?

@azonenberg but that's my point - mentioning him at all, even by proxy and in a mocking context, is validation that he's relevant.

the idea that someone made a whole TV series about space and politics and his existence wasn't even considered for a moment, even as a footnote, is much more cutting than any mockery would ever be.

I don't have an ending for it, but damn that would be a cool premise.

an interesting way to go with it is that you never actually find out for sure. all the rovers are too far away to get near it. the Hohmann transfer window won't come around for another two years, and even then there's all this sudden interagency distrust that'll get in the way of developing a new mission. nobody has the ability to send a manned mission up there, or at least won't admit to it. the whole show focuses on the political turmoil rippling out from this bizarre discovery.

the way I think I'd structure it is you start out seeing the perspectives of some European countries directly involved in the ESA, then some perspectives from the UK and NASA, perspectives from C-level people at tunnel boring machine manufacturers being thrust into the spotlight, then India, then Russia, then Japan, then China, all of these from both a science and a gov/mil perspective, and at each stage you're finding out more but also finding out that none of them are actually behind it.

at the end of the show you ultimately leave it open to viewer speculation. maybe three or four main theories that hold weight. leave certain people's motivations unclear, because naturally not everyone is going to be forthcoming, but you're not sure if it's for other reasons. since the focus is so heavily on the political situation and the people involved, you can avoid the end being unsatisfying by wrapping up many of those interpersonal challenges and political conflicts.