centizen (u/centizen)

centizen commented on Progress on Intel and Nvidia GPUs on Raspberry Pi jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/ingve

vaxman · a year ago

Jeff is a consumer electronics influencer, but I want to say how important Jeff's work is to many children and adults looking to expand their knowledge in an accessible manner.

centizen · a year ago

Jeff exists in a space that is dominated by people playing the algorithm for views, and has remained successful without having to engage in the same tactics. I really appreciate his video style and approach, it’s a breath of fresh air in the current tech YouTube sphere.

centizen commented on The biggest AI flops of 2024 technologyreview.com/2024... · Posted by u/gronky_

mg · a year ago

My biggest surprise in AI 2024 was that it seems that Bing did not manage to take any market share from Google:

https://bsky.app/profile/gnod.bsky.social/post/3ld43usdckk25

ChatGPT now has hundreds of millions of users. Personally, I do over 50% of my "searches" on LLMs now. And Bing, while having access to ChatGPT and being the default search engine on every Windows machine seems to not have gained any traction from it.

centizen · a year ago

It’s been terribly unreliable in my experience (Bing) so I’m not surprised that it’s not getting wider adoption. Half the time I try to interact with it, it just resets the conversation randomly. Other times I can’t even get it to open without closing all running Edge processes from task manager first. It just seems the most buggy and half baked of all the major AI.

centizen commented on Extreme, Extreme! The literature of laughing gas. (2014) theparisreview.org/blog/2... · Posted by u/bryanrasmussen

GoldenRacer · a year ago

I don't think replacing oxygen in the brain is the main mechanism of action (in medical settings they mix nitrous and oxygen and it's still effective without risking hypoxia). Looking at Wikipedia it says the mechanism of action isn't fully understood but it says the effects "are likely caused mainly via inhibition of NMDA receptor-mediated currents".

I've been under the impression that biggest risk of long term use of nitrous is that it causes b12 deficiency which is really bad for your nervous system. Wikipedia also mentions that NMDA receptor antagonist in general are neurotoxic and studies in mice suggest that nitrous has this neurotoxicity.

centizen · a year ago

It absolutely does, and with the recent uptick in recreational nitrous use we have clear examples of what it does to people. This is just one of the handful of cases of nitrous overuse leading to long term mobility loss

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-67355097

centizen commented on Indonesia's e-bike shops are building their own batteries restofworld.org/2024/home... · Posted by u/donohoe

ajsnigrutin · 2 years ago

I have no idea what the fascination with this is, and what makes these batteries "homemade".. also, it's spotwelding and not soldering.

Buying battery cells and spot welding them together is a thing that many companies do, even in the "western world", i know of at least three in my small eu country.

Before lithium, they did the same with NiMh and NiCd batteries.

You can also make them yourself at home, although it can get relatively dangerous if you don't know what you're doing... same as with replacing an outlet at home, but more of a fire damage instead of a shock risk, so definitely not for everyone, but with some basic precautions, can be done safely.

The bigger problem in the current times is, that device manufacturers fight hard against any kind of repair or DIY stuff, so sometimes just disconnecting the cells from the BMS (battery management system) makes it "reset" and fail the "authenticatioN" between the device and the BMS (which exists only to prevent repair). Companies know how to avoid that (via using a power supply to keep the board powered up), but attempting to DIY fix it (without knowing about the issue) makes you destroy the BMS.

centizen · 2 years ago

They are even matching the internal resistance of the cells, I can't think of much more a professional manufacturer would be doing. As long as they are getting their cells from reputable sources (big if) I don't see anything wrong with a boutique battery industry for niche applications.

centizen commented on The Elondrop balajis.com/elondrop/... · Posted by u/jseliger

centizen · 4 years ago

Is this satire?

centizen commented on A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation arxiv.org/abs/2112.09365... · Posted by u/say_it_as_it_is

3a2d29 · 4 years ago

Just out of curiosity, why THC + caffeine? I am a regular coffee drinker, but never smoked at the same time.

Is it the caffeine gives you focus, but the THC removes the jitters and antsy-ness that goes along with it?

centizen · 4 years ago

I've always assumed it to be that the caffeine keeps the user more energetic and alert than they would be otherwise.

centizen commented on Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/LordAtlas

neilv · 4 years ago

As many techies will probably always say anytime inkjet product shenanigans come up: just buy a laser printer.

And I now add: and don't let it connect to the Internet, and don't install proprietary drivers or software for it on your computers.

Also, remember the names of companies doing sketchy things, and do your part to provide negative feedback when you can, and to give positive feedback to better companies. (Example: I've just moved away from the Apple product ecosystem, because Apple did one too many obnoxious things, and I'll also be pointing friends who ask to alternative solutions.)

centizen · 4 years ago

Canon was actually on my short list of printer vendors I would have recommended people to use. Now it's just down to Brother and Kyocera I guess.

centizen commented on Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry? · Posted by u/jaytaylor

Bjartr · 5 years ago

The storm was absolutely rushed to market. That's actually the reason that the whole screen was a big physical clicky button. Existing BB software was designed around cursor based interaction, and cursors can both hover and click. In order to release an iPhone competitor sooner RIM opted to create hardware that could separate "hover touches" and "click touches" rather than take the time to redesign their software for touch.

At least, this was the story as I heard it.

centizen · 5 years ago

I was at RIM during this time and it was an absolute shitshow. It took so much in-fighting to get RIM to even address the iphone, so many people thought it was a passing fad and would never get polished enough to be a real competitor, despite the fact it was already destroying marketshare.

But even then, there wasn't enough buy in from the company at large with the device, and it was certainly rushed, I think almost intentionally to try to prove the point of how "bad" touch only phones were going to be.

centizen commented on Treasury Calls for Crypto Transfers over $10k to Be Reported to IRS bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/PLenz

delecti · 5 years ago

How does mining work in proof of stake models?

This isn't intended to be a gotcha, I genuinely don't know. I've mostly just heard the term "proof of stake" without much explanation, and the Wikipedia doesn't mention mining at all.

centizen · 5 years ago

Proof of Stake changes things to the point where mining is no longer really a good descriptor of what is going on behind the scenes.

Proof of Stake starts out with a large amount of coins being generated out of thin air. These are then distributed, and owners add nodes to the network by locking in a portion of their coins as their "stake".

The nodes perform transaction verification, and over time a reward block is built out of the transaction fees involved. This is awarded to a psuedorandomly selected node weighted by stake.