digitallis42 (u/digitallis42)

digitallis42 commented on Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer? civileats.com/2025/02/18/... · Posted by u/greenie_beans

PastorSalad · 10 months ago

The two-decade war between my Dad and the local foxes cannot be understated. The chickens are fully enclosed, naturally. They currently have a (completely buried) overturned concrete igloo under their feet. There’s a dual perimeter fence, the outer one is regularly coated in all manner of larger mammal’s urine he buys online. Team Fox is currently tunnelling to map out the concrete igloo, convinced there’s an opening. They’ve gone full mole.

With some distance it’s quite amusing, but it’s claimed a large part of his life, being the obstinate bugger he is.

digitallis42 · 10 months ago

Pea gravel. Lots of pea gravel in the holes. Blow it in with water.

You can't tunnel in pea gravel.

digitallis42 commented on Bosch's brake-by-wire system may be the next big leap in automotive tech newatlas.com/automotive/b... · Posted by u/zfg

djoldman · 10 months ago

Why is there a seemingly unending shift in the automobile industry toward digital/electric controls and away from anything mechanical/physical? (I'm not asking about entertainment/cabin items, just the ones that start/stop/move the car)

Is it really as simple as "cheaper to produce"? Is it cheaper to replace?

The article mentions "saves weight and installation space" - it seems this savings come at the expense of massive complexity; how big can the savings be?

As an aside, IMHO every time a component changes to "by wire" the driving experience tends to suffer due to latency.

digitallis42 · 10 months ago

A few things:

* Automation (emergency auto braking, full adaptive cruise, autonomy) is here and needs electrical signal input. AEB is very nearly standard everywhere now, so there's an electrical input braking component that has already been added to the system.

* If you look at modern brakes, it's hardly simple anymore. Brake boosters, ABS, master/slave systems. It's run on a corrosive fluid that is water sensitive and uses hard pipe plumbing.

digitallis42 commented on Why hasn't commercial air travel gotten any faster since the 1960s? (2009) engineering.mit.edu/engag... · Posted by u/sorentwo

ghaff · 10 months ago

I largely agree. But if you're anything like a regular traveler you get TSA-pre for not a lot of cost or effort and that pretty much all goes away.

digitallis42 · 10 months ago

If it was free, I would be more accepting of this answer. Since you have to pay it is just extortion and it incentivizes poor service in the gen pop TSA lanes. Generally you want to avoid incentivizing a public service to be shitty.

digitallis42 commented on Starlink and T-Mobile open satellite texting test to all washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

glzone1 · 10 months ago

It's interesting to see all the criticism of things like this on a place like hacker news.

Starlink has repeatedly been pooh-poohed. It's impossible, it'll never work, no one will want to use it.

If you have ever travelled internationally the potential game changing nature of Starlink would be immediately apparent.

This is a test. If nothing else, spacex is known to iterate. Starlink satellites have intentionally low lifetimes in space, they are all going to be replaced relatively soon with later generations.

Yes, Biden and the FCC successfully fought Starlink, they got the awards for rural connectivity revoked, and the appeal of the revocation also kept the award revoked because starlink supposedly couldn't provide rural connectivity. So at least on paper starlink has "failed" to meet the needs of rural folks.

The FCC "concluded that Starlink had not shown that it was reasonably capable of fulfilling Rural Digital Opportunity Fund requirements to deploy a network of the scope, scale, and size required to serve the 642,925 model locations in 35 states for which it was the winning bidder."

You'd sort of expect hacker news folks to be interested in the science of potential benefits of this sort of thing (even if they doubt it'll ever happen). T-Mobile is betting pretty clearly that starlink WILL be able to deliver messaging via a space based backhaul.

And rumor has it that starlink is bringing in some real money even if the govt has determined its not technically feasible so there is some market validation of their ideas.

digitallis42 · 10 months ago

I've traveled internationally extensively. These days my phone just works. I have not traveled to Africa or South America though, so maybe we're just doing different traveling. I mention this because you say it should be obvious if you've ever traveled.

My provider is Google Fi.

digitallis42 commented on Order Declassifying JFK and MLK Assassination Records [pdf] govinfo.gov/content/pkg/F... · Posted by u/kalu

bathtub365 · a year ago

What’s the conclusion?

digitallis42 · a year ago

That the comment bots are getting better at phrasing things as clickbait?

digitallis42 commented on Sniffnet – monitor your Internet traffic github.com/GyulyVGC/sniff... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

digitallis42 · a year ago

This feels like the same project as ntop. I'm curious what drove this one.

digitallis42 commented on Personalized voice recordings by Elwood "You've got mail!" Edwards (2024) blog.jgc.org/2024/11/pers... · Posted by u/fzliu

HeatrayEnjoyer · a year ago

> Aside: I was so worried it was going to be an AI voice generator based on his voice. I sadly think it's inevitable but I can hope he didn't make enough recordings to be able to reliably synthesize his voice.

I have bad news about the state of voice cloning...

digitallis42 · a year ago

There was an entire skit series, numerous videos and interviews... Just about the only confounder is that he used many voices and accents.

digitallis42 commented on PlasticList's Advice for Food Companies twitter.com/natfriedman/s... · Posted by u/Jimmc414

asdasdsddd · a year ago

Why are wood cutting boards outlawed for commercial kitchens.

digitallis42 · a year ago

Wood is porous and unable to be fully sanitized, as well as absorbing and giving back off everything from soaps and sanitizers to food flavors. Example: chop a few onions on a wood cutting board. Clean and dry. Then the next day wet your cutting board and give it a sniff. The onion is still there.

It also has trouble with repeated washing cycles as a material.

There's some evidence that biologically, wood fibers will dessicate and shred bacterias, and there's the historical anecdotal evidence of wood cutting boards having been used throughout history, but those anecdotes aren't enough for commercial kitchen operation where food needs to be able to be given to all comers, including infirm, allergic or immunocompromised.

digitallis42 commented on Unitree Robot Off-Road youtube.com/watch?v=X2Uxt... · Posted by u/jedixit

digitallis42 · a year ago

Several moments look like CGI, particularly with how the dust behaves. It's getting hard to believe video like this.

digitallis42 commented on The withering dream of a cheap American electric car wsj.com/business/autos/th... · Posted by u/voisin

jgalt212 · a year ago

I have yet to see a study showing efficiency gains, or losses, are greater than the price difference in fuel types.

digitallis42 · a year ago

If your engine does not require the higher octane, then no efficiency will be noticed and you're just burning money. If your engine is specified to take the higher octane, then you can notice an efficiency bump over running a lower octane fuel in most modern engines. The engine computer will adjust the valve timing to prevent predetonation with the lower octane fuel at the cost of efficiency.

Adding octane to fuel isn't adding a booster. It's adding stability to the fuel so it can be run in a higher compression engine. If your engine doesn't reach that pressure then you'll notice no effect except your wallet getting lighter.