High school is often sending the best kidsto college with half their first year done already with AP classes.
Between AP and dual credit, my kid should graduate HS with somewhere around 30 hours of college credit.
Readit Newsvidanay commented on Despite sticker prices, the real cost of getting a degree has been going down theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/linusg789
vidanay commented on Physical media is officially back embedded.substack.com/p/p... · Posted by u/herbertl
But how is development of new forms of media? Which hold even more data, write and read it faster, and last longer. And thus can be used as long term backups?
How much innovation and progress is happening in that?
Microsoft has Project Silica but that's crazy expensive. Only huge corporations, government and maybe churches could afford it. Not individuals.
What are the chances we some day see something like Project Silica as a cheap commodity product, femto lasers and all?
I was promised hologram cubes!
vidanay commented on New electrical code could doom most common EV charging motortrend.com/news/natio... · Posted by u/zdw
AFCI stands for "Arc Fault Circuit Interrupter", a type of device that detects arcing (sparks) on a circuit and will shut things down if the "arc strength" is above some arbitrary threshold. The main risk from arcing is fire. Compare GFCIs, "Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters", which detect when some current supplied to the device is going missing (i.e., returning through a different path involving ground) and shut things down if the missing current exceeds some level in milliamps. The main risk from a ground fault is electrocution.
It turns out that detecting arcs is hard. Really, really hard. The window between "normal operation of some random crap that's plugged in" and "bad stuff" is tiny, or even nonexistent. (Old tools with brushed motors arc during normal operation!) I worked on an arc fault detector once, as part of a larger project. We never got the thing working before the whole project got canned. It was consistently the one piece of the project that I was reporting to management as "We have no idea how to make this work. The rest of this thing, we have a plan for (maybe a bad plan, and maybe we won't execute well; such is life in R&D), but the arc detector doesn't work, we have no plan for it, and no idea how to make a plan." And we were doing a next-generation version of a device already shipping — we should have had a working arc detector right out of the gate! But it didn't work.
(The tests for arcs, incidentally, were insane. We used the test procedure from the previous-generation product, a special board made up with various "simulated arc strengths". Then we set up a low-kV range power supply, put on those giant rubber gloves that you see in cartoons, and moved in a pointy probe, by hand, toward the right spot on the test board until it arced over. This was less than reliable, and rather difficult to automate. (My proposal to automate testing by changing the intern's name to "Automated" was not accepted.) It turns out that the arc signature is deeply dependent on the exact test method you use. We had another fixture designed in-house involving a variable-distance spark gap made with two adjustable spheres. Its results were completely and totally different than the other board, so we just pretended it had never existed.)
So arc detection is difficult. It will not surprise you then to learn that the first generation of AFCI devices and breakers did not actually work correctly. They were notorious for tripping randomly and generally not things you wanted to have in your life. They were also expensive (probably paying more for the testing than for the materials cost). The NEC mandated their use anyway. Their reliability was so ridiculously poor that there was general agreement among everyone that that part of the NEC should just be ignored and standard or GFCI devices used instead. Did the NEC care? No, they insisted that AFCIs were important. Even though they didn't work. This made a lot of people start to distrust them.
We're on second or third generation AFCI devices now, and they seem to have improved a lot. They don't really false trigger anymore. But do they correctly trigger, or did they just desensitize them so they don't do anything at all? I haven't tested, and I don't want to!
It's also worth considering the risks mitigated by AFCIs. Arc faults at 120V are not really that common, and when serious arc faults do occur, they usually result in an electrical fire. Fire is certainly very bad, but I'd say it's a lot less dangerous than the nearly-instant death by electrocution that GFCIs prevent. (Note that at 240V arc faults are much more common, and up at 480V they are straight-up lethal in their own right. DO NOT FUCK WITH 480.)
So the NEC mandated AFCI devices that caused major hassle, mitigated minor risks, and cost a lot of money. That annoyed people. This came on the heels of them requiring GFCIs everywhere (same issue; ground faults in non-wet locations are not really a major risk with North American style TN-C-S earthing, but at least GFCIs work). That annoyed people. And then they had required TR receptacles everywhere (which, personally, I consider of very little benefit, though I won't argue with anyone who disagrees; at least it's obvious what's going on there), when that technology was also half baked (seriously, early TR receptacles were horrid to use, though they are pretty decent now). That annoyed people.
You can see the trend. A lot of crappy technologies were made mandatory at our expense for minor to modest gains in safety, high losses in reliability, and extreme costs in annoyance. Thus, the question: who are these guys really looking out for? Us? Manufacturers? Insurers?
> Old tools with brushed motors arc during normal operation!
I have all of my grandfathers old Craftsman steel-shell electric power tools with brushed motors. I put a new cord on one of the hand drills a few years ago (the old cloth covered cords are terrifying) and tried using it for a project. That thing throws sparks like a Zippo.
This sounds very Midwestern to me. Where I come from that would happen a lot. It wasn't necessarily that people didn't know the real name of the place. It functioned more like an inflection that helps to distinguish between the company, and a specific storefront operated by that company. Compare it to the distinction between "Alice" and "Alice's". Alice is the person, and Alice's is her house.
For example, you you'd say "JCPenney stock is up by 32 cents this week," but you'd also say, "I bought this shirt at Penney's."
I've got ten bucks that says you've shopped for groceries at "Jewels"
vidanay commented on Love of cargo bikes is changing how we deliver goods in our cities euronews.com/next/2024/09... · Posted by u/rglullis
Speak for your rural or suburban self. I’m in North America, kids school is 420m from home.
Speak for your dense population area self. 418m gets me to the end of my rural driveway. Kids school is 8.3 miles (13.4km).
vidanay commented on Love of cargo bikes is changing how we deliver goods in our cities euronews.com/next/2024/09... · Posted by u/rglullis
Renting a cargo bike is my default option to haul something bigish from ikea nowdays. Rich people love them, as you can put all your three kids and go haul them to school 300 meters away much easier in this thingy compared to both car and walking.
> haul them to school 300 meters away
?
vidanay commented on The reason why music is getting worse openculture.com/2024/09/t... · Posted by u/lr0
That's not what he's talking about. He's a music producer. He likes a lot of today's music because he's producing it. He's talking to the youth who are producing it and he's helping as much as he can. There's not enough people doing it, and what there is isn't getting enough attention because youth are spending a lot of their spare time on social media. Music isn't the primary focus of youth attention like it used to be. Social media is the primary focus now.
Social media can be used to spread music like radio/CD/MP3 used to, but it isn't as effective at that task.
I'm not sure if this is good or bad. I mean, kids back in the 70's & 80's got relationship advice from random song lyrics heard on the radio, a horrible way to make life decisions. Now kids have much better access to information & advice so who's to say that the decline of music is an entirely bad thing? We'll see.
I can vouch for this first hand. Music has absolutely zero meaning in my 16 year olds life. They don't listen to music - new or old. They don't know who current artists are, and they certainly don't have an opinion about who is their favorite.
Thankfully, they are also just as disinterested in social media.
vidanay commented on The first release candidate of FreeCAD 1.0 is out blog.freecad.org/2024/09/... · Posted by u/jstanley
Unless you have solidworks through your job or school, FreeCAD on mac is the way to go.
Solidworks is great until you have to buy your own license. This costs MULTIPLE thousands of dollars. You cannot purchase a "hobby" version that actually gives you the desktop version. I used solidworks up until my company license got pulled. Additionally im not a student anymore so no luck there.
I used to use Fusion - but it was never as nice as solidworks. My student edition expired and now im out of that to.
Now I use FreeCAD on Mac. Takes time to adjust and I cannot model as quickly, but saving $$$$
My first experience with 3D was with AutoCAD 10 or 11 when they had "2 1/2"D. I've used ProE, Catia, Unigraphics, SolidEdge, Solidworks, Inventor, etc.
The workflows in FreeCAD are completely irregular and alien compared to those others. It's incredibly frustrating to use and I have had zero luck becoming fluent in it.