I gave a quick try of meshtastic and quickly switched over to meshcore, which has a much smarter routing algorithm that makes it more useful in cities. I’m also reticulum-curious. In the medium-term I’m looking at possibly putting up a solar “roompeater,” which acts as both a “room” (basically allows asynchronous chat between two client nodes that aren’t always online at the same time) and a repeater (basically a router). It has some disadvantages over running the two separately, but since I want both to have power in the event of a disaster, the cost savings of doing both on one node outweighs those for me right now.

Through the modial interaction of magnetoreluctance and capacitive diractance… https://youtu.be/Ac7G7xOG2Ag

I mean, it’s talking about people thinking that “energy, frequency and vibration are just mystical nonsense.” People don’t think that if you talk about an FM station broadcasting on a particular frequency, or about the frequency of light absorbed by particular atomic orbitals. They think that if you’re explaining that you’ve slept much better since you placed jasper and amethyst on the ley lines near your bed to absorb the negative frequencies.

The implication in the meme that anyone who is using these terms cannot be indulging in mystical nonsense, because these terms can also apply to real things. In fact, though, mystic cranks have been coopting scientific terms for ages, and they show no signs of slowing down. It’s a real problem that people confuse crap with science.

This is what I don’t like about the top meme, though. Like, yes, energy, frequency, and vibration are all things. Obviously. But the top meme is implying that everyone should believe that those things work in the specific ways that the woo practitioners say they do, and that’s a very different demand. More, it’s implying that people who doubt those effects are ignoring obvious evidence, when in fact the people who doubt those effects do so because nobody has been able to demonstrate reliable evidence for them. It has a nasty gaslighting overtone to it.

I think you’re probably joking, but this actually is a thing. e.g. https://scitechdaily.com/engineers-harvest-energy-from-wifi-signals-to-power-small-electronics/

Many years ago when t-mobile first debuted their “visual voicemail” that did automated transcription, my dad brought me his phone and wanted to know what the hell has happened with one of his messages. It said something like “Parrot vegan spaniel primo wavy.” I showed him that he could still press a button to listen to the actual message, and it was from Walgreens; the computer had been trying to transcribe the Spanish voice saying “para diga en Espanol, oprima nueve.”

Glad I could help!

I think their comment has two parts.

First, they’re saying that this is a longstanding trope in mythology and literature, the character who can see the future but isn’t believed, like Cassandra. Lord of the Rings isn’t my thing, but I assume they’re giving examples from there as well. Dune is kind of a digression, in that those characters could see the future by recognizing how patterns were going to play out, but there wasn’t any element of not being believed.

Second, they’re talking about being neurodivergent themselves, and having experienced this kind of pattern recognition prediction thing. They’re saying that once someone caught this on video. It’s not clear exactly what they predicted, but apparently, looking at the video, it’s still obvious to them what the cues were that they observed and used to predict whatever it was. I guess the people around them didn’t see it, and were mystified about how they knew to do whatever it was they did in response. They think that the others should be able to look closely at the video of the incident, maybe zoom in and play it at reduced speed, and understand how they recognized what was going to happen, because they could point out all these cues; but they’re frustrated to know that won’t happen. Subjectively they experience the situation as though it lasts much longer than it does in the video, as though time slows down, which they tried to explain by using video game references.

I’ve heard “If you want snow, drive to it,” which is pretty related.

As a math nerd, this bothers me way more than it should. The reason we say “hundred” when we read a base-ten number that ends with two zeros is because that is the place value of the final non-zero digit–it is literally one hundred times the number you’ve already read aloud. But in the military time version, a) the hours are not hundreds of minutes, they’re groups of sixty minutes, and b) it’s groups of minutes, not hours, so the units also get messed up. If someone tells you it’s currently 0 hours and you should meet again at 800 hours, logic would suggest they’re asking you to go away for more than a month, but in fact they’re saying 8 hours, despite the difference being apparently 800 hours.

I’m aware how pedantic this is, and I’m perfectly capable of understanding what they mean because I’ve heard it so often in movies and whatnot. But I swear these stupid games with units contribute to keeping us dumb.

Mitchell and Webb have a bit about this. Mitchell’s character gets annoyed that Webb’s character keeps talking about how “we beat you in the playoffs.” He eventually asks “Hey, do you remember that time WE defeated the nazis and recovered the Ark of the Covenant? That’s right, you see, I enjoyed watching the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so now I have decided that I was in it, and deserve credit for participation in the events of the story.”

(Not exact quotes, I’m paraphrasing from memory)

“I’ve got” seems particularly strange to me because without the contraction Americans would still just say “I have.” (There are some circumstances where they’ll say “I have got” without a contraction, but it’s mainly when they’re drawing a contrast with what they “haven’t got.” E.g., “No, I don’t have a baseball… oh, but I have got a lacrosse ball, will that work?”)

I think the rule is probably closer to “you don’t contract a stressed verb,” but that’s not terribly useful since there are so few rules about stress patterns. Verbs at the end of sentences are typically stressed, though, so you’re right that ending with that kind of contraction is going to sound wrong to most people.

I think it might be more common in British English? Like “I’ve a fiver says he muffs the kick.” Or “I’ve half a mind to go down there myself.” (Curiously in American English this latter would probably still have the contraction but add a second auxiliary verb: “I’ve got half a mind to…” English is such a mess.)

I think “ct” on this receipt is short for “count” rather than “cent.”

Yeah. At least I managed to pick up a used 3070 a couple years ago. I’ll just jolly along my old i7-7700k system for a few more years…

GPUs at least are actually not that expensive right now. Aside from the 5090, they’re mostly close to MSRP, which is a pretty novel situation. I was waiting to upgrade my whole system for that, though, because my CPU would be a bottleneck at this point, and that’s not really an option now because of the crazy RAM prices. The past few years have been super frustrating for PC builders.

I mean, it is also that OpenAI cornered the RAM market, which is a typical price gouging scenario; it’s just weird that OpenAI wasn’t trying to make money directly through the maneuver. It does seem like they wanted prices to rise, though, to increase the barrier to competition.

Huh, I was misinformed about that. Thanks!

Do we know it plays a role? I thought we basically just knew it was an associated biomarker. I kinda thought the research was leaning towards the underlying problem being some kind of issue that kept glial cells from clearing debris effectively, and that the amyloid plaques were mostly another consequence of that same cause, rather than a key mechanism in the chain that led to the dementia.

Note that it’s not an RPG, though.