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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • The most important risk you face is if somehow mains voltage ends up contacting somewhere you get electrocuted and die.

    There are 2 purposes of an earth ground: First it can be used as a reference for certain signals, such as microphones. Second, it can be used to protect against turning yourself into a sparker.

    There is a clear separation between mains voltage and system voltages so it’s typically not going to be a problem, but if a little wire ends up contacting the power supply case it can become energized and things start to get really bad.

    Most of the electrical code where I live focuses on grounding as “Bonding”, which is purely safety related for giving dangerous voltages a safe place to go.








  • It’s an easy thing to just assume people are stupid. It makes the world nice and simple and if only people would stop being stupid and start being smart (smart like you, obviously!) All the problems of the world would be solved.

    For a lot of people, reality isn’t so simple. The common man is already struggling. Throughout history, the age people get married and have kids has been indicative of the stress civilizations are under, and many people aren’t having kids before they get too old to have kids because that’s the level of stress the common man is under. Global civilization is facing a demographic bomb as every continent except Africa is facing a massive reduction in population in coming decades because nobody is having kids because life is so hard.

    As a study in contrasts, just look at wages vs. rent while I’ve been an adult. Minimum wage went from 11/hr to 15/hr. Meanwhile, my first 2 bedroom apartment was 350/mo, and today you can’t get anything for less than 1200. A few years before I rented, there were decent houses available for $50,000 and today the average house price nationwide is $800,000. (Not the US, obviously)

    So when a bunch of the business leaders and politicians who magically seem to get richer every time something is done “for our own good” – politicians who make as much as a senior engineer on paper but all of whom seem to become fabulously wealthy regardless (huh wonder where all those extra millions came from) while the common man has suffered – get together to figure out new ways to squeeze the common man, is it really so stupid to be skeptical? “Don’t worry everyone, we’re going to make your life even harder but it’s all for your own good.”

    Having the summit in Dubai is fitting – a city of extreme inequality, paid for with oil money, built by slaves, ruled by kings.

    You can try to guilt and shame people into not caring about basic biological drives, but you actually can’t. Entire generations of people have been pushed so far that their family lines will end with them. It’s comfortable enough – like being in a pool of comfortably warm water right up to your neck that you can’t escape from, but when you can see people plotting to add more water to your pool the next step is you drown.

    In previous eras, common people being this stressed out led to the fall of the Roman empire, the French reign of terror, the end of the Romanov dynasty in Russia or the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. While you call people stupid for not listening to their leaders, historically speaking those same leaders will be lucky to keep their heads on their shoulders.



  • The level of raid is fundamental to the operation of your raid array.

    As I recall, RAID 0 is striping. It will give you faster throughput because your array can pull values out of multiple drives at once. RAID 1 is mirroring. In that, half of the drives are used for data, and the other half are used to back up the first half. RAID 5 is parody, and that’s what you’re looking for. Essentially, your drives will mostly be used for storing data come up with the last one will be used to track what information is on the other four, so you will have one drive for redundancy and the other four will be storing data.

    Hardware raid versus software raid matters to the extent that parity calculations are relatively expensive and so if you’re trying to do RAID 5 on software raid, that’s going to eat up more of your CPU power and reduce your drive throughput.

    I don’t recall truenas in particular, and what you using the nas for is really what is important, but I do recall that some Nas software doesn’t even want you to be using hardware raid because it will be using its own software algorithms that are separate from what you would typically consider to be raid.


  • I’ve never used syncthing, but nextcloud has become a major part of my life in part because of the notes app, which I use for my work log, as well as nextcloud news, which lets me read news from any device and which articles I’ve read are tracked so my news feed is actually news. A third thing that’s neat is I keep my windows user folders in my nextcloud folder so my computers have the same synchronized user folders – if I download a file on my main PC it shows up on my travel laptop and vice versa, and if windows crashes I don’t lose the files in my user folders, I just resync.






  • I feel like phaser emitters on nacelle pylons is a general nono.

    Typically you see them on thicker areas and further from the warp nacelles.

    I imagine having a bunch of phased energy next to the source of your warp field could be tricky.

    It would also be particularly bad if your phasers had some sort of catastrophic failure and it blew off one of your warp nacelles, or if the enemy ship was targeting phasers and blew a hole through your pylon in the process.

    Unless I’m misreading the image and someone is trying to shoot the pylon.


  • I remember reading that book. His first book was called “I am not Spock” and was talking about all the stuff that’s Leonard Nimoy alone, but this one was about how he’d internalized a voice from his character who would have the Vulcan point of view.

    One of the most interesting parts of the book was where Spock pointed out there’s no need to fear death because it’s non-existence, and you won’t be there to care. Considering I read this when I was still in grade school, it was a pretty big revelation.



  • My ISP had the same problem, ultimately I was able to convince them to let me use my own router. In doing that, I was able to at first use a standard off the shelf router and later a pfsense firewall to handle NAT that exposed my servers to the outside world.

    Before I was able to do that, I was pretty convinced I wasn’t going to be able to self host. There are other options, such as special VPNs for self-hosting, but that’s not really the point, is it?