Kazinator

The stepping-on-shit feeling! I award this #AliExpress gold. #FacePalm #LOL Item link: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006904677235.html

@HopelessDemigod@mstdn.social I replaced a clutch that turned to goo in a #KitchenAid mixer. That was probably 15 years ago at least? The replacement is now turning to goo. The rubberized pitch bending and expression wheels on my #Alesis #Quadrasynth Piano Plus turned to goo like two decades ago. The polymer lining of the suction cups of windshield mounted GPS #navigators horribly turns to goo with a combination of age and upon repeated exposure to sunlight. KitchenAid is overrated shit by the way. I only got that mixer because it was a good deal in a second-hand store, and at that time I didn't know how badly overrated shit KitchenAid is. It's a completely empty brand name that's all about appearance. Lipstick on a Kenmore.

@timixretroplays@digipres.club I remember it was around Y2K. Laptop computers with the slow, old style LCD screens appeared in the late 1980's, not active matrix. These were so bad that for desktop computers, CRTs continued to be used for another ten years. LCD "flat screen" monitors started to appear in maybe around 1998 give or take and by Y2K were starting to take over. TVs came next. In 2003 I bought a LCD TV: a ViewSonic 720p thing from Costco for around a $1000 CAD. That was maybe the tipping point year for CRT to LCD: reasonably cheap LCD TVs were now available with good picture you could watch from across the room. That the TV carried the brand name of a computer monitor company is telling; the LCD revolution was nucleated by computer monitors. And for a good reason, because computer monitor users tolerate smaller screen sizes, and don't require brightness for viewing from a distance.

@jackdaniel I'm not ever accepting LLM contributions regardless of legislative consensus.

@Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt Comb through, because those are also AI natives. AI is even more applicable to the humanities because the level of bullshit acceptable in the papers is a fantastic impedance match for AI.

@ldottxt@kind.social Because seashells were used as currency in ancient China.

This year I was mildly surprised that #ToyStory is only at 5; you'd think it would be like at least 17 by now. Sure helps me feel younger, in any case.

@psf@oldbytes.space I see from the MuLISP manual that closure is a dynamic closure mechanism. But it is not a true dynamic closure mechanism. The funtion takes a list of variable symbols, and captures their current values. Then when the closure is applied, those values are temporarily installed into the dynamic scope. If the constructor were modified to take the pseudo-environment directly, you wouldn't have to do the RPLACA manipulation. A true dynamic closure captures a porton of the dynamic environment itself (not simply copying the values) and then installs it when the closure is called. I implemented such a thing 25 years ago in a dynamically scoped Lisp. Newly funcalled dynamic frames were specially marked with a "top" bit. When a lambda was evaluated, it captured a slice of the dynamic environment up to the closest frame marked as top. Lambda invocation grafted the captured frames to the top of the current dynamic environment. lambdas captured under the same environment shared the variables properly.

Hey Mastodoners with #Vancouver connections. Do you happen to remember a little brick-and-mortar #electronics parts store that used to operate in North Burnaby, in the industrial area the west of Gilmore, near 2nd ave? I went there a few times like 25+ years ago: bought a JFET transistor, some passive components and such. The place was geared toward audio; you could buy turntable cartridges there and things like that but also circuit level components: resistors, caps, op-amps, ... Can't remember the name of the store for the life of me.

It turns out that while the #Kia Soul has ridiculous manual gear ratios, Kia redeem themselves in the Rio. The 2018 Rio5 LX manual has a decently high 6th gear, allowing cruising at around 2500 RPM at 100 km/h. The engine is 1.6 l, naturally aspirated, rated as producing 130 hp. Hatchback, small engine, no turbo, tall overdrive gear: approved.

@Artemis201 Officer, at the speed I was going, the light honestly looked green ...

@DrewKadel@social.coop I've been a fairly prompt engineer: mostly on time to meetings and reasonably quick to respond to questions.

@carnage4life@mas.to You can't remove the broken one because only that clock has the mounting plate that screws into the ceiling. If we just delete the broken clock, the working clock falls down. Also there is a test detects that we have clock support, by detecting the presence of the screws in the ceiling. We can't change it because we have to run in an identical building in which the same clock is still working and doesn't have anything taped to it.

@XanIndigo@writing.exchange Very Seussy. I do not like them Sam I Am I do not like lame ads and spam I do not like them with a Musk I do not like them with a tusk ...

@grendel84@tiny.tilde.website Dear Walmart, please provide the price history for this jar of peanut butter for the past five years, quarterly, so that I can make you a proper offer on it.

I test drove a 2016 #Nissan #Micra, 5 sp. manual the other day. Car in excellent, clean condition, fairly low mileage. Yeah, that gearing leaves something to be desired. Took it to the freeway for a bit. The engine has plenty of pep to easily get to 100 km/h, but then you're revving 3000 RPM, reaching to shift to a 6th that isn't there. Also, I found the 2nd gear sychro to be slow, causing shifting resistance, resulting in somewhat awkward starts. Some of that lack of smoothness was me not having driven manual for 15 years, but it was irritating not to have it go into 2nd like butter. The car was also too basic. I could live with manually cranked windows and manually moved mirrors. These are actually a good thing. No remote locks or A/C though. I can get a machine that has these things and revs 2600 at 100.

@paulg If you're inclined, you can dump the full URL of a Toot into your own Toot; essentially quoting it like any other URL-identified resource. The ergonomics isn't quite "quote tweet" but for occasionally writing a Toot which references another Toot (rather than replying to it), it ought to do the job. You can't prevent people from quoting you on the Internet such that you don't know about it.

#Math and #Electronic mini-topic. If you amplify a voltage by 29.3530708596299, i.e. multiply it by that amplification factor, what decibel increase is that?

Fell while #Cycling in #Vancouver today. I was coming from Richmond off the Knight Street bridge. I never use the pedestrian path, but today I stupidly decided to use just the very end of it, by the exit ramp to Marine. The entrance to the path is just before the point where there is an idiotically placed lamp, smack in the middle of the path. I noticed some fucking scavenger's garbage bags full of junk, lying there just after that pole. So I planned to swerve around the pole and do an immediate hard left to avoid the bags of cruft. My attention was on the garbage bags and I didn't see that the black patch before them was a mud puddle several inches thick after the rain we had yeterday. As I entered the counter-steered S maneuver, I hit that patch and flipped on the side. My left #knee is hurting more and more this evening. If I just lift my foot, or straighten my leg (lock the knee) or try to get up from a squat ... ouch! The joint is definitely irritated; hope I didn't tear anything.

@lagomoof@mastodon.social There is a standard way to represent a voltage ratio as decibels; no other information is required. That representation is based on power (ten times the power is ten decibels), and assumes power is proportional to the square of the voltage. db = 10 log_10 V1^2/V0^2 = 10 log_10 (V1/V0)^2 = 20 log_10 V1/V0

@CMDR_Royal_Mons@mastodonapp.uk "Italian MEP Pasquale Tridico, who negotiated the file, called the vote 'historic' and described it as a 'major victory fo Sicily ... err ... citizens and small businesses ...'"

@schamspeare@mstdn.social @Firesledge@piaille.fr The "Monitor" DPDT switch determines whether the meter/monitor/headphone monitors the faded mix, or whether it monitors the 2 track (either in isolation or in combination with the pre-faded mix). The "To Mix" DPST switch determines whether the mix is isolated, or combined into the 2 track. When the two track "To Mix" is off, then the 2 track is excluded from the mix, We can use the "Monitor" switch to monitor the 2 track in isolation, or we can monitor the faded mix, which excludes the 2 track. When the two track "To Mix" is on/connected, the 2 track is combined into the pre-faded mix, so we hear it in the monitor bus both ways, faded or not. The inserts are special. It looks like the two circles on the fader buffers indicate where the connectors are. This means that the inserts don't feed the pre-faded mix bus; the insert into the buffered, faded output. Thus, if you are monitoring the 2 track, whether or not it includes the pre-faded mix, YOU DO NOT HEAR THE INSERTS.

@psf@oldbytes.space What is that? Are closures just tree structure in muLISP, whereby you can use rplaca to replace some element, like the closed-over environment? Which is just a naive alist? (Why does that need the (quote ...) wrapping). So you made a couple of closures which reference a free variable, and then you injected a shared environment which closes the variable. Whether you can do that in another Lisp depends on whether such a manipulation of its functions is allowed. There may also be multiple representations to deal with: one way to manipulate the environment of a compiled closure vs. interpreted one. I suspect that in compiled Lisps, you may not be able to do it exactly like that. If a closure is compiled whose body refers to a free variable x, the generated code will not be accessing that x through the environment vector: the x references get compiled differently based on its scoping discipline.

@th@social.v.st Au soleil, sous la pluie, à MIDI ou à minuit ...