@researchfairy@scholar.social
B'kdel Test
1) At least two named Klingons, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than honor.
(sorry couldn't find attribution)
#startrek
Remote
bipolaron
@bipolaron@scholar.social
mastodon 4.7.3I'm a prototype equipment designer and artist who works part time as an materials science instructor at MIT.
I am most interested in connecting with scientists, artists, burners, gardeners, cooks, electrical engineers, musicians -- really anyone with hobbies other than consuming content.
#MaterialsScience
#Energy
#Chemicals
#Electronics
#Art
#MeshCore
I delete posts after 2 months.
264 Followers
332 Following
32 Posts
Joined April 26, 2022
I don't even know what to put on my consulting website anymore to actually find work (scientific equipment and prototype design for small businesses), but I know "This page was hand-crafted without the use of an LLM" is going in the footer for better and worse.
Replying to
If the people you're "protecting" finding out about what you're doing is embarrassing or upsetting you --
YOU KNEW WHAT YOU DID WAS WRONG WHEN YOU DID IT
If your motive was actually to help people you'd announce it on high and tell everyone who would listen about your great ideas.
How do these people sleep at night. Maybe they don't.
Replying to
@artemis I feel like you can hear them failing to grasp the find-out part, as allies deny use of bases and airspace, about how hard it is to do things on the other side of the planet without help.
They figure they can yell at and threaten allies until they let them keep using bases. That will go great. Meanwhile everyone moves on and finds better allies in each other.
There is no way they learned anything, you can see them struggling to grasp soft power and they're just so confused.
Replying to
@emilymbender @404mediaco Every time I've talked to a medical professional in the last few years, they've told me that they get booked back to back with actually zero minutes for taking notes.
And then of course they can't keep up because "the system" is effectively double booking them and expecting them to keep up. I blame hospitals being run by profit maximizers.
[Still I say no to AI notes, but they only "need" it because the medical facilities keep them from doing it carefully.]
rolling requires friction,
if it weren't for friction between the tires and street the wheel would just slide downhill without spinning.
yes, this is a subtoot, but a super petty one so.
I hate when I'm introduced to someone who needs help and the first thing they want is an NDA.
I'm not interested in telling anyone what you're doing... I probably will forget your entire project a day later anyway.
Convince me that what you're working on is worth it for future-me to worry about if I want to do something similar later.
Yeah an NDA might allow it, but do I want to have to prove that I didn't pass along anything secret in court? Are you going to reimburse me for that time?
Replying to
@TerribleMaps extremely curious about what kind of population has 4.01 limbs per person.
Replying to
@artemis@dice.camp we need to stop teaching the Socratic method to high schoolers, Socrates was an asshole.
Replying to
@neurovagrant@masto.deoan.org ah, that explains why I have to disconnect from my VPN to get Ubuntu updates all the sudden.
Fucking cloudflare.
Replying to
@ElenLeFoll@fediscience.org be prepared to take over their positions when the bubble pops, funding dries up, and it turns out they have to pay for "compute"?
What professor actually has time (or likely interest) in writing grants?
It doesn't seem like a hard sell, especially since any professor thinks themselves exceptional enough to not be influenced by it being a sycophant and review the output impartially.
Public, easy funding. Grant funding is the entire weak link in the story.
Replying to
@petrillic@hachyderm.io cool. jlcpcb is amazing, I've only used their assembly and PCB fab service so far but definitely looking for a good excuse to have them design an enclosure or something,
I hate doing a ton of mechanical design and am not good at it. I drove solidworks for years at work and have a great deal of evidence that I have no taste. Functional sure but nice never.
Replying to
@petrillic@hachyderm.io Here's one of my most recent -- I guess it has nice curves, but they're mandatory to get the two LEDs to have the same optical axis under our nanoindenter. Fun (albeit time consuming) to learn to machine 😄
https://www.neltnerlabs.com/publications-and-patents/2026/4/7/giant-and-controllable-photoplasticity-and-photoelasticity-in-compound-semiconductors
But it did work!
Replying to
@neptune22222@kolektiva.social cool! that's an odd one, usually you just do whatever the datasheet says for the crystal, that's a hard one to find.
Replying to
@neptune22222@kolektiva.social it's probably not the clock.
First I'd make sure my user has permissions to /dev/ttyA whatever, though you probably know to check that.
Then I'd check the power supply voltage at the chip, and that the reset pin does go high properly.
Then I'd scope the digital lines from the converter chip to make sure they look reasonable, maybe the converter chip is not on.
Using a scope on the crystal is unreliable, the capacitance of the tip is often enough to make them stop oscillating.
Replying to
@jerome@jasette.facil.services https://github.com/dabeani/meshcoreterm
When I first started out someone said it was the best option.
Sadly it's still the only one that supports Bluetooth and map tiles, somehow. But random things break each release that worked fine before 😑.
I mostly just used it because it supported longer channel names and more of them; I couldn't add our local channels in the ripple ui at all at the time.
Replying to
@AnnieBuddy @artemis oh, they certainly used to understand, then they took a chainsaw to usaid... the population of the country watching the news, not so much.
Replying to
@MelissaBearTrix Only email client that supports emoji responses?
I can't believe how many people replied "thumbs up" to my emails in outlook notifications one day at work.
"How are you all doing up there?"
🫤
Replying to
@xgranade can you imagine how angry you'd be if you were hired as a TSA agent and they paid scabs to do the *easy* stuff instead of your coworkers that took off to go to a food bank because none of you are being paid while the scabs are.
Replying to
@petrillic@hachyderm.io forgot a photo zoomed out a bit to show the probe and microscope
Can anyone recommend a tool that will let me emulate clicking over and over and over at a fixed repeat rate? I found several things online but hard to know what to trust.
I want to make the post dates for a portfolio with my publications and patents match the publication dates, but there's no "change year" button so I just have to click like 140 times to get the year back to 2005.
Replying to
@keirFox that's horrible.
If you do 'sudo dmesg' it may find a clue.
My recommendation is to prioritize remounting the filesystem as read only and not touch it, the below should forcibly remount it as read only.
mount -f -o remount,ro /mount/point
I wouldn't suggest this except experience rebooting or shutting down is often that it never starts back up.
Read only mode may buy you time to get a replacement drive and external drive enclosure so that you can copy over your files.
Replying to
@Canageek oh that's a good idea, mine is a special mouse for hand ergonomics but I see some razer mice around the lab... something for gamers seems like a good bet, the contour software is hot garbage.
weird that this mouse I got special for people who have bad hands doesn't do remapping of the buttons very well, it lets me configure a button for "left click repeat x times per second" but it doesn't actually stick. they took a year to fix it so I could map buttons for page up and page down 😂
Replying to
@Canageek it worked perfectly, I was able to map ctrl-y (for year) to clicking twelve times at the location of the cursor.
Replying to
@oldclumsy_nowmad @TerribleMaps ooh, and I didn't notice New Zealand coming in hot at 4.02?
So it can't just be some floating point error then.
huh.
Replying to
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social after this clip she says "I guess we've got a very bipolar topic here"
I love that she apparently thought the cheers were because "AI is now a factor in our lives" rather than "remember how great it was a few years ago?"
https://www.youtube.com/live/zwYkHS8jvSE?si=BlKlPqrvvKx8ww3X&t=4869
She goes on to get booed a few more times by talking about how great it is that "AI capabilities are in the palm of our hand" and I guess this is what happens when chatgpt writes your speech and you forget how to adlib.
UCF Spring 2026 Commencement | May 8th (7 p.m.)
Replying to
@petrillic@hachyderm.io so I tried looking up PCB card guides and the results assume I already know -- what is a card guide for?
I've used extruded enclosures with card slots, is this to add them? It seems like something I should be aware of 😂
Replying to
@petrillic@hachyderm.io you poke a sample very carefully and measure how big the dent is as a function of the force applied.
The microscope to the right of the indenter probe is just an optical microscope to measure how big the dent was.
You can use it to get surface plasticity, and it's helpful for analyzing metal samples to make sure that the alloy is strong throughout. But it's a pretty specialized materials science tool for sure.
Replying to
@jerome@jasette.facil.services what in the hell. the vibe coding is one thing, the trademark is bonkers. I accidentally ended up using a UI that seems to be depressingly vibe coded and every single revision something that previously worked stops.
Two revisions ago it was *updating without a full reflash*. This time it broke bluetooth so that I have to turn it off and back on again manually at the device (or reboot) to connect after disconnect. Used to work fine!
I hate that these people think they're helping.