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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • It’s a broadband bang that can be heard across the whole spectrum. It becomes audible when listening to radio broadcasts.

    Regular radio transmissions are comparatively narrow band, allowing lots of simultaneous transmissions in the same airspace, each on its own frequency. The spark gap transistor is very wide band, so it basically sounds as if you are sending a bang sound across all radio frequencies at the same time.

    It wouldn’t destroy radio equipment, but the radio transmissions. It’s basically as if you’d use a radio jammer as a morse code transmitter.



  • Pretty much the first type of commercially viable radio transmitter was the spark-gap transmitter (“Knallfunkensender” in German). It worked by charging up some capacitors to up to 100kV and then letting them spark. This spark sent a massive banging noise on the whole radio spectrum, which could then be turned into an audible noise using a very simple receiver. That was then used to send morse codes (or similar encodings).

    They went into service around 1900, and by 1920 it was illegal to use these because they would disrupt any and all other radio transmissions in the area with a massive loud bang.


  • This.

    There are often actual limits to what can be done, and there are practical limits. Especially in the early days of a technology it’s really hard to understand which limits are actual limits, practical limits or only short-term limits.

    For example, in the 1800s, people thought that going faster than 30km/h would pose permanent health risks and wouldn’t be practical at all. We now know that 30km/h isn’t fast at all, but we do know that 1300km/h is pretty much the hard speed limit for land travel and that 200-300km/h is the practical limit for land travel (above that it becomes so power-inefficient and so dangerous that there’s hardly a point).

    So when looking at the technology in an early state, it’s really hard to know what kind of limit you have hit.



  • It’s not all quite as rosy.

    Yes, Linux is much more capable now than it was 10 years ago and it’s much more capable of being used as a main system. I myself have been using Linux as my main system for a few years now.

    But it’s also a fact that a lot of stuff might not work (even if it works for someone else) and that some things are still more difficult than they should be.

    For example, on my laptop cannot wake from sleep since kernel 6.11. I have manually sourced a 6.10 from an older version of my distro and keep holding it back, so that I can use my laptop as a laptop. For someone without technical skill, this would mean that their laptop just can’t sleep any more. Hibernate also doesn’t work.

    Another example is that LibreOffice still makes a lot of formatting mistakes when it has to open word documents. And sure, everyone could just switch to odf, but it’s not quite as easy to make everyone else switch to odf. It makes it really hard to use LibreOffice in any kind of professional environment. Wouldn’t want to make a powerpoint presentation that then looks like shit when it’s played on a different PC.

    Lastly, Nvidia sucks, but it’s also close to the only option for laptops with dGPUs. When I look for laptops with dGPUs available in my area on a price comparison platform, I find 760 laptops with Nvidia GPUs and only 3 with AMD, all of which are priced at least €500 more than comparable Nvidia devices. So if you want to go for a gaming laptop, Nvidia is pretty much the only option, and under Linux it really sucks. Steam games generally work ok for me, but trying to use Heroic Launcher to play anything from my gigantic library of free Epic/Amazon/GoG games, about 10% of the games I tried actually work. And even with those that work, my laptop sometimes just decides that a slide show with 3 FPS is good enough. That stays even after reboots and resets, and after a few days it returns to normal. Only to go back to slideshow mode a few days later.

    If you just use your laptop to run a browser, I can recommend Linux 100%.

    If you want to do anything else and don’t have any technical skills and/or don’t want to spend hours fixing things that should just work, I can’t fully recommend it.


  • It’s a wildly different thing, though.

    Married vs. unmarried means you have a companion, but you still got the same demands on your life as before. You might have to arrange schedules, but that’s about it. Your day has just as much free time as before, you can stay out just as long as before and your social opportunities aren’t restricted due to the fact that you are married.

    In fact, there’s no difference at all between married vs. unmarried and in a relationship vs single. Getting married changes nothing in that regard.

    Having kids, on the other hand, changes everything. Now your social activities are limited by your responsibilities towards the child(ren). Can’t stay out until 2am if you know the kids will be awake at 7am and will wake you up 3 times in between. Can’t take a random day off and do a day trip if the kid needs to be at school that day. Can’t visit friends after work together with your partner if the kid needs to be in bed at 7pm. It’s a massive limiter on social opportunities.

    At the same time, spending time with the kids is pretty great in its own right, and that’s what the article touches upon. If you are married but don’t have kids, you might get your fill with your partner after work. If you have 5h or so every day with your partner from getting back from work until going to bed, that’s a ton of quality time.

    But if you return from work at 5pm and the kids go to bed at 7pm, then pretty much all the interaction you get is eating and preparing the kids for bed.

    As a father, working from home means I can see my kids grow up, especially in their earlier years. It means I was there when they took their first steps. I’m there when they start talking. I can actually spend time with them, get close to them, be part of them growing up. I’m there when they cry, when they say the funniest stuff. You know, be with them when it matters.

    With my wife, on the other hand, as much as I love her, I’m not going to miss a ton of really important things if I’m not around her 24/7. On the contrary, she’s happy for any bit of actual alone time she gets.





  • Yeah, a tattoo printer would have to be at least a 5 axis robot. Technically, that’s not a huge issue, and even pressure sensing or using machine vision to adjust the print aren’t that difficult to do.

    But even if it becomes a mass produced device, manufacturing costs for the robot part alone would be at least 3k-5k and then you will need a skilled operator to control that thing.

    So you are replacing a minimum wage tattoo artist with an expensive robot and an even more expensive robot operator.

    Doesn’t really make sense.

    The same thing holds true, btw, for pretty much all “humanoid robot applications”. Minimum wage wokers are incredibly cheap, maintenance and setup costs (aka healthcare and education) are paid for by the employee, there’s no vendor lock in and if you don’t need them anymore you can just fire them whenever you want.

    That’s incredibly hard to compete against for a generalized robot.




  • Beware, there’s a difference between “push notifications” (which is what your links are talking about) and “notifications”, specifically with the “notification history” feature.

    Push notifications are a mechanism to transport messages over google services. What that does is that the backend service of some app (e.g. the Signal server) can send a message to an app that’s currently not actively running to tell it that there’s something new happening, e.g. a new incoming message. This goes via Google services because that way, the app doesn’t need to be constantly running. Google services then wakes up the app and allow it to do something with that info, e.g. display a notification.

    The alternative is that the app is constantly running, constantly actively checking for new messages and thus constantly consuming power.

    This can be e2e encrypted by the app, and then Google can only see metadata.

    Notifications, on the other hand are the things that show up on your phone when you swipe down from the top navigation bar. These notifications can be read in plain text by any app on your phone, including the OS. If you have Notification History enabled, they can be backed up (again in plain text) to Google’s servers. And any old app you have on your phone can silently do the same. That’s why Signal allows you to hide the text content and/or sender name for notifications.