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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • In my personal experience, even wholly within a professional domain when an expert is trying to give an overview to non-experts (for example to mid-level managers for the purpose of decision making) a lot of things end up having to be axioms (i.e. “trust me this is how it works/this is what’s needed/this is how its done” as fully trying to explained things to them would requires explanations of the explanations of the explanations.

    This is with same-industry expert-domain-adjacent professionals, so I can see how much worse it would be when explaining stuff to average whose understanding of an industry is zero.


  • I recognize gallium at least as a dopant material (what transforms the pure sillicon, which is an isolator, in the the n-side or the p-side of a semiconductor junction, where gallium specifically is used in light emitting junctions such as in LEDs) and a quick search showed that antimony is also a dopant.

    (For the curious, here’s the Wikipedia article)

    As you might have noticed, even my short explanation of what a dopant is actually requires people to understand to an advanced level what semiconductors actually are made of, so I can see why an AP article which is targetting the average person wouldn’t go into that specific rabit hole of explaining stuff that requires more stuff to be explained which in turn requires even more stuff to be explained and so on.

    Also, I would be surprised if there are more than a handful of journalists in the World with even the most basic understanding of how semi-conductors work.





  • Yeah, the case with antennas is a good point - when I decided to concentrate various things in a Mini-PC in my living room (TV-Box, Router and so on) I actually looked into these router Mini-PCs as an option and the biggest problem was the lack of a proper antenna, so I ended up going with a generic Mini-PC and leaving out the router functionality which remains done by my old router (which is quite decent, just a bit outdated).

    Mind you, this one also wouldn’t work for me because I’m using 4 Ethernet ports (1 for the external connection and 3 internally) whilst this one only has 2 (a weird choice for a router).

    IMHO, this isn’t really better than just getting an SBC with 2 Ethernet ports and WiFi and put it in a box with an antenna), a setup which suffers from exactly the same problem as this one: not enough Ethernet ports.



  • Whilst that’s a nice slogan, in Electronics “open source” doesn’t mean anywhere as much as it does in Software because it’s generally just knowing which components go into the circuit, which is but a fraction of the work (laying out the board is a massive chunk of work, in some cases most of it, and at high enough clock speeds circuit design is an art in itself).

    Mind you, I like the Orange Pi and Banana Pi guys, and the idea of an SBC designed for being an open source router is pretty appealing, though nowadays maybe pfSense would be a better choice than OpenWrt.

    Finally this thing having only 2 ethernet ports + WiFi makes it little more than a regular $70+ SBC board + a box - something easy enough to put together by any technically inclined person - which isn’t exactly exciting.







  • Here in Europe they’re forced to show the lowest price of the last 30 days and I was looking at some games in GoG and for several interesting games their Black Friday “discounted” price is €15 whilst the lowest price in the last 30 days is €10.

    So the Black Friday “discount” is in fact 50% more expensive than the previous time that game had a “discount” which happenned not even that long ago.


  • I think that in the last 30 or 40 years people have relentlessly been fed racist bullshit, only it’s been portrayed as anti-Racism.

    So “Jews this”, “Jews that”, only it’s all things that paint all members of that specific etnicity in a good light like “they’re victims”, “were oppressed”, “have Western Values” and so on, hence it’s sold as “the opposite of Racism” because it’s says good things about the character of all individuals of an etnicity rather than bad things.

    However all that shit is still the very same “people from etnicity X are all the same” mindset as the Nazis had: the core Prejudice that millions of people can just be reduced to members of a Race and treated as if they’re all the same is no different in Nazism from that in Liberal politics.

    Hence the surprise when Israel - the self-proclaimed “Jewish Nation” and representative of all “Jews” - turns out to not at all act as “victims” or “opprossed”, and instead act as the very opposite, victimizing and oppressing others to such extremes that they’re at the same level of depravation as those of the Nazis themselves.

    All this to say that people need to try and overcome the brainwashing by spotting when their own thoughts, judgments and conclusions are anchored on racial-prejudice, even when said prejudice might be oriented in a direction which seems “positive” - most such “surprises” as when the “Jewish Nation” turns out to be the latest variant of the Nazis aren’t at all surprising when you stop thinking “Jews are X, Y and Z” and instead just think of people as being people, which means that some when they get power combined with de facto immunity for their actions act in the most horrid of ways and the majority around them will just go along with it and even convince themselves of the most extraordinary justifications (in the case of Israel that being extremely racist takes on Palestinians and Arabs in general) for why the actions they’re going along with are the right thing to do.