robryk @robryk@qoto.org

@dpiponi Do you expect that some summary of accelerometer readings could tell a bit of a story? (I would expect that it could identify the type of conveyance used to transport the airtag and, in some cases, narrow down to a small subset of vehicles: it could detect precise timing of aircraft takeoffs and maybe landings and of the times when a train stopped.)

@mcc There's a pinning difference, and I wonder if that's the only one.

@_thegeoff There's a mod that makes orbital dynamics consider bodies other than the closest one btw. (I haven't played with it yet, but a coworker seems to have high opinions about it.)

@avatastic @_thegeoff

Another thing to think about is how much your motivation depends on presence and properties of company (does it help significantly if you have people trying to learn the same thing, or maybe people who will be at least somewhat interested in what you're trying to figure out and will ask nontrivial questions?).

@_thegeoff Fluid mechanics? How blood flow splits between vessels is somewhat nontrivial, and I'd expect that there are nice scaling rules to be had around determining whether blood flow in some area will be laminar.

Not physics per se, but maybe statistics in the area of measurements with inaccuracy? "How do we tell with few measurements whether this value increases over time" is something I haven't seen doctors and vets have an intuition around.

@0xabad1dea I agree that it seems to have been applied all the time the train was visible. I wonder how much earlier it got applied: only when the crossing got into view, or significantly earlier at some sort of pre-crossing signal (not a block signal, but a crossing status signal -- I'm not sure if Netherlands has those though; for comparison, the signal in Poland looks like this: https://www.transportszynowy.pl/Kolej/sygnalizacjaprzejazdowe).

@0xabad1dea

Does this train seem to move at a speed typical for that line? I'm kinda surprised that it seems not to have been notified by the signal before the crossing that the crossing is not closed properly (it wasn't closed properly at any point, because the barriers got broken off -- which is usually sensed -- essentially immediately).

@_thegeoff I don't understand the comparison, because I think the units don't match. Do you mean sth like "if you were to fill a large volume with potassium chloride, you'd get 2x normal background dose in the middle of the volume"?

@mcc Many sites will sadly ignore that header though. I'd check (by using "copy as curl" in devtools and modifying the command) if the site in question is one of those.

@cstross

FWIW Sam the alien in the webcomic Freefall claims that his original society is somewhat like that.

@GroupNebula563 @Heliograph @_who_up_instancing_they_host

And probably refuses to give out signed objects, so that boosts do not propagate versions for wrong instances.

@_thegeoff

Perhaps wardriving? Or using Shodan?

Random, potentially useful fact: powered wheelchairs seem to reasonably often be convertible to push mode. Look for a lever somewhere around one of the motors which switches between powered operation&break enabled and freewheeling (with brake disabled! note that they're potentially heavy).

@_thegeoff

E.g. I recently received a document (https://www.oeffentlichkeitsgesetz.ch/downloads/befreite-dokumente/efd/2025-03-12_scan_2025-10-10-16-14-11.pdf) as a result of a FOIA-style Swiss federal law. As previously agreed upon, some attachments were omitted entirely (because they would most likely not have been releasable and I didn't care for them). Amusingly, the titles of those attachments (which we actually discussed earlier in person) were redacted from the attachment list.

I suspect that the reasoning was similar: there was very little chance of me complaining about that.

@_thegeoff

Also, underredacting is irreversible, while overredacting isn't. There like are more incentives to avoid underredacting (because there are people with potentially clear and demonstrable harm from such a mistake) than overredacting, too.

@islieb Soll das nicht lieber "letzer Tag" sein? :)