robryk @robryk@qoto.org

@rysiek

What if they are aiming to increase the number of people who are intrigued enough to start reading the article (á la "you can't guess what happened"-style headline)? I would expect that being imprecise helps with that goal (because you can tell less about the story from the headline) and using terms that sound less pedestrian than they are does that too. (And then you want to keep consistency in the rest of the article, maybe?)

@aredridel @mcc @AlgoCompSynth

You mean the ones that are emitted as mechanical vibrations or vibrations in current draw (they are coupled, but if I imagine things correctly the coupling will be between weak and, for motors driven by VFDs, nearly nonexistent)?

@mcc @AlgoCompSynth @aredridel

An interesting question is where the mains frequency comes through to the signal path. If there are nonlinearities along that way, they will generate harmonics. (This is e.g. why the transformer buzz is a buzz: the path from changing magnetic field to position of movable conductive pieces works similarly to a kazoo, because those metallic pieces often behave like springs that get stronger the further you pull them.)

@jasongorman

If you describe something as an FSM, you need to describe the states and transitions. For any nontrivial program you can't enumerate states nor list the full table of transitions. So, I expect that you want languages where what you write is a description of the full state of the program and a transition function (in some fashion).

Nothing that is literally like that comes to my mind, but this reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_reactive_programming, where you write functions that take streams of input events and produce output events. You can think of the internal state of the function as FSM state and the function's logic as defining transitions. (This approach admits compositionality in a pretty obvious way; I don't see how anything more FSM-like would, which is, I suspect, correlated with me not knowing practical languages that are more FSM-like.)

@mcc @dansup

Following that reasoning, a storm often causes water level in a river near where I live to rise a few days earlier. :)

@mkj @niconiconi

If you have a slowly-changing signal, you can use a 1 bit ADC to get arbitrary resolution, by adding white noise of a known distribution to the signal and ADCing the sum (the averaged value you get from your ADC will correspond to the noise's PDF at negative input signal value).

Amusingly, many GPS receivers (used to?) play a similar trick, because they deal at some point with something like a signal with very low SNR that they have to average over a longish period of time (although they don't care about increasing resolution, but only increasing precision), so they already had to deal with a noisy signal. (See https://s53mv.s56g.net/navsats/theory.html for the kind of simplifications that yielded in old receivers.)

@_thegeoff

It's a pity we don't get taught the concept of impedance way earlier, given how many different places it can be applied in. For example, it's really nice to be able to see that a kazoo is very similar to an amplification circuit that's clipping. (Your post reminded me of this, because the lightness of the foil is helpful there insofar it makes for better impedance matching with air.)

@fontes Ah, so the stick's position controls the scroll speed?

@fontes

What kind of scrollwheel are you using? (IIRC PMW3389 can't detect rotation around the point it looks at, and you seem to have only one of them, so it doesn't seem to be using ball spin)

@b0rk

We have various ways to indicate emphasis in text, but we don't seem a generally understood way to indicate uncertainty/slight inaccuracy/... If we had such, would you think that using it to point out knowingly-incomplete abstractions were useful or maybe too noisy?

@WiltClan @mcc

From similar weird UI choices that became weirdly pervasive: click the timestamp for permalink

@niconiconi was it you who described how high ESR of large electrolytic caps after something like a buck converter helps prevent voltage oscillations?

@_thegeoff

I'd not be surprised if there were various hydrates there, but I don't think that alone would explain how the crystal grows on the end that's far away from the liquid, or would it?

@m0bi @rower

O, trójkołowiec z dwoma kołami z przodu, które są skrętne. Z tego co pamiętam (z bloga kogoś, kto taki konstruował iirc) jest coś nieoczywistego w konstrukcji mechanizmu kierującego takimi kołami, co trzeba wziąć pod uwagę, żeby uzyskać rozsądną stabilność w skrętach.

@_thegeoff

I would be extremely surprised if I could get mass transport through a crystal where all the liquid was bound into hydrates. After all, I can't see how I can get mass transfer without having ions dissolved in the liquid, which can't work then (right?).

@lauren

Do you mean left as in more redistribution towards a wide group of people, or that and also more freedom from traditional social structures?

@_thegeoff

I put a safety pin (which I falsely thought wasn't stainless, apparently) in a bit of brine in a mug and left it for 2 weeks on my desk. The mug ended up covered in salt crystals from the level of brine up to the edge, and even a bit beyond the edge. My only hypothesis how the salt gets transported to grow this crystal layer is as brine, through the crystal (which must be wet via capillary action). The surprising thing is that I can barely notice the crystals on walls are conductive (which a colleague suggested to me as a test for whether the crystals are moist) -- if I use my multimeter probes stuck <5mm apart, I sometimes get ~15MOhms. I haven't gotten around to measuring conductivity more properly (using contacts of larger surface area, looking at more of the V/I curve, etc.).

Another interesting thing is that the crystallized thing on the walls seems to have at least two layers of different structure. I haven't tried to figure out why yet (one hypothesis that I have is that it's related to the brine being made from iodized salt).

@wolf480pl I used a shortlived system that for some reason had an equivalent of vimpager set as the pager for manpages.