I’m a scientist and systems engineer, particularly materials science, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, bioengineering, renewable energy, um… okay, so kind of I enjoy being a general engineer and doing a little of everything.

But I love trying to help scientists turn super technical concepts into usable prototypes because I can translate biologist to electrical engineer really effectively.

I am the star trek kind of anarchist.

  • 8 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I saw the writing on the wall a few years back, it was so painfully obvious. I started switching to KiCAD early, and feel so bad for ever recommending Eagle to people who will now have to learn yet another new tool in order to find something usable.

    Fusion360 is so bad, I had to explain why SolidWorks was different earlier today and they were shocked by things like “if I move the case the board I say is attached to the case moves to” and “I don’t have to align it by eye, it’s a computer”.

    And I’m definitely not starting VMWare to run Fusion360 with nonsense online components that slow it down to uselessness and integrate it into a tool that doesn’t need to be on at all… it’s just not possible. It was obvious once they stopped updating the version. It’s pathetic nonetheless that they cannot think beyond the one-true-way of integrating a dozen mediocre tools into one extra-mediocre product.


  • Thanks for looking, and indeed signal still works fine on my desktop computers with the VPN running.

    Really feels like their tech support was lying. I do just enough of this that the recommendation makes my eyes glaze over while sounding transparently wrong. Suddenly I need open UDP and TCP ports, but only on my phone (computer is fine) and only as of a few weeks ago (prior to that it was fine)? What?

    Allow *.whispersystems.org, *.signal.org, updates.signal.org, TCP port 443, and UDP traffic. If you have a transparent or reverse proxy it needs to support WebSockets. Signal uses a non-standard TCP port to catch filtering issues at the signaling step and also utilizes a random UDP port. All UDP ports will need to be opened. The underlying IPs are constantly changing, so it’d be hard to define accurate firewall rules.

    If the wildcard FQDN config is not working properly and you notice issues with calling, allow turn2.voip.signal.org, turn3.voip.signal.org and sfu.voip.signal.org. These are subject to change at anytime.



  • I mean, largely to me this is fine and great as long as the reverse is also true. It’s fabulous to have two totally independent systems that are fully interoperable to such an extent.

    I don’t think there’s a meaningful competition in growth or anything, that’s just a number. The main downside is reduced development focus…

    But – If Lemmy is like a frontend for kbin and vice versa, isn’t that fine? The Lemmy apps will load kbin posts and kbin apps will load lemmy posts.


  • TL;DR: I think it is basically impossible to have that much money and claim it was earned ethically. Therefore it is basically impossible to be “good” without giving it away.

    I think that it is borderline impossible to ethically accrue that much wealth. Is it possible? Maybe? I’d love to hear more examples of where a company owner made sure all their employees shared in the success when the company is large enough that the owner is that rich. I remember hearing that Google did right by their early employees, but it’s been the exception that makes the rule and was also a long time ago in a different world where their ethics were different anyway.

    And if you inherit that much wealth, what are the odds that it came to you free and clear of having been generated from exploiting others? Colonizing/“settling” and redlining making property values super high? Using eminent domain to tear down minority major communities for the sake of putting an interstate down the middle instead of risking devaluing the richest people’s property more? Because odds are that even if they didn’t cause the system they certainly benefited from it.

    And unfortunately, “charity” is a horror in the USA because it’s used as a very bad and very biased by rich people version of an actual welfare system that worked. The idea that there are food banks operating off donations while billionaires exist is horrific. If billionaires did not exist I frankly think that a lot more things like food banks (and public transit maybe?) would find themselves with funding.





  • I think I’m much too old for Prodigy or something because one episode was too much.

    But Lower Decks is absolutely amazing, it’s really nice to have a legitimate comedy within the honest-to-god Star Trek universe so they can just actually make fun of Riker by name.

    I like Strange New Worlds alright. It’s better than Discovery, and I liked Discovery fine.

    Picard was great until the S1 twist and I refused to watch further. Maybe that’s not fair, I found it a bit Disney-ish but wow that ending. I just have to head cannon a more respectful ending and I imagine I’ll get around to it.

    Though I have somehow never managed to get around to Enterprise…




  • I’ve been kind of suggesting the same thing a few times inside of posts. I’m coming at it from the perspective of having had to do a lot of in-person recruiting for voluntary activities, mentoring, and teaching – you cannot tell people things like “you should just join lemmy/kbin” – you have to wait for them to ask “how do I join lemmy/kbin?”

    That’s okay! It just means that the focus when introducing people to it has to be “here’s what you’re missing”, positive about where they could go rather than negative about where they are.

    It’s an uphill battle trying to argue with people who do have a point about it being harder to use (we shouldn’t gaslight people), but they’re also saying what the audience is wanting to hear because it gives them permission to do nothing.

    How many are just admin accounts or sock puppets for some agenda or another anyway?

    Consider focusing on the positive – link to specific posts on these systems that are objectively worth going to participate in. They don’t need an account to read and enjoy.

    Then, if they discover that they wish that they could participate in the thread – that is the time to explain that they should just join whatever instance the post they really enjoyed was on for starters. They’ll realize that they can see magazines from other instances, probably after a week when they realize other instance domain names are showing up on things. Then some nice person explains what’s going on.

    And now they’ve convinced themselves it’s worth joining…


  • While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it’s clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they’re usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.

    I’m not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to “[email protected] and [email protected] are different people” because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn’t take that long to click honestly.

    Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don’t turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn’t seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what’s going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I’m sure…!





  • Did they initiate the process and ask for help or did you offer?

    I’ve been teaching twenty years. If students get themselves to the point of coming with a question based on experience, odds are excellent that they will listen to what I’m saying. If they do something at my suggestion, they are not engaged and do not retain. Same is surely true for learning to use a new website.

    So I dunno if this is a suggestion for you or other people reading this post, but consider directing them to magazines/communities that are an actual draw, since people are the actual draw. When they find they cannot post, then they will have incentive to pay attention.

    This is so far true for “what is a photon”, “what is consciousness”, “how do you do a kick”, and “why are most metals thermally conductive” so I suspect this isn’t a unique thing. Dangle the incentive, then wait for them to ask how to get involved.

    Again, not criticizing especially since I don’t know your approach, hopefully this can help others. The draw is the community and posts, so highlight that way before they ever see a signup page. They can browse the site without an account.








  • Of course in a magical world all the different basically the same magazines on different instances would get merged seamlessly in the UI with posts all somehow connected.

    In the real world I can’t even conceptualize how you could handle moderation (or a random collection of posts vanishing from a thread) with instances that have different rules unless each magazine for different topics was a separate silo.

    The natural outcome, without much active effort, seems likely to be that niche stuff is consolidated on a single instance that members aren’t necessarily on in order to have enough participation while popular stuff truly just gets silo’d into different self-sustaining groups that talk about the same stuff but with different culture developed, different moderators, and a different instance.

    Is there another way? We’re assuming each one is self-sustaining, it will be good enough or you’ll find one on a different instance…

    I expect people will see there’s existing local magazines for a bunch of things, and then to search out magazines for niche interests.