I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Yes it looks like it’s adjusting the port length. (In plain english: some speaker boxes have an intentional hole in them, if you adjust the length of the pathway that sound takes to exit the box through this hole then you adjust how bassy it sounds).

    To add a hollow cavity into the plastic part would immensely complicate the design of the moulds (assuming you try and implement the cavity in the same style & orientation of what gluing that bit of wood in achieves). The plastic shells of this speaker look like they’ve been designed for two-part moulds, which is the cheapest and simplest way of designing a mould. Any internal cavities of the part would require bits of steel mould to be in the cavity during injection, those pieces then have to be removed somehow and that would be a nightmare. Two part moulds can just be clamped & separated over and over again without snagging on anything.

    For the walls of a speaker to reflect sound they need to have a density that is very different to the air inside the chamber. As it turns out basically anything fulfills this criteria, even cardboard makes fine speakers (just don’t get it wet or poke holes in it). Plastic vs MDF wouldn’t matter here acoustically, both are fine.

    Bits of particle board can easily be cut and glued by unskilled workers. For business reasons the injection moulding might be getting done at a different place to the final assembly, and the product manager who wants the speakers properly ported might only be in charge of the latter. IDK.

    glue applied likely by a machine

    I suspect this would be all human assembly. They’ll probably have motorised torque-limited screwdrivers and jigs to hold the parts on during assembly, but still human arms doing the work.

    In particular: stuffing the white polyester wadding in would be a PITA for an automated assembly machine. Humans are tolerant of variation and bits of wadding blowing away, pre-programmed movement robots are not.



  • WaterWaiver@aussie.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlmmmm tasty carbon
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    4 months ago

    I swear that I read that white lead oxide is water soluble, thus happily sticks to your fingers and then gets on your food. I must be misremembering.

    Maybe it was something about the solid lead object turning into an (oxide) powder that can then be easily ported as tiny particles on greasy hands? Hearsay science and safety information from me today :)


  • WaterWaiver@aussie.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlmmmm tasty carbon
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    4 months ago

    The fun thing about Pb is it’s relatively safe in pure form. Unfortunately the oxides that appear on its surface are water soluble and love entering our bodies.

    Just looked this up, apparently I’m completely wrong. Maybe I was thinking about lipid compatibility? Not sure now.




  • Bleepingcomputer’s title and article are very misleading, the presentation did NOT reveal a backdoor into an ESP32. It looks like Bleepingcomputer completely misunderstood what was presented (EDIT: and tarlogic isn’t helping with the first sentence on their site).

    Instead the presentation was about using an ESP32 as a tool to attack other devices. Additionally they discovered some undocumented commands that you can send from the ESP32 processor to the ESP32 radio peripheral that let you take control of it and potentially send some extra forms of traffic that could be useful. They did NOT present anything about the ESP32 bluetooth radio being externally attackable.

    Another perspective that might help: imagine you have a cheap bluetooth chipset that is open source and well documented. That would give you more than what the presentation just found. Would Bleepingcomputer then be reporting it’s a backdoor threatening millions of devices?







  • Ooh thankyou for the link.

    “We can leverage it [ray tracing] for things we haven’t been able to do in the past, which is giving accurate hit detection”

    “So when you fire your weapon, the [hit] detection would be able to tell if you’re hitting a pixel that is leather sitting next to a pixel that is metal”

    “Before ray tracing, we couldn’t distinguish between two pixels very easily, and we would pick one or the other because the materials were too complex. Ray tracing can do this on a per-pixel basis and showcase if you’re hitting metal or even something that’s fur. It makes the game more immersive, and you get that direct feedback as the player.”

    It sounds like they’re assigning materials based off the pixels of a texture map, rather than each mesh in a model being a different material. ie you paint materials onto a character rather than selecting chunks of the character and assigning them.

    I suspect this either won’t be noticeable at all to players or it will be a very minor improvement (at best). It’s not something worth going for in exchange for losing compatibility with other GPUs. It will require a different work pipeline for the 3D modellers (they have to paint materials on now rather than assign them per-mesh), but that’s neither here nor there, it might be easier for them or it might be hell-awful depending on the tooling.

    This particular sentence upsets me:

    Before ray tracing, we couldn’t distinguish between two pixels very easily

    Uhuh. You’re not selling me on your game company.

    “Before” ray tracing, the technology that has been around for decades. That you could do on a CPU or GPU for this very material-sensing task without the players noticing for around 20 years. Interpolate UVs across the colliding triangle and sample a texture.

    I suspect the “more immersion” and “direct feedback” are veils over the real reasoning:

    During NVIDIA’s big GeForce RTX 50 Series reveal, we learned that id has been working closely with the GeForce team on the game for several years (source)

    With such a strong emphasis on RT and DLSS, it remains to be seen how these games will perform for AMD Radeon users

    No-one sane implements Nvidia or AMD (or anyone else) exclusive libraries into their games unless they’re paid to do it. A game dev that cares about its players will make their game run well on all brands and flavours of graphics card.

    At the end of the day this hurts consumers. If your games work on all GPU brands competitively then you have more choice and card companies are better motivated to compete. Whatever amount of money Nvidia is paying the gamedevs to do this must be smaller than what they earn back from consumers buying more of their product instead of competitors.


  • really flashy guns and there is a very intricate damage system that runs at least partially on the GPU.

    Short opinion: no, CPU’s can do that fine (possibly better) and it’s a tiny corner of game logic.

    Long opinion: Intersecting projectile paths with geometry will not gain advantages being moved from CPU to GPU unless you’re dealing with a ridiculous amount of projectiles every single frame. In most games this is less than 1% of CPU time and moving it to the GPU will probably reduce overall performance due to the latency costs (…but a lot of modern engines already have awful frame latency, so it might fit right in fine).

    You would only do this if you have been told by higher ups that you have to OR if you have a really unusual and new game design (thousands of new projectile paths every frame? ie hundreds of thousands of bullets per second). Even detailed multi-layer enemy models with vital components is just a few extra traces, using a GPU to calc that would make the job harder for the engine dev for no gain.

    Fun answer: checkout CNlohr’s noeuclid. Sadly no windows build (I tried cross compiling but ended up in dependency hell), but still compiles and runs under Linux. Physics are on the GPU and world geometry is very non-traditional. https://github.com/cnlohr/noeuclid


  • As a general rule I hold suspicion to any marketing that claims that using CO2 (or other products of burning) is environmental friendly. The products you get from burning fuels are supposed to be useless and of low value, otherwise they are not burning them efficiently.

    To turn CO2 into potassium carbonate (pearl ash) you will need a lot of energy. Where they get this energy from is far more important than where they got the CO2 from. I would not be surprised if it is more environmentally friendly to make the pearl ash through a different process and ignore the CO2 rather than trying to convert the CO2 into pearl ash.

    Background chemistry

    Fuels are chemicals with a lot of potential chemical energy stored in them. They are generally considered (at a minimum) flammable or “reactive” in some way.

    When we burn fuels we turn them into products with very little potential chemical energy, mainly CO2. You cannot burn CO2 and get energy out of it, it is a “stable” or “unreactive” chemical. It has very little chemical energy stored in it compared to the original fuel.

    The difference in stored chemical energy between the fuel (eg methane CH4) and the products (eg CO2) is turned into heat and then electricity (via steam turbines). If your products are still reactive then you have not used them to their full potential and you will not get as much heat out as you could (not to mention improperly burned products tend to be toxic, eg carbon monoxide).

    Now let’s look at potassium carbonate (K2CO3). It’s a somewhat reactive chemical, it’s not anywhere as stable as CO2, you can observe this by the fact it readily wants to react with other chemicals (caveman test: put it on your skin and it will sting). CO2 is very stable and does not want to do much (caveman test: put it on your skin and you won’t feel it).

    To make K2CO3 from CO2 you will require energy input. Turning an unreactive chemical into a reactive one is a bit like the reverse of burning something. This energy will probably come from burning more coal or gas. I suspect it will require more coal/gas than making the CO2 did, so net overall you will probably be releasing more CO2 than you capture and turn into K2CO3.

    Of course if they’re using renewal energy (solar) for this step then this could be a net positive.

    My level of trust in the honesty of product packaging and marketing is pretty low and if they don’t mention it then they obviously don’t think it’s important. 🤷

    EDIT: I’ll also add that “carbon capture” projects (things that claim to get rid of or make use of the CO2 from burning fuels) are universally disasters or scams.

    EDIT2: I’ve taking some simplification liberties with the chemistry here. Technically CO2 isn’t completely stable, you can do stuff like make weak acids in water with it, but I do not believe anyone has found a way for that to usefully use up what we emit from burning fuels.


  • WaterWaiver@aussie.zoneto3D Printing@lemmy.mlWeird PrusaSlicer error
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    7 months ago

    All of the the surface normals are backwards. This means your shoe is inside-out; instead of being a solid shoe in a vacuum it’s a shoe-shaped-hole inside a solid universe.

    By default blender renders all polys as double-sided so you mostly don’t notice (other than some lighting oddities near corners). Turn on backface culling if you want to check if your normals are the right way around or not.

    I often end up with some of my polys backwards because of the way I extrude and join parts of my models. I distinctly remember a bug in Gmax (old free version of 3DSmax) where the mirror tool would create polygons with some special, broken property where their normals would be correct in the editor, but completely wrong when exported :( much time and hassle was lost to that.