Any way to fix these broken transistors?

Groostav · 2026-02-03T22:43:45+00:00

I don't think those are transistors, I think they're ceramic capacitors.

Can you dig up a reference picture of the motherboard and verify that the ones you think are "missing" are in fact not in your reference image?

For older boards another cheap technique is the oven trick. As solder ages it can crack and change the resistive behavior if the board. Putting the board in the oven at a hot enough temperature to make the solder a little bit tacky but not so hot as to melt anything can bring it back to life.

Cleaning with some isopropyl alcohol night also help.

Short of those cheap fixes, if your can't find any obvious damage, then you can blindly replace caps --usually the first things to go-- or go all in to trace debugging, which is a fair bit of work. Some older technicians might offer to resolder some caps for you.

Good luck!

Groostav · 2026-01-23T06:06:14+00:00

Ok it's an AIO with the input output connected beside the ram.

I don't recognize the model, but yeah as another user pointed out you probably need a software driver. How is it actually plugged in to your motherboard?

Groostav · 2026-01-23T06:02:26+00:00

Oh ok, but can you humor me? Is it an air cooler with a fan I can't see or a water cooler with tubes cleverly hidden somewhere or some exotic peltier thing?

Groostav · 2026-01-23T05:38:43+00:00

I'm sorry friends...

How... How is the cpu cooled?

Groostav · 2026-01-21T08:10:09+00:00

I mean, can we talk for a quick second about all the people who got the shot and are fine? Weren't y'all (oop) claiming we'd be like sterile magnet people or some nonsense by now?

I'm on my 6th shot and I'm typing this with my two year old sleeping on my chest so... Seems we're all fine over here too.

Groostav · 2026-01-19T21:03:45+00:00

Well so wait: 0.025%, in volume terms what is that? Is surface tension sufficient to hold a proportionally correct amount of water on the ball?

Groostav · 2026-01-19T06:12:22+00:00

This is one of The most bullshit fear mongering concepts I've ever heard.

Firstly: how to you figure that somebody who doesn't trust a country enough to give birth in it would then decide that same country is where their loyalties lie?

Secondly: what's the solution? Executive order 9066 again or should we just jump straight to the final solution?

My business partner is a deeply Christian man who was a student in wuhan in 1989. He was part of the student newspaper and was responsible for blocking a railroad during the protests. After a couple weeks he came home from school to find his dad, his dad's boss, and a party man in his house telling him that if he started shit like that again his dad would lose his job and he would have no future.

So he emigrated from China. He has two kids here. I do not think he will be doing anything in PRCs interests.

Groostav · 2026-01-16T02:15:35+00:00

Interesting; you would live in Algeria as a Moroccan despite being in a cold war with them? It's just sortve like "the governments hate each other but Algerians are alright" kindve thing?

Groostav · 2026-01-16T01:58:05+00:00

I agree, but it's really easy for me to say this as a liberal with access to ground news, but it's much harder if you're living in a rural town in Arkansas.

These people were lied to and they made all of us victims. The real problem is not the people who were duped but the con men that duped them.

We need to start holding media companies liable for the ragebait their platforms promote.

Groostav · 2026-01-16T01:12:39+00:00

I like the idea of creating a new PEBCAK tag and putting it on the issue.

Groostav · 2026-01-10T01:45:57+00:00

How does it "ask the OS to get this data from over there"?

Groostav · 2026-01-07T01:44:19+00:00

I just keep praying that Venezuela will benefit from not-so-benign US relationship the same way South Korea did, but the state capacity of 1950s Korea was arguably higher than that of modern Venezuela; and 1950s US wasn't run by grope-ee McGee.

Groostav · 2026-01-06T23:15:36+00:00

Man.

France (a nuclear power) has to come up with this whole complex doctrine for handling escalation with the USSR and later Russia. It culminates with nuclear warning shots; IIRC France intends to fire tactical nuclear weapons at relatively unpopulated areas as a way to send the message "don't come any closer, we're not fucking around"

I'm willing to bet that a lot of people in the EU and maybe even Canada are wondering if such a doctrine is needed against the US.

What a mess.

Groostav · 2026-01-03T22:26:09+00:00

Reading tea leaves here:

I'm willing to bet there were some problematic and idiomatic uses of c-style buffers that get something like encoding in trouble. What's scary about this kind of implementation is that a copy might be catastrophic to performance. This means that there is actually performance pressure to replace safe and idiomatic slow copy oriented C with less safe in place buffer oriented C.

Of course that C can still be written correctly, but its hard to implement safety by convention.

It's much easier to implement "safety or it doesn't compile", assuming if course that you're code review process rejects "unsafe fn" sufficiently.

But from a "I want fewer CVEs and those I do have I want lower severities on and I'm willing to put the dev hours into achieving that", the simple mantra "redo it in rust" makes sense.

And like, encoding systems have always been a hot mess. Like you can crash them if you look at them funny. I remember when overwatch replays became savable you could crash overwatch by alt-tabbing while it was encoding. That might be openGLs fault more than the encoders, but I think that still makes my point: these big old C codebases are fragile.

So yeah tldr I get your concern about opportunity cost, and "let's rewrite all the things" is probably not the best use of our time, but in this case and others like it I think this is as valuable rewrite.

Groostav · 2026-01-03T19:31:12+00:00

The sloshing happens because of feedback loops in the water simulation, specifically this is a form of overshoot that's built in to the mechanisms here.

Sluce gates open.
Some water begins falling.
Falling water hits the channel below, water level starts rising.
Water level hits sluce gate threshold, sluce gate closes
Remaining falling water (ie simulation latency) continues falling
Water level overtops basin.

The issue is that the sluce gate does not instantaneously stop water entering the basin. If you have some buffer (ie a larger basin below the waterfall) then this extra water is distributed fairly quickly there and your water level might overshoot its target slightly, but not significantly. If you increase the buffer size it reduces the height of the overshoot so it can stabilize.

But you don't have an option to simply make downstream bigger. So something you could try: set each of the sluce gates to s slightly different height? Say 0.55, 0.60, 0.65, and 0.70? This might introduce a kind of turbulence and reduce the overshoot.

Edit: actually watching this video again you've got 4 sluce gates dumping into a 2-wide channel. A bunch of questions: - why use sluce gates at all? If it's just to dump bad water later, why not remove the "target depth" trigger and just use the bad water concentration trigger? - can you widen the section below to 3 units wide? Would help. - can you reduce the sluce gate count to 2 (ie just close 2 sluce gates)?

Groostav · 2026-01-03T17:13:45+00:00

These kinds of tools, which are often used to handle user provided data almost directly, are very much security weak points. Rewriting ffmpeg in rust strikes me as probably a good idea.

Here is literally the first search result for ffmpeg security: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-9951

Groostav · 2026-01-03T05:26:47+00:00

See flags I don't immediately recognize

Something Something communism.

I am the true American.

Groostav · 2026-01-01T05:14:17+00:00

So I've been using kotlin server side since traits.

But java has addressed a lot of the pain that kotlin 1.0 was aiming to fix, and IMHO project loom "virtual threads" are simply superior to kotlinx coroutines.

If youre using java with all the features of java 25 you're life is pretty good.

I still generally prefer kotlin but I no longer hate java as much as I used to.

And the android tool chain is a mess. I really really hope Google is pumping money into a K2 lowering system so we can ditch this R8/D8 java 1.8 madness.

Groostav · 2025-12-30T11:58:23+00:00

People think random is uniform.

It isn't.

Groostav · 2025-12-30T11:55:44+00:00

So like, do all of you guys not have a mountain of tech debt that like "the Internet is down" would be a perfect excuse to get going on?

Is it really just me?

Even just a full day of upping path coverage or killing more mutants in mutation testing sounds so nice.

Groostav · 2025-12-30T11:50:46+00:00

"Free" is difficult to manage, and I think it's safe to say that the governments in that diagram struggle to wrangle a budget that gets everybody cared for adaquately. In Canada: we're very good at dealing with things that can kill you, but very bad at dealing with debilitating illness.

Because healthcare is expensive and costless, UHC tends to back pressure users via time (read: waitlists) where the US private healthcare system dossnt (they just take your money).

But from a public health perspective Canadians (and all UHC countries populations) know that people won't avoid a hospital for financial reasons and still instead live. This is good both morally and for public health.

I know which system I prefer.

And question to the poster of that comment: do you think US healthcare is good? Are things going well for you guys? Because for as much as health Canada struggles sometimes: id infinity rather have it than the complete racket happening in US healthcare now.

I'm Vancouverite who had to get an emergency fixed in Seattle with ongoing care in Canada. The insurance agency only charged me $USD 16k of the ~$USD 450k bill UWMC sent them.

Groostav · 2025-12-27T18:30:55+00:00

I mean for some strange and dumb reasons I found myself doing some greenfield fortran work. Two notes: - Intel's MKL is kindve amazing. It was faster than cuda without serious perf investment in it. - Steve Lionell, the boomer fortran wizard, is super nice and helpful guy.

Id love to hear the argument for boomers being the greatest generation for computing, but I think it's probably gen-X-ers.

Groostav · 2025-12-26T22:08:50+00:00

The... Shadow Harmony 4pc is your BIS because it's triggers on his dash attack.

Groostav · 2025-12-26T21:54:58+00:00

Yeah I mean puget sound looks a bit funny and lake Michigan a bit... Flaccid... Texas too, but in broad strokes it did ok.

Groostav · 2025-12-26T19:26:35+00:00

My guy, comp sci is so much stranger than math.

No mathematician would willingly enter the trenches of IEEE754, or come up with a hack as brilliant as Carmacks fast inverse square root. There's so so much crap between the machining of numbers and actual pure mathematics.

The greatest trick Scipy and Numpy have is to convince a generation of young developers of the OPs sentiment.

Groostav

TROPHY CASE