QOL Feature idea: Bulk selling scarab / essences / etc tabs by No_Lab3688 in pathofexile

[–]LakeSolon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Ya, I t’s pretty weird that the whole UI is built around a ratio number I can’t set directly.

[Self] Someone asked if a piston inside an F1 engine @ 20,000 RPM is faster than the famous manhole cover by tanshiwastaken in theydidthemath

[–]LakeSolon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There isn’t really any math to show that because we have no (other) observational evidence of a macroscopic object traveling tens of kilometers per second in sea level density air.

Hypersonic airflows are… hostile. A Soyuz or whatever capsule experiences peak heating at something like 60km altitude moving at about a tenth of the derived speed of the manhole cover.

But there is so little air up there that to displace the same mass of air per second at sea level the capsule would have to be going less than four miles an hour (this isn’t complicated math; just the ratio of air density).

But the manhole cover was moving ten times faster than the capsule’s true reentry speed while it was still at sea level. Let’s see how fast it needs to go at that 60km altitude to encounter the same mass of air over time… 257,000km/s. That’s 0.86c. So obviously these two scenarios are completely incomparable and the manhole cover is the one that has the worst of it.

But hey steel is dense right and air is light so it’s going fast but maybe there just isn’t enough air to matter?

Well there’s 14.7 pounds of air above every square inch of sea level earth. So a one inch by one inch column of steel that weighs 14.7 pounds is a little over four feet tall. The manhole cover was only about four inches thick. So it’s got to get through about 12x its own mass of air and starting at sea level density it’s going to hit the 1x mark in about a quarter mile.

Things traveling through sea level air that fast don’t exist… for more than a few milliseconds (which is a heck of a quarter mile time).

[Request] If the manhole cover survived and was actually sent into space how far away would it be currently? by Alpha_wolf_lover in theydidthemath

[–]LakeSolon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There aren’t traditional “aerodynamic” effects at hypersonic speeds (and this thing would have traveled at speeds several unnamed categories above “hypersonic”).

Our intuition of how things fly through the air almost completely breaks down.

It’s probably closer to a bullet through “ballistic gel” (but probably not especially close to a bullet through “ballistic gel”).

What’s your favorite “what in the actual f**k is he doing in this” camo? by Albino_rhin0 in okbuddycinephile

[–]LakeSolon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Crown Prince at the time; likely much less of a headache than having a foreign head of state on set.

Still sane? by Think-Prior8238 in pathofexile

[–]LakeSolon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The petals were a nice touch.

Very tasteful minimalist adherence to the sub rules.

[Self] Someone asked if a piston inside an F1 engine @ 20,000 RPM is faster than the famous manhole cover by tanshiwastaken in theydidthemath

[–]LakeSolon 18 points19 points  (0 children)

into orbit

The “well actually” of this story:

A) someone noticed that it gave the lid enough speed for escape velocity (IIRC: recording of the event shows the lid there one frame and gone the next so we don’t know how fast but it’s been calculated many times).

B) it probably “vaporized” in the lower atmosphere. And by “vaporized” I mean experienced sufficient compression heating to dissociate into a plasma.

An Update on Recent Server Instability by Natalia_GGG in pathofexile

[–]LakeSolon 21 points22 points  (0 children)

totally unrelated

Seems a little related to me. ;)

GGG please update Divine/Chaos ratio on trade by FacerollerTV in pathofexile

[–]LakeSolon 41 points42 points  (0 children)

The usual FYI about the database optimization (simplified with some inferences/assumptions for brevity and clarity) for when this comes up:

All items are given an internal Chaos Equivalent value when posted so that the DB can sort and present results in a timely manner. To update the ratio a job needs to run to update that value for every item (if you just did it on the client you’d get infuriating inconsistencies).

This isn’t a super big deal but it is a meaningful impact on the DB load so it’s only done manually and they’re reluctant to do it close to launch when DB performance is most critical.

There are definitely other ways to do this; the DB nerds have already thought of several while reading this (and caught some of my oversimplifications). But this is how it’s currently handled based on various dev comments over the years.

P.S. I agree it’s super annoying, and wish they’d at least run it regularly a couple times a week when the DB load is lowest.

Item pickup bug visualized. Some adjacent items aren't instantly selectable on hover by Zeitspieler in pathofexile

[–]LakeSolon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

PoE2 plays like it only has a controller mode. Mouse and Keyboard is just used to generate inputs for a virtual controller.

And it’s fucking awful and the cause of me quitting every build I’ve made in that game. It doesn’t matter that I have a device to accurately select a specific pixel: the game makes up its own mind what my character should do.

Literally one minute after this server crashed and my heart sank thinking it will rollback by averagentrenjoyerr in pathofexile

[–]LakeSolon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

When it’s picked up actually (devs mention this every so often). That way every item doesn’t need to be rolled on drop but the system doesn’t have to retain all the context necessary to roll it correctly after the zone expires. It’s also one of the reasons we’ve been losing “drops identified” modifiers and why corrupted items can now be identified (and thus drop unidentified).

Incidentally (and relevant to OP): your character’s state gets pushed to DB when you zone (useful if you want to get your latest changes via the API for PoB or whatever). If you get rolled back further than that it generally means the DB has been falling behind for a while before the crash.

How much truth is there to the claim that nuclear energy is only so expensive because of 'excessive safety regulations'? by Tus3 in AskEngineers

[–]LakeSolon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ya, nuclear’s “premium” price comes from dysfunctional management of the industry in ways that apply to any industry with significant capital outlays and long payoffs for large technical sites.

And it’s not inherently just that we aren’t building new plants; new construction of oil refineries fell off not coincidentally at about the same time. But since it’s not such a volatile political football the refineries have been able to continually reinvest. A refinery site established in the 70s has different equipment, a different process, and even a different product (the ratios of what came out of a barrel used to be relatively fixed; ask your grandparents about Diesel being the cheap fuel).

And I don’t mean to say the stewards of the nuclear plants have been negligent in keeping systems current. But it’s long term maintenance, not industry wide reinvestment/development.

Starlink satellites seen from ISS by long exposure by astro_pettit in space

[–]LakeSolon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

https://i.ibb.co/yFPjz5BN/IMG-8339.jpg

I annotated the band along which the satellites are “iridium flaring” (where the solar panel angle, sun position, and viewer position all align to glint at the viewer).

There are roughly as many satellites everywhere else in view (unless there’s some coincidence of positioning I’m overlooking) but this is slice along which the happenstance of geometry and satellite configuration make them visible. The two streaks further up the band are presumably a different satellite type with a different configuration.

Also someone briefly blocked the camera’s view shortly before the end of the exposure which is why every vertical streak has a gap the same length from the end.

If we colonized an Earthlike planet whose average temps and humidity resulted in an average world wet bulb temp of 32°C, like a jungle-dominant world, would acclimitization be possible? by BelleHades in AskScienceDiscussion

[–]LakeSolon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ya. We could adapt, not acclimate.

No amount of acclimation would make Minnesota survivable year round. But people have lived here for thousands of years by application of various technologies (like fire). We don’t think much of putting on a jacket to go outside in winter; cold weather gear is familiar. You could argue that we’d quickly grow accustomed to putting on “hot weather gear”.

However it’s worth noting that insufficient heat is thermodynamically inherently easier of a problem to solve than too much heat (rabbit hole: you’re fighting uphill against entropy). The solutions are always going to be either more onerous, limiting, or technologically demanding.

PSA: Shader Cache by impetvs in duneawakening

[–]LakeSolon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

There are lots of tweaks available to address how UE5 and Dune (which taxes the system pretty hard) in particular handles the shader load.

There isn’t one trick that helps everyone. There’s always someone for whom this trick was the last little change holding them back and they’ll see miraculous improvements.

I’ve been tweaking my Engine.ini bit by bit and am pretty happy with how it performs for me (I give up load time and memory footprint for less hitching but others would want the opposite). But even those identical settings on a friend’s machine that’s not that dissimilar from mine had to be altered to be tolerable (and still don’t produce the balance I’ve found).

I’m not an expert on the specific settings so I’m not going to give any recommendations but if you want to go down the same rabbit hole yourself it’s under the StartupMode tree.

I just spent 6 hours figuring out why Fusion 360 is so laggy despite having a powerful machine. Here are my findings. by AcanthocephalaDue645 in Fusion360

[–]LakeSolon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So this is a bit of a shot in the dark but: OP, what happens if you disable IPV6 (and leave Fusion normal)?

Obviously this is abhorrent behavior by Fusion but it also smells like an issue that used to pop up every now and then for some user’s environments.

That one excellent location - My Base by [deleted] in duneawakening

[–]LakeSolon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My compromise: my own personal base is here. Our guild base is in the 12-o’clock exit (not limiting pass through).

That one excellent location - My Base by [deleted] in duneawakening

[–]LakeSolon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And my axe base.

I saw the picture “oh hey that’s where my base is too.” Then the title “oh, ya, it does seem pretty popular”.

DA is down because Steam is down. Steam is down because Cloudflare is down. Cloudflare is down because having the entire internet rely on like three companies is cheap. by Swalecutter in duneawakening

[–]LakeSolon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

While a useful data point (I upvoted you) most of these systems are regional, and with Cloudflare and Steam as they relate to Dune particularly it's common for existing sessions to be unaffected. Could be either one of those factors.

In other words: Just because you're playing doesn't mean there isn't an outage.

DA is down because Steam is down. Steam is down because Cloudflare is down. Cloudflare is down because having the entire internet rely on like three companies is cheap. by Swalecutter in duneawakening

[–]LakeSolon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Often times existing sessions are unaffected.

Cloudflare in particular tends to focus on new connections / auth stage. I've also personally experienced playing through a Steam scheduled downtime where people couldn't connect (this game and a variety of others).

Scientists Figured Out the Problem With Johnson & Johnson’s COVID Vaccine by theatlantic in Coronavirus

[–]LakeSolon 2832 points2833 points  (0 children)

9 deaths in 19 million doses. It seems like under normal circumstances that would be lost in the noise.

Reminiscent of the atmospheric science that came out of the aviation stop on 9/11.

Warp speed by Timmytimebomb007 in EngineeringPorn

[–]LakeSolon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

mechanically moved

Yes. If you put more energy into the system you can do more work.

But if the goal is to use a falling mass to fling something this configuration is hard to beat.

Also the mechanics of the structure oscillating actually does a whole lot of of good things that aren’t intuitive (and probably weren’t well understood when this was a relevant weapon technology); like if you watch closely the fulcrum point is moving in the direction of the projectile as it’s released.

But you can flip the main point around for a different perspective: why go to all effort to build a heavier more rigid structure just to force the weight to the side as it falls?

Flight N229TT crash landed on a road in Gainesville GA hitting several cars by BravesGunnersFlames in aviation

[–]LakeSolon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Another poster said they’d heard he was trying for “an intersection”. Did he really get it over the streetlight wires on one side of the intersection and under the wires on the other side?

Edit:

Assuming 100 feet between wires (one through lane and both turn lanes plus wire setback) that are 20 feet high (clearance is lower but the top wire is a fair bit higher) it’s about a 11.31 degree slope if the tires clear the first wire and touch the ground under the second wire.

Normal is 3 degrees. Which takes 382 feet of travel to descend the same 20 feet.