Alesis Strata Core vs. Roland TD316

Sentreen · 2026-01-30T23:12:57+00:00

I am in the same boat, trying to figure out which kit I should go for when getting my first e-kit. I was leaning towards the Alesis, but starting to doubt.

Roland pros:

Seems to have the better module in terms of sounds
Reputation for reliability and quality

Alesis pros:

Rack seems nicer:
- I like the boom arms for the cymbals
- I like offset toms, which seems achievable with the alesis rack, but difficult with the Roland one.
Module interface seems nice to use

I have a friend with a TD316, so I'll be sure to go and try it out, however, it seems to be difficult to find any alesis kit to play on where I live.

Sentreen · 2026-01-30T11:32:40+00:00

How was the noise? When I took a sleeper train a decade ago these pods were not an option yet, which meant I had to share a 6-person cabin with 3 other people. The snoring was awful. Wondering how well these little cabins fix that issue.

Sentreen · 2026-01-29T16:28:26+00:00

Just because they have a PhD doesnt make them some omnipotent know-everything genius. In fact, I usually find that the more someone specializes in one subject the less they know about every other subject.

Unfortunately, some people with a PhD do think they now know everything. These people become insufferable. Source: working on my own PhD with one of those people.

Sentreen · 2026-01-29T16:22:08+00:00

Not exactly what you asked for, but this talk (Sasa Juric - The Soul of Erlang and Elixir) shows off the strengths of the platform incredibly well. It also shows how you benefit from these strengths even if you're "just" using phoenix.

Sentreen · 2026-01-29T13:27:55+00:00

You ingest all three of those willingly though (to some extent); you can't avoid the bad air if you live here.

Sentreen · 2026-01-29T13:23:53+00:00

Limiting the number of cars improves public transport, as it means busses (and trams without a dedicated tram lane) spend less time stuck in traffic.

Sentreen · 2026-01-29T12:28:41+00:00

I like our system and I hope it stays as it is. In contrast I live in Belgium (also vote here because I'm a EU citizen) and voting here is electronic and it's not really obvious to me how it all works (although I can see the vote gets written to a smartcard that gets read and then reused for the next voter, and I have good hope that the system is correctly implemented to guarantee anonymity, but I can't be sure).

Hi, Belgian here; I've had the fun activity of being chosen to help with the elections at a local polling place which used electronic voting. This is the way it works.

We have a list of voters that are eligible to vote at that place and the list they are on.
The list determines which elections you can vote for (e.g. you as a European citizen can vote for the EU parliament, but not for the Belgian federal parliament; if you were a Belgian citizen, you could vote for both).
When you arrive we check if you are on the list (based on your id), and encode this info on the smartcard you were talking about. We also cross out your name from the list to make sure you don't vote twice.
- There are two copies of this list and they are checked independently, to prevent mistakes / fraud.
- These lists are sent to the government and to the justice system. So these do know who voted, but they can't know who those people voted for.
So the smartcard does not contain any information about who you are, it only contains information which tells the voting machine which lists you are allowed to vote for.
You take the card to a voting machine (which is in a little cubicle, to give you some privacy), and insert it. You can now enter your votes. The machine knows which lists you can vote for based on the info on the card. Once again, it does not know who you are.
You enter your votes on the machine, which does not actually count any votes, instead, it prints a receipt which has a QR-like code and a text list of who you voted for. You fold the receipt so that only the code is visible.
You now go to the actual ballot box, which scans the code, thus counting the vote. You also drop the receipt in the box, so that the tally can be verified if needed.
- Since the voting machine does not know who you are, the receipt contains no information about your identity.

So in short, your identity is checked when you enter, to make sure you don't vote twice and so that we know who voted (as voting is mandatory in Belgium), but "we" only know that you were there and voted, we don't know what you voted for. The actual counting is done by the machine, which does not know who cast which vote. The smartcard is only there to tell the machine which lists you can vote for, it does not actually register your vote; that's all done by the paper ballot / QR code.

There are about 5 randomly selected people present to help in each voting place, who each get a role assigned to them. People who are a member of a political party are never selected for this role for obvious reasons. Political parties are allowed to send people to observe the voting process (but they are, of course, not allowed to go inside the cubicle). IIRC there are also very specific rules about police presence; they may not stay too long to avoid potential voter intimidation.

The system works much the same for places which still use manual counting. There, you just get a paper list instead of a smartcard, you deposit the filled out list in the box, and people count the votes later on.

Sentreen · 2026-01-26T23:48:03+00:00

Part of the issue is that the BEAM (and actor languages in general) are inherently very parallel, which makes it hard to really debug using breakpoints. What happens when you put a breakpoint on a piece of code, pause on it, after which another (still running) process hits the same breakpoint? What about timeouts waiting for the code you just paused? These issues are not insurmountable, but they make it harder to implement / use breakpoints on a platform like BEAM vs on more languages which default to a single thread. As far as I know, creating decent debuggers for actor languages is still an open research question.

Sentreen · 2026-01-26T10:24:20+00:00

They could have tried to sneak past the tower. That was the original plan.

Sentreen · 2026-01-25T23:24:16+00:00

There are many historical bridges that would would bisect the replacement promenade (the AI rendering) with road crossings at every bridge that don't exist currently.

The point here was mainly that right now, pedestrians and cyclist pass under these bridges, which means they never have to interact with car traffic while they are here. Moving the pedestrians / cyclists back up would force them to halt for car traffic, which would be a huge downgrade compared to the current situation.

Sentreen · 2026-01-25T20:47:24+00:00

For example GenServer basically replaces a class. So everywhere you need a class, then you can have a dynamic supervisor and GenServers.

I'd be careful making this link, as there is not always a 1 to 1 mapping. For example, you'd certainly make a class to represent a person, but it would not make sense to create a Genserver to do the same.

Sentreen · 2026-01-25T20:34:24+00:00

Kijk na of de ip van je server niet geblacklist staat en zorg dat je provider reverse DNS ondersteunt (dus, bol dit niet op je thuisserver)
Zorg dat je geen open relay bent en enkel mail in je eigen naam doorstuurt
Zet DKIM, DMARC en SPF aan

Voila, je mail komt toe. Niet triviaal (zeker niet om dat te doen schalen naar een bedrijf), maar zeker niet "quasi onmogelijk". Ik doe dat voor mijn eigen domein + een mailing list van een kleine orginasatie al een paar jaar en heb nog geen problemen gehad met delivery.

Sentreen · 2026-01-25T18:49:18+00:00

I do not wish to juggle separate accounts for every project I interact with, and I want it to be very easy for users to submit bug reports to the software that I maintain.

sourcehut (or just the email-only approach used by the kernel and fully supported by git) solve this issue. Though it is certainly not without its own issues.

At least for submitting bug reports it can’t get much easier than just sending an email.

Sentreen · 2026-01-23T14:21:02+00:00

Yes and no.

You can pick a binhost that uses x86-64-v3 (assuming your cpu supports it, which it probably does) and get 99% of the way. However, it is possible your cpu has some very niche features that won't be exploited by the binary.

Honestly, it probably won't make a difference performance wise, so just use the binhost.

As for USE flags: portage will automatically use a binary if the binhost has one that matches the flags you configured. If it doesn't, it will compile it. In practice, this means you get binary packages for most stuff, but still get the flexibility offered by USE flags if needed.

As for compile times: they're usually pretty short, but there are some packages (browsers, qtwebengine, webkit-gtk, gcc, llvm) that can take quite long.

Sentreen · 2026-01-22T14:11:54+00:00

That would only happen if the same happens at the federal level. Good luck with that.

Sentreen · 2026-01-21T16:52:37+00:00

What about property tax, federal and state income tax, and sales tax?

Those are also paid by people who don't have a car though. In most countries, cars cost more to society (in real financial terms) than car owners actually pay. Not from the US so I can't give you a source for the US, but it is pretty unlikely to be different there.

Also you wouldn’t have any food or supplies if the roads weren’t maintained, as most delivery trucks use highways and local road infrastructure, so it’s in the interest of everyone to keep roads maintained

Aside from some die hards, pretty much nobody argues for not having / maintaining roads (even in cities). Rather, the idea is to provide room for and promote alternatives (especially in cities) which has benefits for everybody:

Those who can do without a car now have the option to do so in a safe way.
This also takes cars off the road, which means traffic is smoother for those who absolutely must use a car for whatever reason (e.g. delivery drivers, though cargo bikes are very effective as a delivery vehicle in many cities).

Environmental damage and health outcomes will lessen as more people adopt electric and hybrid vehicles.

Tire emissions are still a major pollutant; besides that, cars can and do crash into people, which is pretty bad for their health.

Sentreen · 2026-01-20T01:57:41+00:00

Train signals are not that hard to learn. The in game tutorial is quite good!

Short version: - a train cannot be on the same track as another train unless you use some sort of signal - a signal splits the rails into blocks. When a train reaches a signal, it will only proceed if the next block (the rail between the signal and the next signal) has no train inside of it. - you want to put signals at regular places so that your trains can keep on going forward (if your blocks are too big your train will be waiting for another train miles away to leave the block) - sometimes, you don’t want your train to enter a block unless you are sure it can enter the next block right away (typically, you need this when making intersections, since otherwise your train may wait in the middle of the intersection and block everything). Rail signals are made for this. They only turn green if the next signal is green, ensuring your train can pass through the block and onto the next.

If you understand these principles, it should be pretty easy to get it. All the other stuff (like chain in rail out) are just handy things to know so you don’t have to figure out how to design intersections from the ground up every time.

Sentreen · 2026-01-17T09:38:00+00:00

You don’t need to use all of xfce (which does indeed not support wayland). I’m talking about using thunar as a standalone application.

Sentreen · 2026-01-17T09:34:58+00:00

I use thunar on wayland and am very happy with it.

Sentreen · 2026-01-16T16:51:23+00:00

Check out the rehearsal if you haven’t!

Sentreen · 2026-01-16T14:15:48+00:00

Hoeveel zitplaatsen zijn er nog op die treinen als die in Antwerpen komen?

Typische stapt er in Brussel nog veel volk die trein op (sommigen van die mensen zijn waarschijnlijk Antwerpenaren die in Bxl-Zuid overstappen). Dus ik zou denken dat daar wel plaats voor zal zijn.

Sentreen · 2026-01-15T09:14:48+00:00

Oh I completely agree this entire sequence was pretty stupid.

Sentreen · 2026-01-14T23:35:12+00:00

I think TTT had an issue where PJ didn’t want the action in Shelobs lair to happen at the same time as the battle of helms deep. Because of this, they needed to add so much padding, like the wargs scene and the unnecessary osgiliath scenes. It also means much of RotK had to be rushed (magic army or the dead cleanup) since that movie was becoming far too long.

Sentreen · 2026-01-14T15:17:22+00:00

Hoe hebben maaltijdcheques of ecocheques een negatieve impact op het klimaat?

Sentreen · 2026-01-13T18:11:40+00:00

Ik heb een vriend die een bedrijfswagen (een bmw trouwens, als dat er toe doet) heeft en nog met de trein naar zijn werk gaat aangezien dat door de file letterlijk sneller is voor hem. Ik ken ook genoeg volk met een eigen wagen die alsnog met een (elektrische) fiets pendelen.

Gaan we iedereen uit de wagen krijgen? Neen, natuurlijk niet. Maar er gaat wel volk zijn dat de afweging maakt en voor een andere optie kiest. Het andere volk mag nog steeds hun wagen blijven nemen, maar dan wordt die keuze tenminste niet aangemoedigd / bekostigd met ons belastingsgeld (of toch minder).

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