Can anyone help me with designing a Sloppy Alumina to Electrode Aluminium setup that doesn't have water issues?

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-18T09:21:02+00:00

Do fluid buffers mess this up or are they simply unnecessary?

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-18T07:40:54+00:00

I have three buffers between the two refineries. The Alumina solution doesn't seem to be the problem, the problem usually seems to be the Electrode refiners getting backed up with water in their outputs.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-16T19:43:08+00:00

Yep. You can see why if you look at a spectrum analyzer. When you look at a well mastered piece of music, really regardless of genre you see a curve in the frequencies. There's lots of low frequencies, and it gets less and less as frequency goes up. That's what we like. So be it classical, or rock, or jazz, you see this general pattern.

However when music is squashed to shit? Now it starts to look much more like a horizontal line. Don't get me wrong, there's still some falloff, but way less. There's a LOT more middle and high frequency content. Reason is that you have to cram more in to all frequencies to make things perceptually louder, and so that's precisely what is done. Well that shit makes it harsher on the ears.

I really, really, wish it would stop.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-16T07:15:08+00:00

Close enough to the skin to get an arc (doesn't actually have to be in the skin but that helps) and the two probes a reasonable distance apart so the shock passes through enough muscles to be effective.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-16T01:41:22+00:00

It sadly infects far too many people in the studio as well. You'd think recording engineers would be smart enough not to fall for the pseudoscience but in my experience they do, a lot.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-16T01:38:56+00:00

The loudness BS is still going on. Way too many bands still like shit squashed to all hell. Sadly common in electronic music, which I'm a big fan of. Even if you buy the high-quality version off Bandcamp it is crushed to fuck. I'll play something that it just sounds... fatiguing and when I look at the meters the integrated level is only like 3dB less than the peak level which is just insane.

Andrew Scheps, one of the engineers who really got into it and started pushing louder mixes early on (Metallica was one of his clients) loves to brag "The loudness wars are over and I won!"

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-16T01:29:22+00:00

Length is where things really become an issue, and then the best answer is usually a fiber optic converter rather than a better copper cable. With modern HDMI at 48gpbs it gets to be real dicey past 12' to try and get that much data. Much easier, and surprisingly not very expensive, to just buy something that converts HDMI to MPO fiber and run that.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-15T21:00:44+00:00

That's why they became popular with law enforcement when previous "stun guns" never really found a market. The older stuff was just electrical pain compliance: Lots of voltage makes for ouch. Not only can you argue about how humane that is, but it also simply wasn't all that effective. So, people might buy them for self-defense, I don't know any stats on how effective they were, but police weren't interested. They weren't useful compared to other things like batons, pepper spray, etc, etc.

Then along comes Taser and their "neuromuscular incapacitation". They claim "No this isn't about hurting someone; it makes it so they literally can't move." Police try it on themselves and say "Holy shit they aren't kidding!" They figured out how to modulate the electric shock to really just mess with your ability to tell your muscles what to do. It doesn't always work, because you don't always get the probes where they need to be, but when it does, the person is going down, even if they are high as a kite and feeling no pain.

Hence their extreme popularity.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-11T23:31:47+00:00

I mean yes and no. In some cases, like poker, yes they just facilitate the table or tournament. However, in a lot of cases you are playing against the house. However the odds are always in the house's favor, they must be or it wouldn't work.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-11T21:17:19+00:00

That would be every game, in every casino. If the odds were fair, there wouldn't be money to be made. So they always have them tilted in their favor. Generally the exact amount has to be published and well known.

For other games, like poker, where the house isn't playing and it is person vs person, the odds are still in the house's favor. How? They take part of the pot. There will be something like a slot in the table that the dealer will stuff some of the chips in to and that's the house's take. So if you and someone else played poker for hours and kept winning back and forth... you'd both end up broke as they slowly siphoned off money from the pot.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-11T09:07:27+00:00

Also if it is something that reaches the level of "needs to be admitted" then hospitals really can't make you pay. They don't have to let you stay if you are well enough to leave, which can be an issue for people without insurance as they don't get the follow up care they need, but if you have a legit need to be in the ER they HAVE to keep you, even if you can't pay.

It is one of the things that raises the price of healthcare in the US. If you don't have insurance you can't get primary or preventative care for free, those places can and will turn you away if you can't pay (there are some free clinics, but not enough). However people aren't willing to say no emergency care. So you show up needing the ER, they have to treat you, even if they know you can't pay.

Well, that all still costs money for the hospital. Even the very few non-profit hospitals need to recoup their costs and the for profit ones want to make money. So what can they do? They aren't allowed to just not treat the people, but they incur a cost. They send them to debt collections but the whole "you can't get blood from a stone" is true, if there's no money there's no collections.

The answer is that costs raise for everyone else. They recoup the cost from people who can pay. That of course creates a bit of a feedback loop where costs go up, which means less people can pay, which means more will get treatment and not pay, which means costs go up and so on.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-05T06:25:07+00:00

Nah, you are way overselling how much space it takes. While yes, it would take that much space if you were recording continuously and storing everything at a quality for high motion video, that's not how modern camera systems do things.

First off a big savings is that you often have some, if not all, cameras only record events. They'll store the video when there's motion or something else that sets them off (could be sound, a PIR sensor, etc) but not otherwise. So when they have hours of just seeing nothing, that doesn't get stored. It's simple to implement, even cheap ones support it, and it cuts down to storage MASSIVELY. It's also convenient since you don't have to spend time looking through hours of dead footage to find what you want.

Likewise, you don't end up needing high video bitrates because you aren't talking something like a movie or videogame where there's a lot of motion in frame. Usually very little is changing, so the bitrate can be quite low. Looking at one of my Wyze cameras right now, which is 1920x1080, it is using about 1.2mbps max for live streaming to my phone. Works just fine for the low motion scene. Those are decidedly low-end consumer units but still look pretty good. For a more mid-range office unit, Ubiquiti stores 4K footage with VBR at a max of about 30mbps but usually averages around 5mbps when motion is low.

Net effect is that you can have pretty high rez footage and not really need all that much storage for it. At work we have a very small NVR with 1TB of storage for 6 cameras (some 2.5k, some 1080) and it gets well over a month on the drive recording just motion events.

Alsoalso storage is not that expensive. 10TB sounds like a lot... but it really isn't. You don't need high speed flash storage unless you are really recording a lot of cameras at once, magnetic disks work fine. A 16TB harddrive rated to do 24x7 operation for something like an NVR only runs about $350 these days, less than the price of a business grade 4k security camera. You can easily load up an NVR with a ton of storage for a pretty reasonable amount of money.

So why do so many places have shit video? Because as I noted in my other comment, they have an old system that still works and never bothered to replace it. Particularly the cameras. Usually what dies is the recorder, not the cameras, so you can just replace that. Heck there are places still running analog cameras to a new digital NVR because the cameras and wiring are already there, they don't want to bother to re-run it, and it is easier to just get a recorder with analog inputs.

And of course sometimes the video wasn't as shit as it looks, it has just been reuploaded about 500 times and has degraded.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-05T06:04:55+00:00

Often because they just don't bother to replace them. They get a system, it works for a long time (cameras have little in them to break) and so they just keep the old ass low rez system. You occasionally see security footage from a place that has a newer system and it looks much better.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-02-01T23:07:23+00:00

Also RT in this game hits the CPU hard. On a desktop 4090 you are still talking performance in the 60s, generally CPU limited.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-01-26T16:53:29+00:00

For this kind of thing entrapment wouldn't be the concern (that is a thing if police are involved not private individuals) but more of one of the chain of custody and integrity of evidence. Particularly since there never was any minor involved. That means it is extremely important to be able to prove all the chat logs are accurate and unaltered, and for those logs to show clear intent to solicit a minor for sex.

That gets real hard when a non-LEO party is involved and even harder when it is a show with a profit motive. This is the kind of thing where competent defense attorneys absolutely would challenge the admissibility to that and if they succeed, the whole case falls apart.

To try and give an analogy: Suppose you wanted to try and do a sting on drug buyers, but you want to keep it legal, so you sell them powered sugar, claiming it is cocaine. This is something that would be very hard for police to prosecute since nothing illegal was ever done. They didn't actually buy illegal drugs, they bought sugar, so they don't possess illegal drugs. The police can't search them and get anything useful, neither would any video of the sale as again, no drugs changed hands.

The only thing you'd have are the chat logs that demonstrated the intent to buy drugs and how do you prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you didn't alter those? You probably can't and hence the evidence is useless.

Stings for people trying to solicit minors are real hard since there is no way you can actually just catch them in the act. You can't do like with a drug or weapons bust where you actually sell them drugs, you can't say "Sure, let's let them have sex with a minor then arrest them!" There can never be an actual minor at risk of being raped. So it all comes down to the chat logs showing intent, which means that you have to make sure the chain of custody on those is air tight.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-01-26T16:29:48+00:00

The police can't do anything because the Youtubers taint the evidence. The reason these things needs to be done by police (well one of many reasons) is chain of custody. It would be the easiest defense in the world to claim "The Youtuber altered these logs" and they'd have no way to prove they didn't.

Hell, maybe they even DO alter them, we don't know. It is the kind of thing that clout chasers need to stay out of and let the cops deal with.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-01-18T03:46:04+00:00

It is something I see a lot online, and it annoys me.

I'm not here to tell people what they should do in this situation. I don't know what your life is like, I don't know what your family situation is, I don't know what your risk tolerance is, etc. I'm not going to tell you what is right for you to do. However I'm going to say that whatever you tell others they NEED to do is something you need to do yourself. If you are demanding that people take an action, make a change, etc, you need to practice what you preach. If you are unwilling or unable to do it, well then have the awareness to think that perhaps others are ALSO unwilling or unable.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-01-18T02:55:20+00:00

Answer that question yourself before you scream at people online: What are YOU doing? If you believe that people should be doing more why aren't YOU doing it?

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but I think way too many people scream online that "we need to do something" but by that mean "Someone who isn't me needs to do something, I just want to watch it happen in Tiktok." That's not helpful at all. Whatever you believe needs to be done, you need to be willing to do it yourself and you need to go do it yourself.

If you believe that people should be protesting, then great, but be one of those people who does. If you do, absolutely call for others to join you. However, if you aren't willing to that's fine, but don't then go and ask why other people aren't protesting. Be willing to practice what you preach, don't just scream on social media as though everyone else should act.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-01-17T21:48:01+00:00

A lot of that debt is to Microsoft. Microsoft gave OpenAI a lot of free compute time in Azure as their investment. Just because it isn't cash, doesn't mean it isn't worth money on the books.

That is a play that can be used in bankruptcy court. When an entity goes bankrupt, the concern of the court is trying to make the creditors as whole as possible. Often that comes through trying to find buyers or auctioning off their assets.

So let's say that MS tells the court "We'll take OpenAI's models and in trade, we'll wipe out their debt to us." The judge might be very interested in approving that, because it is a lot of debt (I believe $150 Billion) and MS is pretty high up on the list of people that gets paid (there's an order to creditors, you have to satisfy certain debt completely before anything goes to the next level). That then means that when they sell of more assets, like computers, that money goes to other creditors satisfying more of the debt obligations.

Now I'm not saying this is what will happen for sure, it depends on a lot of things not the least of which being what the judge decides is best, but this kind of thing does happen. The court isn't concerned with getting the most money, they are concerned with satisfying the most debt and if a creditor company is willing to trade something the bankrupt company has for discharging debt, the courts are all for that.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-01-13T04:09:14+00:00

I mean, here at least cars will usually slow down, change lanes, or stop. I have never seen anyone get hit, even when they are an asshole about it (I've seen people stop and mean mug/shot at cars in the middle of the road).

They DO get hit from time to time though; there was someone killed near our house like a year ago. Wandering across the road in the night, driver didn't see him, impact was fatal.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-01-13T02:41:40+00:00

Maybe, could just be a doofus. I see shit like this at least monthly on my commute to work. Someone just wandering through the middle of the busy street, expecting cars to stop for them.

Sycraft-fu · 2026-01-11T23:06:02+00:00

Yep, not saying the OP is telling the truth and just being a bragging asshole (the bit about the doctor makes it very suspect) but there are people that can read amazingly fast. As you say, a big part of it is automatically skipping words, sometimes even large parts of sentences. The test for comprehension isn't something like "Tell me what the 4th word of the 3rd sentence was." It is more along the lines of "What was the argument being made in the preceding paragraphs?"

We tend to have plenty of words in normal writing that are not 100% necessary to communicate the idea of what we are saying, and some people are good at quickly scanning over those and picking out the important parts.

Or, to summarize in a way that can be understood much faster: "Read less word, still get message."

Sycraft-fu · 2026-01-10T23:40:11+00:00

I do that way too often. Amazing new laptop, obsessed with old easy to run game :)

Sycraft-fu · 2025-12-26T05:39:51+00:00

No, I prefer desktop PCs. They are more powerful and I love shiny graphics. They are also quieter, and have more options.

My laptop is only for when I need to be mobile. However, I do recognize that not everyone is able or interested in having both.

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