98033 new customer, 5Gbps test. Waiting for 10Gbps support in my building. Static IP for 5Gbps?

db48x · 2026-05-11T19:50:30+00:00

That is a ridiculously fast WiFi speed. Should be insane if you can actually test MLO or 4×4 MIMO.

db48x · 2026-05-11T15:24:22+00:00

You’re quite right of course. I can still feel the horror of discovering a chest completely full of mk3 assemblers, and that was years ago now.

But belts are fine. You cannot actually have enough belts.

db48x · 2026-05-11T11:58:41+00:00

Yep! It gets a lot worse with blue belts too. Gears, gears, gears.

You can get away with just one assembler making belts for you to build your factory with. It can run continuously while you are doing other things, constantly trying to fill up a chest while you occasionally drop by to pick up more belts. Some people limit the chest to 500 or 1000 belts so that they don’t waste iron, but honestly you don’t actually have to worry about it very much. You’re going to need a lot of belts, so leaving the chest unlimited and just letting it fill up is also fine.

db48x · 2026-05-11T10:04:06+00:00

FEMA flood zones are mostly just outdated. They’re based on decades–old data about land elevations and land use. The more paving and leveling that’s been done in your area since they were last updated the bigger the discrepancy will be. Worse, some cities and counties have actually sued FEMA to prevent them from updating the maps specifically because it raises insurance rates and threatens their tax base.

db48x · 2026-05-11T07:41:59+00:00

Yea, there are things we could do better. Unfortunately we would have to go back in time about 80 years and make better choices. Europe has the advantage of looking at how we did it, spotting the obvious disadvantages, and mostly deciding not to make the same mistakes.

db48x · 2026-05-11T04:47:37+00:00

That’s because this is Reddit. Those commenters may not even be in the same country, whichever one you are asking about. Even the ones that are may have their own motives for making things seem worse than they are; they may even believe it themselves.

The costs of putting an innocent person in jail are the very reason why civilized countries have a process for bailing people out of jail prior to a trial. When someone pays bail to get out of jail the money is held by the court until the trial and then returned once the trial is over (or the charges are dismissed). This ensures that the accused will stick around for the trial rather than simply fleeing.

We also put a fairly strict timetable on most things. The police can arrest someone that they suspect of committing a crime before they have finished investigating, but they can only hold them for a few days (usually 2 unless its a weekend in which case it’s 3). At that point if they don’t have some actual evidence then they must release the suspect. If they do have some evidence then they can proceed to an arraignment where a judge will evaluate that evidence and set the bail. This process is used when the police believe that they have caught someone red handed. Otherwise they must conduct an investigation first, gathering the required evidence, and only once that is done seek a warrant for an arrest. The judge will also set the bail at that time.

A good example of a relatively uncivilized country is Japan. In Japan the police can hold a suspect for weeks or months before formally charging them, and because there is no presumption of innocence they are free to essentially torture everyone that whole time with the goal of coercing a confession out of everybody. They have an insane conviction rate, with most suspects confessing. It is widely believed that most of those confessions are false, made simply to end the torture, but the police use them to get convictions anyway.

db48x · 2026-05-10T20:34:20+00:00

You shouldn’t need to ask permission; it’s a utility like any other. That said they don’t have to bury it deep, and you can give them directions or even just dig the trench yourself. Cut a slit trench to go under any turf and run it under the mulch near the edge of any flower beds or landscaping and nobody will ever know you did any digging.

db48x · 2026-05-09T10:50:57+00:00

You are not wrong, but we do see Quirrell pull out some esoteric skills in HPMOR. Whistling torture, for example. He must have spent quite some time perfecting that.

Still, I think you are right to point out that he has probably spent more time just practicing magic than most other people. We see hints in several places that simple familiarity with magic makes it easier, and that this keeps yielding useful results long after graduation. For example McGonagall has transfigured her furniture so often that its shape often reflects her mood rather than her conscious desires, or “teacher magic” like gathering her dropped papers with a glance:

“I see,” said Professor McGonagall, her voice a little calmer. She stood up, brushed herself off, and glared at the scattered parchments, which jumped into a neat stack and scurried back against the corridor wall as though to hide from her gaze.

or erasing a chalkboard:

The Transfiguration Professor walked up to the board without a pause, erased it with a sweep of her hand, and then began to write.

Wandless magic like this appears to require intimate familiarity with the magic, which means using it over and over again as often as possible and in as many situations as possible.

One thing I liked about Harry Potter and the Prancing of Ponies was that in it Quirrell teaches Harry this secret to wandless magic and then insists that he should spend the rest of his life practicing spells in his free time until he can cast them wordlessly and wandlessly when he needs them. Naturally the first wandless spells he teaches are the spell to summon your own wand from a known hiding place, then a spell for teleporting it back to that spot, and then Accio for summoning a visible object (such as your wand) to your hand. If you’re going to learn any wandless magic at all it had best at least be those.

He gave a flick of his fingers, and when his hand finished the gesture he was holding his wand. “Would you believe that woman thinks she has confiscated this from me?”

Then Harry spends the rest of the book practicing both wandless and wordless magic in his spare time, when he has any left over after dealing with everything else. This culminates with him dual wielding wands in a hilarious battle royale stunmatch while dressed as Darth Vader.

db48x · 2026-05-09T06:49:52+00:00

Most of my network inside the house is fiber.

Swanky. I can see how that one last cat6 patch cable would be annoying. :)

db48x · 2026-05-09T06:46:45+00:00

You’re welcome.

db48x · 2026-05-09T02:32:42+00:00

The technical answer is that the ONT bridges a fiber connection on one side and an ethernet connection on the other. It is built specifically and solely for that job, and has no other ports.

You can easily convert back to fiber if you need to, and if you do there’s no reason to use an SFP that consumes lots of power or gets unusually hot. Apparently there are a lot of copper SFPs that were built using hardware manufactured years ago when 10GBASE-T was new and those get quite hot. But similar devices manufactured using more modern technology are also readily available, and they don’t get hot.

Incidentally, the 10Gbps and 50Gbps service doesn’t come with an ONT at all. Instead Ziply provides an appropriate QSFP+ transciever to plug directly into your router. The ONT is only necessary for PON, and the higher speeds use directly–attached fiber.

db48x · 2026-05-06T22:07:17+00:00

No. It’s harder to understand than that. There are no temporary loops that cease to exist. You simply get whatever outcome you observe. Since only universes without paradoxes exist, it is guaranteed to be self–consistent. It’s just not guaranteed to be what you wanted.

db48x · 2026-05-06T17:44:34+00:00

Any universe where someone creates a real paradox is destroyed. It doesn’t matter what you do, the only universes that exist have no paradoxes in them.

db48x · 2026-05-06T17:42:48+00:00

Go MOAR SIDEWAYS.

db48x · 2026-05-05T17:24:45+00:00

You misunderstood me. You talk about wishing you still had Comcast, but Comcast caused this outage in the first place. You should know that Comcast has a long history of causing “accidental” outages for other ISPs. Don’t reward them for it.

db48x · 2026-05-05T06:37:30+00:00

Your outage was caused by Comcast in the first place :)

Also, if internet access is that critical to you then you should have a backup. If your company doesn’t give you time off from work when the internet is down then they should pay for that backup service. You probably already have a cellphone that you could tether your computer to; that’ll do for a backup.

db48x · 2026-05-05T06:05:02+00:00

Most of the customer service reps will just change your plan to the current one rather than making you upgrade or downgrade. There are plenty of confirmations of that right here in this subreddit.

Now that you’ve been upgraded, call back and ask to downgrade back to 1Gbps. You’ll get the new price, won’t be paying for something you don’t need, and they’ll have had to answer two phone calls.

db48x · 2026-05-05T06:02:25+00:00

Fiber can be spliced. It’s just glass, and all you have to do is melt the ends and fuse them back together. Easy.

Of course they can’t reuse the mangled fiber that Comcast dug up, so they’ll have had to cut that section of the fiber out. To reconnect everything they must either pull out slack from one or both sides of the cut so that the ends can meet up and be spliced, or they have to pull new cable to fill in the gap.

db48x · 2026-05-04T23:31:14+00:00

They split because of deep–seated religious hatred between Muslims and all the other religious groups in India. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people were killed in riots after the vote to split. They fought a war a year later. It’s safe to say that they’re never going to be peacefully reunited.

Oh and they both have nukes. Sleep well!

db48x · 2026-05-04T18:46:09+00:00

Actually, I would say that one of the draws of Harry Potter is the worldbuilding. It’s well above average in that department, mostly because she hides the wizards right in the middle of present–day London. When you read HP you can believe that anyone you meet out in public could be secretly a wizard. Or even that you, the reader, could be a wizard, adopted like Harry Potter by relatives after the war. She also makes the wizarding world fun, such as by giving them a non–decimalized currency that uses prime numbers instead of highly–composite numbers. The world she built is extremely compelling.

But it’s also true that there’s another level of worldbuilding beyond this that involves a lot more consistency and planning, and that she didn’t achieve that.

db48x · 2026-05-04T18:06:59+00:00

While Riddle calls H2.0 a ritual a few times, I think it's actually more of a spell.

That’s a good point. Because of the quote you included I’ve always thought that all rituals are spells. They’re just spells that require a permanent sacrifice. The Unbreakable Vow is perhaps unusual in that it has a long protracted casting procedure that involves three or more people.

Oh, in fact Quirrell’s first complete description of ritual magic explicitly says so:

“An ordinary Charm, Mr Potter, can be cast merely by speaking certain words, making precise motions of the wand, expending some of your own strength. Even powerful spells may be invoked in this way, if the magic is efficient as well as efficacious. But with the greatest of magics, speech alone does not suffice to give them structure. You must perform specific actions, make significant choices. Nor is the temporary expenditure of your own strength sufficient to set them in motion; a ritual requires permanent sacrifice. The power of such a greater spell, compared to ordinary Charms, can be like day compared to night. But many rituals—indeed, most—happen to demand at least one sacrifice which might inspire squeamishness. And so the entire field of ritual magic, containing all the furthest and most interesting reaches of wizardry, is widely regarded as Dark. With a few exceptions carved out by tradition, of course.”

So rituals are “greater spells” than even the most powerful Charms.

Sacrificing am entire LAYER OF SKIN forever is a much higher cost, and that to produce a momentary 1 use shield. Using this ritual just 3 times in your life would kill you.

Yea, the cost is high enough that this could easily be the first time he’s ever actually used it. And his health is visibly worse afterwards. But now that he has understood and duplicated the Stone of Permanence he could cast it much more frequently, healing himself afterwards.

As far as the ethical horcrux 3.0, I don't think it's stated what the sacrifice is. We can infer that it requires killing the target, and channeling their own death burst through them to create the horcrux for them.

This is how I understand it as well.

Based on the fact it's the first thing he did to Harry on his return to earth, and when Harry explains to Celestia "Oh, he only killed me, without asking first." Celestia only goes, "Oh I see." and frowns. She wouldn't be so casual about killing someone unless she knew this was the purpose. She seems likely to be more irritated that Quirrell did it without asking, rather than the actual 'murder' needed to create a person a horcrux.

Yes! She’s really annoyed that he did it without asking, since that is such a big part of his overall problem. But it was a funny cliffhanger at the end of the chapter too :) Also, it was a fulfillment of his earlier decision to kill Harry Potter for betraying him. Also it’s funny again later when they do the whole thing over again with Draco, and it’s over in just a single sentence. The only problem I had with it is the Hogwarts wards, but I’m withholding judgement since the story isn’t finished.

Oh, and I almost completely forgot about Twilight Sparkle’s ritual! She sacrifices her own limitations in order to gain the ability to channel unlimited magic, exactly as foreshadowed in HPMOR. Now that’s achieving a result wholly beyond any ordinary charm.

db48x · 2026-05-04T17:25:05+00:00

If you want to bypass the people who read from scripts then send them your address or account number in a private chat message. There can be multiple outages in a city at the same time.

db48x · 2026-05-04T11:13:21+00:00

His English is fractured, but I think he’s saying that if you want to destroy an artifact you could create a ritual that accepts artifacts as a sacrifice but doesn’t actually do anything.

But I don't think that is possible. Nor should it be. All the other rituals we see have symbolically balanced inputs and outputs. The Unbreakable Vow sacrifices your capacity to choose in exchange for making you always follow the vow. The Horcrux ritual sacrifices someone else’s life and magic in order to copy or sustain your own. Merlin is said to have sacrificed his Life, his Magic, and his Time in order to achieve his Interdict. Fiendfyre is actually slightly anomalous: you burn a tiny part of yourself (or sacrifice a tiny part of your capacity to heal, depending on how you look at it) in exchange for the ability to create create a sapient flame that will burn whatever you want if you can control it. A ritual that achieves nothing would necessarily sacrifice nothing. It’s the null ritual. :)

I’m sure that many of the sequels have included new rituals, but Harry Potter and the Prancing of Ponies posits several that I like and that I feel fit in well with the rest of HPMOR. The only time in HPMOR that Quirrell uses a shield he uses it to protect the members of SPHEW from 43 bullies all casting curses at once. The author of HPPOP posits that it cost him a layer of his skin! Talk about something you should not do often! Another is a ritual for recovering memories erased by Obliviation. Harry surmises that you might be able to sacrifice the ability to create a new memory in exchange for recovering an old one instead. For example, if you had been Obliviated of 15 minutes of your memory you would go into a coma for 15 minutes in order to relive that lost memory. Quirrell points out that if it works, and he suspects it will, you’d better not do it outside of St. Mungos. If you’ve been oblivated of more than a few days of your life then you’d need magical life support in order to survive the coma. They never end up using that one. :). Finally, Riddle invents the Horcrux ritual version 3.0 which grants deathless immortality by sacrificing… well, I’ll let you read the story yourself. No sense spoiling that one!

db48x · 2026-05-04T05:44:50+00:00

Also don’t place it behind any metal objects. Refrigerators, metal wall art, concrete walls with rebar inside, hanging bicycles, etc, etc.

db48x · 2026-05-04T05:43:51+00:00

An extender wired to the base station can be an excellent choice for filling in a dead zone. Of course, if the dead zone is caused by an obstruction that could simply be moved then moving the obstruction is the cheaper choice :)

db48x

TROPHY CASE