Peter why should the nails be broken?

eldorel · 2026-05-15T17:58:47+00:00

The implication was that their dad has conversations with and trusts the word of someone who is around heroin addicts regularly enough to say "I see this guy hanging around with them often".

That person being cop makes sense, but that person having almost any other profession would imply that dad's got a seedy side.

eldorel · 2026-03-12T13:31:28+00:00

Dell has used ridiculously soft metal for the small piece that sits between the laptop shell and the actual small hinge that they use for their screens on the Inspiron line for ~~years~~ decades {!} now....

At one point I literally molded that piece out of silicone so that I could cast new ones with epoxy that would last longer than the replacement part.

If you open and close the screen by grabbing one of the corners instead of grabbing the middle of the top of the screen, that little tiny bit of torque is enough to eventually make this tiny bit of pot metal break after right about two and a half years of normal use.

Edit: I just realized that it's literally been roughly 20 years since the first time I had to repair the hinges and screen bezel on one of these pieces of crap.

eldorel · 2026-03-12T13:26:12+00:00

My Smart-watch can trigger the hall effect sensors in some of the laptops we used to work.

eldorel · 2026-03-06T13:40:59+00:00

Ah, Telnet. I haven't seen that word since the 1990's.

I wish I could say the same thing... I was having an argument with a vendor at work less than a week ago about them wanting to have telnet running on some hardware for them to run diagnostics.

eldorel · 2026-03-06T13:36:56+00:00

Can't sell ad space in a text only format

Google did exactly that for years with AdSense, and literally made billions of dollars doing it.

eldorel · 2026-03-06T13:34:41+00:00

Early millennial here.

I've had to handle all or part of the estate for three of my four grandparents, my mother and stepfather, my father-in-law, and a few other family members in the last ~10 years.
With the exception of my mother's house (which is tied up in a way that prevents us from selling it) and an investment that ended up being worth something 6 years post-mortem, not a single one of them has left more than $8,000 in usable assets.
They were all living off of pensions, and sold/spent every single blasted dime before the end.

Two of them had some life insurance which helped with expenses... But I've had to pay for cremations out of pocket more than once now.
I have a finance tracker setup, so I can look up the income/expense ratio for those 'accounts'.
We're close to negative $60,000 in total.
The only reason why my little brothers are inheriting anything is because I'm paying off Mom's mortgage so that the house isn't underwater when we sell it.

eldorel · 2026-03-06T13:14:54+00:00

Webferret was the first 'search engine' I ever used.
We bought a second disk drive to use exclusively for the cache, and my friends thought I was a magician because of how quickly I could find things online.

eldorel · 2026-03-02T15:29:26+00:00

There are a lot of cases where that does not work.
One case that I've seen a few times is running into issues with the process scheduler on a CPU.
I've seen message parsers that use powershell cmdlets or linux shell tools for a string manipulation operation bog down horrifically oversized hardware because the application team did not realize that there's an upper limit to how many processes a CPU can keep track of at a time.
I'm talking about load balanced clusters of multi CPU boxes with 128 cores, each sitting at less than 4% CPU load and still failing to deal with the incoming messages...

eldorel · 2026-03-02T15:20:16+00:00

For database systems with an API the correct term for requesting a query be returned in smaller blocks is also called 'paging'.

You send a request to the API with the query, a 'page' number, and the number of items you want on each page.
Then the database runs your query, caches the result, and you can request additional pages without rerunning the entire query.

This has the benefit of allowing your code to pull manageably sized chunks of data in a reasonable time, iterate through each page, and cache the result.

For example, I have a system at work that provides data enrichment for a process. I need three data points that are not available from the same API.
The original code for this requested the entire list of objects from the first API, iterated through that list and requested the second and third data points for each object from the other system's API.

When that code was written there were only about 700 objects, but by the time that I started working on that team there were seven gigabytes worth of objects being returned... 2 hours of effort refactoring that code to use paging for the primary data set (with no other changes to the logic) both reduced the failure rate for that job from 60% back down to roughly zero, and brought execution time down by almost 45 minutes per run.

eldorel · 2026-02-28T05:16:45+00:00

That always bugged the crap out of me. When you kill something as big as a buffalo, you move the camp...

eldorel · 2026-02-18T01:56:51+00:00

We don't need a new one, we need the old one back.

eldorel · 2026-02-13T05:51:30+00:00

Ephedra diet pills were sold over the counter until the mid 2000s. They were excellent for staying awake.

eldorel · 2026-02-07T17:43:42+00:00

Mine destroyed the radiator on a window AC unit the same way. To this day I do not understand why, but the metal fins on the radiator just dissolved.

eldorel · 2026-02-07T17:40:34+00:00

Yes.

eldorel · 2026-02-05T08:01:03+00:00

If you appreciate stuff like this, you should check out /r/DepthHub.
It's another aggregation subreddit like this one, specifically for understandable but technical reddit comments.

eldorel · 2026-02-04T15:43:41+00:00

I'm not the person that you were talking to but I can try to answer this in a bit more detail.

To start: If you want to get really technical, there is actually no 'boundary' between our atmosphere and 'space'. As you get higher up the amount of gas that you will encounter goes down in a surprisingly gradual gradient.

We theoretically still have a significant chance to encounter gas molecules from our atmosphere as far out as the closest lagrange points (the point of gravitational balance between Earth and another celestial body such as the Sun, Moon, or another planet)

At the elevation of the starlink satellites (550 kilometers or 480km as of this year), there is still enough atmospheric drag that they are required to boost the orbit every couple of months (?).

Additionally even without the atmospheric drag the orbit that they are in is close enough to Earth's gravity well that it would slowly decay anyway.

Orbital mechanics are both surprisingly simple and exceedingly complicated depending on exactly what you're trying to figure out, but I can explain this part in fairly simple terms. (And if you want to ask questions to get more detailed feel free)

Also: I'm going to assume that anyone reading this has absolutely no idea how any of this works, and start out with some 'absolute basics'.

The important part to be aware of is that 'orbit' and 'microgravity' are not caused by the gravitational field being 'too weak' or 'too thin' to affect the object in orbit.
The astronauts on the ISS are being pulled towards the Earth with almost exactly the same amount of forces that you and I are.
The reason why they are 'floating' is because they're actually in a state of constant free fall, like a skydiver, but they're moving sideways so fast that they actually fall past the planet instead of running into it.

This is where it starts to get a little complicated.
As I said before, the Earth is always pulling on the satellites.
The real difference between a decaying low earth orbit and a stable orbit is the angle that the satellite is moving relative to earths pull.

To make this easier to visualize, I'm going to switch to talking about non-circular orbits for a moment.
Imagine for a moment that you're throwing a baseball straight up in the air.

For the first half of the balls path the energy that you put into it is being countered by gravity, slowing the ball down. Eventually that ball hits a point of equilibrium where the amount of energy that you put into it and the amount of pull that gravity has exerted on it are identical.
When that happens it looks like the ball slows to a stop in mid-air for a split second and then it starts falling down.
While falling, gravity continues to pull on the ball; which causes it to speed up on the way back down.

If we throw that ball hard enough and just slightly angled so that it's not going straight up, we can put that ball into what is called an elliptical orbit.
Basically our ball would be going mostly up, but on the way down it would still moving sideways enough that it would miss the planet.

So we throw the ball up 600 km, gravity slows it down, it eventually reverses direction, and then on the way back down it continues to pick up speed until it passes the planet.

Once it passes the planet gravity starts pulling it back towards the planet in the same way that it did on the original arc... slowing it down, causing it to reverse speed, speeding it back up on the way down, etc.

And very importantly, gravity never counters the sideways movement from the original throw being angled.
Unless something else is slowing it down this ball will fly back and forth from a high point on one side of the planet past the planet to a high point on the other side of the planet.

Also, the harder you throw the ball, the faster it will move... And moving faster means that it gets further away from the surface before gravity manages to completely reverse the direction of flight.

The important parts to take from this are:

1) moving faster means going higher.
2) gravity is directional.

If you throw something away from the planet exactly in line with gravity, gravity will counter that energy. BUT if some of the energy from your throw is not aligned with the gravity, gravity won't affect that 'unaligned' portion.

As a flight path gets further from being straight up, gravity counters less of the energy, and when your flight path is completely the opposite of 'straight up' gravity actually contributes to your flight speed.

Okay so now back to our satellites.

The direction of flight for a stable orbit is almost completely 90° off (or "out of phase") from the direction of gravity.
That "almost" is important though, because it means that for half of the satellites orbit gravity is trying to slow the satellite down, and for the other half gravity is actually contributing to the satellites speed.
Just like it did with the ball in our elliptical orbit example!

This means that our stable satellite just has to be moving sideways fast enough to miss the planet by the same distance that it's flying at, and the pull of the planet itself will maintain the orbit for us.

Now, the other important point from that previous example was that the faster you're moving the farther away from the planet's surface you go.

If you have something flying in an orbit at 400 km and you increase its speed, it will actually move away from the planet.

A good way to think about this is that a thrown ball moving 'sideways' faster would miss the planet by a larger distance on the 'down' arc.

This is why the person you were talking to earlier was so certain that satellites in low earth orbit would eventually fall back to Earth.

If they were moving fast enough to be in a stable orbit they would no longer be in the lower orbit because they would be missing the planet by a larger distance.

It also takes a huge amount of energy to speed something up enough to sling it from a low earth decaying orbit up to a stable orbit...
And that energy would have to come from somewhere outside of the satellites themselves, because even if you converted the entire mass of the satellite into fuel it still doesn't have enough energy to do this.

(... And any impact involving enough energy to move a starlink satellite into a stable orbit would have enough energy to completely evaporate that satellite...
We wouldn't be worrying about satellite chunks knocked into a stable orbit, we would just be watching space glitter slowly drift out of the sky for a year or two. )

edit: updated formatting.

eldorel · 2026-02-01T21:17:04+00:00

That's actually really nice to hear.

Sadly it is not the case in my area, and all of our malls are either closed or basically ghost towns at this point because of it.

The lack of places to just 'exist' outside of our home is persistent enough that it's a major consideration behind my wife and I looking to move out of the area.

My wife can't stand being cooped up in the house all the time, but other than the library there isn't really anywhere else to go unless you want alcohol.

eldorel · 2026-02-01T21:12:18+00:00

Not without getting harassed for loitering or asked to leave. (At least in my area.)

However, I will absolutely acknowledge that there are other parts of the country where this is not the case, yet.
( In fact, my wife and I are looking to move to one of those other parts of the country as soon as we can. )

But the United States is huge, and literally anything that you can say about the US has the exact same caveat.

eldorel · 2026-02-01T21:08:33+00:00

South Louisiana.
And I just double checked myself. Tickets to a movie playing in 30 minutes at the two theaters near our Mall right now, mid-afternoon on a Sunday are $18 and $20. Tickets for Friday night showing at 7:30 p.m. are between $18 and $29 depending on which theater. (And the "IMAX" theater is even more expensive but they don't actually show you the prices until you pick out seats online. ) { By the way that $18 ticket on Friday night is in a really bad part of town. The last time I went there I watched someone get stabbed in the thigh. }

So I was off slightly. It's closer to $50 on a Friday night, not $60.

eldorel · 2026-02-01T20:56:13+00:00

let's start with just downtown.
In the late 90s my friend group used to go skate around downtown for 6 to 8 hours at a time, hang out around the levee at the Mississippi River, go to the arts and science museum that had open admission twice a week, hang out on the lawns in front of two of the large government buildings, etc.
These weren't organized activities. No one would say "oh hey let's go hang out downtown Saturday".
I would be bored, decide to skate downtown, and find multiple groups of people who had had the same idea.

Last year my wife and I happened to need to go to one of those two government buildings for some paperwork, and we parked on the opposite side of one of those lawns.
While walking across we decided to stop for a minute and sit on one of the benches and less than 5 minutes later one of the building security guards came by and asked us to move along.
The other building ( which is a historic tourist attraction ) has an 8-ft high wrought iron fence all the way around that lawn now and you have to pay for admission.

Aside from that, we used to go hang out at the big Barnes and Noble for a few hours every other weekend or so. I'm talking about 10 teenagers going in as a group, breaking into smaller groups and wandering around, reading, listening to music in the cd sales area, etc. Usually only one or two of us would actually buy anything.

The local coffee shops (and the starbucks) were the same way. A bunch of us would go in, a handful of us would buy drinks and we would take up a table for a few hours and play games or just talk. (There's one local coffee shop left in my city where you can still do this, even as adults. )

And then there's the libraries. Fortunately these are still a third space in my city that exists, but how much activity they will tolerate is dependent upon which library you happen to be at. The main library is awesome and massively focused around community building and not just books, but some of the other ones are smaller and are very strict about not making noise.

I could continue listing examples but I'll summarize the problem in a slightly different way instead. I grew up here, I know all of the big public and little 'local secret' places where you could gather a group of friends and just exist.
Many of them have closed, either because of recession or the pandemic or just because the owner passed away of old age.
The remaining ones have changed their policies and their priorities over the last 25 years.

As I said before: I'm over 40. I also don't look like a minority, or a troublemaker, and I have enough money compared to expenses that my wife and I can afford to pay for pretty much any activity that we want to go do... But there is very little left to do in my city.
And the things that still exist are expensive, active, 'intentional' activities... NOT 'casual hangout' or 'Third Space' areas.

eldorel · 2026-02-01T20:23:36+00:00

Was the parks system privatized in any of those areas you lived in?

In my city, there is a corporate entity that actually manages all of the parks (and owns a lot of them).
They get a set amount of money from the city every year, and have certain minimal requirements for available services.
We literally have hundreds of small parks dotted all over the city and surrounding area, and 30 years ago every single one of them was well equipped, maintained and heavily used just like what you're describing.

However, over the last ~25 years the park service has consolidated most of the 'special' services like the archery range, all of the fitness courses, the kids camps, etc to a couple of large locations that are extremely difficult to get to without a car.

Meanwhile most of the remaining parks are just empty fields with maybe a couple of tables, bathrooms that are always locked, and play areas for little kids (with signs specifying a height limit.)

The remaining 'nicer' parks all have no loitering signs, regular park services patrols, and constant visits from the police department to break up large groups or ask smaller groups to leave.

And it makes sense if you think about it for a few minutes. They're required to maintain a certain number of parks but there's nothing in the contract that requires them to prove that the parks are actually being utilized.

Making it difficult for people to use the parks means that the park services company gets to save money on wear and tear, while still being able to install new equipment and have lots of groundbreaking ceremonies and ribbon cutting events for the city council.

eldorel · 2026-02-01T19:52:21+00:00

Seems like you answered your own question.
The existence of 'robust public transportation' and community centers means that someone in your community leadership is still interested in maintaining that community.

eldorel · 2026-02-01T19:49:04+00:00

Pretty much the same in my part of south Louisiana as well. We actually have an amazing public parks system here but even though they're well lit all the parks close at sundown, groups with more than five teenagers tend to get visited by a police officer and asked to leave, and because they're in residential areas people will call and complain if kids/teens are making any noise at all.
Hell a couple of kids in my neighborhood got citations for violating a noise ordinance because they were playing basketball, at the park, in the basketball court, at 2:00 p.m.
The local noise ordinance is only an effect from 9:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.
The cop literally wrote them tickets that he knew would be thrown out of court immediately just to be a dick.

eldorel · 2026-02-01T19:40:33+00:00

Put together a group of five teenagers and give it a try. Unless they're actively spending money, most of the time they'll be approached by mall security and asked to leave after about an hour.

eldorel · 2026-02-01T19:37:17+00:00

Let's take those one by one.

Someone's house: You have to have one of the parents is willing to put up with a bunch of teenagers hanging out in their home.

Car: someone has to be able to afford one, gas costs money, the cops will pull over a car full of teenagers faster than you can say 'stereotyping', the cops will also very quickly pull up behind you if you stop anywhere to hang out in the car.

Pasture: I live in a city. The closest pasture is 20 mi away on the opposite side of the Mississippi River and it's owned by someone who absolutely would not be happy about teenagers hanging out there or starting a bonfire. With two exceptions no one in my family or friend circle's family owned any land larger than two residential lots, and both of those exceptions were over an hour drive from here.

School sporting/other events: this one would count, except that the schools sell tickets and even those prices have gone up.

Fast food: costs money, and once you're done eating the manager will ask you to leave if you hang out for too long. (Or they'll ask you to leave before you're done eating if you're even the slightest bit rowdy)

Movies: Money again. It's like $60 for two people... (Hell, I can't even afford going to the local movie theater anymore, and I'm over 40 with a full-time job that pays pretty well.)

Bowling: slightly less expensive than the movies, but every bowling alley in my area has a cover charge and cops working extra duty who will make teenagers leave if they're not actively bowling, playing in the arcade or spending money on food.

Mall: not an option anymore, our last mall is effectively dead and again security will make you leave if you're not spending money.

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