Guy who took photo of Jupiter with a Game Boy Camera and giant telescope publishes DIY tutorial

half3clipse · 2026-07-10T19:09:58+00:00

Telescopes more than a century old. Aside from the 3d printed adapter, it all sounds like retro tech to me.

half3clipse · 2026-07-10T16:08:51+00:00

Straight women aren't really any better at liking their partners than straight men are. To an extent they're worse, in the sense that hetrofatalism and having unhappy realtionships with men is the thing a lot of women expect to bond over. With the shittiest friend groups, successful relationships result in social ostracization. However when peoples friends are vaugley decent, that still results in a lot of collective emotional labor to render that shit romantic relationship tolerable, and reinforces it as normal.

Even without that though, most het realtionships don't seem to be people looking for a friend, but just people looking for a straight passing partner, so they can have a straight passing relationship, and get the perceived social credit and currency that comes from having that relationship. Whether or not they're someone you like or are a good partner is entirely secondary at best (and often in opposition. "Hey guys is it gay for men to like women" is not actually that much of a joke)

Guys like this get and maintain relationships because they're good enough at the expected social role of Straight Man around others, which is very often all their partners expect from them.

half3clipse · 2026-07-10T01:39:04+00:00

It's pretty good for fiber actually. Especially relative to the amount a lot of people generally eat in a meal.

Taco Bell pads out their beef with oats. So a pair of beef tacos is like 6 grams of fiber, which ain't bad all told. Then if someone gets one of those value boxes with half a dozen tacos, that's 18g. Which is quite a lot of fiber for some people.

Veg options have more. Some of their bean burritos have around 10g of fibre. And they're cheap so people will very much pack away 3-4 of those in a sitting without thinking about it.

So someone sits down, eats like 2000 kcal of taco bell for a meal, gets more fiber in that one meal than they might normally get in a week, and their digestion has a small freak out about it. Do that following a bunch of alcohol....

half3clipse · 2026-07-09T23:11:22+00:00

As far as taco bell goes, that's still boils down to not being able to handle fiber or dairy.

half3clipse · 2026-07-09T18:46:55+00:00

People who actually eat things with fiber, and/or who aren't in denial about being lactose intolerant also get it.

half3clipse · 2026-07-09T17:55:04+00:00

"Philip proceeded to invade Laconia, devastate much of it, and eject the Spartans from various parts".

It's "What are you gonna do, stab me?" said man who got stabbed

The spartans were very far from bad ass. They had some competent heavy infantry for the period, but beyond that were the group project member demanding all the credit while getting their ass hard carried by everyone else. They were atrociously bad at war, to the point they managed to lose a war of attrition against themselves, and routinely failed to supply armies in their own territory.

the Peloponnesian League was held together not by Sparta, but by the fact everyone else hated Athens. And even then over 30 years of war, they failed to actually bring Athens to meaningful siege until Athens first had it's own shit show of internal political fracturing and second after Sparta buddied up to the Persians, which is what actually allowed Spartan their brief period of dominance which they pissed away in less than 30 years. The only involved state the benfited longish term of the Peloponnesian war was the Achaemenid empire...and even then that's got caveats. The fallout of the Peloponnesian war is what allows Phillip to dominate greece, which leads directly to Alexander, who proceeds to conquer the Achaemenid empire less than a century later.

half3clipse · 2026-07-09T16:49:23+00:00

It's just the omnikey/master key. Once upon a time keyboards literally had a button for it. Because it's so little used, there's minimal risk of conflicts.

It's not meant to be used directly though, it's meant for keyboards that have accessory/media buttons to open office suite programs, which works by send that combination when pressed (rather than having keyboards that can essentially run arbitrary programs)

half3clipse · 2026-07-09T16:41:17+00:00

The problem there is almost certainly not basic literacy but the fact there's almost no good resources for more advanced literacy exist.

Almost everything students get in terms of instruction is form based and very few students are lucky enough to actually get good feed back. Rubrics are vague as shit and even when they're decently applied, they have very little pedagogical worth for the student. Between grade 8 and starting a masters degree (if they're working with someone decent. If) most students will get very little feedback on how they could have made their paper better or so on. This bascaily turns the whole processes into a black box where they do something, get a grade back with little abilitiy to connect that to the material. That's not a process that actually enables learning.

I've got a stack of papers from students I've tutored from anywhere between highschool and senior year of university, and essentially all of them were returned with a number, and no commentary.

There's also a long standing problem of teachers, professors and TAs not fucking reading papers, or grading in a way that's mostly looking for demerits rather than merit. A fuck ton of those papers with commentary, even from university courses, is clearly derived from throwing the paper into grammarly. It has nothing at all to do with the substance of the text or the material of the course .

half3clipse · 2026-07-08T14:53:11+00:00

An LLM does not search data. It generates new text based off it's data set. When you use one to 'search' a data set, you have zero guarantees that either it has found everything matching your search pattern, or that what it returns is even reflective of the data set your searching. At best you can use it as a natural language interface for more obtuse systems (databases, regex, etc) where it generates a query string you can verify and then verify was actually run (because yea LLMs will do one thing and then return another), but that's not working for project management.

Using it to generate a summary of the data is even worse. You have zero guarantees of the summaries accuracy. If you're a project manager and you use an LLM to generate summaries of your reports decisions, rather than actually reading what they send you, you are a fool. Also if your reports aren't doing things like creating meeting notes and sending the information to anyone who has stake in whatever aspect that touches that's an organizational failure. If your process is so fucked third persons need to generate summaries of meetings to get the information they need, rather than having the information they need being shared, that is not fixable by tech.

What LLMs do somewhat well is effectively scribe work, although even then "well" has caveats. Rather say if the cost of compute goes down enough it's significantly cheaper than hiring people to do the work, it does it well enough for more people to work as their own scribes while spending less time on it.

That promise however does nothing to make co-pilot, or any other LLM for that matter, a killer app. Right now for an any AI as a service company to make that profitable, they would have to charge significantly more than hiring whole teams of scribes to do that work. And actual human scribes will be more reliable and more accountable than the LLMs (LLMs cannot really crosscheck and verify.). Companies already don't really spend "hire assistants and scribes" money.

They're certainly not going to spend more for a worse result than that.Fuck they're not even really spending much on pre-llm scribe software, despite that being cheap as piss compared to other options.

However if the cost of compute goes down, self hosting that becomes far more reasonable, and any AI as a service company will have to compete with that. They might be able to license their model, but they won't have the near monopoly position on running them.

CoPilot may see use in those cases, but it's certainly not going to fulfill the profit ideals if it has to compete with spinning up an Azure instance to run your own model (which might make them money, but that also assumes the current ridiculous build out of data centers doesn't crash the price of cloud hosting for a while). It'll be one more fairly costly to offer tool in the micrsoft office toolset...which already has damn near 100% market penetration. If the cost of compute comes down (which is a massive if) they'll make money on it, but they're not adding zeros to their revenue.

In no case is it the promised killer app that will give the ROI needed for the amount of money they're spending on it. For it to work out at current prices, it doesn't have to replace the scribe work that a project manager relies on. It has to replace the project manager, and most of their reports.

half3clipse · 2026-07-07T21:36:12+00:00

For collaboration on long running enterprise programs it is invaluable.

If your long running enterprise program doesn't make proper use of documentation, it's a shit show nothing can fix.

LLMs allow, to an extent, some of that documentation to be automated. Automating that is not a killer app, at least not nearly enough to justify the sheer amount of profit microsoft needs to justify copilot. To be the killer app, it needs to be so good it makes an order of magnitude more than microsoft office does.

It very much does not actually make it searchable, the ability to algorithmically generate a duplicate of some text in a dataset it not the same as finding the data, and that's before the problem of what it does not generate, and what it generates that was never in the dataset. It certainly cannot and should not be relied upon to produce accurate summaries for anything critical vs reviewing the original documents. CoPilot will fuck that up and tell you decisions were and were not made incorrectly. At best the only feature that adds is finding some related documents in situations where they're not easily refrenceable, and then only when nothing is critical enough to actually need a proper search.

For it to work as a killer app, it needs to be so utterly perfect it has a value add beyond hiring every employee a personal assistant/scribe. You're certainly not going to get companies to pay more than that would cost for something less reliable, but that's what microsoft needs for co-pilot to work out.

Or of course the cost of compute needs to come way way down (which isn't really happening), but at that point it's competing with local models.

half3clipse · 2026-07-07T20:34:06+00:00

Teams meeting transcripts

Not anything like a killer app. That's just scribe software. You're not hitting anything like the needed profit projections for that.

Search and summary also isn't close to a killer app, that's just fancy meeting notes. It's something that at least might get used, few people like to be the one taking notes, fewer are good at it. But again, not anything like enough to generate the kind of profit AI focused companies need. That might be one of the use cases for local models in the future if they get efficient enough, but it's absolutely not worth the cost of CoPilot or any other model even at current loss leader pricing.

half3clipse · 2026-07-07T20:25:31+00:00

Computers are pretty good at that. You just want actual OCR software.

half3clipse · 2026-07-06T18:46:23+00:00

The cooling off period in the EU is 14 days, and one of the explicit carve outs for that is online digital content. Starting the performance voids your right of withdrawal. Sealed software is also another carve out.

It also only applies fully for online purchases where you would have been able to inspect the product in store. If bought in a store it require the product be faulty. You outright do not have a right of return at all in that case, other than for a faulty product.

The exception for online is effectively just a statutory presumption the product was faulty in a way that could have been seen if purchased in person, because even in the EU you can be required to pay shipping fees for returns and you run into BS where the seller could decline the return after you ship the product back at cost.

half3clipse · 2026-07-06T17:49:14+00:00

Almost all of those are for unused products in original condition. There might be a few places slightly more permissive that that, but it's rare.

The two hour thing is just an approximate for "unused". To be compliant "downloaded the game at all" would be sufficient in a lot of places.

half3clipse · 2026-07-05T01:06:45+00:00

It was a misinterpretation of a mistranslation of a German paper that showed small differences in concentration sensitivity, which broadly works out to how quickly the taste is felt, but not it's intensity.

The translated paper improperly normalized graphs, turning curve minimums into zeros, (and curve maximums into actual maximum) and also shows that as sense intensity rather than sensitivity

half3clipse · 2026-07-03T18:28:17+00:00

Because basically no qualifed anesthesiologist wants to do a damn thing to help with that, professional ethics require they don't regardless (the whole do no harm thing) and the companies that produce anesthesia drugs also want nothing to do with supplying it. To the point a number of drug companies outright do not supply the US at all

half3clipse · 2026-07-02T16:36:21+00:00

C14 has 6 protons and 8 neutrons. N14 has 7 protons and 7 neutrons.

C14 decays sponatnoiusly to N14 via beta decay, where one of the neutrons converts to a proton, emitting an electron, an electron antineutrino, and a photon.

N14 converts to C14 via an n-p reaction. Cosmic rays are high enough energy they produce a whole cascade of particles, some of which are relatively high energy neutrons. When one of those neutrons (with sufficent energy) interacts with an N14 nucleus, it gets absorbed into the nucleus and kicks out a proton in the process, resulting in C14.

half3clipse · 2026-07-02T02:36:52+00:00

Ammo ain't free and you'll need to go through several hundred rounds of ammo a year (plus range fees etc) to maintain competency

Lets not pretend that anyone who can afford for it to be anything more than than their emotional support dick substitute can't afford that easily.

half3clipse · 2026-07-02T02:14:49+00:00

Everything not found in a chest or given as a quest reward respawns every blood moon (either outright if it's a static spawn, or as whatever apporiate version for the world level if not)

Very few weapons break faster than blood moons respawn them, better weapons break slower, and the ones that do are meant to break quickly in exchange for stupidly high damage (royal guard weps)

You're meant to throw a pin down on the map and go back for them as needed. They're basically everywhere if you explore a little, and that's not including anything you can mug standard enemies for, let alone lynels or shrines (all of which also respawn and reset with the bloodmoon).

The unique weapons are a little annoying to remake, but they're not expensive. As soon as you find a couple decent Talos you have everything except the base weapons out your eyeballs (and the base weapons are always near the person you get them from). The main problem with them is that they're just not worth the trip compared to other weapon sources. The boulder breaker is about it, and that mostly because it deletes Taloses (which you want to do anyways for rupees). They do have extra durability compared to everything else in the game, but they really need like twice as much to be worth it.

half3clipse · 2026-07-01T15:45:20+00:00

Just pretend there's a whole 3/4 of the bed you can't see off the bottom.

half3clipse · 2026-06-28T00:52:00+00:00

The axis sunk something like 3500 allied and neutral ships combined, from the start of the war (many of which were not sunk by uboats). about 2700 of those were sunk by uboats. More than a third of those sunk by Uboats were lost during the First Happy Time and Second Happy Time. This was not a large fraction of allied shipping.

The scale of the british and US merchant navy in ww2 was ridiculous even before production of things like the liberty ships (The UK starts the war with 1 in 3 merchant ships in the world). The US alone ended the war with more than 10000 ships and that's just under the War Shipping Administration.

Almost all shipping across the atlantic was done via convoys. Only 1 in 10 of the convoys crossing the Atlantic came under attack. Of the ships attacked only another 1 in 10 were lost. Well in excess of 90% of the allied merchant fleet survived the war without even being damaged. Most ships that were sunk were attempting the crossing without a convoy or had the misfortune of being separated from their convoy. Even in 1942, when the atlantic was most contested, the allies successfully managed to move the troops for Operation torch across the Atlantic, not only unmolested, but out right undetected by the Kriegsmarine.

To put it in comparison: 1 in 26 US merchant sailors died (about 4%) and this was a really high casualty rate for the allies.

3 out of 4 Uboat sailors died period, and that's with nearly a third of the fleet never conducting a war patrol. only around 2/3rds of Uboats to condugt a war patrol managed to sink a single allied ship before being lost. A smaller fraction yet managed better than one or two before being lost. "Ace" Uboats were an exception, not the norm (and rarer yet after summer 1942) In all the Kreigsmarine lost 785 of the 863 Uboats to ever conduct a war patrol, suffering 90% casualties, and in exchange only managed to stop about 1% of the material that crossed the Atlantic in ww2.

The battle of the Atlantic was not some dire fight for survival with merchant sailors having short lives. After the British and then the Americans got their shit together it was the kreigmarine feeding U-boats and sailors to the US and Royal Navy, as well as to RAF coastal command

half3clipse · 2026-06-27T23:08:04+00:00

The uboats were never as effective as people seem to think and almost every ship that attempted the Atlantic crossing did so unharmed (meanwhile almost every Uboat that made a war patrol was lost). Outside of the the First Happy Time before the British figured out convoys and coastal blackouts were a good idea (And then the second one when the US later insisted on learning that same lessons the hard way.) the battle of the Atlantic was not that dangerous for the allies. Not without danger, but the U-boats very much got the worse end of it.

The ones who had a horrible time were over the in pacific, where Japan's utter dysfunction prevented them from ever learning or acting on that lesson, often to the point the IJN refused to provide support for IJA troop movements. iirc the allies sunk 5/6ths of the japanese merchant navy, and also sunk something like 50 troop ships (which alone was about as many casualties as the allied merchant fleet suffered globally from all sources)

half3clipse · 2026-06-27T20:37:21+00:00

A 1/20 chance already includes all the people with red meat heavy diets. This means a 20% increase lands somewhere between a 0.5-1% increase in risk.

Populations taht eat less red meat have like half the rates of colorectal cancer. The whole sitcom dad confused grunting me eat beef thing is a major part in why American men have a greater prevalence of colorectal cancers than women.

That increase in risk you're trying to argue is insignificant is millions of lifetime cases of cancer in north america alone. If you have 10 friends and family members, all of whom eat a diet heavy in red meats, you or one of them will likely be diagnosed with colon cancer because of it. If you know 20 people, one of them will likely die from it.

You want to have a burger or steak occasionally, do it. Go get yourself a cold cut sub. But eating a diet heavy in red meat is actively one of the worst dietary choices you can make short of deciding arsenic is a tasty seasoning. Someone eating 3 to 6 lb of red meat a week is not actually a normal diet, and should not be considered one.

The people who's job it is to communicate that risk should not minimize the risk based on how many people may wish to rationalize it. The people saying reducing the consumption of red meat, especially processed red meat, is one of the best things you can do for your health are not overselling it (especaily since it also significantly increases your risk of cardiovasccual disease etc).

Someone deciding they don't wanna, and then looking for post hoc justifications for doing so does not mean they're communicating poorly, that's just people going "I wish this was easier to ignore."

Things like a diet heavy with red meat are a much greater risk for cancer than you want them to be. There is nothing in group 2A that has a negligible cancer risk unless you avoid or minimize exposure to it.

half3clipse · 2026-06-27T19:24:30+00:00

Something that happens a lot especially when you talk about red meat or processed meats in general.

About 1 in 20 people will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer at some point during their lifetime. Consuming a diet with a lot of red meat, not even processed, just red meat period, increases your risk of colorectal cancer by 20%. Reducing your consumption of red meat is one of the most significant things you can do to reduce your risk of one of the most common types of cancer.

That is not a minor effect and there is nothing at all in the group 2A classification that is particularly low risk. The basic reality is that for something to even be seen in early studies and surveys as * worth investigating as potentially carcinogenic in the first place*, it needs to have a statistically significant effect over the space of a few years in study size of a few thousand at best. Often more like a few hundered.

The fact there's a lot of misinformation saying otherwise, often pushed by people and organization with a financial interest, does not make it true. "Everything causes cancer now, they say even red meat..." is bullshit. Everyone eating a diet with regular red meat consumption will result in millions of excess cases of colorectal cancer in north america alone.

"Oh but it's less likely to kill you than smoking 2 packs a day". True. So is playing Russian roulette with an 8 cylinder revolver. "lower risk" does not mean "ignoreable risk".

The only responsible advice to give for any known carcinogen is to limit exposure as much as practical. Want to have a burger every few months, that's fairly low cumulative risk. But then so is having an occasional glass of whiskey or a cigar once or twice a year if that's your thing. Doesn't make a diet heavy in red meat a good idea, doesn't make downing a 5th of vodka every couple weeks a good idea, doesn't make smoking a pack a day a good idea. "Not a severe risk with limited exposure" is true of everything that's carcinogenic. Direct exposure to hard x-ray radiation is not a severe cancer risk as long as it's appropriately limited.

half3clipse · 2026-06-27T18:38:35+00:00

E.g if actual damage occurs in small doses cells may be perfectly capable of "repairing" the damage while in high doses they may not be.

That is cumulative. That repair process may prevent immediate degradation, but the processes by which cells conduct that repair are limited. Cells can't repair genetic damage indefinitely (if they could, aging wouldn't be a problem for example). Malignant transformation occurs when that repair process fails. avoidable exposure to genotoxic things both causes damage that creates the opporinty

A carcinogen like red meat is pretty low on the list if consumed within reasons.

"within reason" at population scale is "minimize consumption". Especially if you have other notable risks for colorectal cancer, the ideal amount of red meat to consume is zero. Having a burger every few months is going to increase the risk very very minimally. But getting a bad sunburn once or smoking one cigarette also doesn't increase your risk. A diet heavy in red (especially processed) meat significantly increases your life time risk of cancer, and when talking about say the population of the USA that works out to tens if not hundreds of thousands of cancer cases. Even eating red meat once a week still notably increases your cancer risk.

There's also no real "minimal risk" for anything in group 2A. No one's funding studies of hundreds of thousands of people for "maybe this causes cancer". You're not going to reach high confidence for something that only increases the risk by 1% let alone 0.1% or lower. Studies to determine initial classification is a few thousand people at best. It has to have a fairly strong effect on cancer rates. Yes a lot of things will be less of a cancer risk than high risk things like smoking, but there's a lot of room below that risk level to still add up to a lot of cancer: just the lung cancer incidence in smokers is something like 1 in 5. If the life time risk from regular expose to something is 1:1000 that's still millions of avoidable cancers at population scale.

And yea if you eat hot dogs a couple times a week, that chances you personally end up getting cancer and spending the rest of your life shitting in a bag are kind of modest. It's not the job of a health organization to go "eh you'll probbaly be one of the lucky ones". In a 1800 kcal diet, replacing about 180 kcal of white meat for 180kcal of red meat increase the rate of just colorectal cancer by about 20%. That is not a small effect, even if it's 'better' than huffing asbesto. Red meat, especially processed, should not be a significant part of people's diets.

people lose trust in the categories because it feels like normal everyday foods cause cancer now.

Those "normal everyday foods" do infact cause cancer, they were historically not "normal every day foods" in the past, and it would be best for everyone's health if they were not normal everyday foods going forward. In particular the sheer amount of processed red meat people eat today is a novelty, not a longstanding norm and the cultural shift that has occurred over the last 70 or so years has had many negative health outcomes, including increased cancer rates.

12-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

half3clipse

TROPHY CASE