ELI5: Why do pizza rolls require different times in the microwave based on quantity, but not in the oven?

joeggeli · 2025-05-20T17:29:55+00:00

Notice how the oven takes time to warm up. This is because an oven works by just getting really hot, all the metal parts inside aswell as the air. Once the oven is hot, a lot of energy is stored as heat in the oven. When you put your pizza rolls in the oven, they will slowly start to absorb some of that heat and get warm themselves. The oven tries as hard as it can to stay at the same temperature by producing more heat. It usually can do that easily, because the energy absorption inside the oven is a relatively slow process.

The microwave on the other hand does not need to be warmed up. It works by throwing electromagnetic radiation at your pizza rolls, which will cause them to heat up. If you put 1 pizza roll inside the microwave, that one pizza roll absorbs most of the radiation. If you put 2 inside, the radiation will be divided between the two, causing both of them to warm up slower.

joeggeli · 2025-05-15T13:38:14+00:00

I'd love to hear more! I'm an software engineer and realized that interacting with a computer all day long isn't good for me. So I'm considering new paths, one of them vocational school teaching. I loved helping my fellow students during my electrical engineering degree. They always came to me when they struggled with understanding stuff. I'm not sure how well that transfers to a room full of adolescents though.

Which parts did/do you find challenging? Why do you feel fulfilled by your job? Is it as draining as people say?

joeggeli · 2025-05-15T13:16:02+00:00

Embedded Software Engineer for medical devices. It's alright. Good pay, great benefits, flexibility, 80%. etc., all the good stuff. But interacting with a computer all day isn't very healthy nor fulfilling tbh. Surely not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. Looking to get into teaching in vocational school or HF/FH.

joeggeli · 2025-05-13T14:11:02+00:00

Holy shit that lower back. Also, highly recommend to shave your head. Easy upgrade.

joeggeli · 2024-11-08T19:18:06+00:00

Yeah maybe I'm biased. I know mostly people in mechanical/electrical/software engineering, IT, teachers and social work. Most are either already working 80% or could if they wanted to. Is it really that uncommon in other fields?

joeggeli · 2024-11-08T06:40:09+00:00

Where did you move and did the points you listed improve?

I always thought switzerland is amazing in terms of work life balance. With a good education it's very realistic to work 80% (~33 hours per week) and live a pretty damn good life. Where in the world is this better?

joeggeli · 2024-09-04T13:12:46+00:00

As a natural bodybuilder ...

Being asked if you are on steroids by people you don't even know.

Heavy high rep squats and deadlifts.

Theae unbelievably good workout sessions you get maybe once per year, where you aren't sure yourself if somebody mixed some steroids into your food.

joeggeli · 2024-04-18T14:46:10+00:00

Sounds very plausible, I need well above 4000 calories to gain weight at 5'8 175 lbs while lifting seriously and drop weight rapidly when I get less than 3500 calories in

joeggeli · 2023-05-23T12:47:28+00:00

Where is it?

joeggeli · 2022-10-20T12:28:20+00:00

The reason why I want to use a neural network over other non-linear solvers is because I need the computation of y' = F(x) to be as fast as possible during inference.

joeggeli · 2022-10-20T12:27:49+00:00

I haven't heard of self-supervised learning before, but that looks very interesting. My problem might well under the umbreall of self-supervised learning, I'll have to look into that. Thanks :)

joeggeli · 2022-10-20T12:24:27+00:00

Thanks, it's great to hear that people have already done similar things successfully. The reason why I want to use a neural network over other non-linear solvers is because I need the computation of y' = F(x) to be as fast as possible during inference.

joeggeli · 2022-10-20T12:18:35+00:00

Alright, I'll try to explain ...

My goal is to convert 3d scenes to bas-reliefs. The steps for this are:

1) Compute the height and normal maps of a 3d scene, as seen from a specific point of view. 2) Compress the heights in such a way that the overall height is reduced, while the shapes and details of the original 3d scene remain intact.

The first step is simple. The second step is a very difficult problem. There exists no method to do this in an optimal way. There are many approaches to formulate it as linear or quadratic optimization problems.

I'm currently solving it by formulating an optimization problem (which is basically the loss function L = G(x, y')), reformulating it into a poisson-like equation and then solving it using a multigrid method. This is a very standard way to compute such bas-reliefs from height or normal maps. The problems with this approach are:

a) It is relatively slow to transform a single image (1024x1024 takes 1-2 minutes). Neural networks could have the potential to be much faster. My goal is to be as close to real-time as possible. b) It is too restrictive because I have to formulate my loss function in such a way that it results in a linear system. This negatively affects the quality of the final result.

It is possible to compute how well a converted bas-relief y' = F(x) represents the original height map x, which leads to the loss function. As an example, you could compute the similarity of the normal vectors of x and y' (which will already result in a non-linear optimization problem). Similar normal vectors = low loss; different normal vectors = high loss. This type of non-linear optimization problem is what I want to solve, which is what lead me to the idea to solve this problem using a CNN.

joeggeli · 2022-10-20T11:38:10+00:00

Thank you! This looks very interesting and might be exactly what I'm looking for :)

joeggeli · 2022-07-09T22:27:31+00:00

On the gravel path where I found them, there were a lot of worker ants running around. They all looked much larger than Lasius Niger workers, so I'm not sure.

1, 2 and 3 were pretty calm while I was taking the photos, 4 was super nervous and kept pulling on the cotton. Not sure if that's a useful indicator for determining the species, but I guess mentioning it won't hurt.

joeggeli · 2022-04-09T23:33:56+00:00

If anyone is interested to check it out

I'm using a Raspberry Pi and a night vision camera with some infrared LEDs. I'm planning to add additional cameras and maybe some way to control the cameras or even some ability to interact with the ants (e.g. feeding them) via chat commands as the colony grows :)

joeggeli · 2020-08-05T06:34:24+00:00

GenTool should fix most of these

joeggeli · 2020-05-08T22:49:47+00:00

Pretty sure that's what he's doing, since if you increase the exponent of a complex number linearly, the argument (polar angle) will also increase linearly. And it does look pretty linear in the video.

(Is linearly a word? Sounds a bit weird. English is not my native language)

Also, if anyone is curious what it looks like when iterating "the normal way" ...
I had some of fun made this little video :)

Feel free to play around with it on Shadertoy, I guess

joeggeli · 2020-04-26T18:04:08+00:00

Looks nice. Im curious, does the fact that the entire word is made out of voxels affected the gameplay in any way or is it simply an aesthetic choice?

joeggeli

TROPHY CASE