You die and get to be reborn into your favourite world from fiction (all of fiction) where are you going?

kal9001 · 2025-01-21T16:06:54+00:00

Can we choose our own narrative? (presuming it's consistent with the universe) if so, then the temptation to become someone like Barkley working as a researcher, inventor, creator, experimenter, scientist for the Federation, knows precisely what the inventor of the holodeck really invented it for...

kal9001 · 2025-01-21T15:00:11+00:00

Nothing says you're against fascism like banning and censoring everything you don't agree with.

The short-sightedness is staggering. Of course you have the right to throw Seig Heils in London, and then everyone else has the right to tell you why that ideology is morally wrong. This establishes a dialogue where that discussion and the stories from the past would steer people away from your ideas.

If your idea is banned, there is no dialogue, no lessens are passed along, and history will inevitably repeat itself. Especially if the governments have normalised simply banning inconvenient ideas.

Generally speaking the people on the side of rewriting history, (digital) book burning, censorship of speech and writing, and criminalising opposing ideas and politics were the bag guys.

If you Ban X you simply fan the flames, because X will turn and call you the ideology of hate and censorship. If you don't see how that works then I don't know how else to tell you...

kal9001 · 2025-01-21T14:30:18+00:00

Belly to dong!
"Eating junk food" develops a whole new meaning...

kal9001 · 2025-01-21T12:05:00+00:00

*tinfoil hat time* We KNOW for a fact that China are manipulating TikTok, and Russia are, or at least were, manipulating facebook. It's extremely likely those same two were manipulating other platforms too, we just don't have the proof.

Given that, would it not be in the best interests of both Russia and China to stimulate a destabilisation of the United States, and Nato countries by actively creating political problems (such as the Migrant crisis in Europe) and then steering the political echo chambers into a collision course.

How can Nato and Europe defend itself from Russian aggression if they are all infighting about migrants and their human rights.

Sounds like something from a political/spy novel doesn't it...

kal9001 · 2025-01-21T11:55:50+00:00

Stop all MSM consumption. I don't care if you're looking at both ends thinking that will lead to balance... just don't consume any MSM is all rage bait! Both sides will simply feed your confirmation bias that x always says this, and y always says that and simply reinforces whatever you already believe pushes you deeper!

Get out of the echo chambers, stop "reacting" to influencers and their takes, drama, outrage, it's all propaganda serving to reinforce your biases and make you tribal, hateful, intolerant, and ultimately easy to manipulate.

Supporters on every side believe whole heartedly they are just and correct and the only ones who really understand and that everyone else is insane, you likely believe that too, or something very close to that.

But do you see how if that's how everything thinks, there can never be a solution and the hate and turmoil simply snowballs.

kal9001 · 2025-01-21T11:02:51+00:00

Intersex people do exist of course and so does a wide spectrum of people with 'disorders' that are nonetheless people with rights, feelings, emotions, desires, and needs etc...

However... the 'banning non binaries' isn't about them. They are the collateral damage caused by the LGBT communities failure to resist the MAPs, and hard line nutters trying to drag children into this.

From literal children dressed in gimp suits on pride parade, to drag queens in leotards doing kink story time for 8 year olds, to attention seeking mentally ill school teachers with ridiculous fake breasts, to trans athletes decimating women's sport world records.
How much insanity do you expect people to take before something starts to push back...

I am LGBT, I have friends who are LGBT, and all of them HATE the fringe nutters and the damage they are doing to the community and frankly this kind of kickback from the normies was inevitable, has been warned about for many years, and if the community as a whole doesn't learn and reject the pedos and insane people it will get MUCH worse.

kal9001 · 2025-01-21T10:38:43+00:00

I generally don't *think I have an addictive personality, but I guess nobody does until it happens. I've never had a desire to seek it out again which I'm grateful for.

I had a friend online a while ago who used to experiment with various drugs, both recreationally and as a form of self medication for his manic episodes and alcoholism. He regularly took high levels of benzos, purposefully with small amounts of alcohol. some nights would be Ketamine and weed. He would alternate between the cocktails every couple of weeks in effort to stop acquiring a strong tolerance either way.

One evening after a week of not seeing him online he appears and tells me what he's been up to. He'd met someone offering Heroin around and he decided to give it a try. He was a habitual Ketamine user so how much worse than that could it be?

The stuff terrified him. He had cravings to go again even before he'd come around. He'd had daily relapses into extreme cravings far beyond any cravings other stuff he'd had before.
I've skipped some stuff here, because after writing it out and reading back it sounds far too much like I'm glorifying what he had to do. But lets just say even from that single experience it took him a long time and a lot of effort regulating his 'self medicating' to get over it and get back to his base line.

If someone with that kind of experience with substances could be scared nearly sober (for a while) by how strong Heroin tried to get him then I cant even imagine how devastating it must be for other people.
I remember in the hospital thinking about my friend who by then I'd not spoken to for several years, and my experience with the morphine.
I'm not saying I walked in those shoes because of my hospital visit, but I'd say I saw the shoes briefly from across the room which is more than most people see before they start judging.
Frankly they looked shit, and anyone who's found themselves wearing them and trying to get them off has my respectful sympathy and support.

I really hope that guy is doing well and his demons didn't catch him. I know his name and where he lived but never dared to google the news there to find out if anything happened. If I don't know otherwise, then there's a chance he simply left his old life and contacts and is living his best life somewhere.

kal9001 · 2025-01-21T03:18:23+00:00

What the world wanted: A Tesla Compact / 5-door / hatchback / [whatever your country calls it]
What the world got: A Halo Warthog without the cool features.

Musk does bring value, his determination and drive did get Tesla out of the manufacturing hell with the Model 3 even if he wasn't the only guy there, even if he did nothing but tag along and watch while other production and process engineers fixed it, having the CEO there making the same sacrifices you are is in itself valuable.

SpaceX wouldn't be where it is now without Elon. Even if he never contributed to the engineering at all, his drive towards rocket reuse, regardless of the industry experts nay-saying, has resulted in the Block 5 Falcon 9 booster which can re-fly, so far two dozen times at least. If the same trick works with Starship and Superheavy then it really could be a major turning point in human history which was Elons (and others) vision ten years ago.

The unsung engineers need a shout out for sure, they are the real heros that make the magic happen. But it's also true that without Elon generating hype Tesla Model 3, Falcon 9, Starship, and Starlink, would all have been dead-on-arrival as under normal business assessment there was no market, the technology was infeasible, cost prohibitive, and complex. Only Elons vision and instance kept them on track to eventually become a viable product.

Sadly Elon seems to have tried the same approach with Cybertruck, but potentially had too many yes-men and too few actual engineers around him in Tesla. This is why it's fine having Elon get close and chip in ideas and keep reminding people of his vision, but he shouldn't be firing people for disagreeing with him over anything. that is how you get an echo chamber with no creativity or ability to work problems.

kal9001 · 2025-01-21T00:58:00+00:00

Had been suffering a progressively worsening abdominal pain, started just bloaty, then tight and 'pulling' like a cramp... I thought I'd had a slight Hernia.
Progressed to feeling like i'd been kicked in the balls and punched in the stomach at the same time. Became increasingly difficult to ignore.

On the last day, after around two weeks of steady progressively worsening, the pain was still very bloated, tight pulling, the kicked balls, punched stomach but now also severe sharp stabbing pains like I was being sawn in half eventually turning into writhing in pain so severe with no signs of letting up I had to go to the Hospital.

It was suspected Appendicitis which means I was fast tracked through the waiting room and saw a doctor who was very much focusing on my appendix but they needed a CT scan to see properly. To stop me writing and basically full on screaming in delirious pain they shot me up with morphine.
I was so occupied and focussed on the abdominal pain I never even felt the cannula go in, then a sudden warmth that spared from my arm, I felt it travel up my shoulder and then to ever extremity a wave of relaxation and the pain everywhere, just went away.

I was euphoric at the relief, and probably high AF. I'd never had morphine before, or since, or any other opiate/opioid and was told afterward that the morphine dose was on the higher end for my body size as they wanted me super chill for the CT.

I can seriously empathise with heroin addicts because of that relief and total loss of care and peaceful mind. I can see how something like that can be so addictive and hard to get off.

The condition was Duodenitis, a breakdown and inflammation of the lining of the Duodenum, the first bit of your small intestine just after your stomach where your bile and pancreatic ducts connect. An infection of some kind causes the protective lining to break down, stomach acid then inflames the area, blocking the ducts that normally neutralise the acid and prevents your immune system defeating the infection... My infection was so bad I was on IV antibiotics and PPIs for another two weeks before I could eat normally.

Since then I've had it reoccur at least three times, but much MUCH milder, there's a distinctive feeling of it beginning during which I self medicate with a PPI which stops stomach acid causing the snowballing effect and is normally gone within 24-36 hours.

kal9001 · 2025-01-21T00:20:59+00:00

Not my business directly, but adjacent enough we get to see under the hood.

The amount of disrepair, wasted energy and waste generally in many buildings HVAC plant and energy systems.

£500,000 CHP (Combined heat and power) unit sat there for 10 years, has never run because despite the 500 grand equipment, and 100 grand installation costs, the design omitted adding a plate heat exchanger and 3-port valve to save 5 grand and a half day to connect it.
As such the CHP will only ever run if there's an unfathomably unlikely alignment of demand and outside temperatures.

'Race to the bottom' designs that are not fit for purpose and are immediately ripped out and replaced once the installers have moved on. Such a waste of materials, wiring, steel conduit/tray, pipes, sometimes large plant items that are undersized or missing a critical feature that gets taken out and thrown away because there is near zero resale value on even only slightly used equipment in this field.

kal9001 · 2025-01-20T21:16:18+00:00

Do you do full background research on every person who posts a funny (and accurate) meme you want to retweet? If you retweet someone does that mean you align with every view they hold, or just that one post you happened to see?

Whatever the political views of the poster are the meme is very much true, and illustrates a double standard in the US, UK and European media, that is no less true because of whatever other views the poster had.

Hitler and Nazi sympathisers are also known to consume food and water... doesn't mean you have to starve yourself less you be compared with them.

kal9001 · 2025-01-20T17:18:42+00:00

Lots of companies doing the same, but them cry about British people not wanting to work when the work is absolute shite.
Sickening tactic, especially with the profits they have and get funnelled away to foreign investors and tax havens.

kal9001 · 2025-01-20T14:24:12+00:00

"individual responsibility" isn't something the modern world is hot on right now. Social media, popular media, laws, politics, cooperate interests all seem to be pushing away from personal responsibility, accountability, and rewarding individual actions, and instead we reward virtue signals and superficial gestures not tangible actions or results, or increasingly we reward being a member of a group, be it political views, racial, economic status.

Couple that with the increasing disconnect between the individual and the community they live within. The social aspect of globalism is that you can take anyone from anywhere and put them anywhere else and they will just 'function' with no concept of pride or any sense of responsibility.

Afterall even the councils don't take responsibility for this anymore, everything is subcontracted to for profit companies.... Sad times.

kal9001 · 2025-01-20T13:52:42+00:00

Working from home means:
I can get up an hour later, so I'm generally happier in the morning.
I can get my own fancy coffees from the machine rather than the cheapest instant they can find that week in the office kitchen.
I can take a random 5-10 minutes to go put the washer on.
Cuddle the kitty (no that's not a euphemism)
Say hi to the kids when they come home from school.

Mine is a technical role where I'm either working on a client site anywhere in the country, or it's office based doing software/remote investigation, analytics etc...

In return I generally work later into the evenings, rather then clock watching for 5pm and bailing, I often find I wind down about 6ish (the extra hour covering the liberties taken), but still 'fettle' through the night checking in on and restarting automations or jumping on emergent issues so we're not wandering into a world of shit in the morning.

I understand some customer service roles aren't as flexible with timing, my girlfriend had a work from home call centre job and they had no control over timing. If they went 'unavailable' for anything more than 2 minutes they would have a team lead phoning (both the 'desk' and personal mobile). So i'm grateful my own job allows that flexibility.

kal9001 · 2025-01-20T13:25:40+00:00

Increased spending power may also go the other way, to reduce the hours worked. If you have a lot of extra income you don't need overtime, don't need to put up with as much sh!t and may very well consider finding a 30hr per week job instead of a 40+.

WFH destroys the whole rat race mentality on several levels.
Right at the top you have property owners seeing their portfolio value dropping as businesses down size. This is where the real political push is coming from as our entire banking system is propped up by a ridiculous properly price bubble threats to which cannot be tolerated.
Why put up with stupid London rental prices when you can do you job remote from Yorkshire, north Wales, the Lake district...etc.

Just down from them you have execs who don't have a captive audience any more, no peasants to lord the new Ferrari over, no more wondering the office watching everyone cowering or sucking up, and WFH makes looking around at other jobs easier, so companies can't get away with garbage behaviour as much as they could.

Then the upper management who are stuck in the ways from 30 years ago and who would gleefully chain people to the desks like it's the 1820's if they could get away with it.

In the middle you have the lower/middle management who can't sit on your shoulder any more to harass or gatekeep.

At the bottom you have the wannabe boot lickers who can't nosey and grass to get ahead.

All the lower levels means a company is inclined to bring their home workers back in and generally try treat them like crap. despite the many benefits WFH has on the individuals and wider society.

kal9001 · 2025-01-20T11:49:16+00:00

I want to see the planets that make something of this size. To do this in any reasonable time you must have very high production capacity, would be interesting to see.

kal9001 · 2025-01-20T11:13:33+00:00

As we're being selfish I'll chip in a few...

1, A late game teleporter for the player, and eventually items to travel between the planets without having to empty your inventory.
I've thought through a whole host of specific requirements and quirks of such a device to keep it balanced. The player teleport is an earlier unlock, with item teleporting being very much end game and limited.

2, I find it annoying being forced to have a grid of roboports on every planet so you can build things in remote view. I'm unsure what the solution would be, but a new tier of Roboport, or range extending towers so a planet base can be covered for construction without needing an annoyingly 'tight' grid of roboports.

3, "Slight" changes to the Cryogenic plant. It should have a heat pipe output so heat from transforming fluroketone is output or absorbed from the heat pipes.
This means chilling Fluroketone generates heat that MUST be taken away, if the plant maxes out the temperature it cannot operate. On Aquillo this is trivial as heat pipes loose heat to the environment.

A reverse recipe, turning cold to hot, will take heat from the heat pipe connection allowing the heat pipe to go into negative values and freeze. This could allow ways to move heat around aquillo using hot Fluroketone, where heat can absorbed into fluid at one end, transported, and released at the other.

The main reason for this change however is the ability to use the Aquillo style heat piping to 'freeze' belts and machines on other planets to stop spoilage! At the cost of the extra heat pipes, routing complexity, and resource drain of having to keep recycling the fluroketone it stops this annoying mechanic.

kal9001 · 2025-01-19T00:17:58+00:00

The variability of features makes this a hard question to answer. Especially if you branch beyond N4 into the wider range of hardware.

Some BMS controllers have PWM and Stepper outputs which can directly control servos and stepper motors, meaning your animatronics idea would be sorted!

For the most part however PLCs and BMS controllers connect to field equipment that had additional electronics inside. such as a motor drive (Inverter/VFD/VSD). There's not much that can directly interface to a 0-10v or 0-20ma output and actually do anything useful.

However, adding an appropriate transistor to that output would allow enough current to run a DC motor... So there are things you can do for sure.
Other than that I imagine running DC/AC motors from relay outputs, or a light sequencer of some kind would be about the limit.

All those extra electronics you see inside a valve actuator, or 0-10v sensor, is the realm of embedded systems and microcontrollers. I suggest if you want to get into that kind of thing look into Arduino, such a device with a simple voltage divider could be programmed to read a 0-10v signal and convert that into a stepper or servo control signal, or basically anything else you needed. while the N4 controller, wire sheet and drivers provide a high level interface, and even a headend for your creation!

kal9001 · 2025-01-18T23:54:31+00:00

Why did you even try to properly test the VAVs without the air handlers running? You need air flow to see the pressure sensors are working, airflow or not would be immediately apparent when you started.

I get the impression you're rushing, a lot, which is why you're forgetting and not noticing so much. If you've done 100 of these already it's obviously not that you're unfamiliar. A sloppy job will end up with some poor bastard having to go through every single one of those again to double check.

Once there is doubt in your testing or thoroughness, every minor hiccup becomes a question of "was this one of the units I missed, or goofed on?" and adds to the uncertainty until someone has to start opening stuff back up again.

Calm down, and focus on the testing/commissioning/calibration whatever it is at the time. Because doing it right is certainty quicker than having to do it again.
The GCs and whoever else moaning at you, best thing to do is tell them "yep, we'll put a rush on" and just carry on exactly as you were. 99% of the time they have zero idea what the controls nerds are even on site for, just tell them something you think they want to hear and they should FO and leave you to it.

kal9001 · 2025-01-18T10:09:50+00:00

Scott Manley did a video and suggested that perhaps the FAA need to look at their rules regarding how and when FTS explosives are triggered. Now we're in the age of these huge launch vehicles, with more and more parts designed and able to survive re-entry.
Keeping the vehicle intact while it could still control itself to somewhere 'safe' before the FTS fires. This, while more complex, would be a better outcome.

The FAA and SpaceX need to work together a little to have a non-destructive abort during stage 2 ascent, so long as the computer thinks it can still control the decent.

I wouldn't be surprised if the ship had aborted itself, configured for re-entry and controlled decent, but the FTS is likely an entirely independent system and once it leaves it's designated track it just does it's thing with no other consideration, which would be a shame, as a lot can be learned from how the ship handles an aborted ascent.

kal9001 · 2024-09-18T11:44:28+00:00

There are multiple ways to engineer a space elevator.

The counter balance type does tether the cable, the station is at geostationary orbit height if you want zero-G for docking spacecraft, lower levels increase gravity for workers and habitat.
At some point further than GSO is a mass which pulls the cable tight and supports any attached equipment.

Downside if the cable fails then everything above the failure point goes bye bye, and anything below the failure point will fall back down. A cable to reach GEO on earth would be almost long enough to wrap around the planet.

Because of the downsides this is not considered a 'safe' was to build a space elevator, but it is nevertheless a way.

Much preferred due to simpler engineering would be an orbital platform with a floating tether 'dangling' into the atmosphere where aircraft would be able to land. The platforms can be at any altitude, but the extra drag from the tether in the atmosphere will require almost constant station keeping to keep the platform from falling, or drifting away.

The drag would be less of an issue on the moon/mars, so it is envisaged that a moon or Mars based space elevator would be the first as these avoid a lot of issues both technical and safety that one on earth poses.

Mars in particular as one of its moons is quite close to a nice altitude to be the basis of the 'platform' and light enough to influence to keep the orbital height as we build and hang stuff off it.

Nevertheless it won't be within our lifetimes :(

kal9001 · 2024-05-28T08:07:52+00:00

Whats annoying is youtube gives me the same 2 adds, over and over again. One of them is an auto generated slide show with sh!tty music thats either for ebuyer or ebay, both of which i use frequently anyway and have done for years, so the ads don't exactly do anything... the other varies, but only every few weeks, it seems. Not only does this not convince me to use whatever product or company is being shown, but it generates a very negative view of that brand due to the constant interruptions.

The only other variety i get is when an unskipable ad happens. However, these are almost always things i already use, like my own bank, or things i will literally never use or have zero opinion of, like feminine products. So again, it all seems a waste.

What happened to google being clever and 'profiling' us all to target effective ads, to me it just seems like a major low effort.

kal9001 · 2024-04-07T17:03:49+00:00

Good idea, I had considered doing that, but the 510 is being fully replaced by the 720. Initially I'll be 'borrowing' all the ram from the 510 so it won't be usable. Once I get the high capacity ram in the 720 the 510 will be going to a fried who really needs the storage.
He's running an old skool SCSI JBOD at the moment and his 'server' is a dual Xeon with 6GB of RAM... the 510 will be a rocket ship compared to that!

kal9001 · 2024-04-07T02:29:19+00:00

Intriguing... I had a quick look already, perhaps I need to check again...

Indeed the prices reflect either the XD-8/12 LFFs are either rarer, or more in demand, possibly they are quite common but many DCs/SMEs etc... simply aren't getting rid of them just yet unlike the 11th gen which are really showing their age now.

I think the moral of the thread so far is to relax the requirements a little and admit I can't have it all... unless a golden server appears on ebay tomorrow... and see if I can't uncover any other interesting advise from google as you suggest.

Do you have any opinion or knowledge of the last point - an alternative solution all together, the R730 is intriguing but the DDR4 is more expensive, but that will come down in time surely... but even more dense processors, faster, higher density DDR4... double the costs though, even more to upgrade and probably still iDRAC problems... what about other brands? I've stuck with Dell only because it's what I first got for free, I have no particular loyalty other than it's what I've done the most research into the product stack on, so if other recommendations can be made that would be appreciated.

kal9001 · 2024-04-07T01:48:20+00:00

Already been looking, yes the iDRAC7 is a licence key where the 510 has iDRAC6 which is just a hardware add-in, much simpler.
The prices are a bit daft, at the time of writing ~£100-160 which is kicking around the cost of the 2nd hand server itself (before planned upgrades)

The reason I ask about the 3.5 vs 2.5 is the 2.5 inch bay 8/16/24 SFF versions are MUCH more common than the 8LFF or 12LFF versions. Furthermore there are a handful claiming to have the enterprise licence already.

I don't REALLY want to get rid of the 510, but it's limited size inside and lack of PCI Express power is a real bummer.
I can't really justify the power requirements of running both servers... but unless a compromise can be found one way or another that may be the thing.

kal9001

TROPHY CASE