spinnetrouble

I hear your frustration. It’s so hard to watch the people around you get that close to doing the right thing–we had such good momentum for a while–and then veer towards the opposite end of the behavioral spectrum like they were pushed. That kind of discouragement feels fucking terrible.

Take whatever time you need to heal up. If that’s forever, it’s forever; I’m sorry we left you in this state. I don’t blame you for walking away, but if having someone to commiserate about the ridiculous state of affairs would help you sort out the internal chaos and make it easier to live with, please reach out. I’m always down for political gossip.

What a classic. There’s an arcade nearby with a Tapper cabinet. There’s one control, and it’s a keg pull.

What’s the strength modifier on a chicken laying an egg?

This is no lower 48 Roadkill Cafe, “you kill it, we grill it.” This is a whole different set of cooking skills

Looks like a sturgeon, maybe? I’m no fishologist

Sure, he can move all his stuff. He can move all his stuff wherever the fuck he wants, I don’t mind. Need help packing?

“Un-fucking-believable” is standard usage, but “unbe-fucking-lievable” still works as an alternate. That’s when you’re down to artistic judgment and choosing which form fits your case best. Mixing it up and using something unexpected is a good way to provide emphasis.

It’s obvious to native speakers, but when you’re new to it and trying to learn the cadence to help make sense of spoken language, rules like these help

These are the tips language learners like me rely on

What happens when you flip it around? Instead of needing a solar panel to power something, what could you do if you had a solar panel that had sensors, lights, or transmitters attached to it? None of those attachments cost anything additional to run and they don’t decrease the panel’s output. You just hook all the panels you want together into an array, and the damn thing could basically monitor itself and send error notifications to you when a problem needs fixing. That’s a lot better than what we’ve had so far, either isolating, identifying, and solving problems without any guidance at all, or needing a monitoring system (computer) that soaks energy in order to keep tabs on your hardware. Some of the solar/battery systems you can buy now even rely on the extra power consumption of an AI agent to make sense of your error codes for you. It’s crazy how many points of improvement this team made. I really hope it’s practical on a large scale!

This is really cool news!

The article title focuses on the two different types of energy input, but as everybody’s noticed, the rain provides such a tiny amount of output that it doesn’t contribute more than a watt or two over a whole panel. Put that on hold for a minute and let’s look at some other exciting parts of this:

• Long-term solar panel durability has been a hurdle we’ve struggled to overcome. Part of this is due to the sensitivity of the materials to both water and the physical impacts of raindrops hitting them.
• Protecting sensitive materials that collect light can be a challenge because most things you coat them with will decrease the amount of light they’ll gather, and most of what’s left is really expensive (in money, materials, or energy) to effectively and uniformly apply while maintaining its light collecting ability.

So this research group in Spain comes along and says, “Hey everybody, check this out! We got a twofer: we can make solar panels more durable and just as efficient by putting them in a box and spraying them with hot gas! Pretty great, right? Oh, but wait! There’s more! The stuff we’re coating the panels with can also give you a trickle of energy just when it rains! The raindrops bouncing off the panels, I’m serious. That’s enough kinetic energy to drive a tiny potential. It’s not a lot, but it’s still better than two for one!”

Now let’s go back to the tiny bit of electricity produced by rain. These panels might be able to generate enough power to trickle charge a small battery (like on a weather station that tracks data) when it rains. With the way we’ve been engineering things like LEDs and sensors to be smaller and more energy efficient, we’d be able to use these solar panels to keep them running without needing any other energy source. It’s totally fucking free, doesn’t take anything at all from the panel or its efficiency to drive something like a sensor on a train track that can immediately send a localized signal when there’s a track failure or maintenance needs to be done. If you spread those sensors out over an entire rail system, you could offload an incredible amount of work without doing anything more than installing the new panels and getting it going. Improving rail safety (especially in a place like America where the rails are so bad and so inadequately maintained due to capitalist pressures that the trains are a gamble every time they run) with something as clean, simple, automated, and inexpensive as this is incredibly solarpunk stuff. I’m not a person of vision, so really I’m excited to see where they go next. Most of what I’m thinking about right now is municipal/government and industrial stuff, things that would give repair crews more information on the problems they’re being sent out to fix instead of just “sensor offline” messages. Beyond improving industrial safety through greater automation of simple functions, disaster response/recovery times could also see some seismic changes. I’m fuzzier on the consumer side of things, but small things like solar roofing providing power to automated garden switches or illuminated house numbers and doorbells that don’t need to be wired into the house are all steps towards us consuming less energy. I just think that’s neat!

Would $20/hr make it acceptable to you? $15? Minimum wage? When you find a point that’s different but acceptable, that’s a hangup, not a standard.

I have the same concerns over geothermal fracking right now. We’re only willing to find out how much we can disrupt the underlying rock by going too far a few times, deliberating over the acceptable death and damage toll, and then deciding to stop doing that whenever ~40% of the country agrees it’s time to stop.

This is really useful, thanks!

I appreciate you! My family and I made the decision to move off of Discord when they announced their full age verification rollout. We were planning on setting up and hosting our own matrix server, but now I’d like to know more about Element’s poor stewardship of the protocol.

My tech level is literate layperson, not working in tech and without a background in systems administration, networking, or software development. I can understand the larger concepts pretty readily but get lost in the finer details like why data architects would choose one setup over another. I’m content knowing that someone good at this made a reasoned choice without needing them to explain why as long as I still get to laugh at Bastard Operator from Hell stories.

The results I found last night were things like The Register talking about matrix being adopted more and more around the world, including at the government and military levels, a competing service or two telling off Element for bad practices or poor use of the protocol, and Element’s rebuttal (which basically came down to “our configuration doesn’t need to be everybody’s configuration, THAT’S THE POINT” and “it’s a limitation you have, too, do you really want to make this a thing?”). It’s good to be aware of, but it’s not what I’m looking for. All this involves the paid services side; does anybody have any sourced news on the ongoing development of matrix from, say, the past 3-5 years?

Sounds like a reasonable point, guess I’ll look into it!

Edit: Sorry, I’m not tech savvy enough to find my way to any reputable sources. A little help, please?

Then write your own scientifically-accurate sci-fi, ya doink! Complain, complain, complain