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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • CountVon@sh.itjust.workstoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlPunch cards ftw
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    29 days ago

    One of my grandfathers worked for a telephone company before he passed. That man was an absolute pack rat, he wouldn’t throw anything away. So naturally he had boxes and boxes of punch cards in this basement. I guess they were being thrown out when his employer upgraded to machines that didn’t need punch cards, so he snagged those to use as note paper. I will say, they were great for taking notes. Nice sturdy card stock, and the perfect dimensions for making a shopping list or the like.









  • When a tech is new and cool but still not evolved to practical.

    My friend, there is nothing “new” about this technology. It has been around for ages. As a child I lived in a home with a heat pump, and that was in the late 80s. I’m gettin’ pretty old here, and heat pumps are even older than me. Heat pumps are just air conditioners with one extra part: a reversing valve that allows the direction of flow to be switched so the hot side of the system can be inside in the winter and outside in the summer.

    Heat pumps don’t require further evolution to become practical, they’re already practical. Beyond practical! It’s a heating technology capable of efficiency greater than 100%. It’s called a “heat pump” because the system doesn’t create heat, it moves heat. From outside to inside in winter, and inside to outside in summer. Since a heat pump is not creating heat, instead moving energy that already exists, it’s possible to get more energy out (in the form of heat) than the energy you put in (in the form of electricity). Generative heating technologies (natural gas or oil furnace, resistive electric heat) cannot match that as they will always be below 100% efficiency.

    I live in Canada, I have a heat pump, and it is great. If you think heat pumps are bad, or not suited to northern climates, or not yet practical… I’m sorry, but you’re misinformed.


  • To be “FreeSync certified”, a monitor has to have certain minimum specs and must pass some tests regarding its ability to handle Variable Refresh Rate (VRR). In exchange for meeting the minimum spec and passing the tests, the monitor manufacturer gets to put the FreeSync logo on the box and include FreeSync support in its marketing. If a consumer buys an AMD graphics card and a FreeSync certified monitor then FreeSync (AMD’s implementation of VRR) should work out of the box. The monitor might also be certified by Nvidia as GSync compatible, in which case another customer with an Nvidia graphics card should have the same experience with Gsync.


  • I’m sure there would be a way to do this with Debian, but I have to confess I don’t know it. I have successfully done this in the past with Clover Bootloader. You have to enable an NVMe driver, but once that’s done you should see an option to boot from your NVMe device. After you’ve booted from it once, Clover should remember and boot from that device automatically going forward. I used this method for years in a home theatre PC with an old motherboard and an NVMe drive on a PCIe adapter.




  • Just to make sure I’m understanding what I’m seeing, the plane gets hit at 1:03. The regular bursts of light from the start of the video to 1:01 are aircraft flares? Possibly parachute flares? At least some Russian aircraft apparently have parachute flares. At 0:23 you can see smaller flares being shot out to the side of the main flare. I think many aircraft flares fire in this sort of pattern because it makes the flares better mimic the shape of an airplane. Bonus points for looking really cool:

    A C-130 dropping flares


  • The generation that came of age in the peak of the “greed is good” era?

    I can’t speak for all of Gen X, but speaking for myself and everyone I personally know from my generation: we never liked that shit. That was our parents’ bullshit. We just couldn’t do anything about it, politically speaking, when we came of age because we were firmly outnumbered by boomers. We still are actually, except now we’re also outnumbered by millennials. That’s why all the media discussions of this topic are framed as “boomers vs. millennials.” Gen X is rendered politically invisible by its comparatively small size.



  • After reading the article, I’m confused about how it works. Guinea worms are parasites that you get infected with from bad water sources. Unless you eradicate the source (e.g. the worms themselves), can you really say that you’ve eradicated the disease?

    Many diseases can likely never be eradicated because they have a natural reservoir, some wild population of animal species in which the disease normally propagates. A natural reservoir will keep the disease in circulation and reinfection of humans can occur from contact with species in the natural reservoir. Ebola virus is like that, it keeps popping up now and then because it has a natural reservoir (believed to be fruit bats).

    Guinea worms isn’t like that, which is part of why it’s a strong candidate for eradication. Its reproductive cycle has a step that primarily goes through people or dogs, neither of which would be considered a natural reservoir:

    Guinea worm reproductive cycle

    As such, if we reach a state where there are no infected people or dogs then guinea worm could go extinct. There would be larvae left in the wild at that point, but as long as those larvae don’t infect a suitable host then they never become worms. No new worms means no new larvae, and larvae have a fairly short lifespan so we would only need to maintain that situation for maybe a few years before we could confidently say that guinea worm has been eradicated (i.e. any remaining larvae must be dead by that point).