Badabinski

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I think you may be mixing up Project Orion (let's chuck bombs out of the back to make us go zoom) with NERVA (a nuclear thermal rocket engine where the heat from chemical reactions is replaced with heat from a nuclear reactor to generate gas expansion out of a nozzle). Something like NERVA is actually a great idea. Let me tell you why!

  • It's completely clean (unlike Orion and fission-fragment rockets)

    • the reactor and fuel never touch, the fuel goes through a heat exchanger and is not radioactive
  • it provides extremely high efficiency

    • chemical rockets top out at ~400-500 isp in vacuum
    • NERVA tests in 1978 gave a vacuum isp of 841
    • ion thrusters like NEXT has an isp of 4170
  • it provides lots of thrust

    • NERVA had 246kN of thrust
    • NEXT (which was used on the DART mission) is 237 millinewtons
    • That's 6 orders of magnitude more thrust!
  • No oxidizer is needed

    • All you need is reaction mass, just like ion thrusters

For automated probes, the extreme efficiency and low thrust of ion thrusters makes perfect sense. If we ever want to send squishy humans further afield, we need something with more thrust so we can have shorter transit times (radiation is a bastard). Musk is supposedly going to Mars with Starship, and the Raptor engine is a marvel of engineering. I don't like the man and I'm not confident that he'll actually follow through with his plan, but the engineers at SpaceX are doing some crazy shit that might make it happen.

Just think though, if the engine was literally twice as efficient and they didn't need to lug around a tank of oxidizer, how much time could they shave off their transit? How much more could they send to Mars? Plus, they could potentially reduce the number of big-ass rockets they have to launch from Earth to refuel. If you can ISRU methane, then I imagine you could probably get hydrogen.

There are problems that still need to be resolved (the first that comes to mind is how to deal with cryogenic hydrogen boiling off), but like, the US had a nuclear thermal engine in the 70s. It was approved for use in space, but congress cut funding after the space race concluded so it never flew.

I'm happy to see that NASA is once again researching nuclear thermal rockets. Maybe we'll get somewhere this time.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There are many of these where I live. The lights are usually timed so that you just go straight through without having to stop. They're much better than the traditional intersections that came before.

I will absolutely concede that they're shitty for pedestrians or cyclists, however.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

People who eat Dayton-style pizza are like the city of Dayton itself—smelly inside and bereft of true purpose. Those of us in the US who haven't been so psychically damaged wouldn't eat that shit.

(I'm only just learning about the disgusting gutter pizza. I don't like Dayton because my last company was slowly destroyed over several years by a company that was headquartered in Dayton. I associate the city with the asshole who was CEO. Fuck you, Chris! I've heard Dayton is, at worst, not great, so take my comment as the joke it is.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I just kinda vaguely name them after what they do and how big they are:

smol: my tiny little 2 bay Synology NAS that I'm no longer using
medium: my R620 with 4x 18TB drives that is my current NAS (medium, because it's larger than my previous NAS). Is also a k3s worker and provides NFS PVCs.
big: my old full-tower gaming rig that's a k3s worker and runs my Home Assistant VM
molecule: my current mini-ITX gaming rig and primary computer, also serves as the k3s master node and runs a lot of my home automation stuff. I think I picked molecule because it's REALLY tiny (it's in a Dan Cases A4v2, I think?) and it has a bunch of small stuff running on it (containers and pods)
monolith: my old T440p laptop. It's a large, black, featureless slab that doesn't do much
slab: my new Framework 13 laptop. I just kinda looked at it and said, "that's a nice slab of metal"

All of the above running Linux. I tinkered with Ubuntu for the NAS (because I heard Ubuntu was good at ZFS), but I still absolutely hate Ubuntu, so it's all Arch Linux.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I hate righty-tighty lefty-loosy. Depending on whether you're looking at the top or bottom of the screw, you can see movement to the right or the left. I hate whoever came up with it, and I wish I had been taught the right hand method. It works exactly the same as the electromagnetic right hand rule:
an example of the right hand rule as it relates to a screw thread

Basically, you take your right hand, stick your thumb out, and curl your fingers like you're grabbing a broom handle. Point your thumb in the direction you want the screw to move to. Want to screw something in? Point your thumb towards the thing. Want to unscrew? Point your thumb away from the object the screw is currently in. Then, just look at the way your fingers are pointing! If it helps, squeeze your fingers into a fist and see which way they move. Alternatively, bend your wrist in, and observe which way your fingers are moving. Works every time.

It sounds complicated, but there are plenty of people who are unable to intuitively differentiate from right and left the way they can differentiate up and down. I am one of those people. Thanks to this method, I've been able to develop the muscle memory/intuition to know which way to turn a screw.

It's important to note that this only works for screws that are "right hand threaded." If the screw is only getting tighter when you're using this method, then it's likely reverse threaded, or left hand threaded. If that's the case, just use your left hand instead of your right hand.

[–] [email protected] 113 points 9 months ago (15 children)

lol, I'd love to see the fucking ruin of the world we'd live in if current LLMs replaced senior developers. Maybe it'll happen some day, but in the meantime it's job security! I get to fix all of the bugfuck crazy issues generated by my juniors using Copilot and ChatGPT.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I've been incredibly happy with Kagi. All of the listicles and blogspam get shunted off into their own sections. Kagi also seems to do a pretty good job at finding "deep" results. Like, when I want to find out more information about some home automation gizmo, Kagi does a good job of finding some random blog post where someone has torn the gizmo apart and analyzed every strength and weakness it has. I still prefer Google for looking up restaurants and stuff, but I hardly use it anymore. I don't at all regret the $10 a month I pay to use Kagi.

Edit: I also like that Kagi lets you define rules. Occasionally I'll be forced to go to Reddit to get some information (I really try to go elsewhere first). I deleted my account, so I go to new Reddit by default (which I hate). I don't want to add an extension to redirect to old Reddit, but I can just replace the www with old automagically for all Reddit search results. Works great.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I'm convinced that Orson Scott Card suffered a traumatic head injury at some point. I don't know how you could go from writing something as beautiful and intimate as Ender's Game to shit like Hidden Empire, which is creepy right wing Christian disaster porn (from what I can remember of that trainwreck).