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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • As far as I know hPa is the preferred unit for air pressure and is used a lot. Usually referring to the air pressure of the atmosphere.

    Also hectometer is used a lot when talking about land measurements. And we don’t mostly keep to mm and m, in my experience cm is the most used and most useful measurement for every day objects.

    All of the different prefixes are valid and are used. It just depends on what context, which one is the most useful. No reason to stick to the 10^3 units, just use them all.



  • Thorry84@feddit.nltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy are faucets so expensive?
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    14 hours ago

    A couple of reasons:

    First of all what one wants in terms of faucet designs is very personal. As such there are many many models to choose from. This makes each model in be produced in relatively low quantities, and be more expensive. If everyone would use the exact same faucet, they would be basically free. And you do see some models being used in new construction that are very cheap indeed, just because of the higher volumes.

    Second of all, the tolerances and finishing involved. It’s relatively easy to make a faucet that works, the designs have been perfected long ago and modern manufacturing can easily produce a working model. However to create a faucet that feels nice, that doesn’t make weird noises, opens and closes smoothly etc. is a lot harder. I’ve had cheap faucets before, one of those single handle deals. It would take more force that I would like to open the tap, at which point it shoots open so water sprays out. The range in temperature is insanely hot to insanely cold with only a tiny single spot of normal temperature in between.

    Third reason is they are made from a lot of parts and with materials that need to be handled really delicately. Chrome finishes that scratch easily when handled in properly, leading to the whole thing becoming instant scrap. This leads to hand assembly being the only option. And often it involves a lot of small parts that need to be placed just so. This adds a lot of cost.

    Fourth reason is the materials themselves, often quite expensive to start with. Large parts being machined out of a single piece. By definition everything needs to be corrosion resistant. And it’s one of the products where we still expect them to last 15-20 years easily. Not like the consumerism that’s forced a 5 year lifespan to be called long in the modern world. The finishing coatings are often chemically applied with expensive materials and taking a long time. And a fully polished finish also takes time and is often done by hand and takes some skill.

    Fifth reason is brand names. Just like with any designer thing, brand names and designers are a large part of the costs. You can often find designer faucets for outrageous prices and cheap knock offs that can be trash or sometimes even better than the original for half the price.






  • Thorry84@feddit.nltoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldEwww
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    4 days ago

    There is about 1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000 liter of water on Earth. Lets say Hitler was a pretty good water drinker and on average he ingested 4 liter of water (not just in drinking but also in food). Hitler lived for about 20,454 days and would have ingested about 81,816 of water. Lets say you are a water superfan and live to be 100 years old, then there is a chance of 0.001185845% you will drink some of the water that Hitler drunk at some point.

    So it’s probably not been in Hitlers mouth. Dinosaur piss I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.






  • One thing I’ve also noticed is people doing code reviews using ai to pad their stats or think they are helping out. At best it’s stating the obvious, wasting resources to point out what doesn’t need pointing out. At worst it’s a giant waste of time based on total bullshit the ai made up.

    I kinda understand why people would think LLMs are able to generate and evaluate code. Because they throw simple example problems at them and they solve them without much issue. Sometimes they make obvious mistakes, but these are easily corrected. This makes people think LLMs are basically able to code, if it can solve even some harder example problems, surely they are at least as good as beginner programmers right? No, wrong actually. The reason the LLM can solve the example problem, is because that example (or a variation) was contained within its training data. It knows the answer not by deduction or by reason, it knows the answer by memorization. Once you start actually programming in the real world, it’s nothing like the examples. You need to account for an existing code base, with existing rules, standards and limitations. You need to evaluate which solution out of your toolbox to apply. Need to consider the big picture as well as small details. You need to think of the next guy working with the code, because more often than not, that next guy is you. LLMs crumble in a situation like this, they don’t know about all the unspoken things, they haven’t trained on the code base you are working with.

    There’s a book I’m fond of called Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler. I always used to joke it contained the answer to any problem a software engineer ever comes across. The only trick is to choose the correct answer. LLMs are like this, they have all these patterns memorized and choose which answer best fits the question. But it doesn’t understand why, what the upsides and downsides are for your specific situation. What the implications of the selected answer are going forward. Or why this pattern over another. When the LLM answers you can often prompt it to produce an answer with a completely different pattern applied. In my opinion it’s barely more useful than the book and in many ways much worse.




  • We always put a couple of bells on the bottom of the tree. Because they are shiny and round, the cats always go for them first. This alerts us and we can verbally berate them for messing with the tree. This works most of the time to keep them in check. Even when I’m upstairs and I hear the bells I call down: “I know what you are doing” and they slink off. Sometimes they just ignore me and play with the tree anyways, which is fine because the bottom row is all plastic balls they can play with as much as they like.

    I remember the first time one of our cats saw a Christmas tree, when he was a little kitten. I turned around for 10 secs, looked back and he was sitting proud on top of the tree. I laughed my ass off, until he realized he had no real way of getting down. So I laughed some more and fetched him off the tree. Good to get it out of the system I think, because he didn’t try that again.



  • Yeah I love Ubuntu, it’s really fine. But I think because it’s easy and for a lot of people their first Linux, it’s seen as like the baby version of Linux. So people bitch about it a lot, as if it’s somehow inferior to other distros. Like if you don’t compile everything from scratch you are somehow not worthy?

    Hard “Real programmer” vibes. https://xkcd.com/378/

    And yes, I use pico as a text editor, it’s fine really.


  • Wow! That’s really cool, Debian Potato was so hype back then. And every new release was amazing, I had Sarge running for so long. And I had a little home made router with Debian Sarge and an uptime of like 3 years. I had to replace the NIC on it, from a 10mbit coax only to a coax and UTP model because I was switching over to UTP. I didn’t want to shutdown the server, so I live swapped the ISA cards, and it actually worked!

    Those were the days.


  • Thorry84@feddit.nltolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldWho can relate?
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    20 days ago

    Nah I went over to camp Debian for a long time, switched when Debian Potato was released. Then when Debian kinda stalled I was lured into Ubuntu because they had the latest and greatest. I know it isn’t the cool choice these days, but I have stuck with Ubuntu ever since.