dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
I'm closer to having a prototype for a single helmet working. Right now I'm doing the grunt work of cutting WS2815 LED strips into segments, putting them into sleeves (because I accidentally bought one without sleeves, oops) and then wiring GND DO and 12V on the contacts of one to the GND DI and 12V on the contacts of the next. In some cases I have to use a coffee stirrer stick that my kids have been stealing from coffee shops to nudge the strips through the sleeve since they get so stuck.
I'm sort of getting the hang of the soldering crafting. I need to make absolutely sure I split the contacts in half evenly, which is tricky since they reflect on the cutting tool and the cutting tool is like, the size of the pads so it's hard to see around them[1]. Then I need to fill the contact with solder, then add solder to the exposed wire end, then kind of press the wire against the contact and put the solder iron tip on top until it kind of sinks into the pool of solder on the contact, then pull the iron away while still keeping the wire and pressure in place for a few more seconds. Then I can tug on it and it'll remain nice and together.
I can't quite find a way to do this while they're suspended on helping hands[2], I have to keep them all pressed against a silicone mat and weighted down with other random tools, which doesn't look very pro?
Anyway soldering to contact pads is resistant to tugs but not invincible. I put so much strain on one that a contact pad ripped out of the LED strip. I guess the problem is the 18AWG wire from the hardware store I bought is too stiff, and I should have bought silicone wire for that since it's more supple and bouncy and won't put pressure on them. Yet another thing where I order $7 worth on Amazon to keep things moving then order a big batch from aliexpress.com[3] for $4 to arrive whenever.
Man waiting for stuff from Aliexpress is torture. One batch is in the US as of 4 days ago but it's still waiting to clear US customs.
One thing I'm looking forward to with the kids' helmets is that I ordered ESP32-C3s[4], which are RISC-V based and also much smaller profile. They're like, a whole board with USB-C connector that's postage stamp sized whereas the ESP32 Xtensa I was using is more like, uh, the size of a bic lighter with 1.5x the width? It's kind of sexy how small you can make controllers. I don't know why I find this so impressive, the typical iPhone smartphone is a much bigger miracle of engineering but not as cool for some reason.
- I'm sure there's a perfect small precision cutting tool for $2 at Aliexpress
- Or maybe my helping hands are just not full featured enough. Maybe I should check Aliexpress for incredible deals
- Aliexpress!
- Surprisingly, the Aliexpress price for 3 was equivalent to 3 from Amazon. Huh?
--
Back to the Homies: Ride or Die 3d game, I got a track rendered now and have been doing some minor C++ refactoring since the last time I touched C++ was in 2014 and there's some new features IG. I'm using meson to build but thought I would have more compatibility with external libraries if I used cmake, but cmake is so much more baroque I'm backing off.
Now that I have a NASCAR style track rendered I can work on bounds checking, and add some sound effects of metal grinding if I bounce against the wall. ChatGPT suggests I use SDL_mixer.h, which is an easy lift since I'm already using SDL2.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
Maybe I'm especially retarded but if I was house husband I'd probably outsource so much of the food and cleaning because I'd lose my mind trying to plan the day/week and stick to it and go to pieces if something came up that threw it off. And I'd also feel like none of this shit fills my cup and I'd be miserable.
To say nothing of how much worse it would be if I added kids to take care of.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
While it's true that he could almost certainly do all the actual tasks, it's very likely that he couldn't do it happily, without becoming bored and alienated, which is actually quite rare and valuable. Assuming, of course, that his description is accurate.
I spend a lot of time around hippies where the women are into archaic revival stuff. They love to pick fruit and can it, do sewing and quilts, cook every meal at home, make candles, split firewood, stoke the fire in the wood stove, let a man slaughter but then pluck and butcher chickens, tend hens for eggs, pick up raw milk, worry 100x too much about recycling, run a homebrew kit, etc
(Ironically, the only thing that they don't bring back is washboard laundry. Washing machines are totally cool with hippies)
Anyway, housewifery was actually really fucking hard? Pretty sure the average modern man would have a nervous breakdown if they had to be a 17th century housewife.
It's a lot easier than it used to be but the level that women think on if they own housewifing is certainly something I feel like a tourist in and would be shitty at no matter how much a feminist dad I wanted to be.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
light canoodling at most
Right so I think she wants to be slutty but then got anxious that she was coming off as too slutty and needed you to let her know she wasn't a slut so she can go back to feeling free to act like a slut.
I think you were supposed to tell her she's not slutty but in a fun and flirty way. How do you do that? I dunno!
I probably would've said something like "my policy is to not kiss until at least the fifth date" which sounds not true but wait could he be serious but also changes the subject from her not sluttyness to my not sluttyness.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
Just finished Surface Detail from the Culture series. Kind of stunned by Iain Banks' forecasting. Of course the invention of consciousness upload means we would create everlasting Hell for some people to go to. Probably it'll happen 5 minutes after the guy who invents consciousness upload wins his Nobel Prize.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
I could imagine 20 years from now where an increasing share of international business is done in Chinese rather than English, I guess.
It's not a huge win, just possibly more useful than Spanish.
I'm not asking the internet. I'm asking themotte.org.
Also, it's still an expense to go visit all of the schools. If a dozen people here said "lol no, this is bad, here's why" and nobody had a convincing counterargument I would not bother.
The responses here have been helpful!
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
Maybe I should try reading the Bible at some point. Is it good literature? :P
It's kind of cliched.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
Just on the language piece, Spanish is absolutely and infinitely more useful in the US.
I'm okay at Spanish and haven't found it very useful. Whereas I feel like I'm somewhat blind to one of the largest cultural and geopolitical transformations of our time by not being able to understand Chinese.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
Does every HOA start imploding on harassing people over trivialities after they achieve their primary mission of keeping human garbage out of the neighborhood?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
It's rather amazing how successful Hef was at this. Even women that don't like their husbands' porn consumption find Playboy's brand tolerable, maybe even civilizing.
A GF bought me a subscription to Playboy for my birthday actually, back when it was a thing.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
Oh I just don't believe in language transfer skills.
They all seem useless in terms of utility. Chinese maybe slightly less so because China is at least an ascending global superpower with billions of speakers.
We homeschool our kid but this might be fraying our nerves too much.
The public schools here are generally terrible, and the private schools are either religious or hippie-woo garbage that I don't want to waste time at.
There are a handful of Immersion schools, however. Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.
We're white but my thinking is
- Chinese Immersion School will be full of kids of more upwardly mobile Chinese immigrants
- Their children will be better behaved and not a toxic/criminal influence on my kids, the way median white kids in my community would be
- Their children will be smarter and be a positive influence on my kids
- The school will probably have better academics and not that much on the liberal arts/woo shit because of the Chinese parents
- The rest of the white kids there are sent there because their parents all know this too
- To the extent that learning foreign languages is useful, Chinese is probably the least useless one out of the rest of those
Yes this is racist. But also... accurate? Thoughts?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
I think that sourcing the basics, e.g. a breadboard, wired resistors, capacitors, LEDs, jumper wires, some opamps, is not that hard.
Yeah this part is easy if you know to get the $10 starter kit.
If you increase your budget to 200$, then different people will want very different things. Matrix LCDs, TTL logic chips, myriads of sensors, servos. Some will want passive SMD components (with different preferences to size).
Alas, these electronics vendors do not typically sell to hobbyists. Presumably, cutting five chips from a reel and packing them for sale is not in itself very profitable, but simply a prerequisite to sell a reel of your chips to companies, eventually. Unlike corporations, private persons rarely scale up their projects to a scale where serious money gets spent, and complying with the consumer protection regulations is just not worth it.
Agreed, market failures abounds. Except in China?
So you sometimes find yourself in the situation where you know that four different companies carry the chip you want, but none of them want to sell to you. (These days, it might be possible that you can get it from China, if you don't mind the wait, though.)
I have 3 different shipments on the way from Ali Express, with 3 different orders in each one, each order for $2-3 containing just 3-5 chips cut from a reel or whatever. And the average price of each shipment is about $11 (>$10 is the free shipping level). The combination of cheap labor and postal arbitrage (China gets some preferential extremely ludicrously cheap shipping to the US, cheaper than US-US domestic) is unreal. It's almost outrageous enough that I sympathize with Trump. It does take 10-12 days to arrive though.
Hey thanks for the wealth of excellent info, as usual!
On the power side, I'd at least consider 3S LiPo battery pack, running the LEDs from that voltage, and just using one buck converter for ESP32 (which can be a tiny 5 watt one). That's only a nominal "12v", and really a 10ish-12.6 range, so you'll want to double-check the datasheet for your specific LEDs, but it's well within spec for the WS2815s.
Why consider? I was a bit freaked out by LiPo watching videos of them burst into flames if they get ruptured. Maybe not something I want to attach to my helmet. But perhaps the issue is just as prevalent with 18650s?
You can get 3S 18650 chargers cheap (eg here, not endorsed), though premade packs are so widely available (and tend to have much better low-current protection) that it's hard to justify building your own packs unless you need 5+ amp.
A friend has been going crazy trying to find a charger that takes USB-C and can charge 2S safely. Some reviews on that link say it doesn't do proper balance charging :/
And even once you have your 'jellybean' parts together, you'll always need something specific to a given project, or find that your old parts aren't available anymore, yada yada. Breaking projects into modules can help, but then you're juggling them, too.
It's really something else. A box of parts will arrive and then I'll make a bit of progress but realize I need, e.g. clear heat shrink tubing to make this thing happen the way I want and then it's another 2 days if I pay way too much on Amazon for it or 11 days to get it from Aliexpress. There's just no powering through some online tutorials and banging this stuff out in a weekend if you're coming from it so cold.
If you're only needing a handful and had little or no interest in 3d printing, seriously consider various fabrication services, or local marker spaces (or some libraries), rather than buying a full 3d printer.
The irony is my local library and (non-profit, communist) maker space all have 3d printers (multiple, even), but they're always broken. But maybe hiring people is not a bad move.
For flexible, light-weight, shaped transparent pieces with little 3d complexity, my go-to has been vacuum-forming. Big ones get surprisingly complicated fast, but for anything under a couple feet square you can get away with stuff you probably have in your house, and the big trouble becomes sourcing the right types of plastic.
TIL!
I'd also recommend considering Traditional Manufacturing -- just as there's a lot of people 3d printing what could be made with a handsaw in ten seconds, you may well be engineering something that could be sewn together in a good half-hour. If you want something flexible and comfortable for long-term wear, sewing is kinda the way to go. You'll still want some boxes for the batteries and protoboards to provide impact resistance, but it'll give a lot more space to consider multiple small project boxes or such, and those are a lot easier to source.
This opened my eyes a bit. As such I'm now currently trying to get pieces of acrylic, cutting them to size and seeing how sandwiching the ESP32 etc and wrapping the whole thing in a rubber gasket for light waterproofing works out. This has the bonus of looking really cool since the internal LEDs and circuitry are visible, if it works.
Though for prototyping I might just wrap it all in an ESD packet and tape it to my helmet, like some kind of silicon organ pouch.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
I'm amazed that it could ever go any other way. Schools that get paid to give out degrees that open career doors have inherited a commons. The rare school that doesn't succumb to pressure to pass everyone is like the fisherman saying no, we've caught enough, while surrounded by competitors pulling fish out of the water by the ton.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
So many tech companies have recruiting databases that could probably tell you pretty easily the fail rate of candidates by CS degree from each university.
Based on my experience interviewing, CMU and Stanford are the most solid. But this is mid-2010s era.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
At the least, all of the "em dashes"
—
are a pretty solid tell.
But yeah it's definitely trying too hard.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
Do police/detectives normally have a hotline that they can call for immediate legal advice on a bust?
That's badass.
Anyway why isn't the answer:
"Ask him what's in the basket. Then search it. Based on what you find you can testify to the jury that you heard a baby cry, or that the suspect admitted there was a dead baby in there"
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
In very serious orgs there's a smartphone app called PagerDuty that an operations center or monitoring system can raise alerts to that ignore your do not disturb/silent mode settings.
Google had something internally as well that was very similar.
I asked ChatGPT to help me drop a bomb on Reddit that would cause a civil war and we settled on this after many back and forths. The idea is to drop it on /r/latestagecapitalism and watch the ensuing mayhem. But now I'm chickening out. So, I thought I'd share it here instead.
Title: What if Capitalism Made Everyone Gay? No, Seriously, Shut the Fuck Up and Listen.
Alright, /r/latestagecapitalism. I’m not high. I’m not trolling. I’ve just been sitting here watching this clownfuck society collapse in on itself and I’ve got a spicy goddamn theory.
What if the reason more kids are gay, trans, nonbinary, neopronoun forest deities or whatever—isn't just because they're finally free to be themselves—but because capitalism made them that way? Yeah. I said it. And no, this isn't a tradcath “return to tradition” screed. This is a fascist critique of identity as firmware, updated quarterly for market viability.
Let’s jack in.
(1.) Capitalism Needs You to Be Broken
Capitalism is a psychological malware that runs on alienation. It needs you to feel off-balance, insecure, incomplete—because if you’re ever actually okay, you might stop consuming. So it goes to work at the deepest level: your identity.
Your gender. Your orientation. Your sense of self.
You think the proliferation of labels and micro-identities is some grassroots flowering of personal expression? Fuck no. It’s capitalism running psychological A/B tests on the population to see which neuroses convert best.
(2.) Sexuality and Gender as Market Vectors
The rainbow is now a goddamn SKU. There’s a Pride version of every product imaginable. Queerness isn’t subversive—it’s a fully integrated revenue stream. You don’t come out of the closet, you onboard.
The LGBTQIA+™ community has become a lifestyle subscription service. Buy the aesthetic. Stream the content. Take the quiz. Choose your flavor. Get the merch.
This is identity in the age of the algorithm: endlessly refinable, infinitely targetable, frictionlessly monetized.
(3.) Traditional Institutions Were Just DRM
The family? Religion? Local culture? Those were all clunky, analog forms of user control—DRM for your psyche. Capitalism smashed them, not to liberate you, but to own your operating system.
So now, without those legacy systems, you’re adrift—and conveniently open to onboarding. You get your personality from social media and your worldview from brands. You’re not “expressing” yourself—you’re beta-testing identity presets rolled out via TikTok and Reddit.
You are the product and the lab rat.
(4.) Western Liberalism as Exploit Kit
The USA doesn’t export “freedom” anymore—it exports a cultural OS, bloated with identity plugins and DRM-crippled empathy. It colonizes not with guns but with Netflix, Pornhub, and fucking Instagram.
You don’t even know it’s happening. You’re the end user, clicking “Accept” on terms you’ll never read.
Russia, China, Hungary—these places look at our gender politics and don’t see liberation. They see a psyop. And honestly? They’re wrong about the moral panic, but maybe not wrong about the mechanism.
(5.) Everything Becomes Aesthetic Garbage
You think identity is deep? Capitalism thinks it’s just themed UI skins for your meat. Something to optimize, decorate, and throw in the cart.
Gay? There’s a starter pack.
Transmasc? There’s a Discord server and an Etsy pin set.
Neuroqueer lunarwitch? Here’s a Patreon to support.
We’re not people anymore. We’re marketable vibes.
(6.) Divide, Distract, Demoralize
The beauty of this system is that it keeps you fighting over who gets to exist while the billionaires strip-mine the fucking biosphere.
Bathroom bills. Pronoun discourse. “Is X valid?” Meanwhile, Elon is launching space dildos and the Earth is on fire.
Capitalism doesn’t care what color your flag is, as long as you’re too busy waving it to notice the extraction happening behind the scenes.
TL;DR:
No, capitalism didn’t invent queerness. But it absolutely hijacked it. Refactored it. Wrapped it in HTML5 and sold it to you as “authenticity.” It’s not liberation—it’s feature creep.
We are no longer gendered. We are versioned.
Oh, yeah. Seems like people want small low-power computers to drive widgets rather than make an IBM PC from 1986 on a cocktail napkin.
Ideally all of this should could be end-to-end done with CAD software, or by writing out a .spec file and uploading it to a magic box or web site and then a microwave dings and it's ready. Or it arrives in the mail. Maybe one day...
Maybe it's possible to 3d print ghetto PCBs and also 3d print conductive filament and snap it into place?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
It's really the most hellish part. I'm trying to just take it easy and not worry about how soon I get this done to avoid stressing.
Starter kits help a bit, but they're only like $10 whereas I want something like $100-200 that contains the top 1000 things people use for, e.g. Arduino or LEDs.
I fantasize about taking a two week vacation to Shenzhen and hiring some Chinese EEs that speak English to show me around and going home with a suitcase full of stuff I bought off the street.
Pic of game progress. Still mostly the same as last week but can't come here empty-handed.
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