dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo ago
Maybe I should try reading the Bible at some point. Is it good literature? :P
It's kind of cliched.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo ago
At the least, all of the "em dashes"
—
are a pretty solid tell.
But yeah it's definitely trying too hard.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo 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
razorboy
1mo 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.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
pic attached in last message wasn't showing up. lets try this one.
So, as mentioned in previous weeks, I've been trying to TRONify my cargo bike and kids' bike helmets the last few weeks and I've never quite appreciated how much of small electronics work is shopping in general and specifically, shopping for plastic pieces of shit. This isn't what I thought I would struggle with. I'm a fairly skilled dev so I thought I would struggle with EE concepts or the dexterity required for soldering or even simply being able to work with a magnifying glass but no, shopping, which I find borderline triggering due to hatred of clutter, is the actual limiting factor for me.
And shopping for an enclosure for housing all of this junk is the challenge. For the bikes themselves I can use standard Hammond plastic enclosures and consumer battery packs, but for bike helmets all of the standard stuff adds way, way too much bulk.
The rough sketch of components I need housed are
- ESP32 board, mounted to a perfboard
- a boost converter to bring the 3.7v put out by the 18650 cell up to 12v for LED lights
- a buck converter to bring 12v down to 5.5 for the ESP32 board
- a charging board with USB-C[1]
- an SPST(?) switch for physically breaking the connection from the battery to everything else
- an N-channel MOSFET for controlling COB LEDs (if I supplement the WS2815s)
- a P-channel MOSFET for having the rest of the load shut off if it detects that a USB charger is connected
- nylon standoffs for the various boards
- a holder/receptacle for the 18650 battery itself
Finding an enclosure that isn't as bulky as shit for this seems impossible, so I'll probably have to 3d print something. Which means I need a 3d printer[2]. From my time being involved with a local Makerspace, my opinion of 3d printers is that they spend most of their time being broken, but I've heard from trusted advisors that that's because my experience has been with 3d printers made by the decadent and pathetic Western concerns and that the Bambu 3d printers from China have changed everything[3]
So... maybe that's my next purchase. Perhaps I can justify the 3d printer as some kind of educational value for the kids.
Does my experience here sound right so far? Small electronics success often hinges on shopping skill?
Notes
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I do see combination boost converter/USB chargers for 18650 cells, and that would cut down on complexity/bulk/work, but their amperage is much too low to run LED strips off of so I'm stuck buying individual components for this.
-
Though I think if I want a really cool looking transparent enclosure so we can see circuit boards and blinken lights I'll need acrylic covers? Which requires getting a laser cutter too? I wonder what educational value for kids these have...
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So long as you have no opsec concerns from running proprietary firmware that requires a cloud connection to do anything from a nation state that we might go to war with in the near future. Though I'd be kind of amused to see the worst that can happen.
Switching gears (ha), but to avoid making another post, I'll consolidate into this one.
Aliexpress.com has incredible deals but takes forever, so that stalls my TRON helmet project out.
So, in the meantime, I've gotten to triangle dodge charger skydome in my 3d game (pic attached) that was inspired by binge watching the Fast and the Furious series while feverish. I made some generic cyberspace background while waiting for the right time to take a 360 panorama pic of a skyline in my town.
I fixed the texture banding issue. The camera now follows the car. The car can steer and accelerate. It runs okay on my hardware. So... I guess the next priority is to make a race track and add some collision detection to this bitch? A computer controlled car to drive against? Maybe incorporate some engine revving sounds?
I suppose a true Ride or Die Homies game needs something more inspired than a race track though. Like outrunning a nuclear explosion. Or battling a mechanized raptor.
I should be doing this smart and using Unreal Engine or something, instead of writing a 3d engine from scratch, but I got into computers in the first place because I wanted to write a 3d engine (before getting distracted by the world of Linux and networking), so coming back to this feels like addressing some unresolved spiritual concerns.
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.
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