tunetardis

@tunetardis@lemmy.ca

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tunetardis, (edited )

I’m with you on this one. There are lyrics on almost every single track for crying out loud. Throw us instrumental lovers a bone won’t you? Songs that are lyrically driven but are otherwise super-repetitive instrumentally tend to put me to sleep.

What I love about concerts is when the band goes off script and just starts jamming. Even a 5-minute drum solo will have me grinning ear to ear, and that’s what I’ll be remembering on the way home.

tunetardis,

I have only written potentially life-threatening code once in my life. It had to do with voltage/current regulation in the firmware of a high-powered instrument used by field workers at the company where I work. It was a white-knuckled week I spent on just a single page of code, checking and re-checking it countless times and unit testing it in every conceivable way I could imagine.

tunetardis,

I think I could get very nervous coding for the military, depending on what sort of application I was working on. If it were some sort of administrative database, that doesn’t sound so bad. If it were a missile guidance system, on man! A single bug and there goes a village full of civilians. Even something without direct human casualties could be nerve-wracking. Like if it were your code which bricked a billion-dollar military satellite.

Speaking of missile guidance systems, I once met someone who worked a stint for a military contractor. He told me a story about a junior dev who discovered an egregious memory leak in a cruise missile’s software. The senior dev then told him “Yeah, I know about that one. But the memory leak would take an hour before it brings the system down and the missile’s maximum flight time is less than that, so no problem!” I think coding like that would just drive me into some OCD hell.

tunetardis,

In terms of consoles, I got the most enjoyment out of Super Nintendo. I think that’s in part because my kids were still young at the time and we played a lot of coop mode games on it before they got older and their tastes started diverging from mine.

It was the golden age of platformers I guess, and the focus was still solidly on game mechanics over production. I especially liked Bomberman. The gameplay was just perfect the way the challenge scaled naturally even as you got upgrades or added a 2nd player. Literally a blast!

tunetardis,

Aw man that’s a good list!

tunetardis,

I totally get where people are going with eliminating dictators and what not, but knowing myself as well as I do… yeah, you’d probably find me down at the Chinese buffet.

tunetardis,

Several years ago, I went under the knife and the whole day from the point they put me under is a total blank. It’s unsettling because I am told I carried on conversations with the doctor, family members, etc. after initially coming to from anaesthesia, but it’s only starting the following morning when I woke up in a regular hospital bed that I could start remembering again.

tunetardis,

I’ve come to collect the ren…ah shit!

I've noticed a lot of chill religious people on Lemmy.

Idk why I’m mentioning it but compared to a lot of other online platforms where if religion is being mentioned outside of a religious community it is really in your face on Lemmy it seems like when it is mentioned outside of that kind of community it seems relevant to whatever they are saying and are generally nice....

tunetardis,

Based on my personal observations, there are sort of like 3 rings to a religion. The outermost contains the vast majority of adherents who are pretty casual in their faith. If they are of some Christian denomination say, they’ll show up for Christmas or Easter services and go their separate ways otherwise. The 2nd ring contains people who attend services regularly but are non-evangelical. They are devout in their faith but not pushy about it.

Then finally, there is this innermost ring of evangelicals who make it their mission to tell you how great it is to find God and can be pushy enough to make a priest cringe. People from the outer rings generally try to avoid this group, but they tend to be the most active online. I guess maybe lemmy has yet to be overrun by them?

tunetardis,

Yeah that tracks. I don’t see a lot of 3rd ring people running a soup kitchen. It’s 2nd ring people who aren’t out there to proselytize.

tunetardis,

When I first heard the term “fediverse”, it immediately made me think of some sort of vast interplanetary network. And let’s face it: a fediverse-like model is really what you would need if you had settlements scattered throughout the solar system. A monolithic, centralized service would be awful, given the reality of communication lag and likely limited bandwidth.

So let’s say lemmy (or more generally activitypub) were to go interplanetary. How would that work out? You set up your first instance on Mars. Any content that’s posted there will be immediately available to your fellow Martians. Earthlings who subscribe may also be able to view it as their instances cache the content, albeit after some delay.

But the trouble starts when Earthlings want to start contributing to the discussion. If they have to wait the better part of an hour to get a single comment lodged, it’s going to get old fast.

So you would need to allow the Earth side to branch off to some extent from what’s happening on Mars. Then eventually, something like a git merge would try to bring it all back together? I wonder if that would work?

tunetardis,

So you’re saying the comments themselves get cached on the local instance where the user is registered before being synced with the remote community-hosting instance?

I honestly don’t know how these things work internally, but had assumed the comments needed to go straight to the remote instance given the way you can’t comment once said instance goes down? You can still read the cached content though.

tunetardis,

I did bike commute to a degree with a normal bike but I do so far more often now with the ebike. What’s interesting to me is that my fitbit says I’m actually getting more exercise per week now since I ride more consistently, even if the intensity is not as great as it once was.

With the regular bike, I could get so wiped after one day that I’d be too tired/sore to ride the next. And there were other factors that would affect whether I would ride. Is there a stiff headwind today? Is it a heat wave or is the air quality low? Might I have to make a side-trip in the middle of my work day that will wear me out even more?

The ebike changed all that. It also changed the route I take to work. Now I ride through a ravine park I used to avoid because of all the climbing it would entail once I need to leave it. So it’s a much more pleasant experience being far from traffic, which encourages me all the more. Honestly, I had no idea how transformative getting an ebike would be?

tunetardis,

So far so good… For me, Shoppers is harder to avoid than Loblaws or No Frills, but we’ll see how it goes.

What are some free interests/things/hobbies you can do in the city?

I live alone and I’m just wasting away my time here. It’s actually making me very depressed to be honest. I do live in the city which makes think there ought to be at least something to do out here. Though I can’t really afford to spent money on it every day....

tunetardis,

The city where I live has a musical instrument lending library. I don’t know how common these are? Ours started when a cherished local musician passed away and his eclectic collection became the library. Over the years, more people have donated instruments and there is an annual festival to raise funds for their upkeep. (As a local musician, I’m actually playing at said festival today.)

Anyway, it works just like a regular library. You get your library card and check out an instrument and it doesn’t cost you a penny. And there are all kinds of videos online these days to give you pointers on how to play. I guess if you get really serious, you’ll probably want some one-on-one tutoring, but if you’re just doing it for kicks and don’t have any plans to join a band or whatever, you can just have some fun and see how far you can get on your own?

tunetardis,

I seem to recall reading somewhere that these have better cold weather performance than lithium-ion? As a Canadian, I made a mental note this.

tunetardis,

Is this official though, or wishful thinking on the part of Cameron?

tunetardis,

Fair enough. I’m just looking for some independent confirmation as this is pretty big news.

tunetardis,

They’re somewhat more capable now that we have the walrus (:=) operator.

tunetardis,

Can you use it to initialize vars outside the scope of the lambda?

No, that’s not what it’s for. It lets you define a temporary local variable within an expression. This is useful in situations where you might want to use the same value more than once within the expression. In a regular function, you would just define a variable first and then use it as many times as you want. But until the walrus operator came along, you couldn’t define a variable within a lambda expression.

Can you give an example?

Ok, I’m trying to think of a simple example. Let’s say you had a database that maps student IDs to records contain their names. To keep things simple, I’ll just make it plain old dict. And then you have a list of student IDs. You want to sort these IDs using the student names in the form “last, first” as the key. So you could go:


<span style="color:#323232;">>>> student_recs = {1261456: {"first": "Harry", "last": "Potter"}, 532153: {"first": "Ron", "last": "Weasley"}, 632453: {"first": "Hermione", "last": "Granger"}}
</span><span style="color:#323232;">>>> student_ids = [1261456, 532153, 632453]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">>>> sorted(student_ids, key = lambda i: (rec := student_recs[i])['last'] + ', ' +  rec['first'])
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[632453, 1261456, 532153]
</span>

The problem here is that student_ids doesn’t contain the student names. You need use the ID to look up the record that contains those. So let’s say the first ID i is 1261456. That would mean:


<span style="color:#323232;">rec := student_recs[i]
</span>

evaluates to:


<span style="color:#323232;">{"first": "Harry", "last": "Potter"}
</span>

Then we are effectively going:


<span style="color:#323232;"> rec['last'] + ', ' + rec['first']
</span>

which should give us:


<span style="color:#323232;"> 'Potter, Harry'
</span>

Without the := you would either have to perform 2 student_recs[i] look-ups to get each name which would be wasteful or replace the lambda with a regular function where you can write rec = student_recs[i] on its own line and then use it.

Am I making any sense?

tunetardis,

Actually, now that I think of it, there’s no reason you need to join the 2 names into a single str. You could just leave it as a tuple of last, first and Python will know what to do in comparing them.


<span style="color:#323232;">>>> sorted(student_ids, key = lambda i: ((rec := student_recs[i])['last'], rec['first']))
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[632453, 1261456, 532153]
</span>

So the lambda would be returning (‘Potter’, ‘Harry’) rather than ‘Potter, Harry’. But whatever. The := part is still the same.

tunetardis,

I remember ads claiming it was cutting edge nanotechnology! And I thought oh cool, you mean like there are tiny robots running around in the shampoo? But no, it was microplastics.

If we took material like rock from space and got it back to Earth enough times, would Earth grow as a planet?

As the title says. I’m actually thinking about this hard with my friends because everything that’s produced on Earth stays on Earth so it doesn’t change size, but what if it’s not from Earth but it stays on Earth?...

tunetardis,

This happens naturally in the form of meteors streaking through the sky. Each one of those is adding a tiny amount of mass to the planet.

But you’ve got me wondering about something now. When a large asteroid hits the planet, it obviously adds its own mass, but it also kicks up a lot of debris into space. Some percentage of that will reach orbital escape velocity and never come back. But I honestly don’t know if there is a net mass increase or decrease after such an event? We’re generally concerned about other more pressing matters in such a scenario!

tunetardis,

Wow, that is fascinating!

Makes me wonder about the other direction, going into the near infrared as opposed to UV. I remember from a class in remote sensing that many plants are actually most reflective in that band (more so than in green, even). NIR air photos are often used by biologists to get an indication of the health of a forest. But I have no idea whether animals also reflect NIR? It may be that most animals cannot see in that band in the first place, so it would not offer any camouflage advantage.

tunetardis, (edited )

From what other posters are saying, it may be the other way around? That is, most mammals cannot see green, so it doesn’t matter from a camouflage perspective among mammals. Humans (and primates in general) are an outlier in this repect.

Bird of prey can, though, so there’s that.

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