jon avatar

jon

@jon@kbin.social

Atmospheric water harvesting: can we get water out of thin air? (engineering.purdue.edu)

Earth’s atmosphere holds six times more fresh water than all of its rivers combined. So is it possible to harvest that water, in areas where people have no other fresh water source? Purdue University researchers have crunched the numbers, and have the data to show which atmospheric water harvesting methods work best in...

jon,
jon avatar

The problem is that the places where this technology would be useful also happen to be the places with little to no humidity. You can't pull water out of the air if there isn't any.

The places where this would be useful are places with high humidity, but then water sources aren't usually an issue. You'd have to have a region where it's very humid, but doesn't have access to drinking water. I don't imagine those are particularly common. Such a region would probably benefit more from water treatment than pulling it out of the air.

jon,
jon avatar

You guys tried this once. It didn't work.

jon,
jon avatar

Sometimes you want people to leave you alone on the bus, but don't actually want to piss yourself.

jon,
jon avatar

Death is inevitable. Nothing I do will avoid it, I can't escape it, and it will get me eventually. Thus, there's no point worrying about it. If I live my life in fear of death, I'll be just as dead as if I didn't.

I'm not religious, so as far as I know this is the only existence I'll ever have. I didn't exist for billions of years, I exist now, and then I won't exist for billions of years. In this brief window of consciousness, all I can do is live my life and try to experience it as much as possible. When I die, all I can hope for is that I was a good person who left the world in a better state than how I found it.

I won't lie and say death doesn't scare me. As I get closer, I'm sure it'll scare me even more. I don't want to die, so I'll take whatever steps I can to avoid it. But to allow it to preoccupy my thoughts does me no good.

jon,
jon avatar

11 of me could probably take a buffalo. We might lose one or two of us, but come out on top.

jon,
jon avatar

We're obviously in 'what if' territory, but I'd imagine those games would have sold even better if they'd been in a better state at launch. A lot of people requested refunds after purchase, and a lot of those people probably never picked up the game at a later date. I know there's people like me that were going to buy Cyberpunk at launch and held off once the criticisms came in. I picked the game up for maybe 50% off in a steam sale later on, which means CD Projekt Red only got half the money out of me that they were going to get. It also means that once a game gets polished into a better state, you have to restart your marketing campaign to attract those people that you originally chased off.

absamma, to random
@absamma@toolsforthought.rocks avatar

It's been more than a week since my wife and I watched at our local cinema and I still can't stop looking into it. Most importantly, the moral question of the bombings themselves. If indeed the bombings didn't influence the thinking of Japan's government as some new narratives suggest, then why did Emperor Hirohito mention it in his speech announcing Japan's surrender? Obviously it did play a role in conjunction with the USSR's war declaration.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast

jon,
jon avatar

@absamma It was the one-two punch of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki plus Soviet declaration of war. Important to remember is that the Japanese war council was deadlocked on whether to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. Hirohito himself broke the deadlock to decide to accept the terms of surrender. Even then, that was followed by a failed coup to prevent the surrender.

Point is, Japan barely surrendered. I'm not convinced that if we change one aspect of how things went (don't drop the bombs, drop only one bomb, Soviets don't declare war) that a surrender happens. That leads to either further atomic bombs or a mainland invasion, both of which lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more. Soviet intervention could even lead to a division of Japan similar to how Germany was handled.

This sounds horrible to say, but the way things went may have been the best case scenario, at least if you only look at this as a metric of how many people have to die. You can object to the usage of atomic weapons in any capacity, which I don't think is necessarily a wrong opinion, but I don't think there was a clean way out of this.

What makes a look alternative? Just ask yourself: do you see the day to day average person wearing this? No? Does it catch your eye for being different? Yes? Then it is likely alternative fashion! This category is massive.

Think you don't know what qualifies as alternative fashion? I'm here to tell you that you do! Every time you notice someone's outfit being unique and different, you have identified alternative fashion. As said in the title, this is a massive category with an infinite amount of subcategories....

jon,
jon avatar

Maybe a sidebar rule clarifying your stance on videos? Is this an image only magazine, or are videos allowed if the focus is fashion? Could someone post a music video while calling out "I really like the outfit X wears in the music video for Y"?

jon,
jon avatar

Yeah, when trying to guess what would count the first thing I thought of was '70s punk rock culture, and Joan Jett is pretty awesome.

jon,
jon avatar

I think better advice would be "invest/save" in general. You could just throw money into a mutual fund, index fund, savings account, whatever. If you get a job with an employer matched 401k, max that out. I don't think you need to worry about trying to play the stock market by buying individual stocks. You'll end up spending way too much time doing it for minimal gains over an index fund, and a lot of the time you're just basically gambling on what companies you think are going to do well.

jon,
jon avatar

BS looks better than AAS, but honestly that'll only really apply for your first couple jobs. Once you've got a few years of experience, your specific education matters less and less. I will say that a BS is "better" in terms of teaching you more, but your Associate's credits will transfer if you ever decide to go that route.

Also, once you pick up one language, you basically know them all (with some obvious exceptions). If you know PowerShell, you can pick up Bash pretty easy. If you know JavaScript, you can pick up Python. If you know Python, Java is pretty easy. If you know Java, you pretty much know C#. Learning a language becomes just figuring out how that languages does things. Picking up a new language goes from being a process that takes a year or two and schooling to taking maybe a week and watching some videos. There are some exceptions (Python doesn't tell you much about SQL, and systems languages like C/C++ are their own animal).

jon,
jon avatar

I think this is a good point. Work doesn't have to be a passion of yours. It shouldn't suck the joy out of your life, but there's nothing wrong with with just seeing your job as a job. I currently work as a software engineer for an insurance company. I don't give two shits about insurance. But my team is good, the work is fine, they let me work from home, so i don't mind it.

jon,
jon avatar

It's tricky. Depending on what direction you take, CS can be very math heavy or not. If you get into algorithmic stuff, deep learning, data analysis, etc., that has a lot of math. But if you focus on, for example, front end development, there's not that much.

I won't lie and say CS has no math. At my university, you were able to avoid higher level calculus by doing a bachelor's of arts instead of a bachelor's of science. Calculus 2 is usually the highest level you have to take, which focuses primarily on integration. I was kinda in your boat of being hesitant to do CS because of the math, but I ended up minoring in it. The CS-focused math is mostly logic stuff and discrete math, which I feel is way easier than calculus. And honestly, calculus isn't nearly as bad as its reputation would have you think (until Vector Calculus, that almost broke me).

Look into it, but I'll say that while the math is there, it's not as bad as you're probably thinking. And if you know you're not going into heavy algorithmic stuff, see if there's a path that avoids most of it. And once you're out of school, you'll never touch calculus again (unless you do a lot of physics, maybe? Game dev, perhaps?)

jon,
jon avatar

Here's an oldy. J. Bruce Ismay.

J. Bruce Ismay was chairman of the White Star Line and passenger aboard the Titanic on the night it sank. He's been given a lot of shit throughout history for cheaping out on safety features of the ship, such as not carrying enough lifeboats, using cheap parts and manufacturing that contributed to the sinking, and insisting the ship move at full speed through ice fields to break records. He also took a seat on a lifeboat, saving himself at the cost of another passenger.

Except it's all bullshit.

Titanic did not cheap out on parts. It was a top of the line ship with industry leading safety features. There is no evidence that Ismay was pushing the ship to break any records. It wasn't even a ship built for speed, focusing more on oppulance and luxury. While Titanic didn't have enough lifeboats, it did carry more than it was legally required to. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, as they didn't have enough time to launch the lifeboats they had. And Ismay didn't "steal" a lifeboat spot. Most early lifeboats were being launched way below capacity, as people didn't want to get on them (believing that the ship wouldn't sink, or wouldn't sink before a rescue ship would arrive to save them). Ismay took a lifeboat seat because one was available. He didn't steal it. The only thing Ismay really did wrong is not die that night as the public felt he ought to have.

jon,
jon avatar

You can be as selfish as you want when it comes to dating. You don't have to do anyone any favors. You can reject people over the most petty of reasons. That's all fine. The person who has to live with it is you, after all.

There are only two people in a relationship, and neither of them should be required to settle for the other. Even if your reasons are bigoted and stupid, no one can make you date someone.

jon,
jon avatar

I think Truth Social is based on Mastodon, but I don't think it federated.

jon,
jon avatar

If the war on drugs had ended and the root causes of the cartels were gone, but they were refusing to give up power without a fight, then maaaaybe I could approve of a scenario where the military intervened to break that stronghold. But that's not what's being proposed here.

If we send in the military, we turn Mexico into a war zone, terrorize it's populace, and then leave as a new cartel forms to fulfill the void of business requirements left by the old one. It would accomplish less than actively choosing to do nothing.

jon,
jon avatar

The problem is that this should be the job of congress to pass a student debt relief bill. But congress can't come together to decide what color the sky is much less major economic reform.

jon,
jon avatar

Works on contingency? No, money down!

jon,
jon avatar

You Russians sure are a contentious people.

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

insist on pronouncing "godot" as "go do"

jon,
jon avatar

@aeva With emphasis on the second syllable, so it's pronounced G'Dough.

jon,
jon avatar

The OST from Persona 5, easily my most listened to soundtrack.

jon,
jon avatar

I wonder if it would be a good idea to automate this to an extent? If a moderator isn't active in a magazine for a specified amount of time, they're given a 30 day notice that they're about to lose moderator access. If they don't respond, they're removed as a moderator. If no moderator is present on the magazine, you allow applications for users to become a new moderator. That could be admin approved or opened to the community for a vote. If no one applies and the magazine is truly dead, either appoint an admin as moderator or maybe just auto delete the magazine.

jon,
jon avatar

Go ahead! I'd love to get a community over here running and we could use the jumpstart

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