I really liked .io when those started popping up, I thought it would be perfect if I had any silly little personal API projects.

Their popularity means they are way too expensive for that. Any hope of me actually buying a domain is really shrinking because the more I learned about the web the less inclined I am to have my personal info out there this way. I know there are privacy respecting ways to get a domain, but you know what I mean

Workers and Resources Soviet Republic is an automation simulator masquerading as a city builder.

The most played game right now on my Steam account is Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, an automation game disguised as a city builder, with obscenely detailed mechanics. You don’t buy buildings, you have to have functional construction industries to set them up. You don’t magically draw colored lines to set up bus routes like in SimCity, you have to buy buses at the border one by one and then set up a maintenance schedule. You don’t highlight a dark patch on the map and suddenly have a metallurgy industry like in Cities: Skylines, the fuck you don’t, you need to set up a coal industry and rail transport over the course of thirty odd hours before you start cranking out steel. And that’s without even considering food production, alcoholism management, pollution from the necessary chemicals industry, storage and handling of fresh meat, and of course, citizen loyalty to the Party. It’s a fucking insane game by and for people who probably have to be insane themselves.

I wrote that in a post about my strange relationship with games and media in general in my blog a few weeks ago.

Definitely one of the most distinctly engrossing games I’ve ever played. Seriously. Your cities will be ugly as fuck because it’s genuinely difficult to progress.

Reading your post over again maybe it’s a bit on the extreme side and not what you’re asking for. This is the most extreme city management I’ve ever played. Your sewers have to flow downhill, citizens driving in personal cars is something that happens after like 300 hours, if you sell too much oil too fast you can make oil cheaper on the global market and lose money. I hate it, I’ve wasted my life on it. It’s great I want to play more.

I had this exact conversation with an (online) coworker. I will just feel compelled to drink cups of water, sometimes multiple in a row, and feel refreshed. They don’t exactly taste good but we’re wired to find it pleasant.

My coworker said he had to basically remember to drink water. When he’s exercising it’s more instinctual.

Well I was shocked the first time I actually met this coworker, at the Dubai office where he works from. The water there felt wrong! Apparently I was having good tasting water my whole life. I was kind of dehydrated the entire trip. Literally all the water there didn’t feel refreshing, honestly. It comes out of desalination factories, I get it, it’s still water, but it’s something to think about. I’ve appreciated my delicious Lebanese mineral water a lot more since then.

I hope this doesn’t sound out of touch, I understand most people in many countries can just drink tap water safely, and bottled is seen as a luxury and not a cheap necessity like it is here. But maybe try changing the water? All the answers here feel blasphemous to me. Cucumbers? Flavors?

I’ve found myself reading much older text and still being annoyed by it. I think I paused a YouTube video from like 2015 after hearing it spoken and having to pace a little before continuing. I’ve completely cut that out of my own writing style.

Text extrusion software will obviously favor some writing elements over others, and it is just a supercharged version of bland-yet-saccharine corporate writing style. So all of it, seen sparingly, wouldn’t make you feel like the society is falling apart. But when you see it 10000x more often you really question if anyone is even trying to communicate a novel idea anymore.

I don’t understand, is this for keeping track of the charge level of battery powered sensors?

Also, the description in the page is painful to read. I haven’t gotten into HA yet but I’m keeping an eye on stuff I find interesting, but I really hope having to trudge through saccharine LLM output to understand what each project does isn’t the standard.

Yeah I’ve been involved in stuff on that level by pulling in a library in a university project. But there were higher level research projects going on where they were going into real nitty gritty fine control, I think they had a control model with an obscene number of degrees (as in xth order physical model implemented as a PPIIIIDDD system or whatever). That was a little intuitive since there was a physical process that you can observe.

But the theory is definitely something I’d like to at least understand a little

This was my weakest subject, I found it fascinating but my math was just not good enough for it.

Hopefully someone here has some interesting resources for this stuff, I would honestly love to integrate things like PIDs where they absolutely don’t belong in my bullshit hobby procrastination projects.

This feels like falling into the TVTropes rabbit hole for the first time. Neat

That’s one thing that’s been bothering me a lot about this AI worship era that I don’t see mentioned enough anywhere. Machine learning is a fucking incredible tool that can surely be used to do a lot of things in a novel or better way. Instead all of the investment and eyeballs are on overplayed party tricks

Huh. I picked that up from a used book stand on a whim just based on the tile and skimming it, like ten years ago. I should probably read it.

I would be shocked if it was over even 1000W at peak, but I suppose it’s over provisioned to deal with the very very brief peak when the compressor kicks on.

We have large fridges here. It’s not the volume that matters when we’re looking at peak draw, it’s the compressor’s power rating. The same compressor can cool both, just at different duty cycles.

FWIW there’s probably a lot more auxiliary power being pulled for things like water dispensers and that kind of thing for your fridges. And of course the Palantir-enabled AI Smart Fridge Miner features. In case any of these pretentious commies eats any food correlated with support for the wrong ethnic cleansing victims.

It’s likely the fridges we buy here are simpler older designs with less fragile components, and stuff that runs on lower power. Most people here are not going for the smart fridges. There are a few inverter fridges on the market, but I prefer going with simpler older designs for what should be obvious reasons.

USian here. My refrigerator expects (and is legally required to have) a dedicated branch circuit of fifteen or twenty amps with nothing else on it.

Does any fridge use 1,800W? Even at peak? A small freeze-dryer? I’m holding off on making cheap jokes at the expense of American cuisine, your fridge might be legally over provisioned for some reason, but it’s not drawing this much power. My entire house idles at about 1.1~1.5A, or about 250~350W, if nothing is running but the absolute essentials. And that’s a relevant number for me, I do solar! I do batteries! Every little bit counts. Fridge is the most important thing to power, and literally everything else comes after.

During the financial meltdown/pandemic people ran their fridges for eight or less hours a day because there was just not enough diesel. That’s the time we decided to splurge on solar. If you want more fun anecdotes, during that time I was waiting in line for 3-4 hours for fuel, and then bribing the attendant more than the value of the fuel to let me fill over 20 liters. Not fun times. And I’m someone who was lucky enough to be able to pay his way through the worst of it.

I’m in Lebanon. I too count my blessings. It’s not culturally mandatory to strand your kids at 18 here, nor culturally accepted to have them dodge bullets at school. So you know. Even at the peak of people being harassed by Hafez’s secret police, people were not getting snatched on the street en masse. I don’t have the mental scaffolding to even begin to grapple with your reality my dear. Using the gas because the microwave is unavailable until tomorrow, temporarily stealing my neighbor’s water, angling for favor with feudal lords’ bureaucrats… Problems yes, but problems I understand.

I hope I’m not being too mean here, the US still fascinates me in a way no other potential new home does, even with everything happening right now. How’s that for perspective.

Where I live most people actually do think of household electricity in terms of instantaneous current draw. The power grid is insufficient, so you get rationed grid power throughout the day depending on what area you live in, with the rest filled in by mob-run local power generators.

You pay a subscription based on the maximum amperage and you have to manage your power use accordingly.

🤓☝️ Um that’s functionally the same as a power limit

Yes, but it’s ampere based because it’s managed by a breaker out on the street, and the ampere limit is colloquially understood. “I’m paying for 5A, the bastard won’t give me more” is a perfectly understandable statement. When I was 7 years old I already understood that “we only have 5 amperes during most of the day” and that it meant the microwave wasn’t available during that time. And since the breaker is out on the street, you learn your limit very quickly, since you have to get dressed and go down a few flights of stairs in the freezing cold to turn it back on. If you have an elevator in your building, it sure as shit isn’t running when the generator power is active.

Annoying when you’re using solar to escape this hell electrical system and everyone has to re-learn to think in terms of Watts/VA. I have a table printed out stuck to the wall to “convert” between amps and Watts at 230V. Do you want to explain to grandma which devices are intuitively at 1kW≈1kVA and which are not? No? Then let her keep using amperes, it’s fine.

Yes, the power generators run off diesel, yes, the diesel fumes and generator noise is a problem, yes, we get price gouged by both the generator mobs and the government grid, yes, I hate dieselpunk and think diesel is the most disgusting fuel. The generators give you a much closer wave to 230@50Hz though, so it has that over the grid. Was solar the most expensive thing we’ve ever paid for? Yes. Does it make me feel like a king with a 24 hour battery-backed microwave? Also yes

I’ve expressed this a few times already on Lemmy to little fanfare to say the least, but I use YouTube a lot. I use it a lot on my phone. I’d use it offline on planes. I want to pay for it. But I’m a yucky VPN user and I’m not even allowed to pay a blanket inflated price for it.

The algorithm is still absolutely amazing for music discovery. I already have channels I automatically yank things via YT-DLG from, but like using the service normally is nice too. I don’t see ads on my computer, but I suspect they might be feeding me extra ads on the phone to compensate. Because if this is the standard ad density for phone users it is vomitingly absurd.

Theoretically the folks you watch get paid from the fee. I don’t hate that system. I’m willing to pay, my payment is ready, I’m willing to pay 5 or 20 or however many bucks for it. But using a VPN to watch YouTube on a paid account can get your account banned. Incredible stuff. This is just about the only media subscription I can see myself using. And they’re cutting off all VPN users like that.

I can sound out horrific guttural Cyrillic text thanks to Geoguessr, but this just looks indecipherable to me. The urge to leap at typical Latin script pronunciation is much harder to stave off for some reason, and half of the glyphs just look completely alien to me.

Language really is a fucking miracle

You could say “I wish their executives loved games as much as their developers and artists” or lament that they’re tied to such a cutthroat corporate machine or something. You do know you can express a more nuanced idea than “FUCK X THING” without kowtowing to some of the most high profile corporate bullshit out there, right

I’ve had to use Office a lot professionally and I have to say you do get to learn its quirks over time if you’re stubborn enough to figure out what triggers each unexpected behavior. Ironically learning LaTeX really helped me figure out what’s happening internally in Word in some of those situations, just understanding how the breaks and spaces might be stored gives you a little extra insight.

AFAIK you can do something similar to what you’re describing in outline mode but I could be completely misremembering.

All the Office suite is bloated but LibreOffice still feels a long way off.

I thought the Notepad > Wordpad > MS Word progression was pretty much perfect. A zero complication plaintext editor, something with a bit more formatting, and outright typesetting for print.

Granted I use a combination of Notepad++, Obsidian, and haphazard LaTeX venvs now so who am I to talk. I don’t represent most Windows users and especially not the Linux daily drivers. I’d like to think there’s still a lot of people in my situation.

It says a lot that none of the reasons I like Notepad++ were brought into Notepad when they changed it. A copilot button in the place where I write immediate notes and edit batch files? What could possibly be the use case? I just need it to be able to open massive text files and have a decent search UI and that’s it

Not to be all “The safest way to ski is not to go skiing”, but throwing together a meal can be a way to exercise some agency during low days. Even if the food itself isn’t very healthy, the process can be good for you.

I’ll soak some beans overnight and be forced to boil them the next day. The steps are individually low effort and spaced apart (and you can cook beans with zero onions etc if you want) and at the end you can find yourself sitting in front of a hot bowl of good ass beans and feel hey that was good for me.

Hell, beans out of a can and tomato out of a can over rice out of a pouch can feel like you at least did something, you know? Delivery is relatively cheap where I live and getting into a cycle of being dependent on mass produced food really didn’t help me feel like I had a lot of control over what was happening in my life.

There are like eight cities in the US that give me hope for you guys.

Not a crazy amount of hope, to be clear. But I like seeing this more than the good old find out half of the imperial boomerang.

I have to find a new home at some point and it’s good that not every single community in one continent has decided to continuously shoot itself in the foot at every opportunity. I’ve got friends who moved to Boston and they say it’s nice. Frankly any place where a house costs eight billion dollars better be nice.