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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2024

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  • Federated browsers

    That’s literally just regular browsers, you can interact with any one of billions of webservers

    Federated github

    Git is federated by nature, you can add as many remotes as you wish and push/pull to all of them. Add in a mailing list for issue tracking and “pull requests” (patch submissions) and you’re golden. You can look up sourcehut to self-host a well-integrated combination of the two.

    Federated hosting providers

    Not sure what exactly you mean by this but maybe take a look at IPFS, although it’s more P2P then federation.

    Federated internet

    Internet is already fairly federated by nature - most commonly used protocols in the OSI stack are open and you can host your own components of critical infrastructure. Getting others to interact with them might be difficult due to security & privacy issues.



  • If the Internet went away, we’d have a little time before batteries were not viable even if replaceable, as distributing those batteries would get problematic.

    Good thing portable solar panels & lead-acid batteries exist that can easily power a couple of laptops even if their internal batteries are cooked. Solar panels last for a very long time if cared for, and lead-acid batteries can be (somewhat) useful almost indefinitely if you replace the electrolyte.

    No, we’re all gonna need to learn how to fight, and live without hospitals and drugs and probably electricity.

    So it would be really handy to have instructions for maintaining or even building weaponry, medical/medicinal literature to find useful herbs or other remedies, and engineering literature/textbooks/software to help us rebuild the electrical grid and then the Internet.


  • Honestly, while fun, those videos don’t provide too much value per GB - and I say that as someone who’s watched almost all of them. Their main actual benefit besides entertainment is (IMHO) getting people interested in the relevant field so they study more thoroughly. They often explain simple yet dazzling concepts which get you hooked but don’t provide much value on their own, and don’t directly enable you to solve real-life problems. Even more involved videos like those by 3blue1brown are still edutainment at their core, as acknowledged by the author. In an apocalypse (which, let’s face it, is the most likely reason the internet would indefinitely go down in a developed country) you would be much better off with engineering (mechanical, electrical, etc) literature and textbooks, maybe a couple science textbooks for good measure (I have a drawer full of the Feynman lectures in case something like this happens).


  • Have you ever tried to use one of those superapps? It’s still a clunky experience overburdened with dozens of useless UI elements eating up screen estate of what I actually care about, and then whenever I wanted to do something for which there’s no sub-app in the super-app it would be difficult due to lack of integrations with “the outside”. That’s even before we question the idea of putting all the eggs functionality in one basket centralized app with one developer entity, allowing them to ultimately control all aspects of one’s online life.

    And more philosophically, I’m surprised that as a functional dev you prefer one big tightly coupled combine to a collection of small but useful on their own utilities lightly coupled to produce more than the sum of their parts.


  • But instead, the device turns on (nearly) instantly. Because the wire isn’t actually what causes the device to turn on

    That’s not exactly true. In this case, the energy transmission would go like this: (change of electric field in the little bit of wire next to the power source) -> (change of magnetic field in the air between the wires) -> (change of electric field in the wire next to the load). This limits the amount of energy transmitted significantly and incurs a lot of losses, meaning if you had something like a lamp plugged in it would start glowing extremely dimly at first (think about how some cheap LED lights keep glowing even with the switch off - it’s similar, albeit it happens due to inter-wire capacitance and not induction). It would then slowly ramp up to full power over a course of a year.

    Here’s a video from the same person about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vrhk5OjBP8 (although I haven’t watched this yet)

    Edit: after watching the video, I think I was actually wrong in a couple of my assumptions. First of all, it looks like the reason for the initial energy transmission is wire capacitance and not induction, so (electric field in wire) -> (electric field in air) -> (electric field in wire, in the “opposite direction”, but because the wire goes back and forth it’s the same current direction). This means that my LED example is even more potent. And the second one is that because it’s capacitance and not induction, this means that there’s no slow ramp-up, it just makes the light glow very dimly all the way until the electric field makes it through the wire, and then it ramps up very quickly.




  • It’s actually 0.06 microseconds (0.00000006 seconds) per day, or ~22 μs (0.000021915 s) per year.

    Also, technically, anything moving up or down in Earth’s gravitational field while physically connected to it is having an effect, however it’s usually to small to be reasonably measurable.

    (I wonder what would happen if the rotation speed was changed by 0.06 seconds per day - that feels like a lot, adding up to 22 seconds per year, but would anyone except timekeeping nerds actually notice? I don’t even know how to begin figuring something like that out.)


  • Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.

    Technically only the pressures are equal, and the actual force will be linearly dependent on the area of the dam (or the surface area of the cylinder). That’s why you can make a tall water tank with relatively thin walls, but an actual dam will have to be quite thicc to handle the tensile/compressive stress (depending on the shape of the dam).






  • Phone? Nah. It’s only a tool, used for photography, maps/navigation, messaging while on the go, shopping lists and phone calls for that one time a month you need to make one. Maybe other stuff sometimes, like making a bank transfer when not at home or editing OSM.

    I used to be indirectly addicted to it. It was actually doomscrolling Reddit, but now that I’m off it I don’t get the urge anymore.

    My desktop is a different story, I’m kind of addicted to it while I’m at home; when outside I don’t really miss it.


  • If I’m honest it’s breathtakingly beautiful. I’ve been around most of Europe and some of Asia, and the only comparable places are Swiss Alps and the Himalayas; however, Georgia is much cheaper than the former and more developed/safe than the latter. It’s also quite tiny but heterogeneous: within a day’s drive you can go from (slightly underwhelming) Black Sea through amazing forests into wild mountains, back down to vineyards and sunflower fields, through a volcanic plateau with otherworldly landscapes and then bathe in hot springs under the starry sky. There’s an insane density of buildings and ruins from dozens of different cultures and epochs, all the way from bronze age to medieval Georgian to Russian colonial style to Soviet-era constructivism. I don’t drink wine but I’ve heard that it’s quite amazing too. My only gripes is that the country might be backsliding into authoritarian rule, and the locals are welcoming but “conservative” (bigoted) to the extent that it’s straight up dangerous for LGBT people to visit.


  • Back when I was in Russia I’d say it’d be Suzdal, famous for the density of churches and other traditional architecture; or Tarusa, known for that one song that everyone seems to know a couple of lines from, Gorodok (here is a random rendition I found just now), both with just under 10k pop according to the wiki. And, as a bit of a stretch since it’s not a town and most people would call it Solovki, Solovetsky settlement, famous for being a prison, with about 800 people. Also Oymyakon with under 600 people, the coldest settlement on earth if you’re into that sort of thing.

    Now in Georgia, I’d say Borjomi with just over 10k pop famous for its water, and Bakuriani (just over 1800 people) for its water and the ski resort. Again a bit of a stretch, but I guess everyone in Georgia at least also knows the ski resort of Gudauri at just under 100 people, as well as mountain resorts of Gomismta and Bakhmaro, both with no permanent residents due to the rough winters. Geography nerds will also be familiar with Ushguli, (arguably) the highest inhabited settlement in Europe, population 220.