zksmk

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] zksmk 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Have you been following any of the discussions regarding potential issues with the administration and moderation on ml?

Can't say I have.

However, I originally made this community back in the day when lemmy.ml was basically the only instance, and have since then moved my account to another instance (2 years ago) specifically for those same reasons of lemmy.ml being... hmm.. politically charged.

I didn't think of moving the community until now tbh, but that's not really something I can do. At most I could sticky a link to another community, or delete this one (which would be overkill imo), but for that to happen there needs to be a different community to begin with and community interest for it to happen. The power's all yours people. It's up to you guys to show interest and initiative. Maybe make a post about this, and check if there's interest, discuss where to move etc, a meta post like this is totally fine here on /c/freecad.

Anyway, on a completely unrelated note, the community image did update after awhile, but in the wrong direction! It was the new logo on slrpnk.net/c/freecad@lemmy.ml for awhile, where my account is, but now I see that when the things synced the old lemmy.ml/c/freecad image overwrote the new one on slrpnk.net/c/freecad@lemmy.ml! I guess I can't change the image as a mod from another instance. I will have to mod my old lemmy.ml account here now to change the image (and hopefully it will stick this time around, assuming it works at all) but I will have to make a bug report on github about this when I find the time.

Sorry for the late reply tho.

[–] zksmk 11 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Done. It should take a while to propagate to every instance.

Keep in mind tho, this is an unofficial community.

[–] zksmk 2 points 1 year ago

I think you'd be better off using the Boolean XOR tool from the same Split submenu (if you approach it from the Part menubar in the Part workbench), on your cube and your array, instead of the Slice apart tool.

Then on the resultant XOR object use the Explode compound tool from the Compound submenu.

You'll get a folder with all your sliced parts in it.

[–] zksmk 2 points 1 year ago

I am. :)

Most of the subscribers here are new as well since the recent reddit exodus, I'd say that makes them active.

 

Citizens for Responsible Solar was founded in an exurb of Washington, D.C., by a longtime political operative named Susan Ralston who worked in the White House under President George W. Bush and still has deep ties to power players in conservative politics.

Ralston tapped conservative insiders to help set up and run Citizens for Responsible Solar. She also consulted with a longtime activist against renewable energy who once defended former President Donald Trump's unfounded claim that noise from wind turbines can cause cancer. And when Ralston was launching the group, a consulting firm she owns got hundreds of thousands of dollars from the foundation of a leading GOP donor who is also a major investor in fossil fuel companies. It's unclear what the money to Ralston's firm was used for. Ralston has previously denied that Citizens for Responsible Solar received money from fossil fuel interests.

Ralston said in an email to NPR and Floodlight that Citizens for Responsible Solar is a grassroots organization that helps other activists on a volunteer basis. The group isn't opposed to solar, Ralston said, just projects built on farmland and timberland. Solar panels belong on "industrial-zoned land, marginal or contaminated land, along highways, and on commercial and residential rooftops," she said.

But her group's rhetoric points to a broader agenda of undermining public support for solar. Analysts who follow the industry say Citizens for Responsible Solar stokes opposition to solar projects by spreading misinformation online about health and environmental risks. The group's website says solar requires too much land for "unreliable energy," ignoring data showing power grids can run dependably on lots of renewables. And it claims large solar projects in rural areas wreck the land and contribute to climate change, despite evidence to the contrary.

 

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/258267

On 15 February 2023, the researchers reached a new milestone: for the first time, they were able to achieve an energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoules in this device. This was 17 times higher than the best value achieved before the conversion (75 megajoules). The energy turnover results from the coupled heating power multiplied by the duration of the discharge. Only if it is possible to couple large amounts of energy continuously into the plasma and also remove the resulting heat, a power plant operation is possible.

The energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoule was achieved with an average heating power of 2.7 megawatts, whereby the discharge lasted 480 seconds. This is also a new record for Wendelstein 7-X and one of the best values worldwide. Before the completion works, Wendelstein 7-X achieved maximum plasma times of 100 seconds at much lower heating power.

Within a few years, the plan is to increase the energy turnover at Wendelstein 7-X to 18 gigajoules, with the plasma then being kept stable for half an hour.

 

On 15 February 2023, the researchers reached a new milestone: for the first time, they were able to achieve an energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoules in this device. This was 17 times higher than the best value achieved before the conversion (75 megajoules). The energy turnover results from the coupled heating power multiplied by the duration of the discharge. Only if it is possible to couple large amounts of energy continuously into the plasma and also remove the resulting heat, a power plant operation is possible.

The energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoule was achieved with an average heating power of 2.7 megawatts, whereby the discharge lasted 480 seconds. This is also a new record for Wendelstein 7-X and one of the best values worldwide. Before the completion works, Wendelstein 7-X achieved maximum plasma times of 100 seconds at much lower heating power.

Within a few years, the plan is to increase the energy turnover at Wendelstein 7-X to 18 gigajoules, with the plasma then being kept stable for half an hour.

[–] zksmk 1 points 2 years ago

Nice, it uses Solvespace's solver. Good choice, it's very intuitive.

I still prefer FreeCAD (over Blender and SS) for CAD for its NURBS abilities (which SS lacks) but this is a great fit for Blender's poly modeling! Better than whatever FC's solver is (I forgot).

👍

[–] zksmk 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Would just as soon recommend Debian or Linux Mint now.

KDE Neon also doesn't have a snap Firefox, it comes out of the box with a Mozilla PPA Firefox (despite being Ubuntu based).

[–] zksmk 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's about all our data in aggregate, not about your friend's data in particular.

And yet it still affects your friend. How? Through other people. By having access to all that data the IT powers-that-be can easily build data models to manipulate people into many things, without them even realising it. Making political topics trend, encouraging harmful habits (like doom scrolling) and so on. That all leads to worse people getting elected, which leads to worse roads, worse taxes (higher/lower, whatever your friend thinks), more pollution and so on. That all affects your friend.

Also, what your friend said is that they basically don't care if other more vulnerable people get manipulated into all those things he said (wasting time, money, time is money btw, etc...) because they themselves aren't affected. Do they think of themselves as a person that's that self-absorbed/selfish? Probably not.

And your friend might also say, yeah fine, whatever, but I'm also just a fish in the sea, me changing my approach won't change anything for society. But do they vote?

You have to lead by example. It has to start from somebody, it has to start from all of us. That's how black people no longer had to sit in the back of the bus in the US. It started small. That's how gay people get to marry. It started small. And that's how people won't get manipulated by their online feeds. It starts small.

And if your friend is still, yeah, whatever, it doesn't affect me, tell them about the: first they came for x, but I wasn't an x, then they came for y, but I wasn't a y, then they came for z, but I wasn't a z, then they came for me, but there was nobody left to stand up for me.

Your friend is encouraging behaviours that will bite either them in the ass, or their descendants one day. It will be a war, it will be a law, it will be climate change and a forest fire, that could have been prevented if people cared.

And all it takes is a new messenger, new browser, a single add-on in it, and maybe a new website or two. They're not being asked to be a superhero, just to use a different computer programme. And that's all.

[–] zksmk 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

That's what Bhutan does. It's enshrined into their constitution as the goal of governance, as GNH, and it takes precedence over GDP.

It's not without its problems tho, but it is a noble approach, worthy of pursuing imo.

17
submitted 2 years ago by zksmk to c/memes
 

Thoughts?

[–] zksmk 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

And that's cool and all, but good luck with that endeavour if people can't even seem to agree to tweak their electoral system a bit. The UK, of all places, tends to be very revolution averse when it comes to politics.

[–] zksmk 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Those are called context-based ads or contextual targeting.

The downside is it needs human intervention. It's hard to automate it online, without it preserving the typical track-y nature of online ads (the ads would still be getting served from an ad server to the browser directly, and therefore still no privacy.

It works if the ads are hard coded into the webpage by the publisher server-side, but then the advertiser has no idea how many views the ad got, and therefore how much to pay for the ad space... which means the advertiser needs human intervention to decide how much to pay by a guesstimate, which means this whole scheme can't work for small random websites in an automated fashion.

It might, and that's a mighty precarious might, work with some kind of crazy blockchain scheme (y'know, that whole distributed consensus thing... lol... an actual use for blockchain for once?!), but unlikely, very unlikely....

Basically , I'm all for it as an alternative to donations or volunteering if they aren't possible , but you need to actually attract advertisers that want to advertise on your website first.

 

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-physics/article/abs/singlefieldperiod-quasiisodynamic-stellarator/9B2A5FDCCD7774E4F91BE45E75FDC6B0

A single-field-period quasi-isodynamic stellarator configuration is presented. This configuration, which resembles a twisted strip, is obtained by the method of direct construction, that is, it is found via an expansion in the distance from the magnetic axis. Its discovery, however, relied on an additional step involving numerical optimization, performed within the space of near-axis configurations defined by a set of adjustable magnetic field parameters. This optimization, completed in 30 s on a single CPU core using the SIMSOPT code, yields a solution with excellent confinement, as measured by the conventional figure of merit for neoclassical transport, effective ripple, at a modest aspect ratio of eight. The optimization parameters that led to this configuration are described, its confinement properties are assessed and a set of magnetic field coils is found. The resulting transport at low collisionality is much smaller than that of W7-X, and the device needs significantly fewer coils because of the reduced number of field periods.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.05797 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.05797.pdf

[–] zksmk 1 points 2 years ago
 

In 1957, Valencia experienced a devastating flood that forever changed the city’s relationship with the Turia River. Nearly 3/4 of the city was inundated by floodwater and over 60 people lost their lives. The following year, the city embraced a plan to divert the river around its western outskirts to the Mediterranean Sea.

A park wasn’t the city leadership’s first idea—in an effort to alleviate traffic congestion, they envisioned an elaborate highway system through the heart of the City. But by 1970 the citizens pushed back and protested the highway proposal under the motto “The bed of Turia is ours and we want green!” By the end of the decade, the City approved legislation to turn the riverbed into a park and commissioned Ricard Bofill to create a master plan in 1982. The plan created a framework for the riverbed and divided it into 18 zones. Currently, all but one of the zones has been developed.

The resulting design establishes a monumental 5 mile green swath within a dense and diverse urban fabric, including the historic center of the city, and has an average span of 600 feet, from bank to bank. The park comprises over 450 acres and is characterized by bike paths, event spaces, active recreation fields, fountains, and many notable structures.

A bit more history and a lot of pics of the park in the former riverbed.

Fun fact: now the traffic bridges don't go above the river, they go above the park.

Openstreetmap, for those interested in a detailed view.

Do you know of any other weird parks like this?

 

A conventional ship with an easily deployable and retractable kite sail system burns less fuel than one without it. It's a type of hybrid vehicle, that has two propulsion methods, the main reliable one, and the supplementary one, for fuel efficiency. With the system installed and the kite in use, the ship saves an estimated 15% of fuel. However:

"There's a structural problem slowing down the process: ship owners (who have to make the investment) often don't pay for the fuel – that's the charterer's duty. The charterer on the other side doesn't charter the ship for long enough a period to make installing low-carbon, but potentially expensive, untested technologies pay back."

The lack of carbon emissions regulations for shipping and low fuel prices have added to these difficulties. The shipping industry is responsible for around 940 million tonnes of CO2 annually, which is about 2.5% of the world's total CO2 emissions.

A company behind these (SkySails GmbH), while technically successful at cutting shipping costs and carbon emissions, has faced economic difficulties. Since then, the company (reborn as SkySails Group GmbH) has switched to land-based airborne wind energy systems for electricity production from high-altitude winds.

What do you think? Yay or nay? Is this technology dead in the water? Not worth the effort? Will we see ships like these in the near or distant future? What needs to change?

Some good reads:

http://www.vos.noaa.gov/MWL/apr_09/skysails.shtml

https://rctom.hbs.org/submission/lets-go-fly-a-kite-skysails-and-climate-change/

 

“Long overdue changes landing to what will eventually become GIMP 3.0.

This new development version of GIMP is a bit of a game-changer as it arrives with some long-anticipated CMYK-related features. The way they are implemented will make some users happy, but some users might feel annoyed. It’s got to do with early binding vs late binding.

So let’s talk about it. In layman terms...”

 

“This new development version of GIMP is a bit of a game-changer as it arrives with some long-anticipated CMYK-related features. The way they are implemented will make some users happy, but some users might feel annoyed. It’s got to do with early binding vs late binding…”

 

"This new development version of GIMP is a bit of a game-changer as it arrives with some long-anticipated CMYK-related features. The way they are implemented will make some users happy, but some users might feel annoyed. It’s got to do with early binding vs late binding..."

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