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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • (The correctly used double negative was confusing for me at first, btw.)

    You make a very interesting point I haven’t ever thought about before.

    While I have always considered myself a patriot to a mild degree, I never associated it with tribalism directly. Even with the many faults of all countries, it’s OK to be proud of where you are from. (It does make perfect sense that tribalism is the end goal of state sponsored patriotism though.)

    In my mind, the fine line after patriotism was usually nationalism where tribalism runs deep and hate-based rhetoric becomes extremely effective. The definition of a patriot is somewhat twisted at that point. (ie: unless you believe [insert something random], you aren’t actually a patriot and therefore an enemy of the state.)

    I am not agreeing or disagreeing with you, btw. Your perspective is something interesting to think about, s’all. (I am leaning on the agreement side, FWIW.)

    (For the people reading this that may not realize that I am using the word “nationalism” in a negative context, I am. If that chaps your hide still, replace it with ‘christian nationalism’ or ‘white nationalism’ and fuck off. Everyone else, sorry for the disclaimer.)









  • Pin pitch is pin size and/or spacing. With physical plugs, you start to hit limitations with how small the wires can get while still being durable enough to withstand plugging/unplugging hundreds of times.

    Drop losses. (I am keeping this at an ELI5 [more like ELI15, TBH] level and ignore some important stuff) Every electronic component generates heat from the power it uses. More power used usually means more heat. Heat requires physical space and lots of material to dissipate correctly. Depending on the materials used to “sink” (move; direct; channel) heat, you may need a significant amount of material to dissipate the heat correctly. So, you can use more efficient materials to reduce the amount of power that is converted to heat or improve how heat is transferred away from the component. (If you are starting to sense that there is a heat/power feedback loop here, it’s because there can be.) Since a bit of power is converted to heat, you can increase the power to your device to compensate but this, in turn, generates more heat that must be dissipated.

    In short, if your device runs on 9v and draws a ton of power, you need to calculate how much of that power is going to be wasted as heat. You can Google Ohms Law if you would like, but you can usually measure a “voltage drop” across any component. A resistor, which resists electrical current, will “drop” voltage in a circuit because some of the current (measured in amperage) is converted to heat.

    I kinda smashed a few things together related to efficiency and thermodynamics in a couple of paragraphs, but I think I coved the basics. (I cropped a ton of stuff about ohms law and why that is important, as well as how/where heat is important enough to worry about. Long story short: heat bad)



  • Good luck with that, I suppose. Botnets can have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of infected hosts that will endlessly scan everything on the interwebs. Many of those infected hosts are behind NAT’s and your abuse form would be the equivalent of reporting an entire region for a single scan.

    But hey! Change the world, amirite?




  • Effort vs Reward vs Ability vs Inital investment

    In most cases, think of this kind of thing like a legitimate business. Same concepts. I’ll grade a few scenarios based on what I have seen over the last 20 or so years. (The ratings are arbitrary and just trying to explain my point.)

    Do you have the means to rent a botnet and phish a few million people for lots of credit card numbers? Can you manage that kind of data, test all those numbers and maybe end up just selling that data? Low Risk/Moderate Reward (“Selling shovels” analogy is probably a better scheme than actually renting the botnet, IMHO)

    Could you setup a “call center” in India and run a scam ring like an 8-5 business? Are there enough people you can hire to do this work? That requires training, infrastructure and time. You also may need to “work with” law enforcement to ensure your scam isn’t busted by legitimate cops. Moderate Risk/Moderate Reward.

    Are you part of a small group with an insane amount of skill that has the time to pull off an extortion scheme against a Fortune 500 company for a few million bucks? High risk/High reward

    Those are all normal scenarios above and it’s based on profitability and initial investment. Risk/Reward is always a balance.

    (Sorry. I pulled a “wHellll aKshUallY” when you said it’s not worth the time for the small targets.)


  • If it’s more formal, you don’t say anything. In almost all cases where someone would be tempted to lie, I should already know what the correct information is before I even asked a question.

    In less formal situations, I would just keep asking follow-up questions. Lies are generally very shallow.

    Edit: My point is that there are methods to call someone out without actually making direct accusations. Accusations are “hostile” and not generally worth derailing a meeting for something that can be dealt with later.




  • Alumina (aluminum oxide) is what you are extracting from aluminum ore and tough as fuck, which is why it’s easier to dissolve the rest of the stuff around it first.

    Oxygen is mainly that other “junk” you have to separate with electricity. While the smelters only run at 4.5 volts (per cell), they have to push about 300kA to get the stuff up to ~950°C which breaks its chemical bond.

    You probably have never even touched pure aluminum before. Aluminum and oxygen react so quick, all we typically ever see and touch is a alumina shell.