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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • I was thinking about this while driving my hybrid (Hyundai Santa Fe) after watching Technology Connections (and/or Connextras) video about hybrid powertrains.

    My car stops its engine when it’s not needed. But then it starts back up so smoothly? How? There’s no cranking. It just goes, already at matching revs.

    But then I realized that an electric motor is a starter. Duh.

    Really recommend the videos (and channels) for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.

    The hybrid power train really is an amazingly simple thing.

    Oh, regen braking? Just as I had thought, it’s basically engine braking. Except when you’re engine braking in an ice car, that energy is all wasted as heat and noise…in electric/hybrid, your motor turns into an Eaton Crank Radio, powered by the momentum of the wheels.

    I used to drive ever-so-gently trying to minimize using the gas engine. But he made it so obvious that that’s the wrong way to do it. All the energy that the car uses comes from gas, and it either gets used to push the car forward, or to recharge the batteries…and charging the batteries is a conversion step with its own implicit losses.





  • JasonDJ@lemmy.ziptoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldNo freaking way
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    11 days ago

    Little kids get excited when they hear “six seven”. It’s an international meme that gained a lot of traction with elementary aged kids.

    It’s a damn good thing it fell on a Sunday or teachers would be going more insane than normal.

    In a few years they find a new number to be obsessed with, and 68 gets serious FOMO.





  • My kid (almost 10) takes guitar lessons.

    His teacher is cool. He lets me bring my guitar and learn alongside him.

    All three of us, I should add, have wicked ADD.

    Most classes start out like this…we both tune up, my kid takes longer…I start playing whatever 3-4 chord song I’ve been working on that week. Teacher doesn’t know what song it is.

    But within a couple of bars he knows exactly what song I’m playing and continues the song and we’re just a couple middle-aged ADD guys rocking out.



  • What are the stars? They are bits of fire a few kilometres away.

    We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out.

    The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.

    For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away.

    But what of it?

    Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy?

    The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them.

    Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that?

    Have you forgotten doublethink?




  • Well, yeah, if you do one thing good, that’s gonna be better than doing a million things halfass.

    It’s almost like “a cheap, right tool is better than an expensive, wrong tool”.

    I don’t think we’ll see phones that are as good of a camera as an actual (read: not toy-tier) digital camera. A lot just has to do with the quality of the optics you can pack into a small lens, and how much to expect out of that lens when it’s being touched and shoved into and out of a pocket all the time.

    Portable audio players…the only leg up they really have are tactile interfaces and usually expandable storage…both of which increasingly uncommon on phones. But that’s largely because the phones have nailed that job, and physical media is pretty much dead (albeit at the hands of phones).

    Watch? It depends what you want out of it… As a fashion item/jewelery, point goes to legacy tech. As a utilitarian gizmo? That also kinda depends on your needs…because both camps have merit.

    It’s more like a Swiss army knife, really. The phone is now just technological EDC in and of itself.