Spyke

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What's an easy yet useful skill that everyone should learn?

Everyone should learn the basics of troubleshooting!

When trying to resolve a problem it's really important to keep as many variables under control as possible so that you can find the root cause and fix it.

I see lots of people who try a bunch of things without isolating the issue first but can't figure out what is wrong. Then because they messed with it so much it's almost impossible to figure out.

This is important for car maintenance, home maintenance, electronics, computers. Just about everything that can break or stop working right in your life.

adhd

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My ADHD is not improving as i age :(

I've found my ADHD is more difficult to deal with later in life. It is not because my symptoms are worse, it's more because my responsibilities have grown. More and more of my goals are longer term issues that require constant attention over long periods of time and following through with plans in a timely manner.

I also feel that medication has exacerbated my hyperfocus on things unrelated to my true goals. I get by just dealing with the high stress times that occur when things have been procrastinated long enough to become urgent.

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What's a piece of esoteric knowledge you have?

The SR-71 used an Astroinertial Navigation System that used stars to keep the navigation information accurate as the plane flew over long distances. Normally an inertial navigation system degrades in accuracy over time and distance due to small errors building up and something called gyro drift. The NAS-14V2 used a catalog of known stars and a gimballed telescope to identify specific stars (even during a cloudy day) and determine the position of the stars in relation to the aircraft. Using this information the position of the aircraft can be used to revise the inertial navigation system's data every so often so the accuracy is much better.

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Can someone explain 1/0 in non-axiomatic terms or does it exist solely within the confines of the abstract realm?

It is undefined because the inverse of division is multiplication. If you multiply by zero, every answer is zero. If you try to invert that operation you can't know which number was multiplied by zero to get zero because multiplying by zero doesn't produce a unique answer for each operation.

Additionally, if you take the limit of 1/x as x approaches zero from the positive side the result approaches positive infinity. If you take the limit from the negative side it approaches negative infinity.

An interesting thing to think about is whether multiplication by zero really makes much sense in the concrete world. You can't really have zero groups of something or some number of groups of zero. Zero groups of anything is still nothing. We can think of that abstractly once we have the abstract concept of numbers, but in the real world that idea is nonsense.

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A comic from Lunarbaboon

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The red shirt part of the joke is referring to TOS exclusively because it was so prevalent. But really it's a larger trope found across lots of different shows and genres. They may not wear red shirts but you'll know them when you see them.

I think it's a great joke and has stood the test of time. You should try watching TOS before proclaiming that the joke doesn't work.

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Boeing urges airlines to inspect 787 Max planes for possible loose bolts

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Inspection intervals are based on expectation of damage over time, not to verify if the installation procedure was properly followed.

Design requirements for airplane parts that experience rotation or are part of control systems are regulated to have locking features to prevent loose bolts from happening. If the initial installation was done improperly it could be a failure in quality control at Boeing. Or if they were installed properly but weren't designed with sufficient locking mechanisms it may be an improper design. Either way this could turn into an Airworthiness Directive which is when the FAA steps in to ensure safety.

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why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office?

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I actually have ADHD and the opposite is true for me. Working from home I can concentrate without distractions of office workers walking by, or talking about something that I'm not interested in but can't block out. I work in my office at home with the door closed for practically the whole day and it's great. My work has it's own built in structure, but I imagine that other kinds of less structured work could be very difficult for someone with ADHD.

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Subreddits you are going to miss?

I'll miss the meta subreddits like lostredditors, switcheroo, SubredditSimulator and SubSimulatorGPT2. I'll miss niche communities built around less mainstream games and shows. I'm really going to miss DaystromInstitute and SonicShowerThoughts.

Overall my biggest concern is over the giant stockpile of years of community answers to all kinds of questions. If Reddit falls what happens to all of that? How do we pick up the slack if it does?

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Jury orders Google to pay $339M for patent-infringing Chromecast

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Without reading the whole patent it did sound a bit too generic and obvious for the patent to be valid, but I'm not a patent lawyer. The comments from Touchstream were pretty great though.

I wouldn't blame a small company for not being able to bring a competing product to market against Google, but it seems like a long time to wait to sue someone making money off a stolen patent.

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In what ways has your use of technology/internet changed in 2023?

I finally overhauled my home server. I built a 12TB storage and media server using a few parts from the old server but am running it on Linux using docker rather than my old gaming PC's windows 7 install. Should be much better for security and easier to upgrade or move.

Paid for PlexPass finally since hardware transcoding is locked behind the paywall.

Dropped Netflix after over a decade of using it regularly because the prices went up and I had been using it less.

Have used ChatGPT for help planning trips and developing goals and plans at home. I was restricted from using it or anything like it at work so I haven't been able to properly use it to my advantage much.

Finally upgraded my router to WiFi 6 and my Internet bandwidth to gigabit from 250 mbps. It's refreshing! Probably the best decision I made in 2023.

Dropped reddit (to include blocking the domain on my pihole). I still waste time but less of it is on social media.