I’m a birder. Lots of birds were named after people…Scott’s Oriole for example. You may think a guy named Scott discovered the bird, but nope, just a friend of the guy that did. Scott wasn’t a good guy according to history (re: killing native Americans), so there’s a big committee that’s going to rename a ton of birds that have eponymous names. The birding community is very split on the topic and it’s interesting to see the drama.
Your insurance company isn’t just fucking you with premiums, they also expect the guys that come and fix things up after a disaster to lose money doing it, 0 overhead, 0 profit
Professional: Self-driving trailers are already a thing. They are not legal on public roads, but they work just fine in warehouses and yards. The way it works, a dolly is hooked up to the front of the trailer, and the yard master just instructs it where to go and park, and forgets about it. Thanks to the trailer sensors, the trailer is also able to navigate around fairly heavy yard traffic, which is far more complex than linear traffic on roads. The EU is being lobbied to allow the trailers on the roads. The EU is also being lobbied to increase the max length of a tractor-trailer from 27m to 50m. The new road trains are also using these autonomous engines and steering directly on trailers. We estimate that by 2035, we’ll start seeing a drastic reduction of demand for truck drivers.
Hobby: This is unconfirmed, just an odd thing I started noticing. In some places, in particular around US embassies, modern cameras are blocked from taking photos, and older models are being interfered with through green lasers. I noticed the latter when I tested with the first gen Gopro Hero and a 15 years old Canon. Need to dig out my film camera to see whether it has any impact there.
modern cameras are blocked from taking photos
Really? That’s interesting. I wonder what the technology is that they’re using to detect cameras in the first place. When I think of a DSLR for example, it’s a passive sensor that’s only receiving photons but it’s not sending anything outwards. Some phones have laser autofocus so that I imagine could be detected but even that’s quite rare technology on phones.
This is just pure speculation, but I think the firmware on the camera refuses to take pictures when its GPS detects it to be in a restricted area. That’s how higher-end drones work. At the same spot where I detected my interference, a DJI drone would refuse to take off. Drone no-fly areas are well documented (and advertisef), though, so it was easy to check against those.
But surely a 15 year old Canon don’t have a GPS on it? I just can’t think of what technology they could use to detect someone taking a picture in order to interfere with it other than camera surveillance and some sort of an AI system to detect cameras. I’m not doubting you, just curious about how it could possibly work and especially how to evade it.
The Canon didn’t. That’s where my assumption of a green laser came in. When I aimed the camera directly at the embassy, I got a white screen; when I aimed it a little to the side, I saw a green dot on the screen. This is a bit of a stretch, though. It could have been an optical artifact, with the sun behind me, and me wearing polarized glasses.
I am doubting. This sounds like some conspiracy BS with no evidence whatsoever. What if you’re using a telephoto lens? Lol
Since covid, the insurance industry has been hemorrhaging people. At my company, most people that 3-4 months before they quit. No one knows what they’re doing because of this and many claims are denied/mishandled.
Why?
A lot of work for “meh” pay. It burns people out, and a lot of people took covid as a chance to change jobs, if not careers. And a lot of companies that put people back in the office lost a ton of people, so if you’re insurance company has done that, there’s a good chance your" insurance professional" is just some guy sitting in a training class.
I currently have 260 claims under my name and I’m not the highest. Customers don’t like you because insurance is the devil (which I agree with), you have to make decisions that don’t feel right because your company is looking for results, and you are harrased via phone, email, and teams. It’s just 8 hours a day (minimum) of just back to back to back nonsense and brow beating. And, in the US, almost every state has their own laws and statutes around auto insurance, so keeping track of every difference is overwhelming. Our resources suck so there’s a lot you just have to memorize. Because they want people to wear every hat, shit gets missed very, very often. I get fucked up claims all the time.
And there’s no “off.” it doesn’t slow down or get easier, because the bosses won’t let it. They want to have as few people do the most and the quality suffers because of it, and it puts a lot of stress in the employees. Whenever we say anything, we get a “Yeah, that’s tough” before they give us more shit.
Feds are loosening up Eagle take and to a lesser extent peregrine take for falconry in the US.
Golden eagles used to be illegal for falconers to take from the wild until a few years ago, now there is a lottery to take problem eagles off of ranches. They used to issue permits for ranchers to shoot them, and wind turbines to hit them, but wouldn’t let falconers take them as hunting partners which was very silly. It’s loosening up a bit now which is good. Less dead eagles this way.
Most states have a lottery system to take peregrines already but their population is thriving. I can see states getting rid of the lottery in the next few years. The 50 or so birds taken by falconers each year across the US would be a rounding error to their population anyway.
The influences of capital on academia have been disastrous.
That’s why I write my PhD in all lower case.
PhD
🤨
The film industry is dead and streaming killed it. Pirate movies over a vpn as much as you want.
Movie studios are now just landlords. They’re run by boards of directors, focused on nothing but number go up. They want money for sitting like a dragon on top of a stockpile of content. Fuck them.
Same with animation.
When you say the industry is dead, what exactly do you mean? Like working in the industry is no longer a viable career option, or you think that movies/ shows in general aren’t going to be good anymore?
I’m not trying to argue your point of it’s coming across that way, just not sure exactly what you are saying, I have been loving some recent movies and shows so if something is going to change I will be sad
No new movies and TV shows are being made. I’m a 43 year old industry veteran, forced to look for a new career.
Anecdotally, I used to make $120k/year for the past 10 years like clockwork. The past two years, though: I made $18,00 and $22,000.
This article says 40% but that’s in LA. In other places, production is down 90%.
Sorry to hear
I see… That’s a staggering number. Hopefully there are enough rich assholes who like good movies to keep funding the few movies we still get for the next couple decades…
After that, there will always be independent filmmakers, and with the increasing quality of consumer-grade equipment and software, their stuff will get better as the technology improves. Still won’t hold a flame to studio production quality, but it will be there
Thank you for your insight
Most people are unaware that Google can and has closed accounts without notice or appeal.
A closed account means all your files, photos, passwords, 2fa, are gone.
Let me share this story: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
The guy even has the police explicitly clear him off any foul play, but Google still won’t budge. Consumers have zero rights to something as fundamental as retrieving their own files or emails
This is why i have been moving away from google products for storing anything; emails, photos, etc. They are just not a customer focused company, bad to do business with them
Like this father who got his account closed because he took a picture of his toddler penis to send to their pediatrician.
The picture was automatically backed up in Google photo and flagged as child pornography.
Exactly. Even after being investigated by two police departments, Google refused to open the account.
It means all of those if you rely on google for those.
Never have a central point of failure, and have backups.
Hell Yeah
Uploading receipts associated with your art process, such as progress pictures and files associated with the art program you used to draw the pictures. Not only does this quell accusations of AI being used, it also serves as a means of proving that you are the creator of the artwork.
I made a sub lemmy.mindoki.com/c/aip Art In Progress if anyone would be interested, or maybe you know if a lemmy sub like that that is being more active?
Cool! 😃 Do you accept digital art also?
Just FYI lemmy.mindoki.com was down up to now because of an expired certificate, fixed!
Sure!
The idea is to share the process or give insights into it, to motivate or help people understanding how some arts are made.
Until we get AI that mimics the layers
On-prem still has its uses
Platter harddrives are still useful
Tapes and tapedrives aren’t obsoleteOh god my story. Okay so I was building out a video transcoding service for a company. We all know video transcoding is hella expensive. So I’m using kubernetes to help manage scale, and we’re on the cloud. I warn them hey, cloud is hella expensive, this is going to be… a lot. Well what do you recommend? Glad you asked, and I pitched that we have 3 heavy server nodes sitting either in a rack if we want it official, or even we were small enough we could just have them in the office. They would be VPN’d into the cluster, members of the cluster, and those get the priority. If a transcode job comes in use those nodes, only spin up cloud nodes if the scale is too high. I quoted about 20k for 3 beefy performant machines for the node.
Executives balked at the price. Way too much money, what a ridiculous idea anyway, we’re a cloud company.
Two months into the cloud only solution they were averaging 12 grand just on CPU compute! Why is it so high?! That’s ridiculous!
Absolute fuckers, the morons. I swear I’ve seen so many companies hemorrhage money because they refuse to listen to legit experts in the field. You fuckers, I was trying to save you money, but no your MBA and accounting degrees taught you how to run fucking cloud operations.
Should have told them it was an on prem cloud lol.
I hate that it’s so hard to get these people to agree to capex. My current company runs a few datacenters, and we have some teams that use them for their base load. It saves a shitload of money! Like, I don’t get why this is a concept that MBAs reject. You don’t have to go all in on capex for your infrastructure, just find a nice mix of capex/opex. If you’re afraid that you won’t use the shit you bought later on, then you should probably make sure that the market is there for whatever you’re selling before you dive in headfirst.
Because data center costs are OPex and on prem server costs are CAPex, and companies very much prefer things to be in the OPex (operating expense) column.
We spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars last year doing geophysical processing in azure. But it was an emergency: It was a hot fix to avoid losing out on hundred times that amount. Turned out the contract negotiator never bothered telling operations that they agreed to deliver the data with some processing already applied.
We considered building a processing cluster on site, but buying the necessary hardware and shipping it halfway around the world in a timely manner would’ve been even more costly. Plus I would be the one who had to build the rig, and I was all tied up on a different project a few countries over at that time.
On prem is, in almost all cases, cheaper than cloud. Even when you include the salaries of the folks managing it.
But MBAs will pay a LOT for outages to be someone else’s problem.
If you’re not archiving old data on tapes and shipping them off to a converted bomb shelter, you’re not doing it right.
That is literally what we do at my job.
Three copies: One for the client who paid for it, one for us (internal processing and testing only), and one as a backup goes to a storage location that is a converted cold war era bomb shelter.
Tapes and tapedrives aren’t obsolete
But the drive is pricey :)
Also, do you really need high performance SSDs? Are you actually writing the drive volume a day?
I’ll go first:
Matte black shower sets and kitchen faucets are the shit now. I’ve installed so many of these during the past year.
I used to think white wall and floor are just too basic, but having stayed in my friend’s almost-all-black studio apartment made me appreciate how easy it is in white/bright-themed bathroom to see any impending cockroach before it crawls on any of my limbs :(
Got my bathroom redone last year. Guess which color, lol.
Faucet, sink, tub, shitter, and shower head are all matte black.
To my defense the floor is dark grey and the walls are medium grey. I don’t want it to look like a cheap “fancy” hotel with the white/black contrast I see everywhere.
Mind sharing a picture of your new bathroom? Matte black toilet seat is something I’ve yet to encounter.
Just installed a golden shower though. I’ll never forgive myself for not seeing the joke there before my gf of all people pointed it out.
I would show more, but with 4 kids in the household, it’s an absolute mess in here right now. But this should give you an idea of the general design.
Remember the gloss black fixtures that were very trendy for a brief time in the 80’s?
the fact that she thinks of it means shes game.
And if she’s not, hell gimme a holler; it’s Saturday, which is bath day anyway.
Haha! We’ve been scouring the discount bin at the local hardware stores for faucetry (is that a word?). By now most of our stuff is matte black because that’s all that gets returned.
Not true in government housing
lol
Saw them at a hotel not too long ago and immediately talked about how matte black faucets would be awesome at home.
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Social workers are all recommended to have a personal therapist for themselves. And its possible for the personal therapist to also have social work degree
My ex was a social worker, and I completely agree, but I’m not sure how they are expected to afford therapy.
This is fucking hilarious 🤣
And sad as it’s common
They provide their own therapy
Based on what I heard while upgrading old PCs in a social work office, I’m not a bit surprised.
College students fucking LOVE blow-up bounce houses.
As a business investment, what is the long-term outlook for the bouncy house industry? I assume it has its ups and downs.
I hear it really took off in Australia, with incredible results.
So far, it seems to be benefitting from recent inflation, but I wouldn’t want to be around when that bubble pops.
There have been downturns in the industry before, but it always seems to bounce back.
Don't worry, we can always execute a squeeze to have it rise up from the ground!
#OMGTHECOVETEDPUNTHREADYAAAAS
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i chatted for 45 minutes with the ceo of a bounce house mfg with 2000 employees about 5 months ago. they had moved all of their production to china, and then china started making foreign executives afraid to visit because they might not he allowed to leave. they wanted to move mfg out of china to vietnam but the chinese govt wouldnt let them take their own equipment out. they considered some bribes but hd no guarantee it would he enough. they realized they should write off the equipment and purchase a whole new set but the lead time was like 3+ years and from china. so they likely couldnt mfg any new jumpies for years and would have to make everyone just patch repair instead.
Same story with every tech company attempting to do business inside China. Doesnt stop company after company from trying themselves because they think they are special and extra talented, not like those hacks at other companies.
Wow. Real industry info. I was just going for the pun! Thanks for sharing.
- What, lol. China doesn’t kidnap foreign businessmen.
- “Their” equipment was 51% (at least) owned by a Chinese company. Of course they can’t literally steal it.
- “They considered crime”
- They were going to buy the equipment again… from China anyway? lol
Tell your boss get off the Trump juice.
75% of people working shifts around or inside an aircraft are alcoholics. Never before or at work, but days off are a shit show.
That’s true for all industries.
False. In many industries workers also drink before and during work.
A pretty huge proposal to expand the Light Sport rule is in the works.
For those unaware, in 2004 the United States made some pretty sweeping additions to the Federal Aviation Regulations, essentially adding what the rest of the world calls “ultralight aviation.” What Americans had been previously calling “ultralights” were more like the rest of the world’s “microlights.” The Light Sport Rule added the Sport Pilot certificate (lesser privileges than a Private pilot), the Sport Pilot Instructor certificate, two kinds of aircraft repairmen, and two categories of aircraft, Special and Experimental Light Sport.
The rule has been a resounding success, so they’re talking about greatly widening what sport pilots can fly and what can be built and certified as a Light Sport aircraft. They’re talking about adding night flight, allowing controllable pitch propellers, retractable landing gear, 4 seats, higher stall speeds, higher takeoff weights, higher cruise speeds, possibly even eliminating the language that requires single engines or reciprocating engines.
It’s possible there’s a boom time coming for General Aviation.
No, what I’m talking about isn’t steaming bullshit fresh from the bovine’s ass.
What is the major complaint people have about electric cars? Range, right? Because lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries do not have the energy density per unit volume or unit weight of gasoline. Electric cars are often heavier than their ICE counterparts because they’re crammed with so many batteries to make up for the relative lack of energy density, and they benefit from things like regenerative braking. Electric motorcycles often don’t have regenerative braking, which is why Kawasaki is right now advertising a $7000 sport bike with a 55mph top speed (65 if you push the boost button) and a range of 41 miles (if you don’t push the boost button). The Ninja 250 I bought in 2007 could do 120mph and I routinely went 300 miles between fill-ups with it’s ~5 gallon tank.
Meanwhile these folks have a hexacopter that will out-carry and out-run a Robinson R-44 piston-powered helicopter, on Lithium batteries.
Actually just right there, they say a 200 mph cruise speed and a 100 mile range. So that’s a 30 minute endurance. To legally fly cross country in the United States, you need to have enough endurance to make it to your first intended point of landing PLUS 30 minutes, and that’s day VFR minimum fuel when operating under Part 91. Are you telling me it has an hour of battery life but half of that will be in reserve? In something like a Cessna Skyhawk a half hour of fuel is something like 4 gallons of gasoline, or about 24 pounds. How much lithium battery do you need to make ~100 horsepower for half an hour? And mind you, that’s cruise power, NOT takeoff power. Which will be a LOT greater than cruise power especially in a VTOL aircraft. I get that it’s a tiltrotor and would have airplane-like performance in cruise, but it’ll still be more of a bitch to get airborne than a conventional plane.
Anybody want to see me plan a 100 mile flight in a Cessna Skyhawk, figure up how much gas the trip would take, convert that amount of gas to kilowatt-hours and then look up the weight of a Li-Ion battery with that capacity?
I’d also be real interested to know what the secret sauce is to make those propellers that quiet. Yes, electric motors are quieter than gas engines, but the noise from something like an airplane or helicopter is mostly made by the propeller/rotor blades, especially at the tips. By what physics are you going to make something with 6 propellers quieter than something that has one? I bet that thing is going to be louder - and shriller - than an equivalent helicopter. Stand next to a toy drone in flight and explain to me by what magic they’re going to make one that seats four make “a barely perceptible sound.”
If you’re going to tell obvious lies, just say I’m pretty.
The lack of imagination in this post is astounding. In this wall of gibberish you only really made three points: range, excess range, and noise.
Range: evtols are not trying to replace GA aircraft, at least initially. They will start out as air taxis and toys for the ultra rich, but most people dramatically underestimate the rate at which battery technology is improving. Being able to travel 100 miles in 30 minutes without spending an hour on each end dealing with the airport is something unavailable today.
Minimum fuel requirements: rules are meant to serve us, not be handed down from on high. If this does apply to evtols it will be changed. It’s a completely different use case. For example the emergency landing options for an evtol are vastly more available than for a Cessna.
Noise: I mean, agreed overall if not in detail. Realistically these things are going to be quieter than a traditional helicopter for sure, but will be higher pitch and swarming around in greater numbers. Annoying AF.
“evtols” are going to BE General Aviation aircraft, just like helicopters are today. The thing I saw in that article would be certified under the currently very empty Powered Lift category. I would be extremely wary, as in “nail his skull to the pavement just in case” wary, of anyone trying to say these machines are anything different than that and should thus be exempt from any FARs. That’s the attitude Stockton Rush had. Break out the Ouija board and ask his passengers how that shook out.
100 miles in 30 minutes from any random point to any random point is indeed kind of tricky, A Bell Jetranger can do 150 mph if you really push it. A significantly cheaper Robinson R-44 Raven set a record for piston helicopters at 144mph, more typical cruise speed is 130. Still twice what you’ll do in a limousine going down the highway. They still occasionally pound helicopters full of expensive people into hillsides. Break out the Ouija board again and ask Kobe Bryant about his opinions on rotorcraft operations. We’ve got ~75 years of experience flying civilian rotorcraft. I don’t even know how you’d go about getting a powered lift rating on a pilot’s license right now; studying for my ground instructor certificate there wasn’t even a chapter about them. I had to study hot air balloons and gyrocopters but not powered lift tiltrotors.
You’re absolutely right, the rules are meant to serve us. Minimum fuel requirements are one of those rules that keep planes out of neighborhoods when the headwinds are stronger than forecast. I would say they should actually be INCREASED for powered lift or VTOL aircraft because descent and landing is more power intensive than cruise flight as it has to come to a hover under thrust, rather than the gliding flight of a landing airplane. Again, when someone says “These things are full of lots of trendy buzzwords so they shouldn’t be held to basic operational safety standards” I say “I’ll get the nails, you hold his head to the ground.” This is how we end up with a fire in a neighborhood that can’t be put out.
For air taxi or other for-hire operations it’s going to have to be certified under a standard airworthiness certificate and I don’t even know if we have a category for that. I’ll also eat my AOPA hat if you can find me an insurance company that will underwrite the fucking thing.
Let me also ask you this, just…try this sniff test: There’s a lot of steps between the gas/diesel/turbine airplanes and helicopters we have today, and a battery electric tiltrotor VTOL. Where’s the electric helicopter? Where’s the electric airplane? Where’s the fuel burning VTOL? Surely if there’s a market for a machine that can go 100 miles in half an hour with no runway, there’s a market for a machine that can go 500 miles in 2.5 hours with no runway. Why aren’t they building any of that first as a stepping stone?
Because it’s a fucking scam.
Gas engines generally lack the immediate throttle control/thrust response necessary for use in a multicopter. Why didn’t we see gas RC quadcopters before electric ones? My sniff smells ok.
Would you want a centralized gas engine powering your 4+ rotors causing them all to fail at once or would you like the complexity of 4+ separate ICE engines trying to work in concert with precise torque output?
I’m suggesting these flying transport firms may be lobbying for change, not that they have a viable business/technology.
Ah yes, bacause we didn’t had enough old people crashing already…
Light Sport has proven safer than previous “not actually an ultralight but enforcement is lax” or EAB operations. Having a robust training culture including the creation of a new instructor certificate I think is a major contributor to that safety.
A significant portion of the expansion will be allowing S-LSA airplanes to be used for aerial work such as pipeline patrol or aerial photography. I see no reason whatsoever a Flight Design CT can’t be used for a job a Cessna 152 can do. With a much more modern and efficient engine burning unleaded gasoline.
