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DesertCreosote

@ DesertCreosote @lemm.ee

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16
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • MIT researchers crack 3D printing with glass — new technique enables inorganic composite glass printed at low temperatures

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  • My brother’s lab (not at MIT) has been 3D printing optically clear glass for years. They can do all sorts of shapes and figures, though I’m particularly fond of the Yoda heads. If I’m reading this article correctly, the breakthrough they made was with the temperatures they can do it at, and it’s much less to do with the novelty of 3D printing glass. So it’s much less “hey, this is amazing, nobody has ever done this before,” and far more “we did this cool thing in a new and harder way!”

  • After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers

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  • Waymo can absolutely drive at night, I’ve seen them do it. They rely heavily on LIDAR, so the time of day makes no difference to them.

    And apparently they only disengage and need human assistance every 17,000 miles, on average. Contrast that to something like Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” (ignoring the controversy over whether it counts or not), where the most generous numbers I could find for it are a disengagement every 71 city miles, on average, or every 245 city miles for a “critical disengagement.”

    You are correct in that Waymo is heavily geofenced, and that’s pretty annoying sometimes. I tried to ride one in Phoenix last year, but couldn’t get it to pick me up from the park I was visiting because I was just on the edge of their area. I suspect they would likely do fine if they went outside of their zones, but they really want to make sure they’re going to be successful so they’re deliberately slow-rolling where the service is available.

  • Devils Panties 01/22/2025

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  • They’re still working on it. All the dev is by a single guy, who also runs Pixelfed. He says he’ll be open-sourcing the code soon so more people can contribute and help get things going, but he wants to finish getting the web interface working first. And apparently he’s been spending a lot of time keeping everything online during the surge of interest, which has slowed everything down.

  • Devils Panties 01/22/2025

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  • I’m in the Discord for Loops, but not affiliated with it. The dev said they’re rate-limited by their email provider, so it does take a long time to go through the queue. The queue is also split between Pixelfed and Loops, since they have the same developer, so that slows things down even more.

    It took about three days to get my invite as well, but it may be a bit faster now since I think the initial surge of signups has tapered off a bit.

  • Americans in Puerto Rico can't vote for US president. Their anger at Trump is shaping the race

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  • Turns out communism was just a red herring!

  • Elon Musk may have to sell billions in Tesla stock to rescue X

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  • Honestly I don’t have anything specific I’d recommend. When I was looking into it, I just did a ton of reading on forums along with articles about how to get everything set up. I also looked at the prices I was offered compared to the prices I’d be able to pay elsewhere, and got quotes from several different companies.

    In the end there were a bunch of reasons I didn’t go with solar. I really love it as an idea, and I really want to do it, but it’s enormously expensive. There are lease options, but they’re also expensive and many of them seemed predatory. My utility ended their purchasing program for solar-generated power, and I’m still required to pay a large monthly fee to be connected to the grid, so I couldn’t plan to offset my costs there either. The tax credits are helpful, but you still need to pay up front.

  • We really should have all seen this coming.

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  • Unfortunately the amount of delta-V you’d need to boost it to a parking orbit of some kind, or to the moon, would be deeply impractical. And it doesn’t have the shielding required to support any sort of deep space habitation.

    I’d love to see some or all of it returned to be displayed in a museum, but it would probably be more expensive to do that than it was to build it in the first place. The vehicles to return it in whole or in pieces simply don’t exist right now, and on-orbit disassembly would be incredibly difficult and dangerous for astronauts to carry out.

  • Elon Musk may have to sell billions in Tesla stock to rescue X

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  • No, this was part of a group buy program in my area, which was designed to reduce prices. I ended up turning them down because it was still more expensive than it seemed like it should be, and they were going with an older single inverter system instead of a newer and more efficient micro inverter system.

    I’ve heard the door to door guys tend to massively upcharge. I haven’t had any come through here, though, so I don’t have any direct experience.

  • Elon Musk may have to sell billions in Tesla stock to rescue X

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  • I was talking with a solar company about a solar install with battery storage last year, and they only offered the Powerwall as an option. I literally laughed at them and said there was no way I was tying an enormously expensive piece of home infrastructure to Tesla, because they couldn’t guarantee it’d keep working if Tesla decided to shift direction.

  • CrowdStrike Isn't the Real Problem

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  • I’m one of the admins who manage CrowdStrike at my company.

    We have all automatic updates disabled, because when they were enabled (according to the CrowdStrike best practices guide they gave us), they pushed out a version with a bug that overwhelmed our domain servers. Now we test everything through multiple environments before things make it to production, with at least two weeks of testing before we move a version to the next environment.

    This was a channel file update, and per our TAM and account managers in our meeting after this happened, there’s no way to stop that file from being pushed, or to delay it. Supposedly they’ll be adding that functionality in now.

  • CrowdStrike Isn't the Real Problem

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  • Yes, CrowdStrike says they don’t need to do conventional AV definitions updates, but the channel file updates sure seem similar to me.

    The file they pushed out consisted of all zeroes, which somehow corrupted their agent and caused the BSOD. I wasn’t on the meeting where they explained how this happened to my company; I was one of the people woken up to deal with the initial issue, and they explained this later to the rest of my team and our leadership while I was catching up on missed sleep.

    I would have expected their agent to ignore invalid updates, which would have prevented this whole thing, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen examples of bad QA and/or their engineering making assumptions about how things will work. For the amount of money they charge, their product is frustratingly incomplete. And asking them to fix things results in them asking you to submit your request to their Ideas Portal, so the entire world can vote on whether it’s a good idea, and if enough people vote for it they will “consider” doing it. My company spends a fortune on their tool every year, and we haven’t been able to even get them to allow non-case-sensitive searching, or searching for a list of hosts instead of individuals.

  • CrowdStrike Isn't the Real Problem

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  • Speaking as someone who manages CrowdStrike in my company, we do stagger updates and turn off all the automatic things we can.

    This channel file update wasn’t something we can turn off or control. It’s handled by CrowdStrike themselves, and we confirmed that in discussions with our TAM and account manager at CrowdStrike while we were working on remediation.

  • An arriving plane and a departing one tried to use the same runway, spurring an investigation, FAA says

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  • Summer is the worst season of the year, isn't?

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  • Depends on where you are.

    I’m in the Midwestern United States now, where summer is often pretty frustrating due to the high humidity. But I’m originally from Phoenix, where I really enjoyed summer (in the shade), because I love the feeling of warmth soaking into my bones, and I never got sweaty.

  • Trans youth will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers, NHS England says

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  • On the off chance that you’re actually asking, there have been studies that have shown the regret rate for transitioning is less than 1%.

    Here’s an article about a recent study which tracked people up to 23 years post-transition, showing median regret as 0 out of 100.

    Now, you might be thinking to yourself “but that’s just one study, with around 200 participants, and the results were so uniform it caused issues with the statistics. Maybe it’s wrong.” Well, here is a meta-analysis of 27 additional studies, with almost 8,000 participants, which also shows regret rates are <1%.

    Hope that helps.