batmaniam

joined 2 years ago
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[–] batmaniam 3 points 1 day ago

I imagine it's classified, but NASA being NASA, you know a full risk assessment along these lines exists, probably with dutiful updates as it's still an active program. It would be fascinating read especially with the updates, with how much the world has changed while the probe remained the same.

[–] batmaniam 21 points 1 day ago

I don't get the panic. It worked great for 50% of Venture brothers.

[–] batmaniam 13 points 4 days ago (4 children)

I just want that snake. Is that some iconography I've missed? I have the rainbow gadsen on my range bag I want that one as well.

[–] batmaniam 17 points 4 days ago

Not going to lie, despite loving the stories about the monkey king, I skipped it entirely because of the notes they sent to content creators. Which would also be why I skip movies and games that take the US' DoD money. I'm glad it got passed over.

[–] batmaniam 3 points 1 week ago

ooooh this is it! If you wanted to optimize evil add photosynthesis and nitrogen fixing and you've got it.

Hell, I'd bet you could work on the chloroplasts in isolation of the rest of the organism to parallel path the research and optimize.

[–] batmaniam 9 points 1 week ago

I've been out of synthetic bio for damn near two decades now, and an undergrad when was I even in it, but I'm not so sure. PCR didn't come around until 85. I had professors that used to do every cycle manually. Human genome project wrapped in 03(?). You can order custom oligos for like $0.13USD a base pair mail order now. You type it in on a webform, a machine creates a custom molecule for you, and if you want to pay a little extra you can have it over-night. I suppose it depends what you call "near future", and synthetic biology has always had moving goal posts when it came to "functional liposome" and "synthetic life", but I don't know... shit can move fast sometimes.

[–] batmaniam 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

you bet! I just remember that because we were learning about glucose is taken up (it's an active process swapping sodium and potassium). Another fun bonus for you: thats what they figured out at university of florida (or at least implemented). Someone had the bright idea that if you gave athletes a beverage with not only glucose but the specific K+/Na+ they needed to run the enzymes that took up the glucose, they might perform better.

So the football team, the Gators, got a special concoction of "Gator-aide" at their games. It smelled kinda like sweat, wasn't sweet (glucose isn't actually that sweet), so the formula was eventually tweaked, the branding changed to "gatorade", but the university still RAKES in the money for that license.

edit: Just to add another cool layer. The money to date has nothing to do with the innovation, that patent would have expired (which is fantastic because that concoction is basically how you treat all sorts of things like cholera where the body dies of dehydration despite having clean water, the UN, FEMA, etc basically hands out off-brand gatorade mix). The reason U of florida still gets the money isn't formula, it's the brand. Pepsi pays them for that "gator-aide" name. It's rare IP perfect win; hydration mix for all, and if you there's a business to be made selling it under a specific name so be it, doesn't matter much to the person whos life is saved because of "generic hydration mix".

[–] batmaniam 3 points 1 week ago

Ok. THANK YOU. I also have to say my biggest issue with the newer one (I forget which) is when the parks going to hell, and the park director just decides to go off into the jungle. Like outside of just design of the park, there is NO way you don't have rigid protocols in-place. Like you read about half the crap Disney does/can do at their parks... there's no way the head of the park just goes "oh you guys got this, I'll be back at some point, just do your best".

Like if ONLY for the reason it would be a known PR disaster for something that in universe already had PR disasters... that shit would have been drilled in since day -1000. It's my biggest issue with the writing because it's not even sci-fi.

/end rant.

[–] batmaniam 3 points 1 week ago

Sorry about your grandfather. There's probably more than one mechanism for alzeimers (not an expert), but amaloyid plaque formation, which is definitely A way to develop alzheimer's, is indeed a prion like event. I'm not sure if "prion" has some hyper-precise definition but the ideas similar: you get one amalyoid protein that misfolds, and acts as a nucleation site misfolding and agglomerating others.

[–] batmaniam 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

"mirror sugar". Just dropping some trivia. The first "no calorie" sweetners were actually mirror sugar. They'd activate tastebuds but couldn't be adsorbed in the gut. Only problem was people crapped their brains out because the osmotic balance went to hell.

edit: I think technically the first zero calorie sugar would have been literal lead (as in Pb) back in the ancient roman days, but I'm not really counting that.

[–] batmaniam 3 points 1 week ago

Jumping in down here. I agree with you entirely that racemic mixes are a very different ball than mirror organisms; it's been a known thing for a long time, and while I'm not positive, I'd be very surprised if FDA testing didn't include different chiralities of both the original compound and metabolite.

That being said, there's nothing to say one version of a chiral protein can't behave like a prion. I don't know of any evidence where we've seen it happen either, though. There's also potentially the issue of partial bonding. Not every domain on every protein is chiral. If a mirror protein has some domains that bind but other functional domains that are incompatible, you could see it incorporated into complex that either 1) are now non-functional or 2) have alternate folding that behaves similar to prions.

Again though, I can't point to any evidence of that. You can do the arrow pushing that shows how you get tetrodoxin from the stuff in your tea or coffee, it doesn't mean it's actually going to happen beyond the statistical realm interesting only to quantum physicists.

Just chiming in because your comments are level headed and you've clearly got some knowledge in the area and appreciate the discussion. Looking forward to digging into the report this weekend, I had no idea this was even something are even attempting!

[–] batmaniam 6 points 2 weeks ago

Snow's fantastic. You just make sure you have food and booze. Most (keyword most) employment is accommodating. Apart from that you make sure the heater vent is clear, if it's a real fun one you might need to shovel the roof, but you prep to not go anywhere. OR the even MORE fun part is walking to the local bar.

That's for relatively warm lake effect. That all goes out the window if it's a truly brutal blizzard. Buffalo specifically had an ugly cold christmas a few years back that was absolutely brutal. People freezing to death leaving there cars looking for a house with someone home. Suspended emergency services. That was not the "fun" kind of snow storm.

 

Pretty much the title. I'd like to add it to the archives.

4
Foot peg question? (self.advrider)
submitted 2 months ago by batmaniam to c/advrider
 

Just a preference thing I guess, but I'm curious where people fall. On my gen1 KLR I had stock foot pegs, and I liked them because they were narrower, and sort of "locked in" to the arch on my boot when I was standing.

My Gen2 KLR and now my KTM both have wider pegs, I know thats better for tarmac, and they seem to have plenty of bite, but I never quite got used to it.

Anyone else feel similar? Just looking for some input before I "downgrade"

2
mapping? (self.advrider)
submitted 3 months ago by batmaniam to c/advrider
 

What do y'all use for mapping/researching routes? Looking into some stuff in NORTHERN Canada. Trip wouldn't be until next summer.

4
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by batmaniam to c/advrider
 

Hi All,

I'm getting a great bike in the worst way. The guy that got me into all this at like 10 years old passed on, and as no one in his family rides, the family wants me to keep the miles rolling.

I'm thrilled, and while I was a little intimidated by the size, it's only 20lbs heavier than my KLR, and the height is no issue as I'm a tall rider; I can flat foot just fine. Took it around the block and it was... transcendental. I had no idea that much power could be that nimble.

My question is what are some big maintenance items I should prioritize? I'm coming from the unkillable pig of a KLR. this is going to be a bit of an adjustment. Also, the bike was very well maintained but his health was bad for about a year. The ride I took around the block was great, but the front suspension seemed a little bumpy for pavement. It's got mixed use tires on it so it's possible it was just the tread on pavement, just being a little paranoid.

I also smelled some burning plastic when I fired it up, but am willing to bet it might have been some kind of weird dust in the exhaust; there was nothing dangling anywhere hot and it did go away.

So yeah, just looking for some general tips and icebergs to avoid. I do most of my own maintience but again that's on gen I and gen II KLRs

 

Hi All,

I'm screening a large media library (20TB) wherein some files got corrupted when I did a transfer via filezilla (by my guess ~10%). The corrupted files display with a green "filter" over every frame (when played via plex and a number of local video players playing the file directly).

I'd like to screen the library, and want to write a script to get an average color reading.

Are there any libraries that would let me return a value AND specify how many frames I want it to take the average of? Because of how consistent and defined the issue is, it's really not necessary to average the whole file.

It would also be great if it automatically skipped non-video files, but I imagine a simple "try/except" would be fine.

My skill level here is best described as "high level hobbyist". I'm familiar with what I need to do iterating over the folder etc, but would prefer not to learn how to pull specific frames from a video container unless I have to.

Thanks for any help!

 

Hi All,

About a year ago I transferred all my files to a new drive. I used filzezilla which did mostly ok-ish, but I didn't notice that some of the video files were corrupted. Random files will have a green tinge to them (like someone put a green filter over the lens).

It seems random, although if it's a series it's usually the whole series.

I've been replacing them as they come up, but I was wondering if anyone had any bright ideas to expedite the process.

Thanks for any help!

 

I have the chubby button v1.0 for my music and love it. Only thing is I'd love something to cue my phones voice command like in my car. The chubby button 2.0 does that (by letting you program a function), but 1.0 doesn't and it's still a perfectly bomb proof bit of hardware.

Does anyone have any recs on a real simple, weather proof, button I could ideally wrap onto my crossbar?

 

Hi All,

First year with olives and capers. I live in a region where they're barley happy in the summer and definitely wouldn't survive the winter outdoors.

I knew that getting into it, and have space set aside for them. I also have grow lights that probably do better than what they got during the summer. So my question is, what kind of environment do I give them so they think it's winter?

Like I said, if I crank the grow lights I wouldn't be surprised if they flowered over winter, and I don't want them losing track of the seasons (unless they don't really care).

Any tips?

 

I was wondering if anyone bumped into this. I noticed random jumps (1-3seconds) in playback when playing original quality. Definitely not buffering or performance lag, just an actual playback error. Jump was at the same spot anytime I loaded the media and regardless of what time I loaded it to.

Which is curious because on playing the file with a different media player on the box it was on, zero issue what so ever.

Disabling direct stream option (under debug) resolved it, and there doesn't seem to be much of a performance hit, I'm just curious what's going on here.

 

Running Bookworm, Plasma DE if that's relevant.

Background: I'm learning here. Decent amount of coding and embedded hardware experience but I'm usually missing one or two key concepts with this stuff.

Getting a box running, and wrestling with NVIDIA drivers. I successfully installed the driver (I think), but now lightdm isn't working. From what I read it appears there's a common issue around a race condition where lightdm tries to fire up before the drivers ready, so I need to add the nvidia driver to initramfs.

Can anyone give me some pointers? Specifically while I get the above:

  1. I'm not sure what modules need to be added and if they're named something specific for debian vs other distros
  2. The correct file to modify
  3. The correct format/syntax that needs to be added

I've found lots of examples, just none specific to debian, and screwing around at this level I don't want to bork something enough I need to do a bare install.

Thanks for any help!

 

Can anyone point me in the right direction here? I have a pretty beefy PC I use as a server and HTPC. 24 2.5ghz cores, 64gb ram, kind of a crappy video card, debian 11. I just migrated all my stuff over and stress tested it supporting 8 different transcribed streams simultaneously (mix of in/out of local). That worked great.

BUT, the video playback is choppy (as in frame skipping) and out of sync when I'm running the HTPC program. Oddly using the web client on the same machine avoids that issue.

Any thoughts? I'm wondering if it might be that it's an older TV it's plugged into and there's some issue there. Thing is, like I said, the webclient its worlds better. Webclient seems to have some issues but I'm pretty sure that's just due to the TV.

Any pointers are helpful! I'm OK at this stuff but very much learning.

 

Basically title. I remember reading about it back in like 2018, I even remember a company that would provide crypto based on the amount of traffic you let through. Just curious if that ever saw any growth.

Everything I google keeps bringing up things on the darkweb. The goal of this was explicitly to go "ISP-less". Like they envisioned mesh net covering giant swathes of space.

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