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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • It was totally fine. Borg implants or not, she was still human. She also didn’t have a choice about becoming Borg at such a young age. When her connection was cut with the collective, she basically became a child again making her Janeway’s responsibility. (That was close to Janeway’s logic I believe, and I agree with it. It was a human decision for another human who was incapable of making decisions.)

    The biggest thing is that Seven has already signed a contract with UPN, so she was kinda stuck for a few episodes anyway. Janeway knew this, so after thinking about it over a 50 gallon drum of coffee and a few packs of menthol Kools, she decided to just run with it and make it dramatic. (The Borg attorneys failed to overturn the terms of the contract even after several weeks of absolutely phenomenal work.)


  • Fake or outdated info, actually. While this is a small tangent, I make it a habit to review basic, introductory information on a regular basis. (For example, I’ll still watch the occasional 3D printer 101 guide even though I could probably build one from scratch while blindfolded.)

    I have been in IT for a very long time and have branched out into other engineering fields over the years. What I have found, unsurprisingly, is that methods and theories can get outdated quick. So, regularly reviewing things I consider “engineering gospel” is just healthy practice.

    For the topic at hand, it doesn’t take much misinformation (or outdated information) to morph into something absolutely fake, or at best, completely wrong. It takes work to separate fact from fiction and many people are too lazy to look past internet pictures with words, or 15 second video clips. (It’s also hard to break out of believing unverified information “just because that’s the way is”.)



  • All good! It’s the same situation as I described and I see that increasing temps did help. It’s good to do a temperature tower test for quality and also a full speed test after that. After temperature calibration, print a square that is only 2 or 3 bottom layers that covers the entire bed at full speed or faster. (It’s essentially a combined adhesion/leveling/extrusion volume/z offset test, but you need to understand what you are looking at to see the issues separately.)

    If you have extrusion problems, the layer line will start strong from the corners, get thin during the acceleration and may thicken up again at the bottom of the deceleration curve. A tiny bit of line width variation is normal, but full line separation needs attention.

    Just be aware if you get caught in a loop of needing to keep bumping up temperatures as that starts to get into thermistor, heating element or even some mechanical issues/problems.


  • I am curious as to why they would offload any AI tasks to another chip? I just did a super quick search for upscaling models on GitHub (https://github.com/marcan/cl-waifu2x/tree/master/models) and they are tiny as far as AI models go.

    Its the rendering bit that takes all the complex maths, and if that is reduced, that would leave plenty of room for running a baby AI. Granted, the method I linked to was only doing 29k pixels per second, but they said they weren’t GPU optimized. (FSR4 is going to be fully GPU optimized, I am sure of it.)

    If the rendered image is only 85% of a 4k image, that’s ~1.2 million pixels that need to be computed and it still seems plausible to keep everything on the GPU.

    With all of that blurted out, is FSR4 AI going to be offloaded to something else? It seems like there would be a significant technical challenges in creating another data bus that would also have to sync with memory and the GPU for offloading AI compute at speeds that didn’t risk create additional lag. (I am just hypothesizing, btw.)


  • I suppose you are correct. If the bit isn’t structural, it doesn’t need to pass any test for microcracks. If it is structural and it passes testing, YOLO that shit.

    It’s just the core frames that need serious attention though. I don’t think I have been around a single aircraft that wasn’t constantly bleeding some kind of fluid, so everything else not related to getting the thing in the air and keeping it from completely disintegrating while in flight is mostly optional. (I am joking, but not really. Airplanes hold the weird dichotomy of being strangely robust and extremely fragile at the same time.)


  • And there are significant technology differences. The new upgrade will be the B-52J or K.

    Proper aircraft maintenance cycles are intense, so it would surprise me if any of airframes we use now have 1952 original parts. Aircraft are subject to lots of vibration and the aluminum in B-52s will eventually stress-crack because of it. (It wouldn’t surprise me if composites were added in many places instead of aluminum replacements, but that is just speculation.)

    Also during those maintenance cycles, it’s much easier to do systems upgrades since the aircraft is basically torn down to its frame anyway.

    It’s the same design to what we had in 1952, but they ain’t the same aircraft, philosophically speaking.




  • 185C is cold for PLA. It may work for slow prints, but my personal minimum has always been around 200C and my normal print temperature is usually at 215C.

    Long extrusions are probably sucking out all the heat from the nozzle and it’s temporarily jamming until the filament can heat up again.

    Think of the hotend as a reservoir for heat. For long extrusions, it will drain really fast. Once the hotend isn’t printing for a quick second, it will fill back up really fast. At 185C, you are trying to print without a heat reservoir. I mean, it’ll work, but not during intense or extended extrusions.


  • It seems like it would be extremely fast to me. Take a 50x50 block of pixels and expand those across a 100x100 pixel grid leaving blank pixels were you have missing data. If a blank pixel is surrounded by blue pixels, the probability of the missing pixel being blue is fairly high, I would assume.

    That is a problem that is perfect for AI, actually. There is an actual algorithm that can be used for upscaling, but at its core, its likely boiled down to a single function and AI’s are excellent for replicating the output of basic functions. It’s not a perfect result, but it’s tolerable.

    If this example is correct or not for FSR, I have no clue. However, having AI shit out data based on a probability is mostly what they do.






  • Voyager had it worse than Enterprise-D in general, but I am struggling to define “natural disasters” in this case. I’ll need help with this as I am not an Enterprise-D expert, but I think I can explain more about what I think is proper context from Voyager.

    Strange aliens that invade the ship are just aliens doing what they do. It’s natural, but technically not a disaster.

    Voyager getting pulled into the delta quadrant was an act of an entity and not really a disaster in the whole scheme of things. It was really bad, but limited in scope.

    I almost classified a planet being destroyed by a dangerous power source explosion a natural disaster, but it’s not. It’s humanoids doing stupid humanoid things.

    Voyager does have “Shattered”, that seems natural and a disaster, but it’s limited to just Voyager.

    “Year of Hell” is so close, because time itself is keeping the imperium in a never ending cycle of wiping out entire civilizations, but doesn’t make the cut because it was still the work of one crew and the “disasters” technically never happened.

    “Friendship One” may be in the running because a civilization was “gifted” with matter/antimatter tech before it was ready. It was a mistake of pure chance that kicked off a path to the destruction of a society.

    (Enterprise-D had a few episodes where they were saving planets from actual natural disasters though. As mundane as that sounds, some of those may come out on top by definition.)

    Edit: To completely destroy my own attempt to set content, “The Omega Directive” may be it as the Omega particle was able to create subspace ruptures. It’s perfectly and evenly tied with Enterprise’s “Force of Nature” where warp drives were destroying the fabric of subspace itself. In that context, both win. Unintentional and unexpected natural consequences of one force of nature acting on another. (I just completed wrecked my own previous arguments, I know. Just having too much fun with this one, s’all.)


  • Oh. When I said “the west” I was squarely pointing the finger at France. China is playing the longer game there because Russia has stationed Wagner down there already. It benefits both Russia and China if the population is focused on removing French influence. China gets a long term investment hedge against France and Russia gets more cheap mercs for Ukraine.

    Now, I don’t really want to spend much time doing a full research project on what is basically a game of thrones’ish style side bet. It’s insanely complicated, I would imagine. After a few African countries went full-on coup d’état a few months ago, I realized there was much more going on.

    Edit: I wasn’t downvoting you. I suspect that some people might be trying to launch some instability of their own. Lulz.