dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

If you’re going to display pixels on the user’s screen, you have to send those pixels to the user. Magic still doesn’t exist. HTML img tags are indeed a “pointer,” but once the user’s browser has the path to that image file it will download the entire thing.

That said, there’s no reason to send an image that’s any bigger than it needs to be. Sending a scaled down thumbnail if you know it will be displayed small is sensible. Sending the entire 1200px wide or whatever image it is and just squashing it into a 100px wide box in the user’s browser is not.

First of all, I take a bit of umbrage at the author’s constant reference to “website size” without defining what this means until you dig into the FAQ. Just blithely referring to everything as “size” is a bit misleading, since I imagine most people would immediately assume size on disk which obviously makes no sense from a web browsing perspective. And indeed, they actually mean total data transferred on a page load.

Also, basically all this does is punish sites that use images. I run an ecommerce website (and no, I’m not telling you lunatics which one) and mine absolutely would qualify handily, except… I have to provide product images. If I didn’t, my site would technically still “work” in a broad and objective sense, but my customers would stage a riot.

A home page load on our site is just a shade over 2 megabytes transferred, the vast majority of which is product images. You can go ahead and run an online store that actually doesn’t present your customers any products on the landing page if you want to, and let me know how that works out for you.

I don’t use any frameworks or external libraries or jQuery or any of that kind of bullshit that has to be pulled down on page load. Everything else is a paltry (these days) 115.33 kB. I’mna go ahead and point out that this is actually less to transfer than jabroni has got on his own landing page, which is 199.31 kB. That’s code and content only for both metrics, also not including his sole image — which is his favicon, and that is for some inexplicable reason given the circumstances a 512x512 .png. (I used the Firefox network profiler to generate these numbers.)

Then you should fund my plan to build a giant magnifying glass and attach it to a blimp. Then we can fly over the ne’er-do-wells and zorch them.

That’s the main hurdle.

Re-finding this was a pain in the ass because I didn’t save it. https://lemmy.world/post/19485246/12219336

Editing to add some more meandering. Now this is even longer than the first one.

In addition to surface area limitations, there’s also a pretty obvious line of sight problem in that if your satellite is positioned such that its shiny side is facing the sun, by definition it must be facing the same direction as the Earth’s currently lighted side. The further past the dusk line onto the dark side of the Earth you’re trying to hit the further you have to rotate your mirror until ultimately the surface of it is perpendicular to the incoming sunlight. This is the angle of incidence, in optical terms, and it reduces the effective reflection not only off of the mirror proportionally to the increase in angle (in a roughly geometric manner, I believe) but also where that reflected beam of light hits the ground at its oblique angle. In real terms, it will be impossible to hit any target more than a few degrees past the dusk line with any meaningful amount of energy. Insofar as this harebrained scheme could possibly hit the ground with any amount of energy at all.

The diagram (which is surely not to scale) on these idiots’ website seems to depict a mirror in orbit around the Earth that’s about the size of Massachusetts, which is orbiting at a height that’d put it somewhere in the vicinity of the Van Allen belt, which is also a bad idea (no radio communication for you!) and would result in an orbital period of around 2.5 hours. If so, that means your mirror is whizzing over the surface at something like 14,000 MPH, and you would have some kind of line of sight to it from the ground for maybe 25% of its orbit. So even with the best will in the world and absolutely mathematically perfect rotation control it’ll only be able to remain on a surface target for about 37 minutes at most, most of which would be while it’s uselessly passing through the Earth’s shadow and is reflecting no sunlight at all, and for the remaining handful of minutes with its effective output tapering off to uselessness as it sets over the opposite horizon.

“I’ll just position my mirrors in a geostationary orbit,” says Mr. Clever. “Then I’ll have line of sight to a big chunk of the surface and my satellite won’t move relative to it.”

Well, the further you park your mirrors from the surface, the harder they are to aim. You can’t have it both ways. A geostationary orbit is about 22,000 miles from the surface, a distance from which even the tiniest error in alignment will result in you hitting the wrong target. You can use some middle school trig to calculate this for yourself: At a distance of 22,000 miles, an alignment error of just 0.01 degrees will result in the centerline of your beam missing the target by four miles, which in terrestrial terms is what we refer to as kind of a lot. Maintaining an alignment precision that high especially taking into account gravitational perturbation by the moon, etc., is a rather tall order. To maintain targeting precision within 223 feet, which is probably already unacceptable, you need a constant alignment precision of 0.0001 degrees, and you need to hold it there 100% of the time.

I don’t care how big your rocket is, that’s not happening.

All of this also assumes perfectly flat and 100% reflective surfaces on the mirrors, which never degrades or gets scuffed up or punctured by space debris. Which is also impossible.

To recap:

• You can’t reflect any more energy than strikes the surface area of your mirrors, end of story. The mirrors will be tiny, relative to the size of the Earth, and the Earth is huge, relative to the size of any mirror we can launch.
• The efficacy of your mirrors diminishes geometrically with how far you must angle them relative to the direction of incoming sunlight.
• Most of the time your mirrors will either be in the Earth’s shadow, where they are useless, or over the already illuminated side of the Earth, where they’re pointless. In easily achievable low Earth orbits, their time on target will be very short.
• Positioning the orbits high enough to mitigate either problem will make aiming mathematically impossible, and also magnify any imperfections in focus, which are certain to be vast. That won’t work either.

TL;DR: The whole thing won’t work.

In addition to being a moronic idea, this is also physically infeasible as I outlined in excruciating detail in my comment the last time this came up. The takeaway is that this is an investor scam for sure, and the side effects outlined in this article are just a fun (!) and exciting (!) sideshow if these bozos actually do mange to get a single mirror off the ground and deployed. Which they probably won’t.

Exciting enough for me to use on a daily basis, and I’m actively following their development progress. Not contributing, mind you. Nobody wants me of all people touching their codebase.

FreeCAD - The open source alternative to various proprietary parametric CAD and solid modelling software such as Solidworks, Fusion360, OnShape, etc. This recently passed its milestone 1.0 release at which point it could finally be considered actually broadly functional for actual real world use. Among various other widgets, I prominently used it to make this and this. Yeah, you guys know how it is.

I consider FreeCAD pretty important coming from the 3D printing hobbyist’s perspective because its the lone bulwark (well, okay, maybe also along with Blender and OpenSCAD) standing firm against the tidal wave of predatory bullshit being peddled by the commercial modelling software options, all of which at this point are genuine full-blown instruments of evil desperately trying to strangle, gatekeep, and paywall humankind’s ability to just make some goddamned shapes to 3D print.

In other news, I complied UZDoom from source the other night because somehow I missed that zdoom.org has precompiled binaries on their site, which I haven’t had to visit in years, but the UZDoom Github page doesn’t. We live and learn. UZDoom is pretty exciting because it’s a continuation of GZDoom with the added feature of kicking its insane former lead developer off of the project, or rather forking it out from under him. And everybody loves to play Doom.

Imagine my surprise and amusement to discover that https://www.realultimatepower.net/ is still online.

Not even. The rainbow was god’s covenant with man (or Noah, specifically) that he would not flood the world again in future hissy tantrums. Some wingnuts have not RTFM.

Well, okay. A lot of them.

Most, even.

Well, I do I have tucked into a random bookshelf one of those “World Atlas” book safes that everyone already knows is a storage box and not a book, because they’ve been sold virtually unchanged as far as I can tell since at least the early 1990s. As a little treat to anyone observant who notices this and thinks they’re so damn clever, inside I have nothing but a scaled down 3D printed replica of a cinder block.

It is astoundingly unlikely anyone will find where my valuables are actually hidden in my house, nor am I going to admit it on the internet.

Likewise, back when I built my first big pants real PC out of actual new components and not just hand-me-down bullshit cannibalized from decommissioned office stuff, I put the plethora of stickers that came with everything on the little rear triangle windows on my car. As if they were riceboy components instead, which in a way I suppose they were. Many of them were those textured stamped aluminum ones and they survived for quite a long time.

Surely at least one confused tuner saw this and puzzled over what the hell G.Skill and MSI “car parts” were supposed to do.

Here’s another sign of the times: Out of all the parts for my current rig, only two of them came with stickers. What a rip-off. My processor came with an AMD sticker (just a cheap vinyl one this time) and my motherboard came with an Aorus sticker which is at least textured metal. I stuck both of them to the inside of the front door on my case.

Deer aren’t very smart. I had one walk straight into the side of my car when I was stopped at a stop sign once. This didn’t do any apparent damage to either the deer or the car. Just, thump. When I mention this to other people around the area they inevitably have a similar story of a deer doing basically the same thing.

I don’t think evolution is working quite fast enough to be doing these dummies any favors just yet.

I don’t know who that dude is, but I’m sure the internet does. As these things went, he did a whole series of clips of Obama impersonations in various ridiculous scenarios.

Late in my high school career I got accosted by some dillweed in an empty hallway. I have no idea what his beef was, but what with my lifelong predilection for being an insufferable snarky asshole it’s not tough to imagine pretty much anybody could potentially have a bee in their bonnet over something I said to them at some point, once they had a couple of days to ruminate over it and maybe look up some of the longer words. And for all anyone knew I was just some scrawny nerd who did calligraphy and played stupid card games. Easy pickings.

Anyway, this punk comes stampeding up to me while popping off at the mouth over how he’s going to whoop my ass and I’m a bitch and this and that and the other thing. I figure I know what he’s going to do. He’s either going to do that braindead bully maneuver where he tries to crowd your personal space with his face 2" in front of yours while yelling and flapping his arms around behind and to the sides like a hysterial chicken, in which case I’m going to kick him smartly in the balls. That, or he’s going to try to tackle me.

He tries to tackle me.

Since I saw this coming from a mile away I cut him off by grabbing him by the throat with one hand, roughly the belt with the other, used his own momentum to hoist him up onto one shoulder, and I swear upon my oath that I did a Shinkuu Nage on this motherfucker right over my head and threw him flat on his back onto the tile floor.

Pose at the end and everything. I couldn’t resist. No one witnessed this except him and me. I wish I had it on video. And that was the end of that. Curiously, after this it seems he had suddenly run out of things to say. He elected not to get up. I left him there and walked away.

I did a lot of unwisely flamboyant kung-fu shit on people in my younger years, often to only middling success. But this was perfect, and I will probably never pull it off again so long as I live.

It’s always astounding to realize that a couple of billion molecules have all decided to get together and be you for a while. On a universal scale, that seems pretty unlikely.

My closest brush with celebrity was being peripherally involved in the skating scene back in the day and in the same town as Bam Margera, when he was just starting to get famous. Bam is, was, and probably always will be 5’4" worth of complete flaming douchenozzle. It’s no surprise that everyone had a story about how that one time they almost kicked Bam Margera’s ass. Or actually did fight him. I imagine this would have gotten significantly more difficult over time as his entourage of groupies and sycophants grew ever larger. Eventually he stopped making local appearances altogether. I’m sure as he tells it that’s because he was now so famous that everyone else was clearly beneath him and he was now untouchable, but I imagine the real reason was much more pragmatic: it was probably only a matter of time before somebody finally put a hole in him, and he knew it.

So yeah. This one time at a skate park in the Philly suburbs, I came this close to beating Bam Margera’s ass. I would have won, too, if it stayed mano-a-mano. But it wouldn’t have, because he’s a little punk.

Electro swing is now (still) a thing. It’s out there on the internet. As with most of these genres based on some manner of synthetic zeitgeist, be prepared to be exposed to a lot of anime tiddies in the artwork, though.

Atre was far from your typical sweetheart tech magnate.

Uh. Is there actually any such thing? Every tech bigwig or, indeed, any high level business person in general I’ve ever had exposure to has been a monumental dickhead. Bar none, and without exception.

I am also using this space as an opportunity to suggest, “Crunch Berries, nigga, damn.” And probably get crucified for it.

Yeah, but that backflip, though.

Hand me that illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator, will you?