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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Also totally sucks for accessibility. Some communities strictly enforce having alt text for posts.

    Transcript:

    souldagger

    im sorry i just found out that all steel made post-ww2 has like subtly higher levels of radioactivity… bc the nuclear bombs increased the background radiation in the air slightly all across the world and so atmospheric air used in the production of steel contaminates it… and it’s completely negligible in everyday life and not at all dangerous (really, truly do not worry about it) but apparently it also means that whenever we need Special No Radiation Steel (like for scientific/medical equipment, ex. geiger counters or xray machines) we have to use scavenged steel made before ww2. and apparently shipwrecks are a great source of such steel. so a lot of such equipment is made from recycled shipwreck metal. what the fuck. what the fuck

    for anyone who like me was worried we will one day run out of shipwreck steel: thankfully the background radiation levels in the atmosphere have been dropping ever since nuclear testing was moved underground, so this will become less and less of an issue with time, and now for another radioactive metal from shipwrecks fan fact:

    apparently lead is really good for radiation shielding, which is why it’s important to many physics experiments, especially those concerned with studying dark matter and rare particles. unfortunately, lead is also inherently A Little Bit Radioactive (unrelated to nuclear bombs, it’s just a feature of the metal), but the radioactive element decays over time, so the older the lead, the less radioactive, and hence better for Physics Stuff. which is why ancient Roman lead is Ideal for this, so a lot of ancient bars of lead from Roman shipwrecks - tons of cargo that would’ve ended up as weapons or coins and stuff, if it didn’t sink to the bottom of the sea - are sold to physicists. it’s like a whole “preservation of cultural heritage vs revolutionary scientific research” thing. like a whole fucking feud btwn the archaeologists and physicists


  • Anecdotes from an independent repair shop owner / operator.

    I very rarely encounter reparability issues from Lenovo devices. I’ve worked on the full range down to Chromebooks and all the way up to high-end ThinkPad workstations. Parts are generally available, if not from Lenovo then on the aftermarket. They have repair documentation on their site. There are cases where the memory is soldered, but that is not something that is unique to Lenovo.

    From my perspective, the least repairable devices end up being the LG and Samsung laptops. Parts are much harder to come by, which means that when they are available they’re usually quite expensive. Their designs are hostile to repair, documentation has not been readily available, they haven’t used modular memory for about 10 years now.

    Microsoft’s Surface lineup has historically been real bad for repair, it’s not until recently that they’ve been turning a new leaf. Their logic board designs are so unusual that even component level repair becomes a huge pain compared to others.



  • I got it at launch, spent 80 hours in it, and had my fun. With that being said, Bethesda games have hooked me my entire life, starting with Morrowond at age 9.

    I keep meaning to go back and finish the main storyline for Starfield. It’s not as engrossing of a world as Fallout or Skyrim, but it’s fun enough for what it is - it’s just not “great” the way Bethesda’s other games are.

    Might be worth waiting for a sale price though, there’s always one around the corner.








  • I have to wonder if they, like me, were considering the potential rather than what was immediately in front of them.

    DLSS5 is, after all, an in-development project that currently runs on a second dedicated graphics card. Showing this off the way they did might have been a huge mistake, or maybe this reaction will course-correct what might have actually become a slop filter.

    Lighting and shadow some are the most computationally intensive aspects of a game, they’re usually the first settings I dial back when I need to improve performance.

    The possibility of running lower settings and having their visual fidelity improved as part of the upscaling pipeline is an appealing one for me. The key would be tuning it so that it can be an enhancement to what’s already there, not something that totally overrides it or makes it look like Gen-AI output.




  • The tech seems to have yassified Grace in the main promotional image that’s being used by every publication.

    The rest of the images look improved, for the most part, and I do think it does make sense to offer this functionality as an option in the upscaling pipeline.

    I’m sure that those repeating artist’s intention have never dared use a reshade or texture swap.

    Hopefully, that yassification will be a side effect of the current state of the tech and not something that ships to end users.



  • I don’t think the charger fried your gear.

    If it had, it would have also fried the display unit you tried it on.

    USB-PD defaults to 5V until a negotiation takes place to establish voltage and current limits. In order to have caused damage, negotiation would have to have established voltage greater than 9V.

    Plenty of USB-C chargers do not supply the full range of voltages that are possible through USB-PD. For example, the Nintendo Switch’s charger is limited to 15V because that is the most the switch supports. Lots of inexpensive “phone chargers” top out at 12V.

    It’s more likely that you received a defective unit.