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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • If you’re just looking to get started with 3d modeling, it’s hard to beat Blender. At the cost of free, it’s by far the most affordable way to dip your toes in some modeling tools.

    For many workflows it’s world class. If you plan to do more organic forms or don’t need technical precision, then it’s very competitive or preferable to paid software.

    You might find it lacking if you plan to do parametric or technical CAD-style modeling. Even then, I think Blender can be a low cost way to learn what you want in your software before investing in more specialized software. You’ll learn enough of the modeling basics to more fluently navigate what other software provides.



  • If it helps, think of the water first like a perfect mirror. If it’s a perfectly flat mirror then it would look like there’s another duck upside down below this duck. If you want to be extra precise, it’s mirrored across the plane where the duck meets the water.

    But water isn’t usually perfectly flat mirror, and here you have little nods to there being ripples or waves. The choppier the wave, the less it reflects, so you’ll often see people break up the mirrored reflection at the choppiest parts of the wave. Similarly, waves aren’t flat, depending on the part of the wave/ripple you’re at, you’d be reflecting higher or lower as though the mirror is tilted to the angle of the surface.

    The last tricky part is that most surfaces are more reflective at a glancing angle than head on, so often reflections are stronger further in the distance and closer up you’ll just be looking down into the water. On a more technical note, you can look up the index of refraction to learn more about this phenomenon.

    To tie it all together, this is why those long shots of sunsets have a sun reflection that is really long (much longer than the size of the sun in the distance) - because it’s at a distance it’s a strong reflection and because all the waves are reflecting at different angles you’re getting all the glancing reflections of the sun on the top of each wave. It typically being dark at sunset also means the bright sun reflection blooms to make it look brighter and larger than just the tip of the wave.

    Conversely, in water sports like wakeboarding, you might not see much of a reflection at all because all the water is choppy and non-reflective.

    Looking down into a pond, you might not see a reflection either because the angle is too steep to reflect.

    In short, yes, in this case the reflection should probably be roughly the same size.


  • Permissive licenses permit a broader range of use compared to “copyleft” licenses.

    “copyleft” here just being a cute way of being the opposite of copyright - instead of disallowing others from what they can do with “copyrighted” code, “copyleft” requires that they (upon request) share modifications to your code.

    Permissive takes away this requirement to share your modifications. “copyleft” is considered more free and open source (FOSS), permissive is more business friendly.



  • Which part sounds off to you? This looks like a very reasonable paper hoping to distill traditional medicine into viable research paths, and does it using a pretty interesting model of compounds and effects.

    If all you see is jibber jabber, maybe you should just default to trusting the experts on this one? Like, it’s not in an obscure journal - it’s a highly regarded peer reviewed journal. The authors aren’t random, they’re researchers at some of the best universities in the world (Nanjing University ranks #7 on the Nature Index).

    The abstract is about as plain-speaking as it gets in the world of cutting edge research. You can probably look up the handful of domain-specific terminology and have a good grasp at what the research is about.




  • I don’t know anything about being an electrician - commercial or otherwise, so I’m curious to hear your side.

    When all those people go to working remote, it’s not like they’re no longer in need of electricity. Presumably their home demand is higher and we might even see people adding new office spaces to adapt their home. Maybe the public grid needs to change to support it? Won’t this mean that there will just be a different type of demand for electricians?

    Are there reasons this would be less attractive to electricians? Pay, job security, or something else?


  • For anyone who’s curious, this is the state of discussing this feature: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/8572

    I’m not an authority on the helix ethos, but I’ve contributed a bit and hung around long enough to have a good read on their stance on most topics. The project is still young and managing the growing pains of getting a lot of traction relatively early. I think the devs value keeping the maintenance footprint small to keep the project sustainable.

    The philosophy of helix’s design is to be a more convenient kakoune, not necessarily a vim. vim is much more widely known, so that analogy springs up more often, but this idea of using piping out to an external command for most operations comes from kakoune.

    For features that would introduce significant maintenance overhead, may jeopardize the performance of a more common workflow or where the design goals are still maturing, the team tends to push such suggestions toward being developed as plugins when that system is added. I get the impression that they see the value of this workflow, but would prefer to see it battle tested as a plugin first.


  • I’ve been there, but over the years I’ve gotten better at avoiding being in this situation.

    If you are implementing something for yourself, and merging it back upstream is just a bonus, then by all means jump straight to implementing.

    However, it’s emotionally draining to implement something and arrive at something you’re proud of only to have it ignored. So do that legwork upfront. File a feature request, open a discussion, join their dev chat - whatever it is, make sure what you want to do is valued and will be welcomed into the project before you start on it. They might even nudge you in a direction that you hadn’t considered before you started.

    Be a responsible dev and communicate before you do the work.


  • Thanks for sharing! Really interesting history in this article. It’s scary to think what a world would look like if Sun didn’t sue Microsoft into oblivion and put an end to this strategy.

    We could be living in a world where Windows is the dominant desktop OS instead of our beloved Solaris.

    To be serious, though, being sued/forced to settle isn’t an indicator that the strategy hasn’t worked. In fact, as is evident by the continued doubling down on the strategy by Microsoft and the unfettered execution of this strategy with Chrome, it’s clear that the value far outweighs the cost of the occasional settlement. The only real deterrent is antitrust regulation and that has been just about entirely defanged. These concerns are especially pertinent for something like Lemmy where there’s no central entity to soak the legal fees to go to court.




  • The community-based project of passion to enhance lemmy is already here… it’s lemmy.

    This isn’t reddit. There isn’t a big black box and company around the service that is preventing the community from making it what they want it to be.

    Sure there can be flavors, but I’d guess if there’s the type of consensus around the usefulness as there is with RES, then why wait for a separate project to shoehorn features on top of lemmy when the folks behind lemmy seem quite receptive to contributions?


  • we need to know who makes the most green hydrogen

    That would be an awesome stat, but it’s not what the article claims. I explained that above.

    But because the topic has caught my interest I did some more digging. The only report I found was linked on Wikipedia, which says that 0.1% of all hydrogen globally is produced using renewable energy. This is the same figure China claims they produce, so by volume I would expect the total volume to be proportional to the production/consumption, which would mean China still would produce approximately 2x the next biggest producer. There could still be other countries punching way above their weight, but given the incredibly low net green production globally, we’d be splitting hairs over what amounts to research plant production. You’re welcome to continue searching for more specific reporting.

    Now, given that we’ve found ourselves on a tangent sparked by a misunderstanding of the article, trying to compare countries on a metric that amounts to 0.1% of production, I would say it would be a better use of both of our time to focus on how we get the other 99.9% of production over to green production. Given this article, China seems to be approaching that problem ambitiously and I’m glad to see it. To address climate change we absolutely need China to invest in green tech, so this article should only be received positively. I’m looking forward to tracking the progress, because it looks like there’s a lot of opportunity to improve globally.

    (sorry for duplicate posts, deleted the 3 others)


  • It can both currently produce only 0.1% of hydrogen using a green process, while also developing a new process that is 99.9% green (for the hydrogren that it produces using the new process). That means the overall production right now is probably still ~0.1% green, but the point of the article seems to be that they hope to transition to this new process, which sounds pretty cool.

    And to also knock out a few other misunderstandings, I’ll also address your comment below: The stats you link are for the number of plants, not the volume of production or consumption (what is claimed). Both stats can be correct if China has large plants that produce more volume than in other countries. But better yet, we don’t even have to root around for the details - the article cites it’s source: the World Economic Forum’s latest whitepaper (June 27, 2023), which in turn cites statistica “Global Hydrogen Consumption By Country”. So there you have it - China out-consumes hydrogen at a rate of about 2-times that of the next largest consumer (the United States). That seems to track pretty well, since both countries are similarly developed, and China is about 4x the size of the US by population. If you wanted to split hairs, you could say that this doesn’t include volume of production. Given the incredible lead in consumption volume, I’m willing to grant them that omission.

    And, not chalking this up to you, but I’ve seen other replies in here about how China is somehow cooking the books. That’s becoming more and more obviously wrong (and more than a bit racist). As one indicator, their universities occupy 8 of the top 20 institutions in the Nature index. For those unaware, this is a premier British-based peer-reviewed journal that releases a ranking of academic institutions based on their publishing to high-impact journals. China’s year-over-year change also means that they’re rising on that list rapidly.