The Meme and Jokes Thread

[mnementh]

Cat resistant Christmas Tree:


-Pat

That is literally the only way it's gonna happen, short of a level 3 containment field.

mnem
which might last through the entire Christmas season. might.

[mnementh]

Haha, what a fugly mess of that car they have made. I wouldn't be seen dead in sh1t box, what on earth made then do that.

It's the abstract concept of "quality". Some people get it. Some people don't. This person does not get it.

mnem
So if you don't rate, just overcompensate;
At least you'll know you can always go on Ricki Lake...
The world needs wannabes,
The world loves wannabes,
Let's get some more wannabes...

[bd139]

Haha, what a fugly mess of that car they have made. I wouldn't be seen dead in sh1t box, what on earth made then do that.

It's the abstract concept of "quality". Some people get it. Some people don't. This person does not get it.

quality? oh shit......bd must have read robert pirsig.

(read ZATAOMM in 1976.....and have not been right since)

Edit: this turned into a rant. Sorry

To be fair I read that fairly late on, after I'd been throwing together web applications for a few years. I came to the conclusion that some people actually have zero to no idea if something is good or not. Sometimes they are employed by people with the same ability. You only get an idea of if things are good by consuming and analysing as much "art" as you possibly can over a long period of time. When I say "art" I mean anything that humans create, not just paintings. Eventually you develop an intuitive feeling of raised hackles every time someone puts something that is garbage in front of you. Good is a trite form of quality.

The book cemented that, when I read it in around 2010, by at least providing an abstract framework around reasoning about it and giving it a name, although it had some crack smoking around temporality and "now" being part of the quality equation which I disagree with because it's completely missing the entire lifetime of everything. The alternating side story was interesting. It could have been a lot shorter.

Fundamentally it gets broken down into two questions:

- Does it look and feel nice?
- Does it function well?

This is all plainly obvious crap but you have to sit and think about it for a bit and probably didn't need a voluminous diatribe written about it.

There are of course exceptions and midpoints which are where all hell breaks loose. I mean I have a lovely Knoll Sapper monitor stand here which is a nice piece of design but the thing is a complete piece of shit from a functional perspective. You don't realise that until your monitor slowly tilts as you are typing over the space of a few days or when the cable gets caught in the arm hinge very slightly but it still feels quality, just you don't use it. And there are things which decline over time, sometimes very rapidly (cars for example). And there are opinions as well such as ticking analogue watches which I find to be functionally good but fucking irritating because they tick.

Ultimately if we look at that idiot's car, it did indeed look and feel nice once and probably functioned well one. Now one is completely false, the other is uncertain and the owner is clearly ignorant to the former which is what drums up the raised hackles. That person should never be trusted. I dread to think what the inside of his house looks like.

Ergo I claim quality is more a social issue of trust in others to do something good than actual good.

[nixiefreqq]

It's the abstract concept of "quality". Some people get it. Some people don't. This person does not get it.

quality? oh shit......bd must have read robert pirsig.

(read ZATAOMM in 1976.....and have not been right since)

Edit: this turned into a rant. Sorry

To be fair I read that fairly late on, after I'd been throwing together web applications for a few years. I came to the conclusion that some people actually have zero to no idea if something is good or not. Sometimes they are employed by people with the same ability. You only get an idea of if things are good by consuming and analysing as much "art" as you possibly can over a long period of time. When I say "art" I mean anything that humans create, not just paintings. Eventually you develop an intuitive feeling of raised hackles every time someone puts something that is garbage in front of you. Good is a trite form of quality.

The book cemented that, when I read it in around 2010, by at least providing an abstract framework around reasoning about it and giving it a name, although it had some crack smoking around temporality and "now" being part of the quality equation which I disagree with because it's completely missing the entire lifetime of everything. The alternating side story was interesting. It could have been a lot shorter.

Fundamentally it gets broken down into two questions:

- Does it look and feel nice?
- Does it function well?

This is all plainly obvious crap but you have to sit and think about it for a bit and probably didn't need a voluminous diatribe written about it.

There are of course exceptions and midpoints which are where all hell breaks loose. I mean I have a lovely Knoll Sapper monitor stand here which is a nice piece of design but the thing is a complete piece of shit from a functional perspective. You don't realise that until your monitor slowly tilts as you are typing over the space of a few days or when the cable gets caught in the arm hinge very slightly but it still feels quality, just you don't use it. And there are things which decline over time, sometimes very rapidly (cars for example). And there are opinions as well such as ticking analogue watches which I find to be functionally good but fucking irritating because they tick.

Ultimately if we look at that idiot's car, it did indeed look and feel nice once and probably functioned well one. Now one is completely false, the other is uncertain and the owner is clearly ignorant to the former which is what drums up the raised hackles. That person should never be trusted. I dread to think what the inside of his house looks like.

Ergo I claim quality is more a social issue of trust in others to do something good than actual good.

don't want to trigger another rant.....so this is just a suggestion for your reading pleasure:

"The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism".

[tggzzz]

"Does it look and feel nice? Does it function well?" Key questions, and why I like Bauhaus.

ZatAoMM was revolutionary in its time, and that can be difficult to understand if you don't realise how much has changed in the past half century.

When it was written:

• Art and Science were two different things, and n'ere the twain shall meet. Engineering? Wossat?
• Eastern philosophy was second rate rubbish, in no way comparable with Western (Christian) philosophy
• Buddhism was more or less unknown. There were only couple of (very dry and scholarly) paperbacks about it, one by a well-respected judge (Christmas Humphries)

ZatAoMM was one trigger for that change.

ZatAoMM had lots of very quotable quotes in a mass of supporting self-realisation drivel. Some readers need such drivel before they "discover" the key points.

The key "revolutionary" quote is “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.” That directly challenged the prevailing unthinking presumptions.

Others include

• “When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.”
• “You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.”
• “Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive”
• “Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes that's hard.”
• (I thought I originated this one when approaching Malham Tarn; clearly I had forgotten its origin) “In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”
• “The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.”
• “Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.”

Those seem pretty obvious to me. The general cultural ethos during my youth wouldn't have considered such issues.

[mnementh]

"What is your major malfunction?"

"I grew up and I still give a fuck."

mnem
true story.

[vk6zgo]

It's the abstract concept of "quality". Some people get it. Some people don't. This person does not get it.

quality? oh shit......bd must have read robert pirsig.

(read ZATAOMM in 1976.....and have not been right since)

Edit: this turned into a rant. Sorry

To be fair I read that fairly late on, after I'd been throwing together web applications for a few years. I came to the conclusion that some people actually have zero to no idea if something is good or not. Sometimes they are employed by people with the same ability. You only get an idea of if things are good by consuming and analysing as much "art" as you possibly can over a long period of time. When I say "art" I mean anything that humans create, not just paintings. Eventually you develop an intuitive feeling of raised hackles every time someone puts something that is garbage in front of you. Good is a trite form of quality.

The book cemented that, when I read it in around 2010, by at least providing an abstract framework around reasoning about it and giving it a name, although it had some crack smoking around temporality and "now" being part of the quality equation which I disagree with because it's completely missing the entire lifetime of everything. The alternating side story was interesting. It could have been a lot shorter.

Fundamentally it gets broken down into two questions:

- Does it look and feel nice?
- Does it function well?

This is all plainly obvious crap but you have to sit and think about it for a bit and probably didn't need a voluminous diatribe written about it.

There are of course exceptions and midpoints which are where all hell breaks loose. I mean I have a lovely Knoll Sapper monitor stand here which is a nice piece of design but the thing is a complete piece of shit from a functional perspective. You don't realise that until your monitor slowly tilts as you are typing over the space of a few days or when the cable gets caught in the arm hinge very slightly but it still feels quality, just you don't use it. And there are things which decline over time, sometimes very rapidly (cars for example). And there are opinions as well such as ticking analogue watches which I find to be functionally good but fucking irritating because they tick.

Ultimately if we look at that idiot's car, it did indeed look and feel nice once and probably functioned well one. Now one is completely false, the other is uncertain and the owner is clearly ignorant to the former which is what drums up the raised hackles. That person should never be trusted. I dread to think what the inside of his house looks like.

Ergo I claim quality is more a social issue of trust in others to do something good than actual good.

"Form, fit & function" & the foremost of these is function.

Many times, I have had to upset the internal "prettiness" of a piece of equipment to fit components which are really up to the job, or replacing those which are unobtanium.
When a device is used by your employer to make a living they don't care if its insides are "pretty" or not.

A case in point is Sony picture Monitors versus just about everybody else's.
Sony boards don't look pretty, but they are almost always repairable.

We had some Barco monitors (the ones that look a bit like microwave ovens, with the keyboard entry for all functions).
They were nice when they were working, but completely failed in functionality ---one click of a switch on a Sony could select the function you needed, but with the Barco, you had to wade through menus.

Where they failed mostly internally was their fetish on the "form" side.
The boards were things of beauty, but when we tried to remove components for replacement, we found that the through hole diameters were so close to that of the leads as to become an "interference fit".
To add insult to injury, there was minimal copper around the holes, so unless we were extremely careful, a nice little "doughnut" of copper would come off.
A Pace desoldering tool didn't help, as it delighted in eating the copper.
Obviously, there were "work-arounds", but working on them was much more time consuming than a standard picture monitor should require.

[Runco990]

We had some Barco monitors (the ones that look a bit like microwave ovens, with the keyboard entry for all functions).
They were nice when they were working, but completely failed in functionality ---one click of a switch on a Sony could select the function you needed, but with the Barco, you had to wade through menus.

Where they failed mostly internally was their fetish on the "form" side.
The boards were things of beauty, but when we tried to remove components for replacement, we found that the through hole diameters were so close to that of the leads as to become an "interference fit".
To add insult to injury, there was minimal copper around the holes, so unless we were extremely careful, a nice little "doughnut" of copper would come off.
A Pace desoldering tool didn't help, as it delighted in eating the copper.
Obviously, there were "work-arounds", but working on them was much more time consuming than a standard picture monitor should require.

Oh, I remember the Barcos. I've worked on those, as well as their projectors and owned a Barco Mega Calibrator Monitor myself. It was fun playing Quake on a 29" CRT computer monitor, even though it took up the entire desk!

Anyhow, I made a long living servicing and color calibrating Sony Broadcast Monitors. Barco may be ultra modular, but Sony held up and was pretty easy to repair. I haven't touched a Barco in many years. I still keep a sony broadcast monitor on my bench today.

[dl6lr]

To be fair I read that fairly late on, after I'd been throwing together web applications for a few years.

Haha, web development... We are just facing some shit from the group that throws AWS on everything not being nailed down. Now they arranged to use AWS IOT but failed to nail them to fixed IPs (you can do that, but it costs some money) because "we have no problems with it". But AWS has abt. 200 IPs and each DNS resolves only 6 of them. So the firewall catches 6 IPs and the devices probably 6 different ones the next millisecond...

[bd139]

To be fair I read that fairly late on, after I'd been throwing together web applications for a few years.

Haha, web development... We are just facing some shit from the group that throws AWS on everything not being nailed down. Now they arranged to use AWS IOT but failed to nail them to fixed IPs (you can do that, but it costs some money) because "we have no problems with it". But AWS has abt. 200 IPs and each DNS resolves only 6 of them. So the firewall catches 6 IPs and the devices probably 6 different ones the next millisecond...

That sounds about right. Any ancillary services other than the core ones like VPC, EC2, S3 etc are a turd.

This is our biggest problem with AWS at the moment. That was our entire year datacentre TCO...

IMG_0062.jpeg

If you know what you are doing though, like me, your costs are somewhat lower. I just managed to scam $200 of credit out of them as a reward for pointing out holes in ECR so this will go down to nothing

This is running an EC2 instance (with windows on it), S3 bucket, cloudfront distribution, my domain DNS infra and TLS cert management.

Screenshot 2023-12-19 at 22.02.38.png

[vk6zgo]

We had some Barco monitors (the ones that look a bit like microwave ovens, with the keyboard entry for all functions).
They were nice when they were working, but completely failed in functionality ---one click of a switch on a Sony could select the function you needed, but with the Barco, you had to wade through menus.

Where they failed mostly internally was their fetish on the "form" side.
The boards were things of beauty, but when we tried to remove components for replacement, we found that the through hole diameters were so close to that of the leads as to become an "interference fit".
To add insult to injury, there was minimal copper around the holes, so unless we were extremely careful, a nice little "doughnut" of copper would come off.
A Pace desoldering tool didn't help, as it delighted in eating the copper.
Obviously, there were "work-arounds", but working on them was much more time consuming than a standard picture monitor should require.

Oh, I remember the Barcos. I've worked on those, as well as their projectors and owned a Barco Mega Calibrator Monitor myself. It was fun playing Quake on a 29" CRT computer monitor, even though it took up the entire desk!

Anyhow, I made a long living servicing and color calibrating Sony Broadcast Monitors. Barco may be ultra modular, but Sony held up and was pretty easy to repair. I haven't touched a Barco in many years. I still keep a sony broadcast monitor on my bench today.

We had both a Sony & a Barco projector.

The unfortunate Barco was inadvertently connected to the studio light fader output, how, I don't know, as the outlets used a different type of connectors, so it should have been "idiot proof" (a superior class of idiots, I guess!).
When I entered the picture, it had been repaired & worked, but it suffered from a raft of strange faults which seemed to be the results of that incident.

The Station Manager's Office had a small "theatrette", with a ceiling mount for the Barco, which, unfortunately would do its "party trick" whenever the Boss really needed it, so we would have to "liberate" the Sony from wherever it currently resided, reverse the vertical scans & hang it up instead.
It got so that we left the Sony up there, just grabbing it when it was needed for other duties.
The Barco was "stuck in the corner of the workshop, with vague promises to "look at it sometime"!

In general, getting parts for stuff from the EU was like watching paint dry, whereas I could ring the Sony bloke in Sydney & the bits would be on the next airfreight, or if they had to come from overseas, a couple of days.

Of course, even with such speedy service, there were times when we needed to substitute different devices, but due to sensible design most of the power devices were similar to "jellybean" ones readily available "over the counter" locally.
Philips BD208Ds, for instance, worked well in both the SMPS & horizontal output of KX27P Sony Profeels.

[Cubdriver]

The unfortunate Barco was inadvertently connected to the studio light fader output, how, I don't know, as the outlets used a different type of connectors, so it should have been "idiot proof" (a superior class of idiots, I guess!).
When I entered the picture, it had been repaired & worked, but it suffered from a raft of strange faults which seemed to be the results of that incident.

Given the seemingly unlimited creativity of idiots, it is utterly impossible to make ANYTHING idiot proof. The absolute best you can ever hope for is idiot resistant.

-Pat

[bd139]

Given the seemingly unlimited creativity of idiots, it is utterly impossible to make ANYTHING idiot proof. The absolute best you can ever hope for is idiot resistant.

After reading the first few bits of a book on mathematical logic, I think it is possible to produce something actually idiot proof. You just need to set a statistically high number of tests and traps around it so that the probability of someone being able to use it decreases until it is insignificant.

[tggzzz]

Given the seemingly unlimited creativity of idiots, it is utterly impossible to make ANYTHING idiot proof. The absolute best you can ever hope for is idiot resistant.

After reading the first few bits of a book on mathematical logic, I think it is possible to produce something actually idiot proof. You just need to set a statistically high number of tests and traps around it so that the probability of someone being able to use it decreases until it is insignificant.

I think thermodynamics has a few lessons here....

Yes is it possible to "win", provided that you define the system appropriately. E.g. heat pumps that are >100% efficient.

But if you include more in that system, then you can see you aren't winning. E.g. power station efficiency plus transmission losses, or the idiots doing something (anything) to work around the unusable whatever-it-is.

[mnementh]

Naaah; fools are just too fucking inventive. You'll still have to monitor it 24/7/365, with a finger on the "NUKE IT FROM ORBIT!!!" button.

mnem

[vk6zgo]

Given the seemingly unlimited creativity of idiots, it is utterly impossible to make ANYTHING idiot proof. The absolute best you can ever hope for is idiot resistant.

After reading the first few bits of a book on mathematical logic, I think it is possible to produce something actually idiot proof. You just need to set a statistically high number of tests and traps around it so that the probability of someone being able to use it decreases until it is insignificant.

I think thermodynamics has a few lessons here....

Yes is it possible to "win", provided that you define the system appropriately. E.g. heat pumps that are >100% efficient.

But if you include more in that system, then you can see you aren't winning. E.g. power station efficiency plus transmission losses, or the idiots doing something (anything) to work around the unusable whatever-it-is.

Yes, I've never been happy with heat pump type air conditioners quoting kW ratings far in excess of the power they take from the Mains.
OK, I sort of understand the explanation, but it still sounds like a lot of "handwaving".

My favourite "hate" is the idiots who think that gain antennas really do increase power!

[tggzzz]

After reading the first few bits of a book on mathematical logic, I think it is possible to produce something actually idiot proof. You just need to set a statistically high number of tests and traps around it so that the probability of someone being able to use it decreases until it is insignificant.

I think thermodynamics has a few lessons here....

Yes is it possible to "win", provided that you define the system appropriately. E.g. heat pumps that are >100% efficient.

But if you include more in that system, then you can see you aren't winning. E.g. power station efficiency plus transmission losses, or the idiots doing something (anything) to work around the unusable whatever-it-is.

Yes, I've never been happy with heat pump type air conditioners quoting kW ratings far in excess of the power they take from the Mains.
OK, I sort of understand the explanation, but it still sounds like a lot of "handwaving".

My favourite "hate" is the idiots who think that gain antennas really do increase power!

Provided the "box under consideration" is your house and the motor is inside the house, they can be 300% (etc) efficient when heating. You put 1kWh electricity into the motor, and that escapes into the house. The result of the motor running is that fluid also puts 2kWh into the house. Therefore, for 1kWh input you end up with 3kWh inside your house.

I don't particularly care that outside the house gets cooler, provided that you can continue to make it cooler even when it is already unusually cold.

I do care that the power station is (IIRC) 28% efficient and that there are transmission losses. Nonetheless, if I buy £1 of electricity, a fan heater gives me X kWh heat but a heatpump would give me 3X kWh.

As for high gain antennas, my pet hate is people that think you can legally increase WiFi range by putting a 20dBi antenna on the transmitter.

[Cerebus]

Yes, I've never been happy with heat pump type air conditioners quoting kW ratings far in excess of the power they take from the Mains.
OK, I sort of understand the explanation, but it still sounds like a lot of "handwaving".

That's a bit unfair as the standard worldwide is to quote cooling plant in terms of the rate at which it will move heat around. The units may vary, tonnes, BTU/h, or watts, but it's the energy pumped that is measured, not the energy needed to do the pumping.

[Cerebus]

Provided the "box under consideration" is your house and the motor is inside the house, they can be 300% (etc) efficient when heating. You put 1kWh electricity into the motor, and that escapes into the house. The result of the motor running is that fluid also puts 2kWh into the house. Therefore, for 1kWh input you end up with 3kWh inside your house.

The systems of the size you're talking about all use sealed compressors, so any waste heat from the motor goes into the working fluid and is rejected in the condenser. Then it's just a question of where the condenser is, not where the motor is, as to where that waste heat ends up.

[bd139]

Yes, I've never been happy with heat pump type air conditioners quoting kW ratings far in excess of the power they take from the Mains.
OK, I sort of understand the explanation, but it still sounds like a lot of "handwaving".

My favourite "hate" is the idiots who think that gain antennas really do increase power!

I think they're considering the total gain of the system. I mean you're just converting energy but if you stick 100W in and get 1000W out, even if you're sucking 900W out of magic unicorn shit then that's a gain as far as your interest goes. I mean the overall system efficiency is cost for the gain so you can only rationalise this in terms of an efficiency ratio and a price.

As for antennas with gain, it's difficult to explain this as well. It's not really gain but a decrease in loss!

Again semantics but work back from the output rather than from the source and it makes sense.

[vk6zgo]

Yes, I've never been happy with heat pump type air conditioners quoting kW ratings far in excess of the power they take from the Mains.
OK, I sort of understand the explanation, but it still sounds like a lot of "handwaving".

My favourite "hate" is the idiots who think that gain antennas really do increase power!

I think they're considering the total gain of the system. I mean you're just converting energy but if you stick 100W in and get 1000W out, even if you're sucking 900W out of magic unicorn shit then that's a gain as far as your interest goes. I mean the overall system efficiency is cost for the gain so you can only rationalise this in terms of an efficiency ratio and a price.

As for antennas with gain, it's difficult to explain this as well. It's not really gain but a decrease in loss!

Again semantics but work back from the output rather than from the source and it makes sense.

Ohh, I understand how gain antennas work, but people still think that, say, 5 watts with 20dBi of gain means you can be subject to dangerous levels of "EMF".
The radiation from an imaginary isotropic antenna is not "loss" in the conventional sense, as much as signals going in directions where we don't want them to go.

[tggzzz]

Yes, I've never been happy with heat pump type air conditioners quoting kW ratings far in excess of the power they take from the Mains.
OK, I sort of understand the explanation, but it still sounds like a lot of "handwaving".

My favourite "hate" is the idiots who think that gain antennas really do increase power!

I think they're considering the total gain of the system. I mean you're just converting energy but if you stick 100W in and get 1000W out, even if you're sucking 900W out of magic unicorn shit then that's a gain as far as your interest goes. I mean the overall system efficiency is cost for the gain so you can only rationalise this in terms of an efficiency ratio and a price.

As for antennas with gain, it's difficult to explain this as well. It's not really gain but a decrease in loss!

Again semantics but work back from the output rather than from the source and it makes sense.

Ohh, I understand how gain antennas work, but people still think that, say, 5 watts with 20dBi of gain means you can be subject to dangerous levels of "EMF".
The radiation from an imaginary isotropic antenna is not "loss" in the conventional sense, as much as signals going in directions where we don't want them to go.

If in the "wrong" location, you would be subjected to 100 times more power than radiated from an isotropic antenna. In other locations you would be subjected to less power

[Specmaster]

And now some seasonal jokes, Happy Christmas to all.

santa seatbelt.jpg

snowman.jpg

hum it.jpg

FB_IMG_1703150843066.jpg

[Reddwarf3r]

Someone's about to make an Ass of himself.

unnamed.png

[BU508A]

Want to play a bit with snow and glowing sticks or LEDs?
Scare your neighbour a bit?

Then I'm having a suggestion for you:

glowing _eyes.jpeg