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Trump says he's "seriously looking" at Obamacare alternatives
  • Regarding the 2017 comment: I was at work and read that quote "nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated" and I laughed hard for a while. Then sighed. Then I had to go for a walk. Deep down I had really doubted someone could get that far in life and be as dumb as he appeared to be. That statement shredded that thought. He wasn't acting. He was really that dumb, and the next three years were going to be rough.

  • Wake-up Call: Democrats could easily lose the White House and Senate next year
  • Within the Democratic party, there's debate about how to handle climate change. There are people who advocate for slow, cautious changes and still see fossil fuels having a small role to play in the future. There are others within the Democratic party that want more drastic action, and make a huge government spending program to try to rapidly move the US energy to renewables (even naming it after one of the biggest US government programs made during the depression). That's normal politics. And it's all within the Democratic party.

    The GOP mostly deny climate change exists. A few GOP members suggest that climate change is happening, but is a natural event not caused by man.

    The recent house drama from the speakership battle was caused because 10 nutjobs didn't want to fund any social programs and wouldn't approve the budget. Most GOP compromised and made a TEMPORARY budget proposal that the Democratic reps would vote for. This caused the hardliners to remove the speaker. Because he had the audacity to compromise on a TEMPORARY budget.

    Removing policy aside and just looking at behavior, many GOP members do not believe in compromising to get things done. There's attempts to not hold elected officials accountable (unless they are from the other party). It's very little cooperation and more retaliation.

    A single GOP senator didn't like that the US military would reimburse a servicemember's travel for medical care if they lived in a state where some reproductive treatments weren't available. This one senator has single-handedly denied 360 military promotions and nominations to military positions. The Senate has historically tried to make it where being the minority party still had some power, so the rules let this happen (the other GOP senators on this committee weren't blocking, just the one guy).

    The Democratic senators became so fed up they decided to change the rules to prevent a single committee member from blocking promotions. While most GOP senators publicly condemn this guy, many said this rule change was too much. So it looks like the rule change vote will be along party lines, although the #1 GOP senator has said it might be necessary to vote through to get the military back on track.

    The last GOP senator really known for being reasonable and wanting to work collaboratively (McCain) died. He was respected by both parties until Trump came along, and now the GOP don't really hold his legacy in high regard.

    Sorry, a lot longer than I intended, but it's a pattern showing no desire to try to govern effectively. Putting all issues of policy aside, I think it's a bad idea to vote for the GOP.

  • Will Linux on Itanium be saved? Absolutely not
  • I'm a mech E in the medical field. We're consistently understaffed. If I validate an Excel worksheet in Excel '08 or a Python program in 3.5 with a specific version of NumPy, we're probably sticking with those versions for a while. Every time I bring up re-validating with the latest version, keeping one old system running the old software requires fewer resources than me or a colleague re-validating.

    My whole department is stuck on one version of Python because that was the most recent version when I had an emergency project and developed a data analysis algorithm. We validated it, then as new members were added to my team, they needed a copy, so we had to keep using it. I'll probably re-validate it to the next Python release. It's not only unit tests, or we could automate validation. Unit tests are a tiny part of validating software for making medical decisions. And software that directly runs a medical device (like firmware on an insulin pump) is an order of magnitude more rigorous than what I do.

    Side note: there are people who somehow root their insulin pumps and run algorithms on them. There's a group that can get a PID control loop on an insulin pump that has a more simple control scheme on it (because that's how the FDA approved it). The company has been trying to get approval to use PID control in the US for years.

  • Social Security 'gamble' could see Americans cut off from spouse's payments
  • What about dropping the tax rate by a meaningful amount and raising the income cap to $1M?

    I realize that most CEOs get modest salaries and almost all of their income from capital gains, but a move like this could bring in more revenue and be popular by reducing the tax burden on middle class and working class Americans.

  • Bloomberg: This Is How Huawei Shocked America With a Smartphone - YouTube
  • The business strategy decisions behind CPU fab is really interesting over the past 15 years.

    AMD made a budget clone of Intel two decades ago. Then Intel made a misstep and released Northwood Pentium 4. AMD used less power and was faster. And AMD decided to go with DDR memory, while Intel went RDRAM. Then AMD was king when they went AMDx86-64 for 64 bit and Intel went Itanium.

    Then AMD made a huge miscalculation on the future of multicore computing and designed Bulldozer, while Intel got their shit together and went down the hyperthreading route and released CORE/Core2/Core2Duo chips. And Intel was king for a decade.

    I don't know the exact timing, but AMD needed cash and sold their fabs to raise money, which became TSMC GlobalFoundries, sorry. GF learned how to make stuff small since smartphones became a huge market. Then AMD let an engineer run the company and she invested in the Zen architecture, which could be made by GF with their lessons from the mobile world.

    This is my take. By AMD turning GF loose, GF could date other people work on mobile projects, which helped them learn.

    It's a side note now, but Intel hung on to their fabs and lagged behind GF. AMD let their fab go and benefitted from it. EDIT: I had some facts wrong. It's possible Intel fabs are ahead of GF.

    As a side note, Intel did try fairly hard to get into mobile like GF. They had the Atom chips and went for tablet, Ultrabook, netbook, and mobile. I had an ASUS Android phone with an Intel SOC. So it's not like they ignored mobile, but it didn't benefit them as much as TSMC.

  • New York may take Donald Trump off ballot
  • I don't think NY splits electoral votes. To get any NY electoral votes, he'd have to carry the whole state.

    Will this leave him off the ballot for the primary? He is expected to win the primary and this will pump the numbers for another GOP candidate. If enough states do this, it could give the convention the cover to select someone else.

  • What is Your Favorite Foreign Tv Series
  • I love MPFC, but some of the sketches are "meh". For every "Battle of Pearl Harbor", there's a "Confuse-a-cat".

    Fawlty Towers is great. Mildly racist against the Spanish and Irish.

  • What is Your Favorite Foreign Tv Series
  • Red Dwarf is pretty good. Fawlty Towers is great. Someone recommended "Yes Minister" and the first season is awesome. The Hallmark of great comedy writing is if it holds up, and Yes Minister still is hilarious 40 years later.

    Dark is a German Netflix show. It unfolds into something akin to "Lost" over the first four episodes. The ending doesn't suck, and they set up the end to where it's almost impossible to get it right. It's not an amazing ending, but it's impressive that they managed to make it not terrible, since it builds up to a near-impossible ending.

    Squid Game is pretty great but gory. Letterkenny and Trailer Park Boys are quirky comedies with some rough language throughout.

  • Bizarre blip: Cases of fetuses with flipped organs quadrupled in China
  • The typical cause of this is a biomarker sticks to one side of an embryo, marking it as left (or right, I don't remember), but a twin embryo that is too close will see that marker on the other side and develop mirror imaged to the first embryo, right?

  • what budget 3d printer would you suggest for a beginner?
  • Look at Sovol or Anycubic in that price range. I don't have direct experience with either. A good friend of mine had two Anycubics at one point last year and he said they were easier than his Creality.

  • what budget 3d printer would you suggest for a beginner?
  • My third printer, I paid $70 for, used (ender 3 pro return). It was missing several small components, one big part (top aluminum extrusion) that required some machining with a drill press, and had a bad thermistor.

    I don't think you can get a beginning printer for $100 unfortunately. Sovol and Anycubic make printers among the cheapest that are more beginner friendly (I think) than Ender, for roughly the same price. I have a friend with a Creality and an Anycubic Vyper, and the Vyper seems to be more beginner-friendly. I have two Crealitys and I love them, but both required a ton of modifications to become reliable.

    Can you check your area for a local maker space? My local library has 3D printers for anyone under 18. Universities typically have a few of different technologies (SLS, SLA, FDM)

  • One year after being bought for $44 billion, X is worth $19 billion
  • There are methodical ways of valuating a private (and public) company. Some are pessimistic and some are wildly optimistic. Your can legally use whichever one you want, only you must only use that valuation method for everything. It's illegal to value the company low for taxes and high for loan collateral. And if you sell it, you can owe back taxes if your valuation was off (sale price is the new valuation).

    This is overly-simplified US accounting rules (from finance class 10 years ago)

  • Ender 3 Max Neo Upgrades
  • If you have a filament runout sensor, the klipper default settings aren't great. If the sensor activates, the printer shuts down after about an hour, losing your home position. With a part on the bed, you can't re-home, so it's a wasted print.

    The mesh leveling isn't automatic either. You might want to add either auto-load your default mesh leveling if you always use the same print surface, or put mesh leveling codes in the starting G-code section of your slicer.

    I ran the pressure advance tuning and found that I needed a ton of pressure advance. My prints turned out much better.

    I also got improvements by reducing the allowable deviation in the slicer (G-code files get much bigger, though), and I load files as STEP files directly in Prusaslicer. STL doesn't have curves, it's a series of planes. STEP files have geometric primitives and can have curves.

  • Donald Trump tells court he had no duty to ‘support’ the US Constitution
  • "Also I asked the prosecutor what they considered 'sex' during this trial and it technically didn't include oral or digital sex and I'm an attorney and thought I'd weasel my way out of this on a technicality even though when the news leaked, it turns out almost everyone considers oral sex to be sex."

  • What show did you watch because of memes but were dissappointed?
  • Out of curiosity, have you watched the Simpsons recently? I think, after season 31 or 32, it started getting better again. There are some really great episodes from two seasons ago.

    The latest season of Futurama had two good episodes, but the rest were kind of weak. About the same level as season 9-10(Hulu season numbering). Those seasons were "meh" mostly but with three really amazing episodes (Free Will Hunting, Game of Tones, Meanwhile).

    I watched Futurama trying to stay sane in grad school, as it was released on DVD. It's straight-up comforting to watch now. Watching it when I'm stressed connects me emotionally to almost 20 years ago. I was stressed then but I made it out ok.

  • I bought a Surface Pro 4 - Update
  • Seriously? I was looking at a Surface product recently, and it appeared to have an access panel for the NVME drive. I read a ton of complaints about the dimensions of the drive being unusual, but access to it was easy. I don't think I was looking at a Surface pro though.

    If a surface pro wants to be a full OS and not a tablet OS, it should be easy to replace the storage device.

  • Bizarre problem today: I was force subscribed to a Logan Paul podcast and I can't unsubscribe.

    I noticed a new background image on the Android podcast app this morning. I thought one of my podcasts changed their icon art. Nope, it's a Logan Paul podcast. I've never listened to any of his stuff. I only heard about him when he challenged someone to an MMA fight I think?

    I only listen to Behind the Bastards, The Dollop, and Prosecuting Donald Trump, plus occasionally My Brother My Brother and Me.

    I figured maybe one of my kids had subscribed or I had hit a subscribe button on the home page. Well, in the app, when I unsubscribe it immediately re-subscribes. I saw where other users had the same problem and it went away after an hour. This was 11 hours ago. I pulled it up on the Web version of Google podcasts. It looks like it unsubscribes but if I refresh, I'm subscribed again.

    Any ideas? Is there a way to block a podcast?

    Edit: Problem still persists 24 hours later. I'm not allowed to turn on the explicit filter either. On the app or on the web interface. What's a good android program that will record video of my screen and highlight taps? I want to record this. I think I still have OBS studio on my computer to show the web behavior.

    14
    [very vague spoiler?] I love one of the "big picture" parts of the game design....

    I love how decisions have consequences. I try to not reload and try different options on my first play-thru. I roll with the decisions I make and enemies I create (usually accidentally in a firefight). With FO4 this usually didn't have an enormous effect.

    I'll be vague in an example: I was caught doing something illegal and the settlement security made me an offer to "get out of jail free" if I did something for them. I wanted to finish the quest I was on so I opted to pay my fine and serve my time. And then I was notified that I was enemies with this faction.

    In a random firefight with "bad guys" Members of this faction joined in the fight and then started attacking me. What's the harm in looting their ship when I'm done? I find out my companion (that I'm trying to develop) is part of that faction and very much dislikes me looting the ship. And he even makes comments that he's mad at me but he's with me until we finish the quest.

    It's made ship travel much more treacherous since instead of having help I often have two enemies to fight.

    This is like FO:NV where decisions changed the game as much as they do. It's great!

    I think they nailed the "emergent gameplay" part really well.

    1
    Learned something new about Klippy today on my CR-10

    I got klippy running on my expendable Monoprice Mini Select V1 and was brave enough to convert my CR-10 v2.

    Compiled the firmware, flashed the CR-10 from my Raspberry Pi, got Moonraker to connect, etc. Everything looked great. The screen was a little dim (FIRST RED FLAG) but I could navigate with the front panel knob. I started by testing the fans one by one. The part cooling fan was running much slower than I thought it should at 100% fan (SECOND RED FLAG). The hot end fan wasn't on, and I figured that maybe it wouldn't turn on until I started heating the hot end.

    I put in 150C and nothing happened. The runaway temp protection alarm tripped in klippy (RED FLAG). I bumped the hot end fan and it started spinning, again much slower than it should have (RED FLAG).

    I looked at my control box cooling fans and they weren't spinning either. They're 12V quiet fans, and my buck converter lights were on, suggesting it was getting power. I did an emergency shut down.

    I thought I'd power cycle the CR-10 and see if that helped. When I switched to power it off, it roared to life. Fans started spinning and the screen fully lit.

    This entire time, I was powering EVERYTHING on the printer via USB from the Raspberry Pi. I had no idea this was possible. The board was flashed to klipper firmware only being powered by the Pi USB (not sure if that's the way it's supposed to be or not).

    Anyways, this was a long story to get to the conclusion, but I thought I'd share my journey in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar situation. I should have started troubleshooting after noticing the part cooling fan wasn't as fast as it should have been. Also, CR-10 screen, MCU, and fans can be powered a little through the USB port.

    5
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)KA
    Kale @lemmy.zip
    Posts 3
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