• 2 Posts
  • 58 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: April 17th, 2024

help-circle
  • At the risk of coming off as too gatekeep-y, Arabic is structurally so different from English and French (the other two languages I know). It has a reputation for being difficult for a reason.

    Despite it being my native language I’ll occasionally still think of an idea phrased primarily in English, and contorting it into Arabic is very clunky (despite Arabic being much more loosey goosey with word order, in general, you can figure out how to tie up an idea as you go - this applies more to MSA, dialects usually sway more towards a small number of forms).

    While strictly more rigid, you might be better off at least grasping the basics of MSA first before jumping into a specific dialect. It is antithetical to how I think about languages (go learn the specific prescriptive form of Arabic instead of the most commonly spoken popularly developed one) but it might be easier to learn that way.

    (I’m thinking of it like learning piano (or MIDI?) as a baseline for music and more instruments vs learning guitar first and having an understanding of notes and scales that is very closely associated to the relational positioning of these notes on these strings.)

    Or maybe it might not be easier that way. I didn’t learn Arabic as an adult with a background in western languages, fuck if I know what the pedagogically optimal way to learn Arabic is. Arabic is hard, dude. Doesn’t help that half of all Arabic media is (I say this as an Arab) embarrassing mindless drivel.





  • I do have an oversized battery buffer. Most people are discouraged from cooking or using any resistive load on the batteries, but I opted to invest in a bigger battery backup specifically to be able to do that, it’s why I said 85%+ and not like 40%. The battery buffer really is the point of this system, having 24/7 electricity in my home that I can pull over 20 amperes out of at the drop of a hat is without a question the most decadent luxury I have ever experienced. That’s not something I can just hook up to my house.

    If I reconnect the grid-charging circuit, it is more than enough in the winter months nowadays (the grid was down more often in 2020-2023). But that gets really expensive, and relying on the grid is not wise.

    If I use the secondary (mafia) grid more frequently (as I did in 2020-2023 out of necessity) I can pull a tiny amount of amps at an extortionate kWh rate, that’s enough to keep things like the fridge and lights and the water pump running. But turn on one hot plate or accidentally use the microwave, turn on the heater to the wrong setting (or the AC to the right setting but at the wrong time) and you have to cover up to get to the freezing street to switch the breaker back on. Sounds obnoxious? Well pre-solar that was the only option for 12+ hours of the day. I remember going down to flip the breaker over twenty times one day as a kid.

    Let’s not get into the water situation. I just spent a weekend grappling with neighbors and floater valves.


  • They don’t, my current machine is a Maingear branded one that someone painstakingly hauled over from the US, and my potential new one would be an XMG branded machine, shipped at significant expense from the EU.

    I’m in the armpit of the Middle East, I don’t have a local reseller, and even if I did, they’d want $1,000 more than just going through the pain of buying from overseas, alongside a blood sacrifice and the soul of my firstborn child, and a slap across my face for the insolence of asking.



  • I live in a country with abhorrently unreliable electricity.

    Even now that I have solar and even if I mostly (85%+) cook on a plug-in resistance hob and electric oven, gas is just unbeatable as a backup during the winter. No sun? Grid down? Milk boiled over and got into the hob’s thermostat? Need to cook more than one pot at a time? Israel decided to bomb a fucking residential substation for no reason again? Power company operator decided to accidentally pull an epic prank and route the wrong voltage to everyone’s house, frying a whole town’s fridges, during a year when people couldn’t afford to replace them (I can’t find an English article to link but I promise this happened)? No problemo

    I also got a plug-in induction infrared plate and while it is pretty much magical it also makes my inverter shit itself uncontrollably (all my LED lights flicker and it makes an uncomfortable noise) so I really only use it when the ”good” grid is on (the bad one can’t handle it, the good one is the one from the prank above).

    You can pry my backup butane from my cold dead hands. I replace the tank less than once a year, it’s fine. Not everyone who wants this option to stay is a regressive cultist.










  • I can’t place why, but the thought of used enterprise SSDs still sketches me out more than HDDs. Maybe it’s just that I only ever think of RAID in terms of hard drives, paired with a decade+ of hearing about SSD reliability issues, which are very different from the more familiar problems HDDs can have.

    The power and noise difference makes it more appealing to me, moreso than the speed, personally. Maybe when consumer bottom-barrel SSDs get a little better I could be convinced into RAIDing a bunch of them and hoping one cold spare is enough.

    EDIT: I can acquire new ~200$ 4TB Orico branded drives where I am relatively easily. Hm.


  • Ah, I’ve never looked into what hardware is actually available at the consumer level. That is a lot of money to move a video signal from one place to another.

    FWIW I just looked at the AliExpress-tier options and they are much cheaper, but I don’t know about latency situation even if they do hit advertised bandwidth.

    I didn’t even know HDMI cables went up to 15m for the copper version.


  • Again, I just mean literally running Ethernet cables into standard conduits, terminating them, and sticking a HDMI over Ethernet box on either side. In order not to modify the conduits. I don’t know what the bandwidth is for that kind of solution. I’m not presenting it as the only and best option.

    Your solution is cool. My own conduits are surrounded on four sides by concrete, so pulling connectors through is something that I only have to do very very rarely. And more often than not I find myself having to change one thing to wireless or use something that can make use of multiplexing just so I can free up a bit of space in there to do something else.

    My own network is still an absolutely atrocious 200kB/s DSL through decaying, water-damaged copper lines. And those aren’t going through conduits, those have had concrete poured right over them. Over the 2x1mm thick flat two-strand “cable” that was obsolete when the building was built decades ago. RJ11. Plastic sheath that disintegrates into asbestos or some shit when exposed to sunlight. I’m not describing an ideal data transmission environment here.