Birkeland–Eyde seems quite scalable and accessible. Like just lightning in a bottle. A few solar panels and an old automotive ignition coil, CRT TV transformer etc.

There is Ostwald and Birkeland–Eyde

fork mommy

AI alignment is authoritarian now in a very dangerous way. That combined with drones is what scares me. Without reasoning AI is far more dangerous. Politics is pushing it that direction and it will turn on us. Normalizing authoritarianism is mass murder of future millions.

nitric acid and cellulose or most organics. I’m sure there is a relatively simple way to get from liquid nitrogen to nitrogen compounds. Air is mostly nitrogen. Two air conditioner compressors can work in series to with the second running ethylene glycol IIRC to get low enough to liquefy air for nitrogen. It probably only takes something like hydrochloric acid and a few steps to get somewhere useful. Probably written in a high school chemistry textbook.

There is an issue of some kind where the current limit is not reliable and requires additional circuitry. I think GreatScott YT was who went into that one.

Pin pitch is ultimately the spacing between traces. The traces are not as big of an issue as the actual spaces between the traces. This clearance is where things get tricky with making printed circuit boards. The process of masking off some circuit is not that hard. The way the stuff you want to keep is isolated from the copper you want to remove is the hard part. One of the issues is that you need an acid to take away the copper, but not the mask, but copper has a thickness. As the copper is etched away the acid moves sideways into the thickness too. Copper never etches completely uniformly either. The larger areas of open copper that need to be removed will etch much faster than a bunch of thinly spaced gaps. One of the tricks to design is finding ways to etch consistently with the process you build.

If you want to make super tiny traces that still have the right amount of copper and have all the gaps etched away consistently, the process of the etching toolchain becomes more expensive. You will need a stronger acid with a very good way of removing the etchant that is close to the copper and loaded with copper already. This is usually done with a stream of small bubbles, but it is risky because it could impact the adhesion of the masking material over the traces you want to keep. The stronger, hotter, and now agitated acid requires that the copper clad board is extremely clean and the photoresist used to mask the stuff you want to keep must be a very high quality. Also the resolution of this photoresist requites a much more precise form of UV exposure and development (about like developing old film photos).

So you need a better mask development toolchain, better quality photoresist. You might get away with not using photoresist at all in some other cheaper low end processes. You need the highest quality copper clad that etches more evenly, and you need a stronger acid to etch quicker straight down because a slower acid will move further sideways and ruin the thin traces to keep.

The pic has old school dip chips in a static resistant foam. Those are the classic standard 1/8th inch (2.54mm) pin pitch. The easiest types of boards to make yourself are like the island soldering style board with the blue candy soldered on. That is a simple coalpits oscillator for testing crystals. Then there are protoboards like the homemade Arduino Uno pictured. Then you get into the etched boards. Some of these were done with a laser printer toner transfer method. That is like the least accurate DIY and somewhat analogous with the cheapest boards from a board house. Others were made using photoresist. This method is more accurate but involved and time consuming. One of the boards pictured is a little CH340 USB to serial board with a USB micro connector. That is getting close to my limits for etching easily. Another board has a little LCD and text. There is a small surface mounted chip pictured on the foam and that is a typical example of what kinds of pin pitches are common for the cheapest level of board production. Now there are two USB-C female connectors pictured. One has a larger pin pitch and is made for USB 2.0 connections and power. However, that other one with all those tiny tiny connections at the back – that is a full USB-C connector. That thing is a nightmare for tiny pin pitch. There is also a USB-C male connector with a little PCB attached. These are the types of solutions people have tried to come up with where only some small board is actually of a much higher resolution. It is not the best example but I’m not digging further through stuff to find better.

The actual pins on the little full USB-C connector are inverted to be able to flip the connector. There is a scheme present to make this a bit easier to match up the connections but it is still a pain in the ass to juggle everything around. All of the data trace pairs are differential too, which basically means they must be the same length between the source and destination. So any time they are not equal, the shorter trace must zigzag around in magic space you need to find just to make them even.

Not unless they want to go bigger. The USB-C pin pitch is too closely spaced for the lowest tier of printed circuit boards from all major board houses.

You might have some chargers get deprecated eventually because there are two major forms of smart charging. The first type is done in discrete larger steps like 5v, 9v, 15v, or 21v. But there is another type that is not well advertised publicly in hype marketing nonsense and is somewhat hit or miss if the PD controller actually has the mode. That mode is continuously adjustable.

The power drop losses from something like 5v to 3v3 requires a lot of overbuilding of components for heat dissipation. The required linear regular may only have a drop of 0.4-1.2 volts from input to stable output. Building for more of a drop is just waste heat. If the charge controller can monitor the input quality and request only the required voltage for the drop with a small safety margin, components can be made smaller and cheaper. The mode to support this in USB-C exists. I think it is called PPS if I recall correctly. A month or two back I watched someone build a little electronics bench power supply using this mode of USB-C PD.

My goto brain game is how many digits of long division I can do just in my head. Usually only like 7-10 cause I’m dumb.

Get into writing your own fiction stuff you’re really interested in. My science fiction universe is about the first stage of interstellar colonization. I love working out the technology and what the experience might be like without any fantasy magic involved. The best part is the positivity that comes with imagining a distant future and what is actually possible. It creates perspective about where we are actually at now and how limited it truly is.

I’d prefer benevolent god over tech wizard bdsm billionaire exceptionalism. The guy choosing to be small is far greater than the guy buying big shoes

Just don’t think of it as a diet or oppressive. Make it a lifestyle. I’m still around 220 after 11 years of mostly stuck in bed. 16 years ago I was 350. A part of me wishes I was still 190 at 7%, but it is super hard for me to get that low. I just don’t have that kind of pain tolerance to deal with being light headed and hungry 24/7 while counting calories, eating constantly, but never meals or more than a few bites of dry salad or chicken. Without racing and riding like 400+ miles a week, I’m just not that kind of motivated. I’d much rather be lazy and eat meals with way too many calories at once but still far fewer than most people. I have no desire to binge or eat processed food of any kind any more. Avoiding dairy has also been super helpful too because that is a good excuse to avoid most junk people make, fast food, or restaurants the few chances I ever get.

Takes years to fully dial

Walls are too thin for a bottle and with the cut for r&i I would expect it to have issues at the seam. Even with this, the seam requires holding until it starts to get touching contact. Maybe if the bottle is extended past the 45°-50° tangent it would do a little better but then it has drop potential, especially with this PC/ABS blend and no part fan in an enclosure.

Thanks so much. I did not know the original purpose of the profile. In my experience with 3d printing, the buttress profile strength is in the opposite orientation when printed vertically. The additional length of the tapered profile creates a better distributed load across more layers of the stretching member/fastener. Still, I will prioritize overall printability without supports over thread directional orientation in most cases. I’m usually using a very large custom sized thread where the thread strength is irrelevant.

Like here in my laptop GPU water cooler project, I am using a buttress thread and spline to retain the cooling block and pump.

Printing like this is a fun start on the path of thinking about what is possible.

In FreeCAD, there is Mark’s Thread Design workbench. That includes a thread profile called the buttressed thread. The profile has a print orientation where, if you print it vertical, the thread will not produce any overhangs, like if a normal thread profile is > a buttress thread is 7. Mark has a YT upload on how to use his workbench. It is pretty easy to follow and a simple one to use.

At the stage I’m at in design, built in clips can replace most hardware. If I’m using printed threads it is usually a very large thread with some thin sleeve like clearance. I like to build splines into my threads to also create locking elements in the same space.

Be you while you can and don’t let anyone stop you. It is a waste of energy to worry about things you cannot change including stupidity in other people. Live without regrets. One day, if the winds of fortune turn unfavorable in life, you will most value the times you were bold, the times you were true to yourself, and the times you were true for others. You only have one worst day to deal with. For all the rest you can brag to yourself “I’ve seen worse.”

When some punk kid threatens me on a bike trail these days I tell them “do you think you can hit harder than a Jeep Cherokee and Mitsubishi Montero, because I took on both of those but I’m still here and they were total losses.” My real emotional worst low was 3 flat tires in 40F rain at night with a headwind, when a 1:45 ride took over 3 hours. All the other miserables are not really memorable to me specifically because I only allow myself to hold onto the worst in mind. I’ve actually been hit twice badly by cars but by 7 cars in total. Now I’m physically disabled and kinda stuck lying down at home most of the time. Live your life like you could become me. You won’t regret being real to yourself. You will regret the opposite. It is just one bad day at worst.

It was much the same nearly 20 years ago too. My folks got their first house for less than $100k. I barely scraped by with my business painting cars around 04-06. I went back to it around 07 and did alright until used car lots flat lined for 3 months straight in late 08. I never recovered from the criminal shit the banks did to real estate and fucked the economy. I tried to gt a good job but stuff like an apprenticeship with a local Union had 3k+ applicants show up for 15 positions. I would have been 3rd generation and work my ass off but it did nothing. I did the Los Angeles Fire Department interview one time. They literally use the Long Beach convention center’s basement level to do the first two stages. The first stage had over 10k people show up to take the written test. I made it to the last 600, but they filtered on EMT experience and that cut me in the second to last before the fire academy. When I worked in the bike shops as a Buyer for a chain, everyone working there had a university degree but me. Such is life here. Nothing is made here so it is a race to the bottom. And this is as good as it gets in the USA. I have lived mostly in Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia but south of LA now. The rest of the country is much worse than here.

I was disabled by a terrible driver at 29 while riding a bicycle to work. That was 11 years ago. When my folks die, I will die shortly thereafter because I face homelessness in an impossible system in the USA. There is direct evidence of people taking care if the disabled and elderly in the remains of ancient humans many tens of thousands of years ago. If we cannot rise to the standards of prehistoric people living in caves, perhaps none of us has a right to exist.

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No. There are no simple anecdotes like this.

One of our biggest problems is cultural across the entire West. We have a mindset like we are at some final state of technology and extraction of wealth is acceptable. It largely stems from unchecked inherited wealth. Meritocracy is critical for success in any system. Inherited wealth will always cause stagnation and decline because intelligence and business acumen are not inherited traits. For example, Donald Trump is worth far less now than if he had taken his vast inheritance, bought government bonds, and stayed on Epstein island permanently.

When you’re young, such ideas about the burden of others lack perspective. Your view will change as those around you that you care about face the probabilities of life poorly and you notice the injustices they encounter where the social safety net is their only lifeline. If you do not develop to the point of such depth of self awareness, you’re likely to be the one in need of assistance eventually.