Still instance-specific support communities, I think. I don’t know that there’s any better place for questions about Lemmy.

I think most of those sorts of questions get posted to instance-specific support communities. For lemmy.world, that’s !support@lemmy.world .

This is the way.

I’m just saying I could do it with two. One-and-a-half in a pinch.

Pfft. Amateur.

But you can’t make stroganoff out of corn. :(

I’ve got this trick. Basically, I start relaxing the muscles on the way to the restroom. Not enough that there’s any chance I’ll piss myself before I get there. Just enough that by the time I’m in front of the urinal, it’s not difficult to start the stream quickly.

There was this one time I felt kindof bad about. went to the restroom where I worked (back before I was working remotely) and used “the trick” as usual. I get there, and there’s a guy at one of the urinals already. I peed, flushed, washed my hands, and left the restroom before he produced a drop.

Of course, in all likelihood, “the trick” won’t continue to work so well as my beard grows grayer, and some day I’ll be the other guy.

Sometimes we purposefully make computers do nondeterministic things on purpose. Hardware random number generators, for instance.

But not counting those situations, speedrunners often call some of the “other factors that just absolutely cannot be accounted for” kind of stuff that rethnor is talking about “RNG”.

But even aside from that, there are some even less deterministic cases. Also from speedrunning, there’s the famous SM64 upwarp that my have been, but probably wasn’t a cosmic ray, but very likely was some kind of hardware failure that wouldn’t be accounted for by only considering how the N64 is supposed to work (given processor architecture and such).

But an example I find even more interesting. There was a Defcon presentation where someone registered domain names that were one bit different from very frequently used domain names, kindof like typosquatting, but these were for domain names that no human was typing. These were domain names that computer programs were hitting, and the domain names weren’t derived from user input. But his one-bit-off domain names got a significant amount of traffic. Just from random memory corruptions and such due to some variety of weird hardware failures.

I’d be skeptical of anyone I know claiming that they’d actually personally encountered something they knew to be truly non-deterministic in hardware that wasn’t in some way temporarily or permanently faulty or damaged in some way, but I think it is a thing that can happen in computers. And some of that nondeterminism comes from sources that actually do act at quantum scales were true nondeterminism isn’t unlikely to have sway.

Reminds me of https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

(I can’t get that link to work right now. Maybe it’s down. So here is the same story on the Wayback Machine.)

I didn’t check your spelling either, but I think you did about as good as I could have. Lol.

Hey you, sit down and listen.

Don’t be flippant and don’t be dismissin’.

Think you’re a Flash encyclopedia?

Eating, breathing Macromedia.

Think you’re cool saying “all your base”?

Get that Xiao Xiao out of my face.

You gotta be kidding me with that crap.

Animutation’s where it’s at.

/c/lemmyshitpost is for shit, but not for shit as shitty as slop.

All I know is I’m not getting a Switch 2 until I can homebrew it. (Just as I didn’t get a Switch 1 until Fusée Gelée (the vulnerability in the Switch’s secureboot process that first enabled unsigned/homebrew code to be run) was discovered and made public.) Once unsigned code is possible, disabling region locking (assuming it’s enabled in the first place) would probably follow pretty quickly thereafter.

Well, to say “the voltage differential between A and B is positive” is saying exactly the same thing as saying “the voltage differential between B and A is negative”.

There is such a thing as voltage differential. And the voltage potential at one electrode can be higher than the other, or the voltage at one can be lower than the other. But given that “voltage” isn’t really a thing except in relation to something else, there’s kindof no such thing as “negative voltage” or “positive voltage”. Just voltage relative to some other electrode.

And if the voltage of one line is higher than the voltage of a reference (“ground”), then the voltage is said to be “positive”. If it’s lower, it’s said to be “negative”.

I don’t think “negative voltage” is any less a thing than “positive voltage”, really, but neither one is really a thing except in relation to a reference. Which is to say you can’t connect a single electrode to an instrument and measure the voltage of that single electrode. That would be meaningless to try. You can only measure the voltage of an electrode by connecting your instrument the electrode and a reference.

Hopefully that clears it up.

I’m not an expert, but I think I know what the deal is.

First off, the voltage of a single line has no meaning except relative to the voltage of another line. (Just like, say, “in motion” or “at rest” have no meaning except relative to a frame of reference. “At rest” relative to, say, the earth or the sun or the galactic center or car interior or whatever.) If you step on one rail of an electric rail line, nothing happens. You don’t even feel anything. If you step on the other, similarly nothing. If you bridge both, <southpark skier voice>you’re gonna have a bad time</southpark skier voice>.

“Ground” isn’t zero volts in any objective sense. And Vcc isn’t 5 volts (or 3.3 volts or whatever) in isolation.

And in fact, it’s only convention that ground is arbitrarily labeled “zero” and Vcc is 5 volts rather than Vcc being labeled zero and ground being labeled -5 volts. (Ok, it’s a little more than just convention. The latter would be awkward in practice. But it would be consistent, and you could do all your circuit design that way, just like if you labeled the white keys on a piano “Z”, “Y”, “X”… instead of “A”, “B”, “C”… You’d just have to think differently about it to make it work.)

So, I think what’s going on here, and we’ll pretend “Vcc” is 5 volts (relative to ground) just for the sake of this example, is that basically:

• The voltage differential between ground and Vcc is 5 volts.
• The voltage differential between Vee and ground (and the order in which I list “Vee” and “ground” here is important) is 5 volts. (If I listed “ground” and “Vee” the other way around, it’d be -5 volts.)
• The voltage differential between Vcc and Vee would be 10 volts.

So, for instance, if the device has some components that operate at 5 volts and some that operate on 10 volts (I dunno, let’s say the CPU requires 5 volts, but the… I dunno, optical drive motor?.. requires 10 volts), you can get 5 volts by using Vcc as my source and ground as my sink, and you could get 10 volts by using Vcc as my source and Vee as the sink.

That all make sense?

And to one of your specific questions:

Is this a figure of speech or can voltage actually have a negative value?

So, what qualifies as “negative” and what qualifies as “positive” is just convention. Just like what qualifies as the “north” end of a magnet and what’s “south” is convention. (I guess “north” and “south” refer to which direction a magnet points when used as a compass, but then again which end of the Earth is “north” and which end is “south” is just linguistic convention as well.)

In the same way, what we label “positive” voltage and what we label “negative” is convention. However, we do have an established convention with voltage. (And with poles of a magnet.) Just because we “made up” what qualifies as “positive” or “negative” doesn’t mean there’s any disagreement on the topic. So unless you purposefully switch your language just to be contrary, you’re not going to get funny looks or requests for clarification using the terms “positive” and “negative” for electrode voltages.

However, if line A has a lower voltage than B (and what’s “lower” or “higher” is convention) we can say that the differential between B and A (again, order is important) is negative whereas the differential between A and B is positive.

The analogy between voltage and pressure only goes so far, but in this case I think it’s helpful. If tank B has higher pressure than tank A, you can say the pressure differential between B and A is negative. Similarly, you could say that the air pressure differential between sea level and the peak of Mt. Everest is negative. (Though, with pressure, there is such a thing as “absolute zero”. “Perfect vacuum” is technically a meaningful concept. I don’t think there’s any such thing as “absolute zero” for voltage. Only “differences” between voltages on different electrodes.)

You’re still out just as much

And then some. The landlord’s profit.

Dissociation, mostly.

At the end of Idiocracy, they showed hoses pulling water out of toilets to water plants.

To extend the joke, I’m picturing devices strapped to people’s asses to let them type by wiping their butts.

So, I’m not a manager, but I am in a leadership position. (I’m a “tech lead” on my team of developers, and I hold more “leadership”-ness than tech leads do on some teams.) And my experience comes more from software engineering than anywhere else.

The first rule is that to be a good leader, you have to be a good person. Don’t “switch teams” if/when you become a manager. Your job is to advocate for your team. To cover and take blame for your team. To give them space to work. To give them the autonomy they need to improve their processes. To make sure they know they have the autonomy they need to improve their processes. To be vocal to your team in calling bullshit on upper management and agree with your team when your higher-ups do bullshit. To absorb bullshit from above as best you to prevent it from impacting the team any more than absolutely necessary. To talk your team up. To make sure their work is as “meaningful” as possible. To bolster their egos by trying to get them a bigger slice of the “jurisdictional pie”. To ease up when they’re struggling. To learn from them and along with them. To ensure to the extent you can that they get insight into what’s going on at higher levels of management (the high-level company goals and how what your team does fits into that as well as how decisions that might affect your team are made high up). To support your team’s basic needs (sleep can be a big one when overnight on-call is involved, do everything in your power and everything not in your power make damned sure your team never has to do overtime, and of course money is tied to basic needs). To make sure the biggest personalities on your team don’t silence or drown out others. To eschew needless busywork and take care of the necessary tedious bookwork behind the scenes so your team doesn’t have to. To make time for your team, both on an individual basis and on a whole-team basis. To be a source of comfort. To foster relationships between your team and those outside their team that they need to work closely with to succeed as a team. To let them self organize. And to be honest, humble, and apologetic when you have made mistakes, and also open about the fact that you’re learning how to be the best you you can be.

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES fall into the trap of thinking you’re “in charge”. There are very few circumstances in which you should tell people what to do or assign things to people. (Help them to learn how to pull assignments rather than pushing assignments onto team members.) Also, don’t try to “leave your mark” or push your agenda on the team. (No “I’m going to improve things”. More “I’m going to help my team improve their own processes.”) Push the team’s agenda to those above you.

A few resources you need to read/watch/consume/whatever, whether you’re in IT or not:

• #NoEstimates^YouTube – Relates strongly to the “take care of tedious bookwork” one above.
• Turn The Ship Around^Book
• The Phoenix Project^Book

Very likely ME/CFS.

Also, you apparently don’t want to hear this, but this is also very compatible with long COVID. A huge percentage of sufferers of long COVID had no acute symptoms, have no positive test, and otherwise have no reason to believe they ever had COVID except a) chronic symptoms consistent with long COVID b) which came on in 2020 or 2021. Nothing about “I wasn’t” (acutely) “sick” or “gradual onset” sways me in the slightest away from the possibility that this sounds very much like long COVID. Both are entirely consistent, even typical, of long COVID.