Skip Navigation

Thrashy

@ Thrashy @lemmy.world

Posts
1
Comments
63
Joined
3 yr. ago

Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.

  • Chinese SSD Manufacturer UNIS Flash Memory Unveils World’s Fastest PCIe Gen5 SSDs, Featuring Speeds of Up To 14,900 MB/s

    Jump

  • Fair point. My thrust was more that the reason why things like system boot times and software launch speeds don't seem to benefit as much as they seem like they should when moving from, say, a good SATA SSD (peak R/W speed: 600 MB/sec) to a fast m.2 that might have listed speeds 20+ times faster, is that QD1 performance of that m.2 drive might only be 3 or 4 times better than the SATA drive. Both are a big step up from spinning media, but the gap between the two in random read speed isn't big enough to make a huge subjective difference in many desktop use cases.

  • Chinese SSD Manufacturer UNIS Flash Memory Unveils World’s Fastest PCIe Gen5 SSDs, Featuring Speeds of Up To 14,900 MB/s

    Jump

  • The trouble with ridiculous R/W numbers like these is not that there's no theoretical benefit to faster storage, it's that the quoted numbers are always for sequential access, whereas most desktop workloads are more frequently closer to random, which flash memory kinda sucks at. Even really good SSDs only deliver ~100MB/sec in pure random access scenarios. This is why you don't really feel any difference between a decent PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive and one of these insane-o PCI-E 5.0 drives, unless you're doing a lot of bulk copying of large files on a regular basis.

    It's also why Intel Optane drives became the steal of the century when they went on clearance after Intel abandoned the tech. Optane is basically as fast in random access as in sequential access, which means that in some scenarios even a PCIe 3.0 Optane drive can feel much, much snappier than a PCIe 4 .0 or 5.0 SSD that looks faster on paper.

  • Democrat wins special state Senate election in Pennsylvania in major upset [Flipping a Trump+15 district]

    Jump

  • In anything like a competitive district, a progressive Independent challenger is more likely to split the vote for a milquetoast Democratic incumbent and hand the seat to the Republican challenger. Working within the Democratic primary system has its challenges, but also clears the field so that there's one clear choice for left-leaning voters rather than two.

    First past the post sucks ass, but it's what we've got to live with until we've got enough power to change it.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • It's a niche specialization within architecture, and while I enjoy it it's not quite as cool as it sounds. Labs tend to be designed to a common template around the standard lab bench depth (30") and accepted safe aisle width between 66" and 72". Most of the fun is in equipment planning, and that's only exciting for a certain sort of Excel jockey 😅

    Lab planning is a small enough niche that you really only find us in firms with a national or international reach, and so I'm more often working on projects several states away from me than anything in my own backyard. Travel varies, but other than initial meetings it tends to be hands-off job, so much so that I'm actually a 100% remote worker apart from when I'm on-site for a project kickoff or a site survey.

    As for unusual or surprising parts of the job, I have really enjoyed working with some of the PI's I've fitted labs out for. The best has to be a chemist operating a biofuels testing lab, who regaled us with tales of all the times he'd blown up some glassware or singed off his eyebrows in the lab! I was a bit worried for his safety practices, though...

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • It varies from place to place, but the trend is away from them. I recently did a basis-of-design study for another R1 institution, and they said in no uncertain terms that they wanted to decommission the existing central system in their circa-1990 lab tower. Facilities departments often find them to be a PITA to manage and maintain, versus just requiring researchers to neutralize their acid waste before putting it down the sink, or collecting other hazardous waste to be taken away by a service

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Cup sinks in fume hoods used to be more common, but as a lab planner they are pretty rare requests nowadays. If I had to guess, it's probably to do with the move away from central acid-waste neutralization systems towards procedural controls dictating neutralization/dilution prior to disposal.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Pyrite disease! The pyrite oxidizes in humid air, converting to a mineral that takes up much more volume. If the pyrite is incorporated into the fossil matrix, that expansion causes the fossil to crumble.

  • Donald Trump, who has been on a mission to strip transgender people of all dignity, complains ‘everything is transgender'

    Jump

  • Have you seen who's writing code these days? Everything is computer, computer is transgender, ergo everything is transgender.

  • Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

    Jump

  • Elon in his Cave Johnson era and we're here for it

  • DOGE moves to cancel NOAA leases on key weather buildings

    Jump

  • I won't lie, the fact that Americans got a taste of this and then voted to go back for another bite of the apple (not to mention the global rightward shift that's been happening along with it) has soured me a bit on representative democracy. Democratic modes of government seem to be fundamentally incapable of defending themselves against demagoguery, and too large a percentage of the population prefer to be told what to do and who to hate rather than put in the work of engaging seriously with the civic duties required to make a democracy work. I'm at a loss as to what a viable alternative might look like -- various forms of autocracy are what we're trying to avoid, and I've never seen any anarchist ideas that seem like they could work at scale, but clearly democracy falls apart when too many of the people participating in it refuse to participate in good faith.

  • DOGE moves to cancel NOAA leases on key weather buildings

    Jump

  • Worse than that... The commercial weather services aren't doing much more than repackaging or (questionably) refining NWS forecast data, which is derived from a global weather simulation that runs on a supercomputer cluster four times a day, incorporating data from NWS radars, government weather satellites, ground stations, etc. Musk and company want to blow this up because providing all that sophisticated data free of charge undercuts the ability of commercial services to charge for the same thing, but there's no private infrastructure capable of generating the data underlying the base NWS forecast. Unless they plan to simply privatize all of that (a distinct possibility) destroying the NWS just means that there will be no high quality national forecasting at all, and even if they do privatize the infrastructure the expertise to make it all work won't necessarily follow.

  • Rust is Eating JavaScript

    Jump

  • Look, I'm in no position to talk seeing as I once wrote a cron job in PHP, but the profusion of JavaScript in the late aughts and early teens for things that weren't "make my website prettier!" feels very much like a bunch of "webmasters" dealing with the fact that the job market had shifted out from under them while they weren't looking and rebranding as "developers" whose only tool was Hammer.js, and thinking all their problems could be recontextualized as Nail.js.

  • Dallas police refuses to join ICE immigration raids, launches outreach meetings with migrants instead

    Jump

  • MIT builds swarms of tiny robotic insect drones that can fly 100 times longer than previous designs

    Jump

  • Point me towards systems that don't have a human in the loop, particularly any that utilize fully-autonomous swarms, and I'll agree. Scary as the former are, there's a world of difference between a handful of FPV suicide drones, and a cloud of HL2-Manhack-esque things operating on face-recogniton-guided autopilot.

  • MIT builds swarms of tiny robotic insect drones that can fly 100 times longer than previous designs

    Jump

  • I've low-key started to think the only reason we haven't seen autonomous hunter-killer drones yet is that nobody's willing to break the seal, and I'm scared for what happens when somebody finally does.

  • Migration perspectives during Trump's second term in office.

    Jump

  • If there were quick and easy pathways for that to happen, my family and I would be gone already. Unfortunately, for most places you'd want to move to, the options are pretty much:

    1. Go to college on a student visa (that window of opportunity closed for me about 15 years ago)
    2. Marry a foreign national (just have to break the bad news to my wife first...)
    3. Get posted abroad by your employer (about as likely as winning the lottery, even if you do work for a multinational firm)
    4. Already be a dual citizen by descent (my wife can get this for, uh... Israel and the Philippines, but neither are great choices right now if you're trying to escape conservative authoritarians)
    5. Be fucking loaded already and buy a golden visa.

    Past that, you can either take your chances overstaying a tourist visa or waiting for things to get bad enough to claim refugee status.

  • Advertisers Aren’t Thrilled With Zuckerberg’s Embrace Of Hate Speech

    Jump

  • I was the last of my immediate family on Facebook, and I only stuck around to keep in touch with a couple hobby groups. I decided to cut the cord once Zuck went mask-off, and honestly I haven't regretted it. The family group text is still chugging along fine, and most of the people I actually want to talk to are on other platforms at this point.

    I don't blame anybody who feels like they have to keep Facebook to stay in touch with loved ones... but man, it feels good not to have that spammy time suck on my phone anymore.

  • Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots

    Jump

  • Say it with me now: model collapse! I think this approach is especially insidious in that rather than dumping obvious nonsense into the training corpus that can then be scrubbed, it pushes the downstream LLM invisibly towards spontaneously imploding.

  • Starting to wonder if this guy even went to medical school...

    Jump

  • As an emergency medical program maybe it's the equivalent of an Army medic treating every complaint with 800mg ibuprofen and a bottle of water.