I really appreciate your comment- Do you work with RF day to day?

What I like about these kind of questions is how different people take things in a totally different direction. I find it absolutely fascinating to see detailed replies about connotations I never thought of. It’s the whole reason why I love xkcd’s What If. If you’re unfamiliar, do yourself a favour and have a read. I particularly enjoy his answer to the question of everyone standing in one spot and jumping at the same time. He more or less ignores the core question and focuses on the societal & environmental impact of a mass human migration to one point, resulting in a fantastic read.

We may be discussing slightly different things here, I’m not sure if I follow the application of your math in this context.

My point is that a thinner wire will get much hotter than a thicker wire, given the same amount of current. Is this not the case?

Not sure if you’ve ever used fuse wire before. It’s what was used before capsule fuses and breakers. Essentially, if too much current goes through it, it will melt, breaking the circuit as protection. The thicker the fuse wire, the more current it can pass through without melting. The length of the wire doesn’t come into it. 1cm of 10 amp fuse wire will melt at the same current as 1 meter of 10 amp fuse wire.

The super simple explanation is that the wires are too small. The water hose analogy breaks down fairly quickly, but I’ll try using it. Imagine a garden hose, with a regular nozzle on the end. But it’s not a perfect world, and our hose doesn’t transfer all the water that goes into it. Think of this as ten pinprick holes along every meter of hose. If we have ten meters of hose, that’s fine, we only need to turn on the tap a little bit to get a decent spray out of the nozzle, and a little bit will dribble out these holes. Now let’s join another hose on. We lose more water to leakage, so to get the same amount of water out of our nozzle, we have to turn on the tap more, giving it a bit more water flow. Now, our pinprick holes are not just dribbling, they’re flowing freely. Now let’s take it to the extreme- we join a thousand garden hoses together, all leaking a little bit. We have to turn the tap on A Lot More, and suddenly our pinpricks are spraying a serious amount of water everywhere. Now imagine we use a bigger hose. Let’s take it to the extreme again and say it’s a big stormwater pipe. But the key part here is that it has the same amount of holes, ten pinpricks per meter. This way, we can get heaps more water down that pipe, more than enough to give that water nozzle everything it wants. Also, because our pressure can remain low, those pinpricks are only leaking a little bit, not spraying everywhere. This is getting pretty wordy and unwieldy to type out on my phone, so I’ll try and bring it into the real world a bit more. An electrical load, like a motor (say a compressor in a fridge, a circular saw, etc) is like to our nozzle. It will pull more current (amps, or water flow) to maintain the same amount of power output (water coming out of the nozzle). As we get a longer conductor, the voltage drop (pressure reduction due to water lost to the pinpricks) gets larger, and our voltage at the end of a conductor gets lower. Power = voltage * current, so if that voltage is lower, to get the same power we need more current. More current means more heating. More heat in a small cable means melting. Physics has a way out for us, thankfully! The thicker a cable is, the less voltage drop it has, kind of like our stormwater pipe. So the voltage remains at a normal level at the motor, and consequently the motor draws a normal amount of current. This is why longer extensions are generally a lot thicker than shorter ones. If you’re interested in the math, let me know, it’s actually pretty fascinating, and ties into why long distance power lines are all super high voltage, among many other things. The basic equations are also not too hard to work with.

I just know that I’m going to get so focused on the detailed work that we can do now, that I’ll never actually finish any builds.

If it reads as gibberish, you’re too old. If it makes perfect sense, you’re too young. Somewhere in between those ages is the funny zone, where you can sorta understand what it’s meant to be doing.

I’ve got over a thousand in Space Engineers, although some of that is from leaving it on overnight to refine materials. Or possibly exiting the game, but forgetting to actually leave the main menu. Does Steam track time when the computer is asleep?

But I’ve likely got close to ten times that number in Dwarf Fortress. I’ve been playing it off and on for close to a decade and a half now, and when I get into it whole days can just fly by.

Satisfactory scratches that same itch, in a totally different way. Adding that third dimension throws a lot of Factorio people off, because it makes it ‘too easy’- if you build it wrong, it’s fine, just go up a level.

Nah fam, play some more. Just going over the top song gonna cut it off the first few tiers. Especially if you want your factory to look good.

It’s not necessarily the most annoying- but to give an impression that you are people you do not want to live next to, just crank some psytrance. I love me a good doof party, but holy shit I would not want to live next to one.

This is always my reaction to this theory as well. If someone asks “How did life on Earth start?”, surely we can assume they actually mean “How did life start?”

It’s like if a kid saw a baby, and asks their parents “Where do babies come from?”, and their reply is “Oh that baby lives next door, it came from that house”.

That sounds like carrying an ID card with extra steps.

My Linux box seems to have audio issues, weird things that sound like since kind of gated compression that I can’t quite figure out. Will this help?

Personally, I think the dumbest person would be the one that took the time to be snarky about a comment someone wrote about a screenshot of something dumb.

Long standby shift at a hotel (think Hilton style). My employer (not the hotel) had a storage room that was just an old hotel room with all the fittings taken out- No bed or couch, just storage racks. I got super bored, took a nap in the old bathtub.

The staff bathroom of an abandoned diner on top of a mountain in Japan. I was cycle touring, didn’t want to put up the tent if I could just go inside. The big windows and proximity to the road meant I didn’t want to be using a flashlight inside, so I went into the staff bathroom, no windows. Also no toilets or anything, just a bare tiled room. Weird place to sleep, but I went into the main area to make breakfast, it was an amazing view. Bonus for not getting the tent wet.

Oh, yeah, I understand now, thanks. That thing is UI/X design gone too far.

It starts with understanding what you’re spending money on. You can’t control what you don’t measure. Get some idea of what you are buying, be aware of the cost of things.

Even if you don’t set down a full budget, you want to be able to go to the grocery store, say ‘x dollars is all I need to spend’ and then come out having spent less than that. If you don’t know how much you spend on an average shop, that won’t ever happen.

Second to this is any purchase that is a ‘want’ above ‘y’ dollarydos, sleep on it. Steam sale? Put what you want in your cart. Is it more than twenty bucks? Ok, no problem, I’ll buy it tomorrow. Half the time you wake up and forget you ever wanted it. Sweet, money saved. Nice pair of shoes at the shop? Cool, I’ll come back tomorrow and try them on. Gives you a chance to find it elsewhere, cheaper.

I haven’t daily driven OSX for a few years now, but I still miss it every time I use a control panel on any other system. It’s so functional, intuitive, logical, consistent, and not a pile of dogshit to look at. If I want to change my IP address, I go to network, ethernet, IP address. If it’s greyed out, there is a lock icon right there. I click it, put in admin details, and then I can change the IP. All in the same window, in a consistent, logical flow.

I don’t think I understand what you mean with the right click menu. Do you mean when right clicking, the menu that appears with things you can do there? Like right clicking a file, and being able to rename, or open with a different program, etc? Right click the desktop and get an option to change the desktop background? What’s the problem there?

It’s because the gui is designed to be navigated with the mouse. The idea that someone would use the mouse to select a file then use the enter key just didn’t cross anyone’s mind. If someone is using the keyboard in a GUI navigation, it’s probably for text entry- such as search, or renaming a file.