poop
Hate repost bots, if you want to use one as a back-er-up-er-er it should post to a dedicated community intended to be an archive, not the main communities for a topic, they are practically spam and don’t promote any conversation in the comments as people avoid commenting on something that has zero connection to the original poster of the question.
Mathematics like calculus can be mechanised with analogue (continuous output) mechanisms, but programmability is limited. being a continuous analogue output you can say that they are able to instantaneously (ignoring gear backlash and other mechanical tolerances) solve complex equations. The inputs can be changed freely and continuously and multiple machines could be interconnected to form complex analogue logic, but it is difficult to imagine a reasonable way that it could perform general programmable computing tasks rather than being purpose built for a specific equation or family of equations. See the analogue clockwork logic used in early autopilots and space flight computers, bombing calculators, early maritime navigation computers etc…
A general purpose mechanical computer is of course possible, but doesn’t scale well to what we would consider a modern computer equivalent, as another commenter mentioned babbages analytical engine roughly scaled and parallelised to a modern computer would weigh as much as a decently sized asteroid. even if the consecutive generations of smaller scale machines allowed for micro engineering of mechanical logic gates via micro scale CNC it would still be limited to a certain physical minimum size much larger than our current transistors and could only function at a limited speed and with a limited lifetime.
Other methods that could be used are chemical logic, which can be scaled pretty small, but requires constant fuelling and would be prone to “noise” from contamination. Optical logic is another option, but requires advanced optics, filters and polarisers which would require advanced manufacturing in the first place.
The most likely, if still far fetched option for pre-industrial NON-MECHANICAL computing to me is biological, through selective breeding and intense training of humans or animals to perform computing tasks, even subconsciously. We know this is possible as we see the occasional human computer arise naturally, sometimes with extreme and unbelievable capabilities, but we don’t know how to control it to “manufacture” a biological computer in this way.
I lusted after the top end Clies with the OLED screens. I had a T665C Clie, a Treo650, and countless pocket PC models including the HTC ultimate (Imate JasJar technically) and several others before android and the Iphone came around.
I’m into model live steam engines, I’ve dreamed about a model live steam setup but never had the room (or funds) for such a build.
Those ink tank printers are their own kind of scam though, they clog if you dont use them frequently enough, and they use a non-replaceable dump pad when cleaning and purging that effectively bricks the printers when it is considred full, which is usually just a timer, not an actual sensor.
conservative governments in Australia have been trying to kill off medicare and other public services for a long time. the problem is our progressive governments have refused to push back hard enough as it always results in election losses.
Basically the people are stupid, the media influences them, and the government is too spineless to take the risk needed to fix things.
Ah, the good old days.
Which is why I always check dodgy links in a non logged in browser in an isolated vm.
just a website with the usual bullshit rambings of anti-ukraine conspiracists.
I’ve only been able to get a few hours into TOTK due to being a “responsible” adult with no free time, but I’ll keep churning away at it half an hour here and there.
Took me over a year to finish BOTW to a reasonable degree, I imagine TOTK will keep be going for the foreseeable future.
probably just a bit of safety there, it is a more carefully controlled and moderated experience.
You drop the average internet user into the wrong random lemmy instance without teaching them how to tune it to their liking and they are going to be turned off by the amount of bizzare shit they see and just assume it’s all like that.
Gran Turismo 2.
It’s simple and very limited compared to some other games, but the combination of the era of cars, the PS1 graphics and the jazz fusion it’s perfect.
its kinda like MQTT for humans rather than machines.
What the heck? that’s an unexpected one.
Guess I’ll be looking at migrating my domains within the next 12 months, I don’t really like the way squarespace runs their business. I also sincerely hope this doesn’t affect gmail aliasing in any way, I rely on that as my main email address.
I used lawnchair for years as a launcher, allowed for excellent customisation and doesn’t require any root tinkering or custom roms.
I only stopped using it when I got a foldy-thingo and it didn’t support it as well as the stock launcher.
Everything is possible, look at this video called Harder Drive for examples of this sort of thing being done.
There used to be (and probably still are) entire youtube channels of apparent static or random shapes that turned out to be massive amounts of data stored as video.
Skwill just to be different.
There have been many attempts to adapt blood meridian, I still cant see how it would work unless it was like 6 hours long but I would love to see it given a real, high budget, big name attempt.
It would be a very difficult watch, but sometimes thats a good thing.
Saving that font for my e-reader tablet.
Suuuper legible and fast to read.
Digging into some deep speculative fiction here rather than pure fantasy.
An Idea I’ve always I liked that can be extended to include tectonics is deep speculative biology, creating links between plants and animals with ancient evolutionary connections with distant relatives across former continents, within this world extremely slow evolving or slow living creatures could experience time differently to us, to our eyes they might seem completely static like rocks or trees but to them they are a thriving and active community.
From that you can have civilisations that have existed in some form across hundreds of millions, or even billions of years with notable epochs in their long history being related to points in time where different land masses were connected, causing major societal upheaval and rapid evolutionary shifts, but also access to potential new resources and technology.
You could have one group of people on an isolated plate that over hundreds of millions of years contacted other landmasses and either settled them causing new disparate groups to form, or met with existing other groups and shaped their future by passing on some technology or resource.
Imagine an overwhelmingly large planet with uncrossable oceans, how they’re uncrossable could be expanded upon, but imagine that travel across this ocean is completely impossible or impracticable in some way, perhaps flight is also impossible to extreme gravity, high technology may be impossible due to resources. plate collisions are rare due to the immense size of the planet and the small size of the landmasses in comparison so the only way these people have ever come into contact with other civilisations or non native species is through the slow movement of their plates, they have remnants of stories from their deep history, they have long melded into mythology, possibly becoming their creation myths.
So a short prompt for a story or role play of some kind could be:
An outcast scientist has created a piece of equipment to peer into the distance and he sees what appears to be land, it seems to be moving towards them, fast. He tries to tell the ruling priests that a landmass is approaching and will make contact with them within a generation, they scoff as the prophecies say it will be a thousand generations before the next “meeting”.