Both those links are about the same (fake) robot by Kaiwa Technology.

I broke a display. More specifically, a shoddy Chinese NVR box broke the display’s main scaler chip by sending a voltage spike down the HDMI cable as it was being plugged in. It wasn’t an expensive display nor even mine (it was at the local hackerspace), but I was bummed out because it was one of the few good displays we had over there so I figured I’d see if I can fix it.

My knowledge of electronics isn’t great, though I’ve seen enough Louis Rossmann videos to know the basic principles, so I spent some time troubleshooting it with, and I expect this’ll get some flak given that this is Lemmy, the help of AI. I described the problem and what caused it to the AI, took some measurements off the board with its guidance and even figured out how to measure it with an oscilloscope to confirm the diagnosis. This way I could narrow the problem down to the main scaler chip – by all accounts a pretty common problem with this brand of monitor, though this one hadn’t failed so spectacularly.

I ordered a brand new chip from Aliexpress for a total of 15€. I did also find a full logic board on eBay, but it came to over 30€ with shipping and the photo showed it having red marker on top of the very chip I was looking to replace which made me suspect it could have failed QC or was torn out of a broken monitor, so I didn’t want to risk it.

After a couple of weeks the chip arrived and it was time to try my hand at BGA soldering for the first time ever. I couldn’t find a hot plate so I had to do the whole thing with just the hot air station making it harder than it should have been. I managed to tear off three pads taking the old chip off somehow and had to very carefully fix those with some fine copper wire carefully manipulated with tweezers and a crafts knife under the microscope. Against all odds after I got the new chip soldered in, the display worked perfectly on the first try. The success felt pretty ecstatic.

That guy carrying all that bread with the seagulls in the background gives me anxiety.

ðat*

ðe*

It’s still a tiny amount compared to global consumption.

On the flesh of the rich.

There are tons of concept albums where the songs do not directly connect to each other that still deserve to be listened to as a cohesive unit.

Then you just get a movie theater situation where you have to wear earplugs. This is a consequence of terrible audio mixing where the assumption is that audiences like loud as fuck sounds that they can ~fEEL~ and the only real fix to it is to un-terrible the mix by compressing it.

40% of 60%.

The anime will take a good while still to get to the ending.

Because those are what they removed the dislike button from.

The problem is that sometimes you can’t know whether the content is worth engaging until you view it. At least YouTube shorts still have the “Don’t recommend channel” option.

Most passenger cars don’t really have bucket seats. Bucket seats like in race cars have hard, deep structural sides, whereas in passenger cars they’re just soft pillows in a very shallow bucket shape. This is obviously because getting in and out of an actual bucket seat is difficult and consumers don’t like it. Because the pillows are soft, they’re not going to stop you from sliding out in an impact.

I imagine the vaguely bucket shape of modern passenger cars has basically nothing to do with safety, at least not in the “stops you from flying sideways out of your seat” sense, and is mostly just a comfort thing.

I mean, isn’t that what the seat belt is for? I can’t imagine the typical front seat in a modern car keeping you put in a collision either. They’re definitely shaped comfort-first, and at best keep you from jostling around on uneven roads.

Oh, if you didn’t steal anything then that makes it a lot less morally questionable.

Why were you burgling the ski lift?

Next time you think of skipping alt text, think of the poor AI crawlers and all the unlabeled images they have to save.

No, what I advocate for is a society where no one has to do labour. Very different.

I know this is a radical idea but I believe that if we can, via technological and logistical improvements, eliminate the need for people to sit (or dog forbid stand, like in the US) at a till for 8 hours per day doing the menial task of ringing up items, then we should do that. Even if it comes at the cost of people sometimes having to wait a couple of minutes in line.

I absolutely hate eating the same stuff for a week straight and I don’t know how people do it. No matter how delicious the first serving is, repeated servings get progressively more bland and after the 3rd serving in a row I’m ready to throw it in the bin.