I’m a scientist and systems engineer, particularly materials science, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, bioengineering, renewable energy, um… okay, so kind of I enjoy being a general engineer and doing a little of everything.

But I love trying to help scientists turn super technical concepts into usable prototypes because I can translate biologist to electrical engineer really effectively.

I am the star trek kind of anarchist.

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  • 18 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I saw the writing on the wall a few years back, it was so painfully obvious. I started switching to KiCAD early, and feel so bad for ever recommending Eagle to people who will now have to learn yet another new tool in order to find something usable.

    Fusion360 is so bad, I had to explain why SolidWorks was different earlier today and they were shocked by things like “if I move the case the board I say is attached to the case moves to” and “I don’t have to align it by eye, it’s a computer”.

    And I’m definitely not starting VMWare to run Fusion360 with nonsense online components that slow it down to uselessness and integrate it into a tool that doesn’t need to be on at all… it’s just not possible. It was obvious once they stopped updating the version. It’s pathetic nonetheless that they cannot think beyond the one-true-way of integrating a dozen mediocre tools into one extra-mediocre product.


  • I mean, largely to me this is fine and great as long as the reverse is also true. It’s fabulous to have two totally independent systems that are fully interoperable to such an extent.

    I don’t think there’s a meaningful competition in growth or anything, that’s just a number. The main downside is reduced development focus…

    But – If Lemmy is like a frontend for kbin and vice versa, isn’t that fine? The Lemmy apps will load kbin posts and kbin apps will load lemmy posts.





  • I think I’m much too old for Prodigy or something because one episode was too much.

    But Lower Decks is absolutely amazing, it’s really nice to have a legitimate comedy within the honest-to-god Star Trek universe so they can just actually make fun of Riker by name.

    I like Strange New Worlds alright. It’s better than Discovery, and I liked Discovery fine.

    Picard was great until the S1 twist and I refused to watch further. Maybe that’s not fair, I found it a bit Disney-ish but wow that ending. I just have to head cannon a more respectful ending and I imagine I’ll get around to it.

    Though I have somehow never managed to get around to Enterprise…




  • I’ve been kind of suggesting the same thing a few times inside of posts. I’m coming at it from the perspective of having had to do a lot of in-person recruiting for voluntary activities, mentoring, and teaching – you cannot tell people things like “you should just join lemmy/kbin” – you have to wait for them to ask “how do I join lemmy/kbin?”

    That’s okay! It just means that the focus when introducing people to it has to be “here’s what you’re missing”, positive about where they could go rather than negative about where they are.

    It’s an uphill battle trying to argue with people who do have a point about it being harder to use (we shouldn’t gaslight people), but they’re also saying what the audience is wanting to hear because it gives them permission to do nothing.

    How many are just admin accounts or sock puppets for some agenda or another anyway?

    Consider focusing on the positive – link to specific posts on these systems that are objectively worth going to participate in. They don’t need an account to read and enjoy.

    Then, if they discover that they wish that they could participate in the thread – that is the time to explain that they should just join whatever instance the post they really enjoyed was on for starters. They’ll realize that they can see magazines from other instances, probably after a week when they realize other instance domain names are showing up on things. Then some nice person explains what’s going on.

    And now they’ve convinced themselves it’s worth joining…


  • While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it’s clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they’re usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.

    I’m not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to “bob@microsoft.com and bob@apple.com are different people” because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn’t take that long to click honestly.

    Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don’t turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn’t seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what’s going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I’m sure…!



  • I’ll try submitting the same, sure.

    I am suspicious that the search URL will only be indexing kbin.social and not the greater kbin/lemmy universe which is not good. But it’s a !kbin bang and the !msocial bang goes to mastodon.social so I guess it makes sense.

    I’d much rather see a !kbin search that returned results from all kbin instances it has indexed, and a !lemmy search that does the same for lemmy instances, or a !fediforum search that returned results from both. But it’s a start!


  • Very cool, I didn’t know they added !msocial.

    Seems it only searches tags, which seems appropriate for Mastodon.

    I feel like there is a huge difference in expectations of discoverability with this UI versus Mastodon, which makes full text search a non-question here whereas on Mastodon it was a (often ill-informed but well-intentioned) argument about privacy.

    On Mastodon you can opt-in to have your posts indexed by Google, hopefully kbin/lemmy can rely on DDG or Google to do the full-text search for us with a flag on robots…?








  • Doesn’t that result in the general public owning shares that gradually decrease in value while the current owners make money at the current value? Seems like index funds will be paying for it unless the actual amount the Reddit owners sell it for goes down before the sale.

    Satisfying I guess, but frustrating that the people that did the damage get a payout while the public holds the bag while it deflates.



  • Of course in a magical world all the different basically the same magazines on different instances would get merged seamlessly in the UI with posts all somehow connected.

    In the real world I can’t even conceptualize how you could handle moderation (or a random collection of posts vanishing from a thread) with instances that have different rules unless each magazine for different topics was a separate silo.

    The natural outcome, without much active effort, seems likely to be that niche stuff is consolidated on a single instance that members aren’t necessarily on in order to have enough participation while popular stuff truly just gets silo’d into different self-sustaining groups that talk about the same stuff but with different culture developed, different moderators, and a different instance.

    Is there another way? We’re assuming each one is self-sustaining, it will be good enough or you’ll find one on a different instance…

    I expect people will see there’s existing local magazines for a bunch of things, and then to search out magazines for niche interests.