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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’m a mechanical eng turned software, computing and the like are super visible but there’s been a huge amount of advancement in physical things in our lifetime, Steel in particular. By no means an expert, some of this I’ve been out of the industry for a while so just operating on memory, totally welcome any corrections!

    I’m not a metallurgist, but worked with them, there’s lots of grades out there but some of the stuff being used in automotive is seriously interesting (I think they’re boron grades but I can’t recall), needs specific treatment like hot stamping but they can easily hit into the 1-2 GPa range for yield strength once it’s processed. It’s allowed material to be rolled thinner for the same part strength so you end up with lighter vehicles.

    Coatings too have changed a lot, non-chromium passivation is a thing, galvanised materials are no longer just zinc + a bit of aluminum, there’s aluminum + silicon coatings that are supposed to offer decent corrosion resistance at high temperatures, those fancy automotive steels get coated in it for things like mufflers. Construction there were zinc+magnesium coatings starting to show up, supposed to be resistant to coating damage.

    Processing has changed a lot in a century too, steel is substantially metallurgically cleaner these days, probably actually cleaner too with more electric arc furnaces and hydrogen direct reduced iron.

    It’s oldish these days but pipeline inspection was increasingly using Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT) tools when I worked in that field. It let you do ultrasound inspection of steel pipes without needing a liquid medium, so things like cracks and material defects that are hard (or nearly impossible) to find using Magnetic Flux Leakage tools are a lot more accessible to gas pipeline operators as they don’t need to do things like plan around liquid batching.









  • Mine had a bunch of iMac g3s, eMacs came toward grade 8.

    Games weren’t explicitly forbidden, just needed to finish work first, new Cross Country Canada, math circus and Oregon trail were the games I recall the most of. There was this one game though I can’t recall the name of but the concept was interesting, you played as a time travelling velociraptor and had to save dinosaur eggs from extinction, was like a 3rd person shooter, I have no idea why that was on school computers

    Edit: was Nanosaur

    In the distant year of 4122, a dinosaur species, Nanosaurs, rule the Earth. Their civilization originated from a group of human scientists who experimented with genetic engineering. Their experimentation led them to resurrect the extinct dinosaur species; however, their victory was short-lived, as a disastrous plague brought the end of their civilization itself. The few dinosaurs resurrected were lent an unusual amount of intelligence from their human creators, leaving them to expand on their growing civilization. However, as the Nanosaurs were the only species on Earth, inbreeding was the only possible choice of reproduction. This method largely affected the intelligence of the various offspring, and slowly began to pose a threat to their once-intelligent society.

    The Nanosaur government offers a quest that involves time traveling into the year 65 million BC, where the five eggs of ancient dinosaur species must be retrieved and placed in a time portal leading to the present year. Their high-ranking agent, a brown Deinonychus Nanosaur, is chosen to participate in this mission. On the day of her mission, she is teleported to the past via a time machine in a Nanosaur laboratory.



  • Was a kubuntu person for a long time, I haven’t really loved the default Ubuntu DE for a while, but that’s personal preferences. At the end of the day, use what you like.

    I personally like debian (swapped from Kubuntu over time) but keep mint on my thumb drive for family who needs something on older hardware, especially those used to windows it seems to be an easy jump. I love that there are so many options available to people with various levels of prepackaging and configurations.





  • Some of these have been around for a while or remind me of some, my crunchy new-age grandparents were hardcore into the NWO order stuff. Some others I recall

    • NWO stuff: North America would become the North American Union and forcefully adopt the Amero as currency. This was the pretext for the eventual merging of the EU and NAU to start total domination, pretty sure the UN was involved in this one.
    • Stargates are real and the the US has bases on the moon as well as Mars
    • Some water alignment thing, that you can put a logogram or something under a glass of water and that changes its properties to be better (‽??)
    • The Philadelphia Experiment
    • Roswell is responsible for technological leaps, and the powers that be have been slowly releasing things to evade suspicion
    • Mayan calendar stuff
    • Hardcore distrust of medical doctors and hospitals
    • Fluoride - mind control, it’s a neuro toxin!

    There’s others but those stick out.



  • Mine are a bit more recent (2012-202*) but same thing. Old hardware gets used for something, my “server” is just my old i5 11500k with as much ram as I could throw at it and as many drives as I can fit in the case. Oldest is a laptop that’s my bench computer.

    Helps me justify upgrades, hardware’s been capable for a long time, always impressive to me just how capable things are, and sometimes it’s part of the fun (if you enjoy problem solving) to work around limitations. Off-lease enterprise stuff interests me, would need to figure out where it lives though.