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Comment Re:Wayland? Who cares. (Score 1) 46

I have no interest in a giant 4K monitor for my desk. But a 24" 4k monitor would look quite nice. I would want my font sizes to be the same as they are now, just sharper. I find sharper, higher resolution text easier to read as my eyes get older, than blurry text at the same size.

I was just thinking that although my eyes are getting older, I still can see the screen okay. Then I glanced up at the url bar in my browser and noticed I'm browsing the web at 150% zoom. Ha.

Comment Re:Wayland? Who cares. (Score 1) 46

You've tried running screens with very different dpi then? If you have a window running at hidpi on the 4k and drag it over to the 1080p, what happens? Will the app get scaled automatically (hopefully the toolkit redraws instead of everything being blurry). My understanding is X11 cannot deal with that scenario at all, xrandr notwithstanding. But I've never tried it myself. Will have a 4K monitor to test with in the new year.

Comment Re:Wayland? Who cares. (Score 3, Insightful) 46

How well does X.org do with a dual screen system where one is 4K and the other is 1080P? For folks running laptops this sort of scenario is increasingly common, and X11 just doesn't do it very well.

I'm contemplating buying a 4K monitor and my main concern was how well X11 and the various desktop environments do hidpi. Having switched to Wayland, though, and with Firefox natively on Wayland and supporting fractional scaling, it makes the purchase a bit more comfortable.

Comment Re:It seemed like a good idea (Score 1) 99

Will to be fair if it had been 3d printed out of Peak or a number of other engineering filaments then no it wouldn't. Believe it or not there are consumer printers that can print this high temperature filaments. Obviously be didn't use over of them. In less critical applications people have been 3d printing and air box parts for cars for years. And no they don't melt either. Engines usually run well below 270 C. But this is not an airplane obviously.

Comment Re:Zig (Score 1) 68

It's been around for quite a while. It's seems to be a replacement for C and C++. Some see it as an alternative to Rust, but it doesn't have the same safety features. I would love to find a language that's a replacement for C++ that can be used to migrated existing code bases to, but none of them are, really. That's partly C++'s fault. It's very hard to interoperate with C++ code and libraries from other languages, without layers of wrappers (PySide comes to mind for Qt). Even interop between different C++ compilers is difficult. So for now I stick with C++.

Comment Re:Anomalies are a learning experience (Score 1) 91

New Glenn booster can also glide a bit during descent, not unlike the Starship. The strakes on the rocket create a tiny bit of lift, so it has a more flexible landing envelope than the mostly ballistic descent of the Falcon 9. I was very impressed by what New Glenn did on its first successful landing.

Comment Can AI overcome GOP gerrymandering? (Score 0) 110

Every week I read about yet another GOP-controlled state legislature redrawing the boundaries to eliminate districts that might vote for a party other than the GOP in time for the midterms. Indiana is the latest state to do this. I don't see AI overcoming this. It's truly interesting that this widespread, coordinated effort to eliminate democratic seats with a map is hardly a blip in the news media. They are talking about the dems taking back congressional power in the midterms but frankly it's not going to happen.

Several democrat states are responding in kind now, although in their cases they are moving forward with a veneer of legitimacy through referendums. The GOP states could certainly do this but for whatever reason they choose not to. Something about democracy doesn't sit well with them even when it favors them. Still with democrat states gerrymandering away a few GOP seats, it's not enough to counter what these other GOP states are doing in my opinion.

Sadly the cancer of gerrymandering is working its way north. It's already been done here in Alberta to try to weaken the power of the cities vs the conservative rural base.

Comment Re:Directly monitored switches? (Score 1) 54

Obviously the black box can only record what the computer tells it is the state of the switches. There's no camera looking at the switches to confirm they actually were moved. No doubt the switches are wired such that a short or an open circuit will not fool the computer into thinking the switch was moved and shut the engines down. But if something caused the computer to think (pardon the expression) the switches had changed state, it would shut the engines down and the flight recorder would dutifully record this change of state.

Suppose for a moment a computer glitch did shut the engines down. The pilot, upon noticing this asks the copilot about it and he says, no I didn't shut them down. Knowing he has to do something, reaches over, flips them to off and back to on again to try to get them going again, after which the engines did restart but sadly not in time to prevent disaster.

Comment Re:Don't blame the pilot prematurely (Score 0) 54

Mods, this should not have been rated -1 flamebait! Totally inappropriate mod.

I deeply respect Captain Steeeve and his videos are great. Any nervous flyer should watch his videos (except the Air India ones!). And indeed Captain Steeeve's summary of the report is accurate. And his videos about the cutoff switches are accurate too. The chance of those switches being flipped inadvertently or on their own from mechanical wear and vibration is zero. And indeed the computer shows that inputs from those switches went from on to off and back to on again with timing suggestive of human intervention.

That said, one of Captain Steeeve's youtube collaborators, Garybpilot with whom he has done videos about Air India (Hanger Talk) has done his own videos on Air India. In one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0n3iIjvQk8) he mentioned that at Air India, there is not one pilot who believes the official report blaming the pilots. These are pilots who knew well both of the pilots in the cockpit on that tragic flight and find the suggestion difficult to believe. The Indian investigation board has been mired in political intrigue and controversy the whole time (before even). They were definitely under pressure to exonerate Air India and blame the pilots. Also to exonerate Boeing. Not that long ago a 787 had both engines shut down during landing. And there is a minor history of electrical anomalies on 787s, including RATs deploying mid flight for no discernible reason.

If the pilots did not shut the engines down, I don't think we will ever know what actually happened unless there is another accident. And given the problems Boeing has had in recent years (and other planes with engine shutdowns during flight), another accident is a possibility.

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