I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.

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Note: I’m moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I’ll share more info :)

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • What would be the use case for cyborg insects, other than war and espionage? Are they smart enough for search and rescue?

    The fundamental operational range of cyborg insects, which are hybrid robots that combine a living insect with an electronic controller, is inherently restricted to the host’s natural environment. To extend their operational range, we developed a wearable diving suit for terrestrial insects. The suit integrates a miniaturised oxygen generation module with a flexible waterproof shell, enabling continuous oxygen supply and isolation from surrounding water. By fitting a cockroach, which is a terrestrial species, into this diving suit, we allowed it to survive and operate in oxygen-deprived environments such as underwater, transforming it into an amphibious cyborg robot capable of operation across land and water. The suit sustained respiration and locomotion for up to 3 h underwater, establishing amphibious cyborg insects that combine biological adaptability with engineered protection for prolonged exploration in extreme, confined environments.



  • Otter@lemmy.caMtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldMy child is dead
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    23 hours ago

    I’d like to add on this bit that people often miss:

    • In Canada, the healthcare system’s costs include salaries for healthcare workers, supplies, training, and other necessary costs
    • In the US, the healthcare system’s costs include all of the above, in addition to all of the parisitic layers. Just the insurance layer includes insurance shareholders, insurance executives, insurance overhead (marketing, admin, aggressive claims denial), lobbying, etc. Then there are similar costs from each of the private corporations that own the hospitals, the clinics, the ambulance services etc.

    That is why the American system is much more expensive and much less efficient with the money. Since Canada’s system is still partially private and it never got fully actualized to the original vision (in part because of lobbying from the US), we have some of those inefficiencies too.

    Now the thing is, a large segment of the working US population would not be able to afford healthcare because of these parasitic layers. The US government needs to enter this system to keep it afloat, but they have to pay the much higher costs.

    So for an American, not only do their taxes ALSO go towards healthcare, but the US spends far more per capita on it. It changes year to year, but double the spending is what I’ve usually heard.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_healthcare_systems_in_Canada_and_the_United_States

    Cut out the parasitic layers. The savvy businessmen among them can find some other industry to make a profit from.


  • Seems like the solution is: don’t do exams this way

    This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). “It’s a very nice kind of exam, because as you’re giving students practically unlimited time to complete it, it lets you make it harder than normal, to see how far they can go.” In this case, Serrano changed some of the model assumptions they had seen in class, and asked students to demonstrate whether certain statements were true or false under the new assumptions.


  • I use a browser extension that sends me to a reddit frontend on the off chance I come across a post while searching. It works pretty well

    Libredirect + the fastest instance

    From the admin side, I do understand what they are saying but I think there’s a better solution to it. We run the old frontend on our instance, and it gets hammered with bots and scrapers. So if we assume that old.reddit works the same way, then it would be attractive to scrapers. But instead of locking it down, I think they could set up something like Anubis or put it behind some other anti-bot measure.












  • Could this be solved by having two renderers, and only using the proprietary Adobe one needed?

    So what do you do when the pedantic gold standard of epubcheck says your book is fine, when it works without issue on Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Thorium and everywhere else and yet Kobo says it’s “corrupted”?

    I dug into this matter and found out that Kobo uses RMSDK, “Reader Mobile Software Development Kit”, Adobe’s proprietary ebook rendering engine.

    Once the stylesheet was identified as the source of my woes, I could finally drill down to find which specific line was causing the issue. After creating a dozen more variations with different subsets of my stylesheet I eventually identified the culprit. It was this line:

    .copyright img {
        max-width: min(150px, 30vw);
    }
    

    Once I changed it to the more old fashioned max-width: 150px; ADE opened it just fine.

    But what is the problem here? The above code is perfectly valid CSS level 4, it’s just not supported by RMSDK, because its CSS parser is frozen in approximately 2013 — no flexbox, no grid, no math functions, no custom properties. Just good old float, bad font handling, and silent crashes when it sees anything it doesn’t recognize.

    It’s the year 2026. Thanks to the horrendous RMSDK which Kobo decided to use as their backbone for all book rendering (probably for DRM reasons), a single line of perfectly valid CSS turns a perfectly valid EPUB file into a “corrupted file” on Kobo and just drops the whole book. No clear error message, no fallback. Just a massive fail.