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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Nothing to do with the electrical grid. It is just that the positive lead of the output of the power supply is whatever voltage you select above the negative lead on the output side of the power supply. Those are the two relative points in this situation. You can call the negative lead ground if you want. Wiring diagrams for the device you connect it to will likely call it ground. It is not the same thing as the grounding wire in a plug socket.

    Note that the grounding wires in a home have nothing to do with any live circuit in your house. They are to make faults in the system safer by giving a path for electrons to flow if a conductive casing ever gets into contact with a live wire. In normal operation nothing should be flowing through it at all. With doubly insulated devices (like that power supply) the grounding wire in the plug socket is probably not connected to anything at all in the device. The plug likely does not even have a grounding wire in it.


  • I amusingly imagine a force “sucking” the current backwards. 🤭

    If you think of a positive voltage as pushing then it is not anymore inaccurate to think of a negative voltage as pulling. At least if you think in terms of DC, which is what power supplies will typically give you.

    Voltage is all relative. The sign just shows the direction of flow. If you plug a volt meter in backwards it will show a negative voltage. That means the current will flow from the negative to the positive terminals.

    If you have three terminals, let’s say A, B, and C. If you measure 12V between A and B. Then 24V between A and C. Then you will also be able to measure 12V between B and C. Or -12v between B and A. Or -24 between C and A. The direction matters.

    You could label any of these as ground it makes no real difference to the system. Only how you talk about it. Without a ground label then you would not say C is at 24V as it has nothing to compare to. If you pick A as ground then it is said to be 24V, but if you pick B as ground then it is said to be 12V. If you pick C as ground then it is 0V. So when we say a point is at a voltage then that is implied that it is that voltage relative some other point we decided was ground.


    Things get a lot more complicated with AC as electrons move back and forth in the wire they don’t have the same direction as they do in DC.


  • The time to beat a game is generally for the main story if you don’t take ages doing other things. Quite often with side quests or other non essential steps like collecting things or trying to 100% a game it will take way longer then the estimated time to complete. This is epically true for more open-world type of games with lots of places to explore.



  • I don’t think this is the win we want. Sounds like palwprld change the game to no longer infringe on Nintendo copyright claims. So Nintendo can no longer seek an injunction. They are still seeking damages.

    I really want to see the copyright claims be challenged in court so we know where we stand. Rather then the continual settling out of court because Nintendo has more money.

    It doesn’t sound like Nintendo are on track to win or lose this. Just Palworld changed the game to limit the impact of the lawsuit. Which is in a way a small win for Nintendo.






  • Yeah, Steam may be effectively a monopoly, but it’s because nobody else really wants to compete with them at their level.

    Steam has two types of customers. Us the gamers where we can decide which platform to use. They have an effective monopoly on us because they provide a good service. But with a large game library we are locked into steam as well and cannot just switch to a different platform. If valve ever did decide to be evil then we are screwed.

    But developers are also customers of valve. And this is arguably where valve makes their money. They take a cut from the developers sales. Devs cannot just use a different platform without cutting out a huge userbase. This gives valve a real monopolistic control over developers.


  • Its hard to argue that 2 config files both multiple lines long is simpler then a single line in an existing file. Adding a service to cron is just simpler. But adding all the extra bit you are going to want on top increases the things you need to learn to do and configure correctly.

    IMO systemd timers are simpler to get right at a little bit more of an upfront cost to learning how they work. But cron is still simpler to just get something working without caring that much. I still find that ends up biting you in the longer term though though all the missing features you need to add manually on top of that one basic line you added.


  • Cron jobs are nice and simple to create. Until they go wrong then they are a pain in the ass. You need to manage logging yourself. If you forget you root mail will fill up your disk and crash the system. If you forget the mailto setting. If you remember it you justlose all logs and have no clue why something is not working. You need to redirect the output to a logfile yourself. And then risk filling up the disk with logs unless you remember to also set up logrotate. And you then still don’t know when something last ran or if it ran successfully.

    So many traps and that is just the logging side of things.