dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • This is so, but LLM’s are the only most visible public facing ones and they’re the dumbshit technology that every company on Earth is now trying to shoehorn into every product. They’re what people see, interact with, and get pissed off by.

    Learning neural nets are good for various specific types of pattern recognition tasks, but trying to be an electronic butler who answers your questions ain’t one of them and it never will be.




  • HDMI goes in video. Sure, HDMI “can” carry audio. Nobody thinks of it as an audio cable. Component cables rarely carry audio. They go in video cables as well, regardless of whether or not they’ve got the extra two RCA’s glommed on.

    USB-A to Micro B go in the USB cable box. The adapters box doesn’t have any cables in it, it’s all gender benders and pin converters and so forth.

    The box of wall warts is in fact labeled “DC Power” but these days is realistically just mostly full of wall warts. Vanishingly few devices use a DC power cable that is independent of a brick or wall wart but is also not USB of some description. If a brick has an associated AC cable it gets placed in a baggie (almost everything I have is bagged to prevent tangles and aid sorting/labeling), especially since there are so many damn variants of them. Are you going to try to use it without its cable? Of course not.

    Do yours however you want. My system, such as it is, started as one box of cables and got progressively speciated as I accumulated too many cables to fit in one box anymore, and thus one category had to be split out.

    The next split will probably be separating USB cables that contain a Type C plug on them from ones that don’t, as the lingering threat of being buried under an avalanche of A-to-Mini-B cables is ever present.












  • That style should be clutch fit, i.e. the knob just pulls off. It may be gunked on there with 40 years of accumulated crud, though. So this is likely to require a hard yank or possibly some prying. Good news: The cover plate is already broken, so prying on it can’t possibly meaningfully break it further.

    It’s also not outside the realm of possibility that her handyman broke it, and his solution for “fixing” it was to just glue the knob onto its stem before anybody noticed.

    If it breaks, no big deal. Breaking it is also a valid way to get it off, and an entire replacement dimmer is like $9 at the hardware store. You can also get replacement knobs for a couple of bucks, and they’re generally broadly interchangeable (although these days, without that groovy aluminum accent disk in the middle).