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C-Euro posted:My neighbor left an acoustic guitar out for trash day tomorrow so now I own a guitar. What's the best way to clean one of these of dust and someone else's skin oil residue? No need to overthink it. Clean the body like you'd clean anything else, bit of a spray / wipe. Get a tissue and try to get under the strings as best you can. But yeah if the strings really suck then you can take it to a shop to get restrung. Most important thing is to get a guitar tuner app on your phone, GuitarTuna is free and easy. "tabs" app will tell you how to play any song you want. Or of course there is the songbook I posted earlier. Learn E, A, G, C, D. Em, Am, Dm. You can use powerchords for the rest. Play around with the pentatonic scale for fingering if you like. Good luck.
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Nov 29, 2022 09:13
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Ogmius815 posted:Is fabric softener safe to use? Is it bad for the environment? I literally cannot find a source that is not either a health woo website (often with referral links to “organic” or “natural” alternatives)or an industry group for fabric softener manufacturers. My understanding is that it works quite like hair conditioner, it softens the fibres by coating them. But that same coating can build up both on the clothes and in your appliances, which can mean they'll need maintenance sooner. I have heard a small amount of white vinegar will soften fibres through acidity instead which will be better in the long run but I've never tried it
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Nov 29, 2022 12:56
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Fabric softener isn’t “bad” for towels but it does make them less effective due to the aforementioned coating
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Nov 29, 2022 14:39
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Such Fun posted:It is safe to use, generally. Like all things, it’s full of stuff one might develop an allergic reaction to. But most people are fine. According to my mom, who worked in appliance repair, combining the use of softener with a dryer can be a fire hazard though. I don’t know how, or how likely, but it’s something to be mindful of. She's probably thinking of the thing about dryer sheets, which usually include a fabric softener. Dryer sheets can leave a sticky residue on the lint filter, which theoretically potentially can lead to a lint buildup, which in turn is the leading cause of dryer fires. As long as you clean the lint trap every load (and wash the lint trap every few months) it's NBD. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dry-cleaning/ https://www.consumerreports.org/clothes-dryer/how-to-prevent-dryer-fires-a6837216286/
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Nov 29, 2022 14:50
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Ogmius815 posted:Is it bad for the environment? Yes. A lot of fabric softeners are made from petroleum products and they aren't terribly biodegradable, so they end up acting as a water pollutant. They also come in plastic containers that can't be recycled the majority of the time unless you thoroughly clean them. Fabric softener is not absolutely necessary when washing your clothes (especially with modern washers and dryers), so one can argue that the waste and emissions generated in their creation/transportation are entirely unnecessary. Environmentally speaking fabric softener is not as bad as dryer sheets, but it's not far behind. Eco-friendly options do, however, exist, they just cost more.
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Nov 29, 2022 15:00
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And of course, the biggest problem with fabric softener is: spensive
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Nov 29, 2022 15:32
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Thanks. There’s so much bad health information on the internet, it’s hard to know what’s toxic and what’s health nut hysteria.
Ogmius815 fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Nov 30, 2022 |
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Nov 29, 2022 16:20
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Is there a mathematical term for getting a number that's a certain percentage of the way between two numbers? For example, if I have 0 and 200 as my two numbers and I want to get the number that's 25% of the way between the two (50), what do I call this type of function/number?
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Nov 29, 2022 19:01
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Not sure if there's a 'small medical questions' thread that this question would be more appropriate for (I skimmed The Goon Doctor a bit and didn't see one), so here goes. Is a semi-blocked nostril a more serious problem than it sounds? Many years ago I had my nose broken, and while doctors re-broke it in the hospital to set it properly, the cast fell off and I don't think it really ever healed properly. To this day my right nostril feels a bit blocked, not completely but it is uncomfortable, and if I close the other nostril and try to breathe only through the right one, it's definitely more laboured than the inverse. I've been going through some various medical examinations in the past year for depression, fatigue and some other things. They made me do a sleep study, and while it wasn't really what we were looking for, apparently I have 'mild' sleep apnea. I've been wondering if the nostril thing is a factor.
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Nov 29, 2022 19:02
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kedo posted:Is there a mathematical term for getting a number that's a certain percentage of the way between two numbers? Interpolation
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Nov 29, 2022 19:07
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alnilam posted:Interpolation Thank you! Wow I really wish literally any of the math I learned in school had stuck with me.
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Nov 29, 2022 19:19
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Mister Speaker posted:Not sure if there's a 'small medical questions' thread that this question would be more appropriate for (I skimmed The Goon Doctor a bit and didn't see one), so here goes. There isn't a medical small questions thread, probably because medical questions tend to attract a lot of motivated woo peddlers, so it's easier if there's no one thread they can easily lurk in to pollute with bad opinions. Our doctors and nurses are tired enough as it is without having to get into constant moderator slap fights. Make a new thread in The Goon Doctor and hope someone there sees it and has some insights. As a non-doctor, an obstructed naval passage does sound like it could be a factor for sleep apnea. I don't think anyone on the internet will be able to tell you "yes, this definitely is a factor" though; we just don't have access to your medical history, exam results, etc.
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Nov 29, 2022 19:43
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It's dengue fever, cancer and scrotal rot OP. Rip.
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Nov 29, 2022 19:45
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kedo posted:Is there a mathematical term for getting a number that's a certain percentage of the way between two numbers? alnilam posted:Interpolation Interpolation is lot more general than what's being described here. This is a simple weighted average. FWIW, there's a thread for small math and statistics questions over in SAL.
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Nov 29, 2022 20:14
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Specifically it's a linear interpolation, which yes is the same thing as a weighted average.
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Nov 29, 2022 20:19
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Mister Speaker posted:Not sure if there's a 'small medical questions' thread that this question would be more appropriate for (I skimmed The Goon Doctor a bit and didn't see one), so here goes. I'm not sure if it was a goon or someone else, but I remember a guy that was getting treated for severe depression and other mental health issues, but treatment wasn't working. He then got his presumably unrelated sleep apnea treated, and it turned out he hadn't had a good nights sleep in years so the mental health stuff cleared up soon after.
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Nov 29, 2022 20:24
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I would contend that weighted average does not describe what's being asked as well as linear interpolation. The OP wants a number 25% of the way between two others - i.e. mapping x1=0 to y1=0, and x2= 1 to y2=200, and interpolating to find the corresponding y for x=0.25. People do this all the time when using tabulated values in thermodynamics, chemistry, materials science, etc. Mathematically it may work out to be the same as a weighted average of two numbers, but imo the approach to get there is better described as a linear interpolation. Weighted average is IME more used to describe weighting more than two numbers by some sort of importance.
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Nov 29, 2022 20:34
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Tiggum posted:Obviously this is a dumb scam: Just as goofy as the “Name a star” scams. It’s not recorded anywhere but their own records and means nothing.
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Nov 29, 2022 22:23
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I'm trying to picture the type of rube who would fall for that lordship scam and my mind's eye sees a guy in a fedora laminating himself a new nametag and informing his coworkers at GameStop that "you have to call me Lord now  "
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Nov 29, 2022 22:57
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Mister Speaker posted:I'm trying to picture the type of rube who would fall for that lordship scam and my mind's eye sees a guy in a fedora laminating himself a new nametag and informing his coworkers at GameStop that "you have to call me Lord now I "know" one of them (not very well, have had limited interaction with him). He takes himself very seriously, and thinks it's super funny when he insists to be called lord when people disagree with him on social media
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Nov 29, 2022 23:06
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Mister Speaker posted:I'm trying to picture the type of rube who would fall for that lordship scam and my mind's eye sees a guy in a fedora laminating himself a new nametag and informing his coworkers at GameStop that "you have to call me Lord now My wife got me one from Sealand as a gag gift, and my dad took it way too seriously, got super jealous, and got himself one from Glencoe.
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Nov 29, 2022 23:27
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I'm sure there used to be a thread for asking questions about SA's history, but I can't find it. Is there one, or should I post here? There was some drama from about 5 years ago and it's been on my mind a lot recently, I would like to know the outcome.
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Nov 30, 2022 00:44
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Lady Demelza posted:I'm sure there used to be a thread for asking questions about SA's history, but I can't find it. Is there one, or should I post here? There was some drama from about 5 years ago and it's been on my mind a lot recently, I would like to know the outcome. Saga thread in PYF is probably your best bet for drama. link
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Nov 30, 2022 00:55
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Lady Demelza posted:I'm sure there used to be a thread for asking questions about SA's history, but I can't find it. Is there one, or should I post here? There was some drama from about 5 years ago and it's been on my mind a lot recently, I would like to know the outcome. If you’re looking more for a specific meme, ARG or photoshop thread, or something like that from back in the day instead of drama/sagas there’s also this.
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Nov 30, 2022 02:23
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astral posted:
Which goons have these thousand-year probes
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Nov 30, 2022 07:15
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Isn't it a lot of people? I thought it became the usual way to "actually" ban someone, since you can just  away a normal ban.
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Nov 30, 2022 07:55
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The traditional punishment is one hundred thousand hours, which is about eleven and a half years. One thousand years is special.
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Nov 30, 2022 08:05
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Thank you, Inceltown and King Carnivore.
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Nov 30, 2022 15:25
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does anyone here know of an easy to apply, readily available lubricant that sticks well and is heat resistant to about 500f or higher?
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Nov 30, 2022 20:02
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There's a discussion in the Schad Thread about buying old GPUs from defunct Bitcoin miners and it got me curious. I don't know much about computers except for what I needed to know to juice up my Mac as an audio (and occasional video) editing machine. Why do we use GPUs for graphics rendering? Why is it a discrete piece of hardware separate from the rest of the motherboard? I've asked this vaguely before and closest thing to a response I got was "turns out GPUs are better for processing video than CPUs," but I don't really know why. Why don't we see other components made out to be so important? I mean, as someone who works with audio I'm familiar with 'external soundcards' (audio interfaces) being a thing, some of the more heavy-duty professional-tier stuff actually does come in the form of a PCI card, but it's my understanding that the bulk of the work is still being handled by the CPU. Is there a historical reason in the industry that video cards are such a big thing? I feel like there's a good video primer to watch on this stuff but I wouldn't know where to start.
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Nov 30, 2022 20:20
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In hotels, what does a concierge do exactly? I've landed an interview for that position and I want to know what I'm in for. I've worked in hotels before, but specifically in a food service capacity.
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Nov 30, 2022 20:22
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Mister Speaker posted:There's a discussion in the Schad Thread about buying old GPUs from defunct Bitcoin miners and it got me curious. I don't know much about computers except for what I needed to know to juice up my Mac as an audio (and occasional video) editing machine. Implementing a computation in hardware will always be faster than implementing it in software, but once it's in hardware you can't change it. So the things that benefit the most from dedicated hardware are the ones that require you to do a lot of the same computation over and over again. Graphics processing is exactly that, so there's a payoff in making the cards. Nothing else in the consumer market is quite as good a fit, but you do see similar specialized hardware for AI computations.
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Nov 30, 2022 20:24
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Mister Speaker posted:There's a discussion in the Schad Thread about buying old GPUs from defunct Bitcoin miners and it got me curious. I don't know much about computers except for what I needed to know to juice up my Mac as an audio (and occasional video) editing machine. Image processing stuff -- like rendering videos, rendering games, crunching buttcoins etc -- is a task of performing the same set of optimized instructions a bajillion times. A GPU is a collection of hundreds of small cores that can perform those instructions very efficiently, all at the same time. You can do the same instructions on your big normal CPU, and in fact it may even be faster at performing each instruction individually. But because your CPU only has a few cores, and you're doing millions of instructions per frame of video, it would quickly get swamped in a way that the GPU cores are not. Edit: as to why there aren't dedicated processing units for other things, well, there used to be but often they're now minor enough that they just get embedded into the motherboard (like most consumer sound cards, USB controllers, etc) or have been taken over by the CPU. Edit edit: just remembered this video, it's fun and gets the point across https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P28LKWTzrI dupersaurus fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Nov 30, 2022 |
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Nov 30, 2022 20:29
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C-Euro posted:My neighbor left an acoustic guitar out for trash day tomorrow so now I own a guitar. What's the best way to clean one of these of dust and someone else's skin oil residue? Some good replies already, but wanted to add my One Weird Trick I learned while dating an avid guitarist back in the 90's: if the frets are funky, you can clean them without removing the strings by rubbing a regular old pencil eraser on them. Takes off mild corrosion, cigarette smoke residue, etc. Just "erase", blow away the eraser "dust", and boom you got nice shiny clean frets without any liquid spray or whatnot potentially messing up the wood.
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Nov 30, 2022 20:35
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Mister Speaker posted:There's a discussion in the Schad Thread about buying old GPUs from defunct Bitcoin miners and it got me curious. I don't know much about computers except for what I needed to know to juice up my Mac as an audio (and occasional video) editing machine. It's the difference between generalization and specializiation. Picture a carpenter sitting at a work desk, with dozens of different tools around, and a huge rack of shelves on the wall full of hundreds of different parts: cuts of wood, screws, hooks, rivets, knobs endcaps, etc.. He can do just about anything, order a custom piece of work from him and he'll he always be able to find the right tools and parts to make it to spec, whether it's a chair, a wardrobe, a fancy coatrack for your entranceway, whatever. But if you need 500 chairs to fill out a dining hall, don't call him up unless you're prepared to pay out the ears and wait forever. That carpenter is a CPU. Now picture an assembly line pumping out wooden chairs: There are many workers here instead of the one carpenter, but they're less skilled and wouldn't know how to use most of his tools anyways. Instead, they have a bunch of bunch of specialized machines that can do things like cut the boards to the exact right length, sand the corners, etc, so they can make 100x more chairs in a day than the carpenter could. But all these specialized machines only work for making chairs, it would be way more work than it's worth and a ton of setup time to switch the machines over to make wardrobes or coatracks all of a sudden. Maybe if you order 1000 it'll be worth the cost to set up all the machines for it. That assembly line is a GPU. GPUs sacrifice generality and get a lot less flexible/adaptible for general calculation in exchange for ultra-specializing in pumping out millions of pixel calculations at once for stuff like texture colors, lighting calculations, "is this shape visible from the camera?" checks, etc. A 1080 x 1920 screen has over 2 million pixels and it has to do a bunch of 3d vector math to figure out the right color for each of those, 60x per second. They have a lot of assembly-line tools that are really good at doing very specific things very fast, but if you can't translate the job into those very specific things then it'll do the job much worse than a CPU. RPATDO_LAMD fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Nov 30, 2022 |
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Nov 30, 2022 20:56
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Fascinating stuff, thanks all! I can sort of see why they've been co-opted by Bitcoin jabronis, given that information.
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Nov 30, 2022 21:08
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Double post for my question: Is Apple pay really so ubiquitous that people rely on it being a sole form of payment? I work for a mom'n'pop boutique kind of retail store, and while we have a fairly modern POS, take all credit cards, etc., Apple pay works about 10% of the time. When it doesn't, it causes a cascade collapse that requires all 3 registers to need a hard reboot. Like, I'm crawling under the counter physically unplugging the card reader. Ain't nobody got time for that during holidays in retail. So I've put up little signs by the readers saying "Sorry, we don't accept Apple Pay!  " and I keep getting customers huffing and having to ask their spouses/friends they're shopping with to borrow a card or pay for it. If you use Apple Pay, is it really expected that EVERYONE takes it? We're working with our POS support on it (tap has been squirrelly too, that's another story), but I'm frankly baffled by these folks who go out with no money option but their phone.
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Nov 30, 2022 21:12
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Double post for my question: I have a card with me for in case it doesn't work but I think there have been like, a handful of times when Apple Pay hasn't worked. In Canada nearly everything seems to take it, with the exception of some gas pumps and like, a cash-only business I went to once.
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Nov 30, 2022 21:19
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A CPU has a handful of cores. Most things that your computer does are very serial. Each step depends on the previous step, so usually, applications only use one or two threads. CPUs are designed with really complex compute units that figure out how to run the calculation from beginning to end as fast as possible. A GPU has hundreds or thousands of very simple cores. It's designed to do the same basic calculation across a wide array of data simultaneously. This is perfect for, say, applying a convolution to each pixel in an image, or applying a rotation matrix to a whole bunch of vertices. And both of these operations actually use the same instruction. Multiply and accumulate. GPUs are really good at multiply accumulate. While CPUs need to be able to do all kinds of general purpose math involving intermediate values and branching and also handle memory management, a gpu knows its going to be asked to crunch numbers a whole bunch and that's it. Dr. Stab fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Nov 30, 2022 |
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Nov 30, 2022 21:21
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Double post for my question: I know plenty of shops that don't accept smartphone payment (hell I even know a few holdouts that only accept cash!). Even my dad, the person I'd most expect to huff about it, just shrugs and pulls out a credit card when a store doesn't accept it. The people huffing about it are the weird ones.
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Nov 30, 2022 21:22
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