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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • And that’s exactly why Ukraine is kicking ass. Paying $20k or $30k for a single enemy casualty is a pretty good deal in warfare. But these drones aren’t going through some huge defense contractor, they’re being 3D printed and assembled from off-the-shelf parts. Basically a little army of logistics people building hobby drones out of consumer level equipment, just with an improvised explosive like a grenade or some similar impact explosive strapped to the bottom.
    They aren’t even paying $20k for a casualty, they are paying $1-2k for a hobby drone and a grenade and many of them create multiple casualties.

    The more expensive ones cost more, but those are the ones you see that are reusable and can drop several grenades in one flight. Those are more like $5k-$20k. Still an insane bargain even if each one only creates one casualty before it is destroyed.


  • IT person here. Avoiding HP is a good idea. But a better idea is don’t buy shitty cheap consumer level inkjet printers from any brand. Most of them have this sort of bullshit, although not usually as bad as HP does. Instead I suggest buy it for life. Get a nice color laser machine, spend a few hundred bucks, and you will have a printer that lasts until you die. I like the Canon MF743CDw, it’s a little on the pricier side but it scans both sides of the paper in one pass. Also does color duplex printing.

    If you don’t want the extra size or weight of a color laser, get a black and white laser. How often do you really need color? And if you must get something cheaper, get one of the newer inkjet printers that use refillable ink bottles rather than cartridges, like there is an actual ink tank on the printer and you refill it with a squeeze bottle rather than replacing the cartridge.




  • This is harder than it looks.

    See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don’t mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that’s working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there’s big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can’t be used.
    Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that’s not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it’ll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.

    What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It’s huge.
    The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
    It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.

    As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it’ll keep the cars cooler in summer.