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AboutIT Technician
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SkillsDon't have any yet!
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LocationNewcastle upon Tyne, UK
Joined devRant on 7/23/2016
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Apparently the creation of Windows ME is the result of the Ballmer Peak, a very specific bood alcohol amount in their developers body.
https://xkcd.com/323/
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I did get a raise but we also hired like 5 new people... But I still do the same amount of work... Which was already too much...
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Dogecoin hit USD $0.40 recently, which means it's time for the Crypto Rant.
TL;DR: Dogecoin is shit and is logically guaranteed to eventually fall unless it is fundamentally changed.
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If you know how Crypto works under the hood, you can skip to the next section. If you don't, here's the general xyz-coin formula:
Money is sent via transactions, which are validated by *anybody*.
Since transactions are validated by anybody, the system needs to make sure you're not fucking it up on purpose.
The current idea (that most coins use today) is called proof-of-work. In short, you're given an extremely difficult task, and the general idea is you wouldn't be willing to do that work if you were just going to fuck up the system.
For validating these transactions, you are rewarded twofold:
1) You are given a fixed-size prize of the currency from the system itself. This is how new currency is introduced, or "minted" if you prefer.
2) You are given variable-size and user-determined prize called "transaction fees", but it could be more accurately called a "bribe" since it's sole purpose is to entice miners to add YOUR transaction to their block.
This system of validation and reward is called mining.
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This smaller section compares the design o f BTC to Dogecoin - which will lead to my final argument
In BTC, the time between blocks (chunks of data which record transactions and are added to the chain, hence blockchain) is ten minutes. Every ten minutes, BTC transactions are validated and new Bitcoins are born.
In Dogecoin, the time between blocks is only one minute. In Theory, this means that mining Dogecoin is about ten times easier, because the system expects you to be able to solve the proof of work in an average of one minute.
The huge difference between BTC and Doge is the block reward (Fixed amount; new coins minted). The block reward for BTC is somewhat complicated compared to Doge: It started as 50 BTC per block and every 4 years it is halved ("the great halving"). Right now it's 6.25 BTC per block. Soon, the block reward will be almost nothing until BTC hits it's max of 21 million bitcoins "minted".
Dogecoin reward is 10,000 coins per block. And it will be that way for the end of time - no maximum, no great halving. And remember, for every 1 BTC block mined, 10 Doge blocks are mined.
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Bitcoin and Dogecoin are now the two most popular coins in pop culture. What makes me angry is the widespread misunderstanding of the differences between the two. It is likely that most investors buy Dogecoin thinking they're getting in "early" because it's so cheap. They think it's cheap because it isn't as popular as Bitcoin yet. They're wrong. It's cheap because of what's outlined in section two of this rant.
Dogecoin is actually not very far off Bitcoin. Do the math: there's a bit over 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation (130b). There's about 20 million BTC. Calculate their total CURRENT values:
130b * $0.40 = 52b
20m * $60k = 1.2t
...and Doge is rising much, much faster than BTC because of the aforementioned lack of understanding.
The most common thing I hear about Doge is that "nobody expects it to reach Bitcoin levels" (referring to being worth 60k a fucking coin). They don't realize that if Doge gets to be worth just $10 a coin, it will not just reach Bitcoin levels but overtake Bitcoin in value ($1.3T).
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It's worth highlighting that Dogecoin is literally designed to fail. Since it lacks a cap on new coins being introduced, it's just simple math that no matter how much Doge rises, it will eventually be worthless. And it won't take centuries, remember that 100k new Doge are mined EVERY TEN MINUTES. 1,440 minutes in a day * 10K per minute is 14.4 million new coins per day. That's damn near every Bitcoin to ever exist mined every day in Dogecoin
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A while back, I had a lot of telemarketers were calling me daily, and I mean A LOT of them.
I got so frustrated with he calls that I decided I had to figure out a better way to handle those calls.
At the time, I was working with a PBX software called Asterisk, which is used to handle hardware interfaces and network applications for phone calls.
I needed a suitable side project and there was a version of Asterisk designed for Raspberry Pi, so I made a fun little answering service for myself.
Whenever a telemarketer called, I asked them to call back later, but to "my personal number", and gave them the number to my phone robot. (which had a pre-paid SIM card in a GSM dongle mounted)
When it received a call, it would play a pre-recorded phrase, wait for 1000 ms of silence and then play the next phrase.
After all 16 phrases had been played, it would start from phrase 7 again and repeat until the caller gave up.
I had this set up running for a while, and then added another robot for english speaking callers.
The calls stopped after a few months.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
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✨ Gave my portfolio a fresh minimal look and feel. Integrated Spotify to show my currently playing track, just a fun little tweak.
🚀 https://rocktimsaikia.now.sh/
Leave any review for future improvement :)
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So this client wanted a very specific layout, with a very specific keycaps set. And an ALT function that would print the "shrug" text emoji.
Say hello to this
64 key, full CNC aluminum case
Gateron Ink Black switches (lubed)
Super thiccc 2.5 mm brass plate,
Keycaps set
MT3 profile Susuwatari set.
Love the profile and how they keycaps hug your finger up while typing.
I think it might be time for me to gather pieces to build my own as a gift in the future
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Yes, that’s an M2 drive plugged in via usb 2.0. I dunno, maybe when you just need size over anything else maybe that’s ok but wasting all that work that ssd engineers put into making m2 drives so fast just feels stupid.
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I guess I can do one of these a day or so. I've collected some novelties over the years.
First up is a Curta mechanical calculator. Before electronic calculators became a thing, these were the best portable calculators in the world. Notably, they were the calculator of choice in rally car sports.
They work by a series of helical gears that act as registers. A series of internal gears and value assignment switches apply an adjustable number of incrementations to those gears, multiplying gears and the tracking gears, once per "grind." The result is output as a number on top of the device. The "clear register" function is lifting the top ring, which releases the reverse lockout on the gears and a clockwise turn on the ring then resets them to their zero state.
They were designed by Curtz Herzstark, partly before WWII and partly while he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. He had filed a patent for it in 1938, shortly before his family's manufacturey became a weapons factory. During his imprisonment, in addition to nearly starving to death, he completed his plans for manufacturing of his calculator.
It had fun names like the, "pepper grinder," and "math grenade."
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THE HOLY GRAIL BOOK OF COMPUTER SCIENCE HAS ARRIVED!
52 years old and the book set is still not complete
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Refactoring! Refactoring! REFACTORING!
This is one of “those desk books” that you gotta have imo. Personally I love giving names to categories of things, helps us better recognize patterns if we can classify them.
Software can always be improved, this book give you a good majority of the most common refactorings it’s like a recipe book almost.. shows you the code smell... give you the detailed recipes to fix it. Great to have in code reviews.
Doesn’t matter that this book is in JavaScript the concepts and ideas are the big pictures in this book.
Classic “one of those” books.
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From the guy who wrote all the Programming Microsoft books and the Annotated Turing book. Comes this book.
This book is great for beginners great for people who don’t know a lot about software and how computers work, simple read. I like it because it also gives a different prospective, beginning at Morse code and works up from there all the way up to high level languages.
The book gives snippets of code to discuss it not really a tutorial book. It’s a different type of book that all people could understand.
Good read
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