Fred, the Vampire Accountant.
Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.
troyunrau.ca (personal)
lithogen.ca (business)
- 4 Posts
- 29 Comments
Nice perspective.
What would you consider to be a contribution of value? Posting? Comments? Moderating? Installing a server rack in your closer for nightly backups? What would you suggest a minimum contribution for continued use should be?
Troy@lemmy.cato
Fediverse@lemmy.world•FediForum October 2025 Tickets Are Now Out!English
1·3 months agoI worked on open source software for over a decade (KDE). When we started having in person conferences, that’s the first time money changed hands. And even then, the conference attendance was free. Viewed through this lens of experience, this feels like an attempt to earn money from the fediverse for running video chats, rather than a grassroots effort.
Old man yells at cloud.
Troy@lemmy.cato
Fediverse@lemmy.world•FediForum October 2025 Tickets Are Now Out!English
21·3 months agoPaid online event? Weird. What happened to IRC for these sorts of meetings. I’m old.
Troy@lemmy.cato
Technology@lemmy.world•Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire worldEnglish
3·5 months agoThings like platinum notwithstanding, It will almost always be more expensive to go get things in space than on earth.
Hell, even on earth it is often too expensive to get metals like iron if there isn’t rail or a port nearby. Imagine having to fly iron ingots around and the associated aviation fuel cost. Whatever crazy fuel bill you’re imagining, multiply by a hundred or more if you’re imagining getting it from space.
No, all of those metals in space are best used to build some future version of our civilization _in situ. _
Troy@lemmy.cato
Technology@lemmy.world•Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire worldEnglish
15·5 months agoVery true. However, it doesn’t add new material to the equation. If we need it to build electrical infrastructure, recycling won’t suffice.
Recycling aluminum is actually literally the best thing you can recycle in terms of environmental impact and cost efficiency. There are other things we recycle, but nothing pays off nearly as well.
Troy@lemmy.cato
Technology@lemmy.world•Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire worldEnglish
40·5 months agoThat alternative material is aluminum. It’s like a top four abundance material in the crust. It’s just super fucking hard to refine from minerals that don’t like to give it up without oodles of energy. Like, turn minerals into plasma levels of energy. So the irony is, to grow our energy economy past the need for copper, we will first need to grow our energy economy.
Should fusion ever actually meet its promise, then this is one of the likely things we could do with this level of energy.
If we ever become a spacefaring civilization, it’ll almost certainly be necessary during the colonization of other planets/moons/asteroids, since the geological processes that concentrate copper on the earth are not present in those places. Whereas aluminum is plentiful any place rocky.
Any significant communities impacted? Scrolling through my subscriptions list and I don’t have any in my list.
Troy@lemmy.cato
Fediverse@lemmy.world•Does anyone know what's up with lemmy.zip?English
26·7 months agoMaximum compression reached
Troy@lemmy.cato
Fediverse@lemmy.world•What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?English
17·7 months agoThere’s quite a few nice apps for Lemmy. I’m using Connect for Lemmy on android and it’s wonderful.
Troy@lemmy.cato
Technology@lemmy.world•Implementing a spellchecker on 64 kB of RAM back in the 1970s led to a compression algorithm that's technically unbeaten and part of it is still in use todayEnglish
23·7 months agoProbably mostly AI written.
Troy@lemmy.cato
Technology@lemmy.world•Implementing a spellchecker on 64 kB of RAM back in the 1970s led to a compression algorithm that's technically unbeaten and part of it is still in use todayEnglish
72·7 months agoLong article for one sentence of trivia and no info on the algo itself. The death of the internet is upon us.
Ticketmaster is cancer
Troy@lemmy.cato
Technology@lemmy.world•Netflix's Adolescence Is a Trojan Horse for Online Censorship and SurveillanceEnglish
122·7 months agoDid they even watch it?
The free speech absolutists are going to cause something far far worse than what is portrayed. But maybe that is the goal.
Troy@lemmy.cato
Technology@lemmy.world•Lenovo joins growing China exodus as manufacturers flee US tariffs — OEM moving production lines to IndiaEnglish
5·8 months agoYou’re applying logic when logic doesn’t apply. Why would he tarriff Canada?
Troy@lemmy.cato
Programmer Humor@programming.dev•(How to trigger programmers (and make them irrationally angry)
71·8 months agoMATLAB is basically a UI wrapper around Fortran’s BLAS and LAPACK – change my mind. ;)
Troy@lemmy.cato
Programmer Humor@programming.dev•(How to trigger programmers (and make them irrationally angry)
42·8 months agoInsist they index from 1. Like God and Fortran intended it. ;)
Troy@lemmy.cato
Technology@lemmy.world•Microsoft announces quantum computing breakthrough with new Majorana 1 chipEnglish
69·8 months agoI’ll believe it when I see code written for it solving a real problem
Troy@lemmy.cato
Technology@lemmy.world•The hardest working font in Manhattan – AreslunaEnglish
5·8 months agoActually kind of an amazing read. I suspect it shall live another life on 3-axis router tables and such for a while. The mechanic is single stroke lettering remain the same



Yeah, it was fucking weird. Which is why I started googling and found this.