Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 30

@wilbr @aredridel @deadsuperhero That's fine until you need to start a business that requires a large up front capital investment, or you have an established business that needs an injection of capital in order to grow. If companies cease to be investment objects, the next alternative is debt. Companies would have to borrow money to get started, and if it's a high risk venture, only the worst loansharks will lend you money.

Not selling your soul to the devil has a very high opportunity cost. If you want to get by in this world, you have to work for people who have some very unsavoury motives.

The venture capitalist I met works in a large office building with a marble wall entrance decorated with statues. He didn't know how to operate his own coffee machine, because his secretary makes his coffee for him.

When I told the CEO of a venture capital firm that I'm not on LinkedIn for privacy reasons, he wondered if it was a form of protest, or just because I'm quarrelsome.

He publishes a magazine about innovation. He handed me a copy and said "Here. Saved you 18 dollars."

In his vision of the future, surveillance is beneficial because Big Brother loves you. He doesn't say so outright, but that's the implication.

"Could Trump be the next Hitler?"

Oh, come on, he's nuts, but not *that* nuts. https://octodon.social/media/IsdSEPwRJsWC28FejUA

@aredridel @deadsuperhero Information asymmetry is the whole reason the market exists in the first place if you ask me. I don't have any illusions about capitalism, but I also believe that capitalism evolved because it was a meme (in the academic sense of the word) that survived, and I don't think we've found a higher fitness meme to outcompete it yet.

https://octodon.social/media/iYANEWItjIhZmKeKQlc

If you want to quietly piss off a short person, crouch down a bit before talking to them...

"How to handle monetary values in JavaScript"

Does that even need a tutorial? Just store all your amounts in cents, and round to the nearest integer every time you perform a calculation.

@Ricardus Gerber drill files are made for CNC machines, and that's what PCB design programs output, so I reckon that if I make fake PCBs with the same dimensions as the faceplate and the backplate and add the desired holes, that ought to do it. It probably can't do the countersunk holes, but I think you can pull those off if you just use an oversized drill bit and carefully shave off a conical section of the metal around a pilot hole using the aforementioned drill press.

@Ricardus I'm planning to secure the front panel PCB to the faceplate with screws, nuts and standoffs, but in order to pull that off nicely, I will need to machine new countersinks in the faceplate, otherwise the mounting screws won't be flush with the place and it won't have a smooth finish. I think I should be able to do it if I can access a CNC machine and perhaps a drill press.

@Ricardus I'm still not sure how I'm going to get the chassis fabricated. It's extruded aluminum with a matte black coating and comes in 3 pieces: faceplate, midsection and backplate. The plates are fixed to the midsection with 8 countersunk screws. I will need to make a number of holes in the plates, mostly circular except for the DC jack and the opening for the LCD. It's possible to do quite a lot with just a drill and a file, but I don't think that's going to look very good.

@Ricardus Polygonal shape is where the LCD goes, round hole is for the glowing power switch with an LED in it. Hole above polygonal shape is flat flex cable for LCD.

@Ricardus Front panel PCB.

@Ricardus So basically it's a hybrid circuit now, and it will have firmware, and probably stored presets and such. It opens up a few more modes of operation, for example being able to adjust the left/right front/rear balance of each input individually. If changing the levels doesn't add too much clicking to the audio, I might implement a sort of AGC with a bit of hysteresis, so it kinda tries to keep the volume roughly the same without acting as a compressor outright.

@Ricardus Oh, and it also meant that I could replace the comparator ladder LED level meter, because I decided to give it an LCD controlled via I2C, since I had a whole bunch of those laying around.

@Ricardus I ended up abandoning the attempt. I also abandoned the attempt at designing a soft latch power circuit using discrete components on the whole, and stuck a microcontroller in the thing, which turned out to be a good idea, because I could then use digital volume control chips to control mixing levels individually for each channel, with the slight disadvantage that it changes those levels in instant steps of 1 dB, which makes it less useful for AGC than I had hoped.

Circuit is starting to come together. This device will be handy for anyone who owns two computers and needs to hear 5.1 audio from both at the same time (or in quick succession without needing to switch inputs on the amplifier).

Did anyone ever do a chatroom called Chat Noir?