Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 2 Posts
  • 861 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Do you feel it's the end of "eras"?English
    4·
    2 days ago

    How?

    Are they actually sweating? There are systems for doing active cooling from fans running off battery power.

    https://fursuitsupplies.com/fans

    Or liquid cooling, including ice and evaporative cooling?

    https://archive.ph/MiMVI

    How a Cooling Vest Invented by a Furry Made Its Way Into the U.S. Military

    Playing and performing in a full-body, mascot-like suit is a disciplined endeavor—and not always a comfortable one. Any furry will tell you that it’s hot inside a suit and that problem is compounded when members gather in real life. Fursuit-wearers run a real risk of overheating, especially at sunny outdoor events like meetups and Pride parades.

    To increase their in-suit endurance, some furries use cooling vests, much like an athlete might. Specially designed vests can hold packs of fluids that remain at steady, low temperatures against wearers’ bodies—a godsend for keeping body heat at bay when you’re wearing fur head to toe.

    Hmm. Also, while I’m no expert, my understanding is that animals that are in a cold climate, tend to have underfur to reduce convection. Like, dog breeds aimed more at warm climates don’t have that. I bet that one doesn’t need a lot of dense, short fur at the base. Even if there’s long fur, it might not be as insulating as one might expect relative to an animal.

    considers

    If the fabric isn’t actually visible — and for furred areas, I guess it isn’t, because all someone can see is fur — maybe one could use something like burlap at the base, stuff that has a lot of room for air to flow through.

    I dunno what any issues with using carbon fiber are, but my understanding is that it’s pretty thermally-conductive. In some uses, carbon fiber is made into rigid surfaces, is a composite, has resin, but I believe that you can get it as a resin-less fabric.

    kagis

    https://www.ngfworld.com/en/fiber/high_thermal_conductivity.html

    GRANOC high thermal conductive grade is available as Yarn, Fabric, Chopped and Milled fiber.

    I mean, if you figure that it’s possible to use a fabric made out of that, that’ll probably conduct a lot of heat away from hot places.

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8867053/

    According to this, carbon nanotube microfibers have thermal conductivity hundreds of times greater than nylon.

    kagis

    Apparently you get get fabric made from the stuff — though this example looks to be awfully expensive, so carbon nanontube-based fursuits probably aren’t practical for general use yet:

    https://dexmat.com/store/galvorn-carbon-nanotube-fabric/

    Galvorn carbon nanotube (CNT) fabric is highly conductive and made from interlocking loops of Galvorn CNT yarn.

    Galvorn yarns behave like a textile. You can sew, weave, knit, and even blend it with other textiles to achieve your application goals. You can modify the yarn and/or knit to adjust the suppleness of the fabric.

    https://dexmat.com/carbon-nanotube-fiber/

    Thermal Conductivity: Galvorn CNT fiber has a thermal conductivity of 450 W/m-K, exceeding copper’s 385 W/m-K. This superior heat dissipation capability is vital for high-performance electronics and power cables, allowing for greater current carrying capacity per unit mass.

    https://dexmat.com/industries/e-textiles/

    I doubt that people are actually going all the way to carbon nanotube fabric, but if we can get costs down, I imagine that they could.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's a subject you (think) you know more about than the average Lemmy user?English
    6·
    3 days ago

    An enormous number of areas. The average — well, median, but assuming a vaguely-symmetric distribution, mean and median are close enough, and OP probably means median anyway — of any group has about half of the population knowing more than the average. This is going to mean that a randomly-chosen user probably has something like a 50% chance of knowing more than the average for any topic you could name.

    As of this writing, most people commenting are listing things that they could maybe call themselves subject matter experts in, like, top-sub-0.1% or something like that. That’s a much higher bar.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@beehaw.org•Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a CybertruckEnglish
    16·
    3 days ago

    Aside from a MAGA hat, there is likely no object that feels more emblematic of US president Donald Trump’s return to the White House than the Tesla Cybertruck.

    If Musk had been able to attract the typical F-150 owner to the Cybertruck, then the Cybertruck wouldn’t have flopped, and I bet that the F-150 is a whole lot more correlated with voting Trump than the Cybertruck is.

    IIRC from past reading, in terms of voting correlation by party, the Toyota Prius is the “most Democratic” vehicle and the Ford F-150 is the “most Republican” vehicle.

    kagis

    Nope (or at least, not by the metrics chosen here), but I’m close.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/car-models-owned-by-republicans-democrats-american-politics-jeep-2024-10

    To get a sense of how our rides reflect our political leanings, we compared 1.7 million vehicles listed on CarGurus with the results from the 2020 presidential election. We included only counties that were strongly red or blue — those where either Donald Trump or Joe Biden won by at least 19 percentage points. Then we placed every car on a political spectrum from reddest to bluest.

    According to this, which excludes more-politically-mixed counties from the dataset, the vehicle most-correlated with voting Trump in 2020 at a county level is the Jeep Wrangler, followed by the Jeep Gladiator, followed by the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (which I assume is the Chevy analog of the F-150), followed by the Ford F-150.

    The vehicle most-correlated with voting Biden (at a county level) was indeed the Toyota Prius.

    EDIT: To be fair, the article author is probably partly talking about Musk’s association with Trump and the Cybertruck coming out about that time, and he’s talking about the 2024 election specifically, but I think that the Cybertruck is maybe high-media-visibility, but doesn’t have all that much to actually do with voting Trump.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•‘Godfather of Silicon Valley’ Quits Board Over Benioff’s (Salesforce CEO) Backing of TrumpEnglish
    41·
    3 days ago

    I mean, I’m serious. Like, it’s a big CRM platform that people use and I understand has an ecosystem of software that integrates with it, is well-established.

    It’s like, someone may not like Photoshop. Frankly, I avoided it in favor of Gimp since the early 2000s, and I really don’t like the fact that it’s SaaS now.

    But you can’t just say “Photoshop sucks, artists use charcoal sticks now”. You have to have that alternative, like Gimp. And even then, people are going to have some loss in experience and loss in integrated software (like plugins and stuff) in a switch.

    I don’t do CRM. But my understanding is that it does matter and that that ecosystem matters, and “just throw one’s hands up in the air and tell people not to use a CRM platform” is probably not going to fly.

    kagis

    I thought that SugarCRM was open-source, but it looks like I’m a decade out-of-date — it started as an open-source project, but apparently the company founded around it took it proprietary. And I bet that it doesn’t compare in size in terms of people with experience with it or software that integrates with it.

    kagis

    https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-ecosystem/

    The Salesforce ecosystem is an absolute behemoth. Salesforce employs around 70,000 people and is the biggest employer in Silicon Valley. They also have a market cap of a quarter of a trillion – pretty impressive, right?

    However, when you look at the Salesforce ecosystem, there are 15M people involved in Salesforce’s community who work as end users, in consultancies, and for app companies. The Salesforce economy is also predicted to generate revenues of six times that of Salesforce by 2026.

    Like, you’re not gonna move that overnight.

    It could be that Salesforce sucks on a technical level as a platform. I don’t know, haven’t used it. But what I’m saying is that I suspect that for a lot of users, they aren’t in a great position to plop in an existing replacement overnight.

    EDIT: It sounds like there’s a continuing open-source fork of SugarCRM, SuiteCRM. This is the first I’ve heard of it, though, so I kinda suspect that the userbase isn’t massive.