• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • Yeah, most of my knowledge on “Chinese” is from when i tried to learn Korean. Korean still lean on some Chinese characters (hanja?). Not for like “daily” reading/writing, but like, I remember newspaper articles would sometimes have the headlines in Chinese characters. They, of course, would use their Korean pronunciations, but there was no way to tell what that was from the character (unlike the rest of the Korean writing system, which uses an almost completely consistent phonetic alphabet).


  • I heard schools have largely moved away from Phonics, which is wild to me. That’s basically how reading was taught going back to at least medieval monks.

    I hear they’re using a “look and see” method or something? Word is that its how the Chinese teach their students to read…but they don’t have an alphabet, so I don’t know how that’s supposed to work in English.

    I have a relative who just retired from teaching and she says its a real mess in early education because of how badly this reading teaching method works, and its only worsening as students mature.






  • So I’ve heard a typical set up is still dependent on grid power (typical set up => able to push power back to the grid), and so during a power outage, you still lose power at your home. Its my understanding one of the components required for the hook up to The Grid requires continuous power (in case you need to push/pull power from the grid) and since it can’t guarantee power from your panels, it gets that power from the grid (thus grid goes down, your whole home’s power goes down.

    Don’t suppose you know more about this or can explain why this is/isn’t the case? This setup seems unintuitive and undesirable to me, and so I’d love to have proof that’s not the case, if it exists.




  • Yeah, it (in my case, ChatGPT) has been great for helping me along with functions I’m only passingly familiar with / trying to use in new ways.

    One that I was really surprised with was that it gave me a surprisingly robust, sensible, and (seemingly) well tuned-to-my-case check list of things to inspect for a used car I intend to buy. I’m already mostly familiar with what I’m doing there, but it pointed to some things I might’ve overlooked / didn’t know were points of concern for the specific vehicle I’m looking at.


  • Or you just hard-wire it to USB killer only and charge your phone exclusively with wireless charging.

    That feels really insightful.

    Saw this post earlier and was cranking some brain cycles in kinda the same way you were. My brain settled on a switch for the USB since you should just need a 5 pole/2 throw switch (think I’m using those terms correctly?) to go from regular USB function to kill mode. I think for my own peace of mind, I’d want it to be 3 throw though (normal, completely unconnected, and kill). My brain then went to the battery, which I see as the real design constraint.

    Then I got to thinking about building it into a phone case. The case would need to plug in to your phone’s USB port, then have an additional external connection; it would be this connection that is switched into normal/nothing/kill mode. Cases can be pretty bulky, so tucking a battery into there would be easier and still maybe evade detection.

    All that said, I think I like your idea better.

    Edit: spelling

    Edit 2: additional thought: if you went with the case, you’d want to have it really difficult to remove. Like, requiring undoing some screws, especially if you can get some torx or other niche screw head design (bonus points for mix and matched screw heads).
    My thoughts on that are that even if the case is identified as having a false port on it, it would be so difficult to remove that the “adversary” just plugs their info stealer into it anyway.