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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • My employer has a “buy American” policy that kicks in for purchases over a certain dollar amount. To get an exemption, you need to identify 2 domestic options and state why they aren’t sufficient.

    Recently I needed to replace a module in an existing system that happens to be made by a non-US company. There is literally no valid alternative - only this one company makes the modules that are compatible with each other.

    So I had to identify 2 American made products that were vaguely similar and state why they didn’t meet our specifications. Though “Vaguely similar” is a stretch - it was equivalent to explaining to someone why you can’t buy AA batteries to replace a car battery.












  • As someone who occasionally struggles with insomnia, I highly recommend the Insomnia Coach App for iOS or Android. It’s entirely free (no ads or in-app purchases) and based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It was developed by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, but it’s available and applicable to anyone who has trouble sleeping. It has guided meditation and other tools to help you sleep or identify causes of insomnia.

    It requires some effort on your part: you follow a 5 week training plan and keep a sleep diary throughout. However the effort is minimal and again, it’s free. Following the sleep plan significantly improved the number of nights that I have good sleep.


  • Yeah they had the first functional iOS app long before anyone else (Mlem had started earlier but stalled for a while). I recall some of the Memmy developer’s comments saying they had learned a lot about app development since the first beta and had big plans to overhaul the code base. I’m assuming this turned into too much for them to handle, especially as an unpaid gig.

    It’s a shame Memmy’s been abandoned, but I’m still super appreciative of the developer for making a workable Lemmy app back then. It definitely helped ease the sting of the transition from Reddit.


  • It still is a blurry orange ball, where the orange is the location of radio wave emission. The team did a new image where they measured the polarization of the light, which is the result of strong magnetic fields where the light was emitted. The lines are drawn over the image to depict the polarization orientation of the light as a function of location.

    I want to be clear that this is an incredible feat, both the fact that they can produce an image of a black hole from the center of our galaxy AND determine the polarization of the light. But they don’t have a super crisp image of matter swirling into a black hole.