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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • It’s always worthwhile to learn new things!

    And programming is a tool, so it’s typically made to be clear how to use it, although of course people will differ on what needs to be clarified the most.

    My experience is that there’s way too much discussion in what tool to pick, it doesn’t matter that much and almost all of the common languages will allow you to do all the things. And even though some will be better adapted for certain applications, it’s easy to pick up the new tool when relevant, and you’ll be that much ahead by being well versed in one.

    As for how to learn, I find that you kind of need to figure out the basic syntax in each language (loops, conditionals, output, memory management, typology, lists, function calling, maybe classes/libraries if you’re fancy), and then start doing projects.

    A nice intro for C# is the C# Player’s Guide by R B Whitaker, using some gamification and storytelling to get you through the basics, and even leave you prepared to tackle your first projects (by practicing design philosophy, how to break down projects, etc).

    Otherwise, Python is a lot of fun, it’s made to be very easy to jump into, and then it’s fully featured to do anything you’d like it to. Unfortunately all my resources for it are in my local language, but it has many many users so I’m sure there’s great resources to be found in your own language.





  • From a European perspective, the US centre-right are more conservative than the European fringe right. The European far right doesn’t (typically) want to restrict abortion, sabotage education or reinstate child labor for example. And are mostly about increasing and militarizing police, disenfranchising minorities, and different schemes to control that only the right people get to vote.

    I’d argue that the US centre right is actually as radical, or even more so than the European fringe right, they are certainly causing about the same commotion, but of course have much more power in the US.



  • @toboggonablaze is essentially correct, but let me try explain it in a slightly different way.

    Lasers do a bunch of things to basically shoot a stream of photons at something. There’s basically two ways you can affect how much energy comes out of a laser, you can make the stream denser (more photons per second) - called intensity, or you can increase the energy in each photon.

    The weird part about photon energy is that higher energy photons are of a different “color”, where red is lower than green, is lower than blue, is lower than gamma rays, etc.

    So changing the color of a laser already means you’ve changed how much energy it can output.

    Then there’s another part of your question: how lead gets heated up. Different materials respond differently to different types/wavelengths of light, an example you might be familiar with is that glass panes let through visible light, but not the heat from the sun, or that water also is see through, but can easily be microwaved (by microwaves - low frequency light).

    Basically, a material can be more or less “translucent” in certain frequencies. I’d like to look lead up for you, but Google isn’t cooperating today. But basically, there are frequencies that lead will be more and less susceptible to.

    That’s probably not what you meant with the question, but if that’s the application you want to use the laser for, you might want to take it into consideration.

    So, in summary: color is energy, intensity is energy, you can change both independently, so your question doesn’t quite make sense.

    Also, different targets will heat differently, also not making it a fair comparison.