I sail the high seas of the Lemmyverse, posting snarky + Lefty comments

  • 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: May 7th, 2023

help-circle





  • I’m a dev but not very good at mobile.

    I can promise you that a lot of engineering work went into making the tiktok scrolling experience so smooth. Part of the trick is having a good enough algorithm that the user wants to watch the majority of served videos.

    Another huge part of it is having lightning fast content distribution and aggressive “prefetching” of the next videos in the feed.

    I don’t want to discourage you but I also don’t want you to be caught off guard by the difficulty. Do you want to make this bad enough to give it your nights and weekends for a year?




  • subversive_dev@lemmy.mltoDads Only@lemmy.worldHelp
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    3 months ago

    Hey, I feel that. Layoffs recently laid me low too.

    Have you applied for unemployment yet? You definitely want to do that as soon as possible, putting it off is just throwing money away (I learned that the hard way)

    I don’t have good advice about changing industries though. Everything is up in the air and tense and knowledge work is getting eroded by AI. They say there’s a plumber shortage? Maybe there is a way you could get trained as a plumber and have that be subsidized by the state


  • I did a little research and the answer is pretty interesting!

    Originally, chemists assigned hydrogen a mass number of 1, and used that assumption to derive the masses of the other elements. Today we definine “1” as being 1/12 of the weight of Carbon-12 (which is very close to the average weight of hydrogen we use today)

    As to the relative frequencies, they can be different at different points on earth, this Chemistry SE answer goes into a lot more detail.

    If you have never done “stoichiometry” before it may not be obvious but the periodic table average weights are essential for going from “I have x grams of substance” to “I have x number of atoms/molecules of substance” and from there you can use the equation of your target reaction to precisely predict the outcome of a chemical process. If you were doing very high precision chemistry, the differences in isotopic ratio in your sample vs the standard values could introduce an error but I would guess most of the time it is insignificant.