Well, to say “the voltage differential between A and B is positive” is saying exactly the same thing as saying “the voltage differential between B and A is negative”.

There is such a thing as voltage differential. And the voltage potential at one electrode can be higher than the other, or the voltage at one can be lower than the other. But given that “voltage” isn’t really a thing except in relation to something else, there’s kindof no such thing as “negative voltage” or “positive voltage”. Just voltage relative to some other electrode.

And if the voltage of one line is higher than the voltage of a reference (“ground”), then the voltage is said to be “positive”. If it’s lower, it’s said to be “negative”.

I don’t think “negative voltage” is any less a thing than “positive voltage”, really, but neither one is really a thing except in relation to a reference. Which is to say you can’t connect a single electrode to an instrument and measure the voltage of that single electrode. That would be meaningless to try. You can only measure the voltage of an electrode by connecting your instrument the electrode and a reference.

Hopefully that clears it up.

I’m not an expert, but I think I know what the deal is.

First off, the voltage of a single line has no meaning except relative to the voltage of another line. (Just like, say, “in motion” or “at rest” have no meaning except relative to a frame of reference. “At rest” relative to, say, the earth or the sun or the galactic center or car interior or whatever.) If you step on one rail of an electric rail line, nothing happens. You don’t even feel anything. If you step on the other, similarly nothing. If you bridge both, <southpark skier voice>you’re gonna have a bad time</southpark skier voice>.

“Ground” isn’t zero volts in any objective sense. And Vcc isn’t 5 volts (or 3.3 volts or whatever) in isolation.

And in fact, it’s only convention that ground is arbitrarily labeled “zero” and Vcc is 5 volts rather than Vcc being labeled zero and ground being labeled -5 volts. (Ok, it’s a little more than just convention. The latter would be awkward in practice. But it would be consistent, and you could do all your circuit design that way, just like if you labeled the white keys on a piano “Z”, “Y”, “X”… instead of “A”, “B”, “C”… You’d just have to think differently about it to make it work.)

So, I think what’s going on here, and we’ll pretend “Vcc” is 5 volts (relative to ground) just for the sake of this example, is that basically:

• The voltage differential between ground and Vcc is 5 volts.
• The voltage differential between Vee and ground (and the order in which I list “Vee” and “ground” here is important) is 5 volts. (If I listed “ground” and “Vee” the other way around, it’d be -5 volts.)
• The voltage differential between Vcc and Vee would be 10 volts.

So, for instance, if the device has some components that operate at 5 volts and some that operate on 10 volts (I dunno, let’s say the CPU requires 5 volts, but the… I dunno, optical drive motor?.. requires 10 volts), you can get 5 volts by using Vcc as my source and ground as my sink, and you could get 10 volts by using Vcc as my source and Vee as the sink.

That all make sense?

And to one of your specific questions:

Is this a figure of speech or can voltage actually have a negative value?

So, what qualifies as “negative” and what qualifies as “positive” is just convention. Just like what qualifies as the “north” end of a magnet and what’s “south” is convention. (I guess “north” and “south” refer to which direction a magnet points when used as a compass, but then again which end of the Earth is “north” and which end is “south” is just linguistic convention as well.)

In the same way, what we label “positive” voltage and what we label “negative” is convention. However, we do have an established convention with voltage. (And with poles of a magnet.) Just because we “made up” what qualifies as “positive” or “negative” doesn’t mean there’s any disagreement on the topic. So unless you purposefully switch your language just to be contrary, you’re not going to get funny looks or requests for clarification using the terms “positive” and “negative” for electrode voltages.

However, if line A has a lower voltage than B (and what’s “lower” or “higher” is convention) we can say that the differential between B and A (again, order is important) is negative whereas the differential between A and B is positive.

The analogy between voltage and pressure only goes so far, but in this case I think it’s helpful. If tank B has higher pressure than tank A, you can say the pressure differential between B and A is negative. Similarly, you could say that the air pressure differential between sea level and the peak of Mt. Everest is negative. (Though, with pressure, there is such a thing as “absolute zero”. “Perfect vacuum” is technically a meaningful concept. I don’t think there’s any such thing as “absolute zero” for voltage. Only “differences” between voltages on different electrodes.)

Dissociation, mostly.

At the end of Idiocracy, they showed hoses pulling water out of toilets to water plants.

To extend the joke, I’m picturing devices strapped to people’s asses to let them type by wiping their butts.

So, I’m not a manager, but I am in a leadership position. (I’m a “tech lead” on my team of developers, and I hold more “leadership”-ness than tech leads do on some teams.) And my experience comes more from software engineering than anywhere else.

The first rule is that to be a good leader, you have to be a good person. Don’t “switch teams” if/when you become a manager. Your job is to advocate for your team. To cover and take blame for your team. To give them space to work. To give them the autonomy they need to improve their processes. To make sure they know they have the autonomy they need to improve their processes. To be vocal to your team in calling bullshit on upper management and agree with your team when your higher-ups do bullshit. To absorb bullshit from above as best you to prevent it from impacting the team any more than absolutely necessary. To talk your team up. To make sure their work is as “meaningful” as possible. To bolster their egos by trying to get them a bigger slice of the “jurisdictional pie”. To ease up when they’re struggling. To learn from them and along with them. To ensure to the extent you can that they get insight into what’s going on at higher levels of management (the high-level company goals and how what your team does fits into that as well as how decisions that might affect your team are made high up). To support your team’s basic needs (sleep can be a big one when overnight on-call is involved, do everything in your power and everything not in your power make damned sure your team never has to do overtime, and of course money is tied to basic needs). To make sure the biggest personalities on your team don’t silence or drown out others. To eschew needless busywork and take care of the necessary tedious bookwork behind the scenes so your team doesn’t have to. To make time for your team, both on an individual basis and on a whole-team basis. To be a source of comfort. To foster relationships between your team and those outside their team that they need to work closely with to succeed as a team. To let them self organize. And to be honest, humble, and apologetic when you have made mistakes, and also open about the fact that you’re learning how to be the best you you can be.

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES fall into the trap of thinking you’re “in charge”. There are very few circumstances in which you should tell people what to do or assign things to people. (Help them to learn how to pull assignments rather than pushing assignments onto team members.) Also, don’t try to “leave your mark” or push your agenda on the team. (No “I’m going to improve things”. More “I’m going to help my team improve their own processes.”) Push the team’s agenda to those above you.

A few resources you need to read/watch/consume/whatever, whether you’re in IT or not:

• #NoEstimates^YouTube – Relates strongly to the “take care of tedious bookwork” one above.
• Turn The Ship Around^Book
• The Phoenix Project^Book

Very likely ME/CFS.

Also, you apparently don’t want to hear this, but this is also very compatible with long COVID. A huge percentage of sufferers of long COVID had no acute symptoms, have no positive test, and otherwise have no reason to believe they ever had COVID except a) chronic symptoms consistent with long COVID b) which came on in 2020 or 2021. Nothing about “I wasn’t” (acutely) “sick” or “gradual onset” sways me in the slightest away from the possibility that this sounds very much like long COVID. Both are entirely consistent, even typical, of long COVID.

Have you ever actually ridden in an elevator that played music? I’m not sure I can remember ever having that experience.

Of course, I’m familiar with the term “elevator music”. And I don’t doubt music in elevators was a thing or anything. But I’m surprised to hear it’s a thing now-a-days.

I think I’ve probably been in elevators in establishments where music was playing over a speaker system, and the music was audible in the elevator, but the music was never only in the elevator as far as I can recall.

You ok?

https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.world/comment/24735359

Also:

hit enter and not get any result

You mean “hit enter and have it not affect the rendered output.” It does produce a result. It makes it appear/act differently in the editor. That’s not “not getting any result.” Just “not getting any result” that’s visible in the rendered output.

“AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.”

but why isn’t it “fixed”?

Because it is useful to many people in certain contexts. It’s not a bug. It truly is a feature. Not something to be “fixed”.

You may prefer your ice cream strawberry flavored, but that doesn’t mean any ice cream that is instead chocolate flavored is “defective” and needs to be “corrected” or “fixed” to make it strawberry flavored.

So, I think I kindof know what you’re getting at here, but you’re not being very precise about it.

First some definitions (just for purposes of this conversation – don’t take this to be any assertion that a particular term always inherently has a particular meaning, it’s just a tool for this conversation specifically):

• Character: a single unicode character.
• Plain text: unicode text absent any formatting.
• Source: the plain text to be fed into a Markdown renderer to produce rendered output.
• Rendered output: the formatted output of a Markdown renderer, as displayed to an end user.
• Editor: any computer program or component of a computer program for the entry of plain text.
• Line: text (plain text or rendered output, depending on context) rendered at the same vertical position.
• Line break: the point at which text (either plain text or rendered output depending on context) starts rendering on the next line because of a newline.
• Newline: a character that always forces a line break in an editor. (Remember “editor” is only about plaintext, so a newline doesn’t necessarily force a line break in rendered output.)
• Wrap: the point at which, absent a newline, text starts rendering on the next line due to column width constraints.

(As an aside a line break is sometimes accomplished with a “line feed” character. A “carriage return” character is something else that isn’t the same thing. Which is a big part of where the confusion comes from.)

What you’re saying, I think, is that putting a single newline in the source doesn’t result in a line break in the rendered output. Is that right?

In some editors (Vim being one I know of), when plain text word wraps, pressing “down” when the cursor is on the first line of a wrapped series of lines causes the cursor to jump not to the second line of wrapped text, but to the first line after the next newline. To illustrate:

If this line is wrapped due to
being wider than the available
width.
And if this line is on its own line
due to being immediately preceeded
by a newline.

If your cursor in the above example was on the “w” in the first line there, pressing down would take the cursor to the space immediately before “is” in “And if this line is on its own line”.

As a result, it can be quite a pain to deal with word wraps in such editors. This is part of why certain code style guides (like this one and this one have hard limits for how many characters are allowed before the next newline.

Given how much more convenient line breaks can be than word wrapping, people writing source to be rendered into rendered output may wish to be able to insert newlines to cause line breaks in the source without causing any change in the corresponding rendered output.

That all make sense?

At least that’s most likely at least one reason why the people who invented Markdown decided specifically to make Markdown work that way.

Edit: Holy Shit, look, I’m just an idiot typing text expecting WYSIWYG and I don’t see a good reason for why I’m not getting it other than that programmers lack theory of mind.

I’m glad you’re not in charge. I very much don’t want to go back to the days of having TinyMCE embedded in everything.

I’m not sure why there’s so much confusion.

Because you’re not using the right terminology. ;)

I think they’re talking largely (mostly?) about Markdown. (For instance, in Lemmy, when you stick a newline there, it doesn’t give you a line break in the flow of the text.) And when they say “Carriage Return”, they don’t know what they’re talking about. If I’m interpreting them correctly, I think they just mean “newline”. And when they say “two spaces”, I think they mean two newlines.

I know the feeling. Truly we are living in the strangest timeline.

I shudder to think of a future in which we’re like “I miss trump”. 😬

I kinda want to play this game.

If you take an amphibian out of direct sunlight, that’s a shaded frog.

Summary by Brave Leo AI

I’m not usually one to kink shame, but in this case I can make an exception.