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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • ‘Reduced’ implies manufacturing changes. What if, once the product is reduced, it still can’t be reused/recycled?

    What if the intended life of a product is 50 years maintenance-free after which it’s landfill? Can’t be reused, can’t be refurbed, can’t be recycled - but it’s still generally a good use of resources.

    In many products, there’s a repair-reliability tradeoff. If you pot it, you can’t repair failures, but you’ll reduce the failure rate by >90%. Repair shops hate it because the ones they see can’t be fixed, but they’ don’t see all the ‘easy repairs’ that never needed doing in the first place.







  • I’m pretty sure that autistic people have as little excuse for doing it as anyone else.

    It is not some kind of signal that you are born knowing or subconsciously learn from your peers, and people on the spectrum instead have to carefully analyse. People know what a Nazi salute is because they are shown pictures of Nazis performing them, and told that doing this is not OK.

    If there’s a written Manual for Human Interactions, this is explicitly in it.


  • It was an attempt to derail California (and other) High Speed Rail.

    Why would you build HSR if there’s something way faster/better/cheaper, you just need to wait 5 years? You’re going to look really dumb if you spend tens of billions on infrastructure intended to last more than a century, and then it’s obsolete before it’s complete.

    Similar story with Toyota perpetually claiming to have amazing batteries 3-5 years away, making every EV look like an expensive waste with no resale value.

    And a hydrogen economy, small nuclear reactors, or fusion power being 5/10/20 years away, removing the need to invest in transmission and generation.

    A major paradigm shift being right around the corner makes people choose short-term solutions, because you want to wait for the new thing to arrive before investing in ‘old tech’.

    The problem is most of it is lies, perpetuated by those selling the short-term-fix old tech.








  • Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

    Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

    Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

    Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

    For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.



  • My last first aid course didn’t mention tampons specifically, but if you need to stop heavy bleeding, anything is on the table.

    We were told that the general practice with a major wound was essentially to use a rolled up bandage to wipe the worst of the blood away so you can see where it’s coming from, then put said bandage over the probable artery and apply lots of pressure.

    Your job as first aid is to keep someone alive until paramedics arrive. Tissue damage from a tampon gluing itself in can be fixed. Total blood loss less so.

    They did say they’re an option for a major nosebleed though.