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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The real reason for shitty microphone quality is using the shitty microphone that comes with your laptop. Get a decent wireless headset with a mute button on it and you can move around your house during meetings while still sounding way better than you would be sitting in front of it using the laptop mic.


  • I got to bar age after most cities in my area passed non-smoking bylaws for bars and restaurants, but lived for a bit in one city that didn’t yet have a ban. I smoked at the time. I remember thinking that while it was nice to be able to just have a smoke while chilling on a couch with friends and a drink, the air quality sucked overall and I was glad to see the ban eventually go through there, too.

    A while later, I stopped smoking in my car. If I wanted a smoke, I’d park somewhere and do it outside. For places I lived, if it already had people smoking indoors, I’d just do that, but otherwise I’d smoke outside because the clean air was nicer (both while smoking outside and when I returned to the inside).

    So even as a smoker, the convenience wasn’t worth it to me, unless the air quality was already bad.


  • Here’s one I just realized: we’re closer to 2070 than we are to 1970.

    In general, if someone is over 50, we’re closer to their 100th birthday than their birth year. 1974 is currently equidistant to 2074 and it goes up by one every year.

    In 1990, we were equidistant from 1940 and 2040.

    And the bit you mentioned might make you feel old but consider that anyone born before 1976 still spent more time in the 20th century than the 21st. Or more time in the 2nd millennium then the 3rd. The ones who can’t say what you said are the really old ones.

    And both people in the running for president haven’t even spent a third of their lives in the current millennium.




  • That does depend on who is making those memes. The bad faith propaganda meant to further divide the population targets all sides of all issues and it’s another very divisive issue. Any time I see someone making what should be a good point but in a way that will instead increase resistance, I suspect that’s what’s going on. It’s not a certain way to determine if that’s happening; anyone who has read How to Win Friends and Influence People knows that our instincts about persuasion are bad even before any bad faith is involved.



  • Car doors that aren’t on teslas don’t fail open, they are reliable enough that I can’t think of hearing about any failures that don’t involve a collision and deforming of the door (in which case it’s a fail closed and they use the jaws of life to get people out, or another door).

    An electronic latch is either engaged or it isn’t. Fail open would mean that in the absence of an electronic signal saying it should be closed, the latch will default to not being engaged, which would mean there’s nothing holding the door closed if another force acts on it.

    Don’t assume any benefit of the doubt about Tesla’s. I made no comment one way or another about what I think of their doors vs other doors. For the record, I agree completely that they fucked up this part of the design. The purpose of my comment was to say that taking that design and adding “fail open” to it won’t fix it. Fail open and fail closed both have problems with an electronic latch and the only way to fix it without causing other big problems is to design it in a way that still functions as a door that can be open or latched closed whether or not the electronic part of the latch is working.

    And I’m “deliberately misinterpreting” what fail open means? I’m having trouble understanding how it can mean anything other than how I’m interpreting it, even with your clarification, given the disagreement about other car doors failing open. Maybe it’s a misnomer that I’m misinterpreting but why are you assuming I’m doing this in bad faith?

    The downvotes themselves don’t matter, I asked because I wanted to know the reasoning behind them, well aware that bringing them up at all will probably result in more of them.


  • You cannot say that with statistical certainty. There’s about 8 billion people who haven’t eventually died yet and all it will take is one of them to break that 100%. You should include a disclaimer with an error range or you might get sued by someone who spikes someone’s drink with dihydrogen monoxide and then they don’t eventually die for botching their assassination.

    That said, the statistics are pretty strong. 99.9% is basically 100% plus wiggle room so no one can sue me, so readers should be aware that this dangerous chemical can also go by the name of hydrogen hydroxide and some food manufacturers try to sneak it by with the name aqua in their ingredients list.


  • For the fail-safe bit, if the latching system fails to an unlatched position, then the inertia of the door itself could cause it to open on braking and turns (or if someone leans on it or bumps it), since nothing else would be holding it in place.

    Obligatory fuck Elon Musk lol.

    It’s not generally as bad here as it is on Reddit. I still see the occasional comments that make me wonder if their author has any reading comprehension skills, but Reddit seemed to have representation from those kinds of posters in most comment threads. Even on the topics where Lemmy has general biases for, comments can still go off the beaten trail without getting crucified.

    Though with the smaller sample size of voters, I think Lemmy might see more cases where a comment initially goes one way and then swings the other way, which seems to be the case with my comment above, at least for now (and is part of the reason why I try to refrain from ever commenting on the votes, but usually there’s also a spicy or bolder part of my comment where I’m not as surprised if it goes negative).







  • I assume it’s like the new car smell. Pleasant or not, it’s from inhaling plastic and paint particles and other chemicals as the excesses evaporate and loose pieces come loose and become airborne.

    Steam Deck is probably similar. Plastics, anti-corrosion coatings on heat sink fins, trace metals and solder, inks from the PCB, maybe the occasional ion leftover if there’s any micro-arcing.

    I’d guess it lasts a long time because the cooling airflow continually erodes whatever is in its path, while new cars don’t have that continuous erosion so eventually all the particles that were going to escape do and the ones left over are more stable.