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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Oh no not this again. These articles pop up all the time and they’re kind of awful when put in context - like yeah solar panels aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty dang close honestly. It’s great that they mention the stuff at the end about laser welding, but the rest of the article is kind of just fear mongering.

    Firstly, panels don’t really go bad - the article mentions this. But that doesn’t mean they have to be thrown away. Yeah, it makes sense to put 300w/m² panels on your solar farm and replace your old 200w/m² panels. But those old panels are generally still producing power, and can be sold as used for projects less focused on absolute peak efficiency. The old three Rs tell us, Reuse is generally better than Recycle.

    Secondly, panels don’t randomly leech heavy metals. They sometimes have lead based solder, and contain small amounts of cadmium. If the panel is in tact in a pile or deployed it’s all locked up within the panel and doesn’t just jump out. It can leech out if you put ground up panels in an acidic landfill that leeches into the ground water - that’s bad so we shouldn’t do that, but we already don’t and have even more regulation coming.

    Panels are mostly glass and aluminum by weight, they’re not like 20% lead or anything crazy. Recycling them safely is not some kind of crazy future tech, just a matter of regulation and economics.

    Moreover, the amounts they contain are miniscule compared to what fossil fuels produce. As Nickelback says, look at this graph: graph showing oil based energy producing like 40 times more cadmium.

    from here

    Or this North Carolina paper:

    Every GWh of electricity generated by burning coal produces about 4 grams ofcadmium air emissions.21 Even though North Carolina produces a significant fraction of our electricity from coal, electricity from solar offsets much more natural gas than coal due to natural gas plants being able to adjust their rate of production more easily and quickly. If solar electricity offsets 90% natural gas and 10% coal, each 5-megawatt (5 MWAC, which is generally 7 MWDC) CdTe solar facility in North Carolina keeps about 157 grams, or about a third of a pound, of cadmium out of ourenvironment.

    from here

    And as far as total landfill waste its dwarfed by what fossil fuels produce, even just general consumer trash:

    from this paper via this blog

    For most panels it seems like the most polluting thing about them is that they are produced using our current grid and not other solar panels.





  • There’s a pretty large combination of factors that went on from what I remember. Partly it just plain didn’t get that hot that often in the UK or France back then. Partly they wore entirely different undergarments that layered to keep sweat off their actual clothes and keep them cool. Partly the summer clothes were often flowy or puffy which helped move air near the skin. And partly the fabrics they wore were different. Things like linen and cotton were the go tos. Even the linen itself was different, modern linen has shorter fibers and is much lighter.

    After the great renunciation (when men started wearing the modern(ish) suit) you start to see a lot more references to taking off layers either to cool off or to keep them clean or whatever. You also start to see variations in really hot places like the American deep south and Bermuda to deal with climates that get way way hotter than Europe with its nearby seas and cooling prevailing winds.

    Please note that all of this may be wrong and I am entirely going off what I can remember off the top of my head.


  • Yeah, it feels like the entire time he’s really trying to link these games to actual deaths during war that seems pretty tenuous, largely due to his own “ick” factor that “his thing” is being used by the military.

    The section in the middle where he essentially asks all his interviewees basically “have you killed anyone” is pretty awkward. Like, of course these people don’t really want to talk about that. Nobody wants to go around thinking they’re directly responsible for preventable deaths. It’s like he wants someone to just say “Am i the baddie?” like that Mitchel and Webb sketch.

    It also completely glosses over the way that “play” is often just training for something more violent. Tag is a fun game until someone brings a knife. But there’s a world of difference between “you sunk my battleship” and the Bismarck. It’s like he’s somehow taken the stance that video games cause violence in the most roundabout way possible.

    It’s a shame because the video is good but it could be so much more interesting diving into examples about how these games actually work and are used instead of hemming and hawing the whole time over his imagined Cluedo to murder piperine.







  • As per the article, there’s a bunch of hydrogen projects starting, but they often aren’t “green” hydrogen that’s made from water or whatever like people normally assume and instead is made from fossil fuels. On the one hand it means we will have an already built out and hopefully working hydrogen infrastructure for when we get “green” hydrogen figured out, but on the other hand it’s not really much better than just burning fossil fuels (sort of, in some cases - it’s complicated) if it’s not “green” hydrogen so it’s kind of a putting the Kart in front of the Mario situation. All the new subsidies say they’re for “green” hydrogen projects, but the companies involved really want that relaxed because making “green” hydrogen right now instead of the other colors is really hard. Also since it’s all fossil fuels based production it’s fossil fuel companies doing it all, which are notoriously just honorable and good in all ways and would never do anything that could harm the public; so there’s definitely no reason to be concerned.

    TLDR: it’s not the hydrogen it’s the everything else when you make hydrogen.


  • Custom keyboards took off because of mechanical switches. Back in the day people wanted mechanical switches because they last longer than membrane ones, and so you wound up with a bunch of companies producing relatively easy to manufacture mechanical switches. Those switches all felt and sounded a little different so you got people who wanted a specific feel and sound and it grew from there.

    There hasn’t really been the same push with mice because even really cheap ones work really well. Optical sensors are way harder to produce than key switches, and while there are a few different ones on the market other than dpi and polling rate they kind of all act the same - it kind of either tracks right or it doesn’t. There’s no differentiation unlike switches that are “tactile” or “linear” or “scratchy”. And because of size restrictions you can’t really have the same kind of switches as keyboards use for the buttons. And unlike the really niche keyboard people who do their own PCB and machine their own case, making a good mouse on your own from scratch is way more difficult. They’re weird shaped and it’s much more difficult to change things like optical tracking algorithms compared to macros on a 40% keyboard. You can do a run of 100 super niche keyboards and make it work, but just the injection molds for one mouse mean you need to make 10000, which stops it being a project and makes it a business.

    There are premium mice manufacturers, but in general they either are going super light, super ergonomic, or super functional - and honestly they have a hard time competing with a company like Logitech that can produce really similar features for a fraction of the cost and have a decent reputation to boot.


  • I believe you can change the scaling algorithm obs uses? Right click the source and go to “scale filter” is what Google is telling me, not at a computer right now. I think it defaults to bicubic which should be ok though? The switch does its own internal scaling a lot of the time and that can look pretty bad though, but unless you get into some serious shenanigans that’s basically baked in.




  • As far as I’ve found, they’re both right. You shouldn’t have to wash your mushrooms, but it’s not a bad idea if you’re not buying fancy mushrooms.

    The generic button mushroom variants you’re probably getting at the grocery store are grown in compost, which often contains some manure - ie poops.

    But before growing mushrooms it’s pasteurized. Mycelium is picky, and fairly easily out-competed by other stuff, so to make sure you’re just growing mushrooms and not bacteria you basically have to sterilize the medium they’re grown in.

    But those mushrooms are often grown in open beds, and harvested by hand. And that means they get that poop dirt right up on them. Will it immediately give you super botulism? Probably not but it’s still kinda ick.

    Fancier mushroom varieties from smaller cultivars are the ones that actually don’t really need washed and often shouldn’t be. They’re grown in highly sterile environments and they fruit out of a container, so they never touched the poop. And that’s if they even used compost - lots use straw or wood.

    If you do decide to wash your button mushrooms it’s not a big deal, they aren’t actually sponges, and they don’t absorb as much water as some cooking shows say. If they get soggy it probably means they’re old, try putting them in the fridge for a few hours uncovered. It’s basically a dehydrator.


  • It entirely depends on how much and what you’ll use them for. They’re going to be around $200 USD all in, so if they’re for occasional use probably not. If you’re going to use them a lot like for work or a regular hobby then it’s not a crazy amount to spend. They tend to be more comfortable than flange earplugs, and a little better than foamies, but for me at least I don’t want them in for more than 3 hours.

    Etymotic makes a few different ones for general noise, sleeping, music, and they also do ones for their earphones.


  • Sorry I’m too lazy to look up a source, but the way I’ve heard it explained is that while they might occasionally give them to sick animals as a sort of panacea, they often just give all of them a low dose. Apparently it like, makes their immune system not have to work as hard so they gain weight faster. Which is basically textbook how to make resistant bacteria.