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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • Honest question: what about cigarette butts makes them not biodegradable, exactly? To my vague understanding of what they’re made of, I know them to be cheifly comprised of paper and extract from dried leaves. Even after considering all the other additive compounds in cigs added for taste and effect, I can’t picture a lot of it by mass being forever chemicals like plastics.

    That asked, I’m not convinced littering is acceptable even for biodegradable things. Far from all “biodegradable” materials completely disintegrate on a short timescale. Even IF cigarette butts degrade like plain paper and dry leaves, they wouldn’t do it quickly. If it’s a place where even a single smoker haunts multiple times a week, smoking and discarding multiple cigs at a time, they can pile up faster than they disappear.

    And that’s not even considering all the toxins that would leech out from the things that will remain at elevated levels for as long as the littering continued.


  • I feel like the “we don’t know what this function does” meme is kinda bad. There’s no reason beyond maybe time crunch why you shouldn’t be able to dissect exactly what it does.

    Despite this, the notion of a load-bearing function is still very relevant. Yeah, sure, you know what it does, including all of the little edge case behaviors it has. But you can’t at this time fully ascertain what’s calling it, and how all the callers have become dependant on all the little idiosyncracies that will break if you refactor it to something more sensible.

    It has been several times now where a part of my system of legacy code broke in some novel fantastic way, because two wrongs were cancelling out and then I fixed only one of them.


  • I think you can have it, but you’d need to spend a pretty penny.

    All it would take is calling an electrician to run the appropriate wiring from the place you want the kettle plugged in to you breaker box, connect it to the breaker box with the appropriate breaker, cap off the other end with the appropriate plug (a 240V plug does exist in America), and then buy a kettle capable of receiving the rated voltage and current and splice on the appropriate plug (because I presume you won’t find one sold with that plug).

    An extremely expensive way to save maybe three minutes boiling water, but you can do it.






  • Of the people who say anything about it, there seems to be two mutually exclusive camps of people on Lemmy in regards to how it should be structured.

    There’s those who want it to be a drop-in replacement for whatever platform they migrated from (Reddit, ususally), with everything cultured in one simple, easy-to-browse place where there’s enough activity to support diversity, just without the enshittification, even though the centralization they crave is exactly what invites the enshittification…

    …and then there’s those who specifically want the site to stay fragmented, because that’s the whole point of federation, it keeps out all the riff raff, and prevents the platform from losing what makes it so great. But many of them complain about why it isn’t growing as fast as they’d like it to, despite the fact that the fragmentation of community is by far the single greatest barrier preventing the mass adoption they yearn for.

    Each one seems to want a piece of what the other has.


  • I got a 1U rack server for free from a local business that was upgrading their entire fleet. Would’ve been e-waste otherwise, so they were happy to dump it off on me. I was excited to experiment with it.

    Until I got it home and found out it was as loud as a vacuum cleaner with all those fans. Oh, god no…

    I was living with my parents at the time, and they had a basement I could stick it in where its noise pollution was minimal. I mounted it up to a LackRack.

    Since moving out to a 1 bedroom apartment, I haven’t booted it. It’s just a 70 pound coffee table now. :/


  • I think my purest moment of gaming bliss was experiencing completely blind the last handful of worlds in Super Mario Odyssey while buzzed with a few whiskeys. God, my soul was in orbit with that experience. Pure, unfettered joy and whimsy through and through and cinematically epic when it wanted to be. I wouldn’t call it the best game ever or even my favorite game ever, but god damn it, it struck me just right way at just the right time. It was something truly special.

    More games I will cherish will certainly follow, and have followed. But for that specific set of vibes and circumstances, I don’t know if I’ll ever top that peak from playing a video game ever again.




  • I assume the reflowing solder in the oven trick doesn’t reliably work anymore in the era of the high temp solders that are common in laptop manufacturing these days. Bringing the whole board up to flow temp in something as crude as a home oven is almost certainly going to fuck something else on the board.

    I recall trying to do a laptop repair with dinky little soldering iron I got at the hardware store and it could not melt a single thing on the board I touched it to. Definitely not a faulty iron because I used it to successfully solder other things. This was at least five years ago. If that little toy couldn’t do it, then the entire board would need to exceed that temp in an oven, which is probably a bad idea since the iron was still managing to visibly scorch things despite not melting any solder.

    Invest in a proper heat gun and learn how to use it, or just give up and give it to someone else who has one, imo.



  • There’s lots of software out there that is available to use without payment, but is still license restricted in such a way that you are not permitted to redistribute, modify, use for commercial purposes, etc. To many, these rights are the far more important facet of “free” software, above what it costs.

    But since the English language has the same word for all of these concepts, we have all these yucks running around with zero-cost but right-restricted software wearing the “FOSS” badge thinking they’re part of the club. So some people add “Libre” to the acronym to explicitly disambiguate.