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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • The Constant, by Mark Chrysler.

    Headlined as “a history of getting things wrong”, the host goes into deep dives about what we thought we knew, how we eventually came to figure out we were wrong, the repercussions of both.

    It takes a seriously funny and well researched approach to a number of major events in our history, and I absolutely must recommend “the foolkiller” a five episode exploration of a submarine found at the bottom of the Chicago River then lost to history, with a very juicy footnote delivered several episodes later, that I dare not spoil for you.




  • About a year back I stumbled across these cool products that are a heatshrink sheath with a metal ring coated in low temp solder inside. They made all of my wire joining a million times easier. Just strip the end of two wires, push them into the sheath and blast them with a heat gun for 20 seconds until the ring contracts into a crimp and the solder flows onto the wires. Better physical and electrical connection than a crimp, with none of the futzing that comes with soldering and sheathing.








  • Well, yes, but also no. The heat released by fossil fuels absolulety increases the total energy of the atmosphere, but the other half of a zero carbon society is that it is powered by renewable energy sources.

    If we are generating electricity by slowing down atmospheric winds or capturing sunlight incident on the planet surface, then any “waste heat” from the usage of that electricity will be energy that was already present, and therefore have no net heating effect.








  • This statement about cpus isn’t entirely correct. In the manufacture of precision electronics, there is always a reasonable chance of defects occurring, so what happens is that all the parts are built to the same spec, then they are “binned” according to their level of defects.

    You produce a hundred 24 core cpus, then you test them rigorously. You discover that 30 work perfectly and sell them as the 24 core mdoel. 30 have between one and eight defective cores, so you block access to those cores and sell them as the 16 core model. Rinse and repeat until you reach the minimum number of cores for a saleable cpu.

    This is almost certainly not the case in car manufacturing, as while you could sell a car with defective seat heaters at a lower price point, what actually occurs is that cars with perfectly functional seat heaters have that feature disabled until you pay extra for it.