ak217

My furnace is protected by an old school fast-acting fuse. One day it blew and at first I thought it was an anachronism from the house's original wiring but then realized it's intentional - the standard breaker upstream of it is not fast enough. Not clear if it mainly protects the blower fan motor or the circuit board - I suspect it's the motor. At least one other fan motor in the house got fried previously.

I think the quality of your power is determined mainly by the size of the transformer serving your neighborhood as well as the presence of noisy heavy power equipment like AC with poor/no soft starters or big brush motors among the consumers. It's noticeably worse on our street compared to where we previously lived.

It was one of multiple tools that were used to reinforce each other. The alphabet, of all things, obviously plays a huge role in cultural indoctrination and assimilation. You're being strangely defensive about this.

Tangentially related, one of the most underappreciated projects for print media and PDF generation is paged.js. It goes down the rabbit hole of paged media and the surprising complexity of it (have you ever thought about what it takes to render a table across multiple pages?) and provides a great foundation for solving these problems with sanity and using open web standards. It's a project that deserves more support.

> Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable?

Yes.

(I don't disagree that a diverse mix is good, and I'm all for nuclear, I'm just saying the old "it's intermittent and can't grid form" boogeyman is no longer true. It would also really behoove Western countries to start manufacturing batteries at scale if we don't want to get a bloody nose in the future, because they're good for more than just the grid)

> Connections are Brief

This doesn't make sense, in the context of the author's chosen example (postgres). Postgres connections are very heavy and there is a huge performance penalty for cycling them quickly, and a whole range of silly workarounds for this fact (pgbouncer). Maybe the author meant to say that sessions are brief.

I have my Kindle permanently in airplane mode to keep it away from Amazon's shenanigans and use Calibre to upload books to it, but if/when it breaks I have a feeling my next e-reader will be a Rakuten Kobo.

I spent a long time educating teams of developers about git's usability quirks. I don't do that as much anymore - partly because the quirks have been worked out, partly because the developers have better guardrails and resources to learn from.

This whole time (the past 15 years) git has been getting faster without most of us noticing, because big companies have been investing in speeding it up. The reason you don't notice or care is that they work on a very different scale. Thousands of users, thousands of PRs per day, millions of CI/CD jobs all hitting the repo.

Now the cycle is repeating again because these numbers are shooting through the roof because of agentic coding.

All the time? That's very inefficient, especially when running your boiler outside heating season and without a vacuum flask.

The actual solution is to boil small quantities of water. I can boil one cup in 90 seconds or so, even with the 120v handicap.

Right, the 1.8C difference is substantial in terms of human physiology and indicates a diminished level of comfort as the body fights to keep the temperature up.

I also found it funny how they mentioned that modern clothing keeps you warmer longer once you stop moving, then tried to minimize the significance of that. There's a reason "cotton kills" is a cliche. Modern fabrics, windbreaker shells, and engineered layers don't make a huge difference in warm, dry, active conditions - it's when things go sideways that they can be the difference between comfort and fatal hypothermia.

No, their use of “solves for this” is with regards to disincentivizing an incredibly dangerous habit that randomly kills the most vulnerable bystanders in the vicinity at the rate of many thousands per year

Where I live, our work has definitely been successful. The cities I bike in have been steadily improving their bike lane and pedestrian networks, and increasingly prioritizing them in plans and projects - though there is a long way to go.

To be honest with you I really don't give a shit about my reputation when it comes to this, I care about me and my kids not getting splatted by a speeding SUV when we dare to use the street, because I face this situation daily.

Oh it's quite practical, many cities have done it. It just requires standing up to a bunch of selfish assholes who would rather pave over every bit of available space so they can drive around really fast in their giant SUVs while pedestrians and cyclists scurry about on the broken pavement of the 5% of the street right of way given to them, and get run over when they don't get out of the way of the SUVs fast enough.

As someone who has biked and rode trains to work for the past 30 years and continues to do so, I think requiring bike lanes whenever streets are repaved is a pretty awesome idea. ADA ramps are pretty great too, they are not just for disabled people, though the ADA lawsuit regime where private companies get sued needs to stop.

Yes I understand there is a funding issue, it needs to be solved by making the design and approval process more flexible and efficient, not by perpetuating the insane car-only design that kills pedestrians and cyclists.

> Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built.

I would disagree. The engineers absolutely steer the space of available solutions. Caltrans is a prime example, I have personally met Caltrans engineers who might as well have stepped out of a time machine from 1970. This absolutely influences the priorities of both the state and the cities that depends on the framework it sets up.

And yes city politics is separately a major problem.

There is plenty of information about this in trusted sources, the way you're describing this is incorrect. Overcorrection and badly designed simplistic optics can make myopia worse in childhood when the eye is growing. Your eye is no longer growing.

Don't trust everything your doctor says verbatim, they often oversimplify and their information can be out of date. Give your doctor the benefit of the doubt but check it against other sources and use it to build a mental model.

If you liked Sheldon Brown (who was a treasure but the content is out of date now), definitely check out the Park Tool videos on YouTube. Calvin Jones, their director of education, recently retired after building an incredible library of instructional videos. As an amateur bike mechanic, I wouldn't have been able to build or maintain my bikes without Calvin's videos.

> That might be because Japan did have a huge railway accident in 2005 due to excessive speed.

No, Japan more or less invented ATC in the 1960s for the purpose of running the Shinkansen safely.

That's exactly right. I have so many frustrating stories from local politics that go exactly like you described.

There is hope. Scott Wiener is a California politician who saw that these problems can't be resolved at the local level and got himself elected to the state legislature. He is smart about how he sets up the battles so he has had very good results incrementally improving California's zoning - and other things - by gradually restricting local zoning authority when it's abused.

We are not yet at the "convenience store at the subdivision corner" stage, but give him time.

That's a really hilarious take given Nvidia's history with TSMC.

Look, I don't care, I know there are strong opinions about how these discussions sway people one way or another. I'm as much of an EV technology fan as anyone, but I'm speaking from personal experience with this exact situation: if I didn't have a 240V charger in my garage, my EV experience would be garbage and I'd give up on it in frustration. I own one of the most common EVs, I have DC fast chargers in my area, I don't drive my EV that much during the week, but when I need to drive a bunch of short trips on the weekend, this exact scenario arises. I don't care what your theoretical model of an average EV driver looks like, I'm telling you that it doesn't match my reality and I am certain the reality of many others.

What's bizarre is that this should be incredibly non-contentious when it comes to EV adoption. By code, everyone in the US already has two phases at their panel and running a wire and outlet in their garage (or a weatherized cable to the outside) costs $100-150 in materials and a similar amount in labor. This is literally negligible in the broader scheme of the automotive economy. My humble suggestion to you is: save your breath, we're on the same side, raise your voice instead when it comes to demanding a sane EV industrial policy, regulatory policy, urban planning policy, removing subsidies for oil and gas industries, and the like.

Sorry, I love Technology Connections as much as anyone, but that's a ridiculous argument. Even people who drive less than 40 miles a day will occasionally need to drive 100 miles a day for two days back to back. That's not even a long distance trip, it's just driving around. With level 1 charging they are stuck and frustrated. With level 2 they're fine. Not to mention the hassle and mental energy required to plug in and out for every little trip.

For most people a 240V outlet is worth it. Not to mention it's at least 10% more efficient, which is quite significant and weird that Technology Connections didn't mention that.

I have a hacky piece of code that I used with OpenSSL 1.x to inspect the state of digest objects. This was removed from the public API in 3.0 but in the process of finding that out I took a deep dive in the digests API and I can confirm it's incomprehensible. I imagined there must be some deep reason for the indirection but it's good to know the Cryptography maintainers don't think so.

Speaking of which, as a library developer relying on both long established and new Cryptography APIs (like x.509 path validation), I want to say Alex Gaynor and team have done an absolutely terrific job building and maintaining Cryptography. I trust the API design and test methodology of Cryptography and use it as a model to emulate, and I know their work has prevented many vulnerabilities, upleveled the Python ecosystem, and enabled applications that would otherwise be impossible. That's why, when they express an opinion as strong as this one, I'm inclined to trust their judgment.

I've had my eyes on this Asus for a while now, but the rtings review mentions aggressive matte coating that seems like it might negate the high PPI advantage by randomly blurring the result. What's your impression?

When I used to ride Caltrain to/from work, I would often have an uninterrupted stretch of 45+ minutes in a cozy single seat (I would always take an upper deck seat in the "gallery" car) to either doze off or use this time to focus on something. I would get so much done on those days if I managed to avoid the sun blasting too much sunlight on my screen/seat. This commuter rail experience is probably familiar to many of us, but it's specific to commuter rail - being a passenger on a subway or in a car/bus is too chaotic or bumpy to do this.

More generally, I find that switching up your surroundings is absolutely vital for your brain's ability to focus on hard tasks. I will hit a wall if I try to work multiple 10+ hour days sitting in one spot, but a comfortable spot in a different coffee shop or lounge can totally trick my brain into powering through.

Yeah. I have also been to China myself, and have first hand experience walking around Hong Kong with people who later found themselves in jail, or riding the subway getting bombarded with saturation level jingoistic propaganda urging attack against the capitalist aggressors, or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.

The silent majority is silent, yes. Those who try to do something get pushed out, or worse. It's the double-edged sword of immigration. But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.

Yours?

I'm sick and tired of whataboutism from people who are somehow motivated to carry water for aggressive dictatorships that threaten the rest of us. I've already lost my birth country to zombies like that (they call them z-patriots, or turbopatriots, the supporters of Russia's invasion of Ukraine). In case you missed it, my original comment was intended as a criticism of the current government of the United States.

China is governed by the CCP, which holds the world record for the number of people murdered by the state, feeds its citizens militaristic propaganda at scale, is currently controlled by a guy who fancies himself a dictator, and is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade. It takes a dangerous kind of willful naivete to just ignore that fact.

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.

Exactly - the author thinks all these tools just materialized fully formed in their software ecosystem instead of surviving years of competition with other, less memorable tools. It takes many years of work, luck, and yes, marketing to get to the point where any of these tools are, and a memorable name can absolutely make the difference between support and oblivion.