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Pratchett's are to all dragons just like gnomes are to people in standard fantasy settings. (They all are tinkerers, though out of necessity~.)

2685. 2045 

"I have another appointment that would be really hard to move, in terms of the kinetic energy requirements" is my favourite phrase of the week

xkcd bot  

2685. 2045 

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@robryk .... Wait... What was that about scotch tape?! It does what?!

robryk boosted

I today realized (yet another) reason why one must slowly start steam boilers: steam flow provides cooling of e.g. superheaters. Thus, if the heat output of the furnace is combined with lower-than-expected-at-that-heat-output steam flow, you'll overheat the superheater.

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Okay. I really, really want /sees my posts in their home tab/ and /can see my locked posts at all/ to be separate things. I want to the former to be totally open again, and I want the latter to be more restricted than it is now.

Please, please can we make this happen? #mastodev

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2677. Two Key System 

title text: Our company can be your one-stop shop for decentralization.

(xkcd.com/2677)
(explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php)

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I'm looking for an USB XLR interface that's Linux-friendly. Currently I'm using Behringer UMC202HD and it's constantly problematic.

Boosts welcome!

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It used to be the case in that

:t 3

would give you

3 :: Num a => a

but

let x = 3
:t x

would give you

x :: Integer

because storing a value in variable forced the system to commit to a specific type.

Nowadays, though, the latter gives you

x :: Num a => a

What changed? I'm at a loss as to how to search the web for an answer to this one.

possible electrical energy shortage 

I'm surprised that I haven't seen any appeals to clean the radiators in the fridges. (And now am trying to figure out how to get at mine.)

Riddle: what is this a recording of? (The amplitude was ~2mT, and the direction in space was consistent over the period of recording.)

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twitter quote on CS 

there is NO field that more grievously overestimates the layman's understanding of what they do than computer science. if you do too much programming you ascend/descend to an entirely different plane of existence where you think that regular human beings know what linux is

twitter.com/katiedimartin/stat

Do you know of any text media (e.g. newspapers, but also blogs that aspire to journalism) that "show their work"? More precisely, ones that describe not only what they figured out, but also how they did that and, ideally, also the failed avenues. An example of a publication that goes in that direction (but not as far as I'd ideally want to see someone go) is Bellingcat.

Maybe you know journalists who publish (with a delay and redactions, for obvious reasons) log of all the research they're doing?

So, apparently swiss aviation regulator has restricted the number of passengers on a single historic aircraft as a permanent safety measure (in response to an accident from 2018).

If we ignore the effect on the price (by way of reducing total passenger throughout), I think this actually reduces safety. Ensuring safety of an aircraft takes work that mostly doesn't change depending on the number of passengers. Thus, aircraft with fewer passengers require more effort per passenger. So if the amount of passengers remains constant, we end up with more work (incl. more work for authorities) for the same level of safety.

Is there a mechanism (other than reducing the total number of participants) that could cause this change to improve safety?

@pixel

I just learned of github.com/pixeldesu/fediverse (from the koyu.space's open singups announcement) and noticed the "this is from a bygone era" warning that you've added a few days ago. That warning confuses me: I don't understand what changes make it undesirable to adopt such rules. Would you mind elaborating a bit on that?

(Obviously feel free to not answer, or answer in any less public way if you prefer that.)

@moonbolt It just occurred to me that you might enjoy freefall.purrsia.com and might be unaware of it.

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> We discover ÆPIC Leak, the first [...] CPU bug that leaks stale data from the microarchitecture WITHOUT using a side channel. [...] leaks stale data incorrectly returned by reading undefined APIC-register ranges.
> ÆPIC Leak is like an uninitialized memory read in the CPU itself.

What a wonderful time to be alive. aepicleak.com/

So, apparently not all dessicants are safeish to eat: CaO is apparently used as a dessicant (the reason it's not safe to eat is that it generated a surprisingly large amount of heat when reacting with water).

I'm curious why are dessicants from lime preferred (ever). The pictured bag is from a package of seaweed, which makes me doubly surprised: one might e.g. not notice that the dessicant bag has ruptured.

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