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[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 7 points 1 day ago

Thing is, most types of power generation have some kind of issue. Of the cleaner options, hydro, tidal, and geothermal can only be built in select places; solar panels create noxious waste at the point of manufacture; wind takes up space and interferes with some types of birds. Plus, wind and solar need on-grid storage (of which we still have little) to be able to handle what's known as baseline load, something that nuclear is good at.

Nuclear is better in terms of death rate than burning fossil fuels, which causes a whole slate of illnesses ranging from COPD to, yes, cancer. It's just that that's a chronic problem, whereas Chernobyl (that perfect storm of bad reactor design, testing in production, Soviet bureaucratic rigidity, and poor judgement in general) was acute. We're wired to ignore chronic problems.

In an ideal world, we would have built out enough hydro fifty years ago to cover the world's power needs, or enough on-grid storage more recently to handle the variability of solar and wind, but this isn't a perfect world, and we didn't. It isn't that nuclear is a good solution to the need for power—it's one of those things where all the solutions are bad in some way, and we need to build something.

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 4 points 1 day ago

It's been an issue in the Ukraine a couple of times already. So far, nothing has come of it.

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 7 points 1 day ago

Manufacturing of solar panels produces a different kind of contamination, though—it's just not located at the point of power generation. Wind is probably a bit better, with fewer exotic chemicals required, but "rooftop wind" isn't exactly a common catchphrase.

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

X is forbidden from offering services in Brazil until and unless it complies with the local courts (the company refused an order to suspend some accounts, then wouldn't appoint a local representative as Brazilian law requires). Local ISPs are required to block it. I don't know about Australia.

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 5 points 3 days ago

Exactly. This is as much a virus as the program I wrote as a first year CS student that rebooted the computer due to a bad pointer dereference was a virus. (That one would probably just segfault today, but I started back in the DOS dark ages . . .)

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

AI is a conspiracy theory—companies are just hiring people in lower-income countries to impersonate machines!

(/s, of course, but with just enough truth to it that there's probably someone somewhere out there who thinks the above statement is plausible.)

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 6 points 3 days ago

Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts?

We do have originals of some much older texts, though (cuneiform on clay that was fired after impression seems to be a pretty good archival medium, overall). We'd probably have a lot more original Greek and Roman documents if they hadn't been destroyed in wars and other disasters, or recycled for various purposes. There's a big survival rate difference between documents that receive basic care throughout their lives—no rough handling handling, minimal direct sunlight exposure, and some degree of temperature and humidity control in the storage area—and those left to fend for themselves. That's why old documents in surprisingly good condition sometimes turn up in caves, which tend to have constant temperature and humidity levels.

(But, yeah, current electronic media doesn't have much chance, with select optical disk media stored under carefully chosen conditions offering the best chance for your files being retrievable decades later, if you can find a drive to read them on.)

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 7 points 5 days ago

Pale Moon, originally forked from Firefox many years ago (although the codebases have diverged so far that most Firefox patches no longer apply). Still xul, still supports Firefox extensions from back in the day as well as extensions purpose-written for it. On the downside, it occasionally isn't compatible with the latest bleeding-edge nonstandard Javascript features—I keep Vivaldi around for the extremely rare occasion when something goes wrong with a site that I absolutely must visit for some reason (I think I've needed it twice in the past five years).

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 38 points 5 days ago

The Soviets never sent humans into the reactor to remove melted core material. The remains of the Chernobyl No. 4 core are still there inside the sarcophagus, and I don't think anyone was making serious plans to remove them even before the Ukraine war got in the way.

(The job that got so many Soviet workers exposed was moving solid radioactive debris from the exploded core so that the initial containment sarcophagus could be built and the other three reactors on the site restarted. Nothing comparable was required at Fukushima because the explosions there didn't breach any of the cores, thus no chunks of highly radioactive graphite to shovel off the roofs. I understand that the Soviets did try robots, but radiation isn't good for electronics and, well, it was Soviet equipment in 1986—they just weren't very effective.)

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 4 points 6 days ago

To put it another way, the difference is push vs. pull. A catalogue is a pull offering: the person looking at it is doing so by choice, because they're interested in what it offers and want to buy something (or at least window shop). An online ad is a push offering: it's presented to people who did not choose to see it, are not interested in it, and just wish it would go away and let them get on with what they're actually trying to do. Pull advertising is (usually) acceptable. Push advertising is not.

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 14 points 1 week ago

Keyboard typing is a manual skill distinct from tech savvy and has to be taught as such. You're not going to learn it by dealing with a touchscreen swipe "keyboard". I've known a fair number of programmers who were two-finger typists because they were too busy taking CS courses to learn to type.

On the gripping hand, my early-Boomer mother, who learned on typewriters, can type fast and accurately but is quite technophobic.

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 4 points 1 week ago

CGI was a pretty early invention, so you would have had to be on the Web very early indeed to remember when it was entirely static. Main difference between the server-side era and now was that the usual way for pages to show changes back then was to autotrigger the browser's reload mechanism after a fixed time.

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submitted 1 year ago by nyan@lemmy.cafe to c/diy@beehaw.org

I have an ancient and rather ugly office chair which I love to pieces. Unfortunately, on Thursday morning, the chair attempted to make that literal, as I sat down and heard a nasty splintering sound. Now, I got this thing secondhand, and it's always had a vertical split up one wooden leg. My brother had run four large carriage bolts through it in an attempt to hold it together, which in hidsight turned out to be a bad idea, as one half of the leg had split in the opposite direction along the line of the first two bolts. ☹️

Removing the bolts, applying a rather considerable amount of wood glue and some dowels, then clamping it, letting it dry, and cleaning up got me to the point shown in the picture (larger version here )

What I need to know is, is there anything I can do to structurally reinforce this thing any further, short of replacing either that leg (beyond my skill level at the moment) or the entire base (a new one would have to be shipped up from the US)? In particular, would "splinting" it with a piece of new wood along the damaged side (or pieces along both sides) help keep it from tearing itself apart? Or should I just redrill the hole for the castor further away from the end, put a couple of C-clamps on, and hope it holds long enough for a new base to arrive?

I want my chair back. 😭

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nyan

joined 1 year ago