AnyOldName3

joined 1 year ago
[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

I'm not arguing for anything in the post above, just pointing out that a broken (or badly repaired) insulin pump is genuinely more dangerous than having no insulin pump. That doesn't have to count against the right to repair one, as if you've got the right to repair an insulin pump, and do so badly, it doesn't mean you're legally forced to use it afterwards, just like I've got the right to inject all the insulin in my fridge with an insulin pen back to back, but I'm not legally forced to do so.

I do think the right to repair should be universal, but as I think that medical stuff should be paid for by the state, NHS-style, that would end up meaning that the NHS could repair medical devices themselves if they deemed it more economical to do so and recertify things as safe than to get the manufacturer to repair or replace them. The NHS is buying the devices, and gets the right to repair them, and that saves the taxpayer money, as even if they don't actually end up repairing anything, it stops manufacturers price gouging for repairs and replacements, and if the manufacturer goes bust or refuses to repair something, there're still ways to keep things working. It doesn't mean unqualified end users can't use their new right to repair their medical devices and risk getting it wrong, but if you've got an option of a free repair/replacement, most people would choose the safe and certified repair over their own bodge.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

If you've got a broken insulin pump, assuming you're in a country with a functioning healthcare system, you should have been given a spare pump with the original, and probably some insulin pens, so when one breaks, you fall back to the spare, and get given a new one to be the new spare (or could get the broken one repaired). Using the spare is completely safe.

If you don't have a spare, your sugars would go up over several hours, but you'd have a day or two to get to a hospital and potentially several days after that for someone to find you and get you to a hospital, so it's not safe, but also not something you'd die from if you had any awareness that there was a problem.

If you've got an incorrectly-repaired pump, you could have it fail to give you enough insulin, and end up with higher sugars, notice the higher sugars, and then switch to the spare. That'd be inconvenient, but not a big deal. However, you could also have it dump its entire cartridge into you at once, and have your sugars plummet faster than you can eat. If you don't have someone nearby, you could be dead in a couple of hours, or much less if you were, for example, driving. That's much more dangerous than having no insulin at all.

Prosthetic legs don't have a failure mode that kills you, so a bad repair can't make them worse than not having them at all, but insulin pumps do, so a bad repair could.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 23 points 5 days ago

The article says they were claimed to be found in his car by a then-girlfriend who took $10,000 reward money to testify, not that they were found by law enforcement and collected as evidence and checked against a list of things that were known to have been stolen. It's plausible that nothing was found and the whole story was made up for cash, or that it was just some stuff he'd bought at a yard sale that was misidentified, or something he'd stolen from somewhere else. Someone saying someone had junk in their car isn't strong evidence of anything.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 0 points 5 days ago

Even if the AI bubble pops spectacularly and Microsoft aren't training any new models in two years, Microsoft still have massive datacentres that need to compute loads of things, and loads of things they'd like to compute, but don't because they don't have the capacity, but might end up doing if they're suddenly not training AI models on lots of machines. Having free electricity for twenty years is useful for a tech company with or without AI, and nuclear is a good way to get back on track for being carbon neutral soonish like they were going to be before all the recent AI stuff.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

Nuclear is even less killy than hydroelectric (dams sometimes burst and drown a bunch of people downriver) and wind (sometimes technicians fall off when fixing a turbine) per kilowatt hour, despite the potential for really scary failures, largely because it generates so much power when it's working.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

In real life, all quantum entanglement means is that you can entangle two particles, move them away from each other, and still know that when you measure one, the other will have the opposite value. It's akin to putting a red ball in one box and a blue ball in another, then muddling them up and posting them to two addresses. When opening one box, you instantly know that because you saw a red ball, the other recipient has a blue one or vice versa, but that's it. The extra quantum bit is just that the particles still do quantum things as if they're a maybe-red-maybe-blue superposition until they're measured. That's like having a sniffer dog at the post office that flags half of all things with red paint and a quarter of all things with blue paint as needing to be diverted to the police magically redirect three eighths of each colour instead of different amounts of the two colours. The balls didn't decide which was red and which was blue until the boxes were opened, but the choice always matches.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 47 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The US government asked the big ISPs how much it would take to wire everyone up to high-speed Internet, then passed a bill to give them a ludicrous lump sum to do so (IIRC it was hundreds of billions). The money was split between dividends, buying up other companies, and suing the federal government for attempting to ask for the thing they'd paid for, and in the end, the government gave up. That left loads of people with no high-speed Internet, and the ISPs able to afford to buy out anyone who attempted to provide a better or cheaper service. Years down the line, once someone with silly amounts of money for a pet project and a fleet of rockets appeared, there was an opportunity for them to provide a product to underserved customers who could subsidise the genuinely impossible-to-run-a-cable-to customers.

If the US had nearly-ubiquitous high-speed terrestrial Internet, there wouldn't have been enough demand for high-speed satellite Internet to justify making Starlink. I think this is what the other commenter was alluding to.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

That was basically because you could die from pretending to do it. The challenge was to eat a laundry pod. That's really obviously not safe, but biting a laundry pod and spitting it out after pretending to swallow and die for the camera seemed like a reasonable way to freak people out while skipping the dangerous part to a handful of teenagers. The biting step was the real dangerous one, though, as concentrated laundry detergent can corrode tongues and throats and windpipes really quickly, and you'd lose the capacity to decide what to swallow, what to inhale, and what to hold in your mouth and spit out within seconds. This kills the teenager. The news generally reported this as Teenager dies attempting Tide Pod Challenge instead of Teenager dies attempting to fake Tide Pod Challenge, which didn't tell teenagers it wasn't safe to pretend to do, but did make pretending to do it seem like a better prank, so overall only made it more tempting.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 27 points 2 weeks ago

It also doesn't help that once you've paid the large fee for the Pro version, it doesn't actually guarantee any support if you encounter a bug. You get access to a different issue tracker, and might get a Unity employee to confirm that the bug exists after a couple of months (and maybe close it as a duplicate, then reopen it as not a duplicate when the fix for the other bug doesn't help, then reclose it as a duplicate when it turns out the fix for the other bug also doesn't fix the other bug, and at the end of a multi-month process, there still being a bug with no indication an engineer's looked at it).

Anyway, I'm glad to no longer be working for a company that uses Unity.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 34 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Either:

  • They're in denial that this happens (arguably, it didn't happen, as eventually Tesco lost, and they wouldn't know about it in the three years Tesco was winning because The Telegraph/Mail etc. wouldn't report on that).
  • They think worse things would always happen under other systems (e.g. everyone would be a slave of the state and go to gulag if they complained about anything).
  • They don't see it as an inherent problem with capitalism (e.g. simply make doing this illegal, and refuse to let business lobby to reverse the decision, and everything's fine).
  • They think this is a good thing (e.g. the fired workers will be incentivised to work harder, then earn a payrise, and use the extra 10p an hour to start a competing multibillion pound supermarket chain).
[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Bungalow. I don't think you'll find many in London.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago

It's easy to get pressured into thinking it's your responsibility. There's also the risk that an unhappy company will make a non-copyleft clone of your project, pump resources into it until it's what everyone uses by default, and then add proprietary extensions so no one uses the open-source version anymore, which, if you believe in the ideals of Free Software, is a bad thing.

 

I've got a 3D printed project, and went over it with a couple of airbrushed coats of a 50/50 mix of Tamiya X-35 (their alcohol-based acrylic semi-gloss) and Mr Color Levelling Thinner. As far as I can tell, it looks good so far, but now the room next to the one I sprayed in smells of solvent a few hours later, despite extractor fans running. I knew the lacquer thinner was nasty, so bought a respirator, and haven't been in the room with the model without it (hence only knowing that the next room stinks), but would like to know when I won't need it anymore. The best I've been able to find with Google is the ten-minute touch-dry time, but I'm assuming the VOCs will take longer to be entirely gone.

 

Edit 1: I'm attaching the image again. If there's still no photo, blame Jerboa and not the alcohol I've consumed.

Edit 3: edit 2 is gone. However, an imgur link should now be here!

Edit 4: I promise the photo of some plugs does not contain erotic material (unless you have very specific and abnormal fetishes). I can't find the button to tell that to imgur, though. You can blame that on the alcohol.

Edit 5: s/done/some/g

Edit 6: I regret mentioning the dartboard, which was a safe distance below these sockets, and seems to be distracting people from the fact that one's the wrong way up. I've now replaced the imgur link with a direct upload now I'm back on my desktop the next day.

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