Thrashy

Thrashy, 6 hours ago

I can’t wait for Cold War 2: Thermonuclear Boogaloo.

Thrashy, 2 days ago

On the one hand, I agree with you that the expected lifespan of current OLED tech doesn’t align with my expectation of monitor life… But on the other hand, I tend to use my monitors until the backlight gives out or some layer or other in the panel stackup shits the bed, and I haven’t yet had an LCD make it past the decade mark.

In my opinion OLED is just fine for phone displays and TVs, which aren’t expected to be lit 24/7 and don’t have lots of fixed UI elements. Between my WFH job and hobby use, though, my PC screens are on about 10 hours a day on average, with the screen displaying one of a handful of programs with fixed, high contrast user interfaces. That’s gonna put an OLED panel through the wringer in quite a bit less time than I have become used to using my LCDs, and that’s not acceptable to me.

Thrashy, 3 days ago

Unfortunately, recent Supreme Court rulings would seem to put the kibosh on my “the Confederacy is coming from inside the house” theory of outlawing the GOP as a whole for seditious conspiracy.

Thrashy, 4 days ago

Through the course of my career I’ve somehow lost office space as I’ve ascended the corporate food chain. I had a private office/technician room in my first job out, then had an eight foot cubicle with high walls, then a six foot cubicle with low dividers, and then the pandemic hit. The operations guy at the last place was making noises about a benching arrangement after RTO, like people were going to put up with being elbow to elbow with Chris The Conference Call Yeller and Brenda The Lip Smacking Snacker while Team Loudly Debates Marvel Movie Trivia is yammering away the next row over.

Hell, if it meant getting a space to myself with enough privacy to hear my own thoughts I might consider giving up my current WFH gig. But everybody’s obsessed with building awful office hellscapes and I don’t have the constitution to put up with that kind of environment.

Thrashy, 5 days ago

Inland is (or was, at least) relabeled eSun filament, and they’re considered a decent brand for basic filaments. I’ve only ever used their PLA(+) but it’s always been bulletproof.

Thrashy, 5 days ago

I used to have a coworker whose daughter was in competitive cheer. It’s like any youth competition – the parents can lose their goddamn minds over it. If there was a chance somebody could DQ a competing team, or perhaps open up a spot on a team by narcing on one of the current members, somebody is gonna do it.

Thrashy, 6 days ago

I mean, at this point an “ideal” solution (such as it is) would be for the US to stop stonewalling UN Security Council resolutions so that the other members can greenlight a peacekeeping operation a la Kosovo, that would stop the fighting, open up aid flows, and create an avenue for effective enforcement of the 1948 treaty boundaries on the way towards implementing a functional two-state solution. But that seems pretty unlikely right now.

Thrashy, 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

They’re flying these in very low and slow, which is hard for SAM radars to detect and lock on to unless you’re right up next to them – and once they’re past the front lines Russia doesn’t have many (if any) point defense installations.

In fact I imagine that the economic impacts of these attacks may be a secondary goal, and the main intent is actually to force Russia to pull SAM systems off the front line and redeploy them across the Russian interior to defend facilities they thought were safely out of Ukraine’s reach. The fewer defenses on the front line, the more capable Ukraine’s air force is to support efforts on the ground.

Thrashy, 7 days ago

Well, that’ll happen if you don’t take your Neuropozyne. Their test subject should have budgeted for that before getting augmented.

Thrashy, 7 days ago

I tried using ChatGPT to distill my LinkedIn profile down to a summary paragraph for a marketing resume (what gets included with a RFQ response when a design or engineering form is pursuing a project) and everything it spat out was worse than what I had already written and wasn’t happy with. Ultimately I lifted a phrase or two from ChatGPT’s output, but it didn’t do much to save me time or improve the quality of my copy.

Thrashy, 7 days ago

Given that hunting is a very common pastime in the US, and that hunting rifles are statistically the firearms least likely to be used in a homicide, I think you’d find that information to be a pretty useless outlier, on the level of asking about bow or fencing foil ownership.

Thrashy, 7 days ago

Here’s a direct link to the study. Of note is that there wasn’t a significant trend in detected levels by year (odd, since you’d expect the amount off-gassed to decline over time), but that electric cars in the study had ~10 times lower levels of the chemicals being studied. The authors note that this may be more an effect of vehicle brand since most of the electric cars in the study were from one unnamed manufacturer (probably Tesla?) but it suggests that even within the current regulations there are ways to reduce exposure.

I’d like to see the scatter plot for detected levels by year of manufacture, and maybe it’d be good to extend the study’s coverage of vehicle age a bit further, because the lack of a noticeable trend doesn’t jive with my intuitive sense of what ought to be happening. That said, it’s a reasonably solid study, I think.

Thrashy, 7 days ago

As fun as it is to dunk on Elmo I think we both know it’s not the seat foam that’s the problem there. 😅

I’m actually right now in the process of developing design criteria for a battery testing lab, and as part of that I had to do a hazardous materials analysis. Lithium as it is in batteries is considered a water-reactive chemical, and the code only allows you to have ten pounds of it in a building before you’re pushed into a special hazardous occupancy type with lots of extra fire and explosion precautions required. I ran the numbers and figured out that’s about 8000 of your typical cylindrical cells – which is right about the number of cells in a Model S. And in a Model S, you’re just kinda… sittin’ on 'em. Fun thought…

Thrashy, 7 days ago

Right, it’s the weight of lithium inside batteries, not the weight of the batteries overall. I think the biggest laptop batteries I’ve seen had something like 6 16850 cells, and you’d need north of 1,300 of those laptop batteries in a building before it crossed a threshold for hazardous materials.

Thrashy, 7 days ago

I should clarify that the actual language in the building code is per control area rather than per building, and in most cases a control area only covers a single floor (and in some cases not even that, if there’s a sufficient fire separation between tenants sharing a building floor). I think that the amount of lithium batteries in laptops and mobile devices is a bit of a blind spot in code enforcement these days, but from a practical standpoint it’s not likely that a typical office is going to cross the threshold into hazardous-occupancy territory.

Thrashy, 7 days ago

Don’t look at the pile of old phones and laptop batteries that’s been sitting in the trunk of my car for the last month. I tried to get rid of them at a community hazardous waste event, but the computer recyclers didn’t show, and they’re just gathering dust at the moment…

Thrashy, 8 days ago

Look bud, just because I’ve used my access to the metaverse and godlike supernatural powers to create more cookies per second than there were previously atoms in the known universe doesn’t mean you can just have some of them. They’remy cookies, I made them, they’re for me.

Well, me and Krumblor, my pet cookie dragon.

Thrashy, 12 days ago

I highly recommend the Kill James Bond episodes on Charlie’s Angels which break down just how much of each movie is basically just (executive producer) Drew Barrymore perving on her co-stars.

Thrashy, 13 days ago

This is the guy who couldn’t even be bothered to spell his own name correctly, after all. I don’t get the sense that he’s going over anything with a fine-toothed comb on the best of days.

Thrashy, 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago)

Looks like the stroke was a complication from a systemic MRSA infection, which would not be my assassination agent of choice if I was trying to kill somebody on purpose, even if I did want it to look like an accident. MRSA only kills about 1 in 4 people infected with it, and many of those are people who are already hospitalized for some other serious illness. It strikes me as a rather low-probability way to kill a healthy adult.

Thrashy, 14 days ago

I don’t like that Russia is using the ZNPP as more-or-less a dirty bomb threat against Europe, but at the end of the day the VVER-1000 reactors there are relatively modern GenIII pressurized water reactors. An intentional or accidental meltdown there would not create a Chernobyl-like event. It’d probably end up being more like Fukushima, which if I remember correctly lead to a couple orders of magnitude more deaths due to the stress of evacuation than it’s anticipated to create from radiation exposure.

Bottom line, when you’re talking about reactors that aren’t pants-on-head stupid designs like the RBMK the actual health risk of radiation exposure due to accident is lower than the health risks of most other forms of power, including some non-fossil-fuel alternatives. Long term storage of spent fuel is another issue, but one that’s reasonably solvable as long as we treat fission as a transitional base load power source as other alternatives like storage and/or fusion power become more viable.

Thrashy, 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago)

In fairness, several others in the room died years-to-decades later of leukemias that were arguably attributable to their exposures. That said, the Slotin criticality accident is one of those cases where nuclear disasters end up being both completely horrifying and a lot less deadly than you think they ought to be.

Thrashy, 14 days ago

MASH also had a Black character in the first season whose nickname was “Spearchucker Jones,” which is supposedly justified by him being a former javelin athlete (which strikes me as coming from the “Quiet has to be dressed in clubwear while doing Serious Military Stuff because she breathes through her skin!” school of poorly-justified writing choices). It also suffers from the conceit of Hawkeye being simultaneously the moral center of the show, and a shameless womanizer whose conquests only exist in the context of the show for as long as it takes him to bed them.

I love MASH for what it is, but there are aspects of it that are clearly of its era, which we wouldn’t repeat in modern television. I think you can either accept that society has moved on from where it was in the 70s and 80s, or you can be like Seinfeld and be mad that you’re no longer allowed to play sexism and racism for laughs with the perpetrator framed as the good guy.

Thrashy, 14 days ago

My wife once asked me with a straight face if I had any “football cosplay shirts” and while it took me a minute to figure out what she meant, I couldn’t argue with her terminology.

Thrashy, 16 days ago

It’s all Broadwell Xeons. Sure, there’s 8000 of 'em, but after you factor in purchase price, moving and storage costs, time spent parting out nodes, shipping costs, etc… I think you’d have a hard time breaking even, and for an end user you can get like 4x the FLOPS per socket at half the power consumption with current server CPUs.