Yesterday I idly wondered why my (clothes) dryer has heating coils in it, instead of a heat pump based dehumidifier. The same amount of energy would generate the same amount of heat, in addition to extracting water from the air making the clothes dry faster.
Turns out someone patented the idea. Apparently writing down what a non-expert can come up with in two minutes of idle thought is worth a 20 year monopoly idea, and if that makes peoples appliances less efficient, well fuck them and fuck the planet.
The patent expires in 2025, maybe in a few years dryers will get a lot more efficient. Or maybe there is some non-obvious (to me) reason why it isn't a good idea, because someone patenting it doesn't mean it's a good idea, just that they wrote the obvious idea down.
@candyman337 I'm glad to know I'm not totally insane in thinking that a heat pump is a good idea here :)
It doesn't seem obvious to me that it should need to be slower, or that heat-pump needs to be synonymous with ventless. Venting hot moist air to the outside should still make sense...
Today I was struck by how much time young kids spend playing with car and truck toys.
If we want to move towards walkable cities, public transit, and micromobility it may be a good idea to stop indoctrinating people at the age of 1 that cars and trucks are fun.
Of course they're natural shapes for toys. Extremely simple and stable, but slightly more dynamic then a literal wooden block... but it's not like they're the only things with that property.
@deegeese There is a rather large difference between "not pushing things on them unprompted" and "disallowing them from having things they're asking for". 1 year olds in particular aren't asking for any specific kinds of toys.
There is also a rather large difference between advocating for changing something as a society, and doing something just to your own kids that will make them different from other kids.
Pet peeve of the day: Games with "puzzles" that can only be solved by trying a bunch of different plausible answers.
If you know the right answer (but not that it is the right answer), and the reasoning behind the right answer, but you still can't tell that it's the right answer without engaging the games mechanic to check if it's the right answer, it's not a puzzle. It's just a game a brute forcing answers.
I have to say I wasn't a fan of today's Strange New World's episode.
The premise was fine. The acting was good. The dialogue writing was acceptable. But the plot resolution just stank, "the bad guy stops being bad and starts helping out instead, the debilitating condition stops being debilitating in the one character for whom it matters most, and all the terrible things miraculously simultaneously work out just in time for the credits to roll".
It didn't feel like a triumph, it felt like stupidly well coordinated dumb luck.
I suppose they had the ship become disabled to explain why it didn't help out, but the episode would have been better if that part was just cut out. The ship didn't help out because they couldn't see what was happening or something.
Or if you really want the ship to be disabled, the people on the planet find out what is happening, and come save it. Discovering the cause of the symptoms and the locals understanding of how to mitigate them saves the day. Perseverance, diplomacy, "science", not luck.
It wouldn't fix the bad guys sudden change of attitude, but it would be a step in the right direction.
Annoyance of the day: People who refuse to distinguish between "not in MY backyard" and "not in anyones backyard".
Being against something that impacts you, but for the same thing if it only impacts other people, is hypocritical and leads to problematic outcomes in local governance.
Being against things that have huge externalities compared to their benefits, regardless of how close those externalities are to you, is simply good policy.
As a rule, a politician make broad rules against things across a large city, province, or country, is not a nimby, by definition. They are making rules against things that are almost entirely not near them.
Do I understand correctly that for an app to simultaneously be in a window and also have 3D elements in a space that the shared space can’t used for this and a custom space needs to be created? #visionOS
@ishabazz I should really just test this instead of asking the internet, but is there a limit to how big a volume I can make in the shared space? Can I just surround the user with my giant 100^3 cubic meters volume?
@Blakerboy777 In order to keep the service mostly functioning during the huge load spike it was put behind cloudflare with it's anti-ddos protection stuff enabled (that's why you get those "checking security" things when you load pages sometimes).
That stuff also interferes with the endpoints that different activity-pub sites use to talk to eachother, so other site posts/interactions aren't showing up here reliably right now, and the reverse.
I'm pretty sure that the difference is that I'm not embedded in any communities that primarily use reddit and am not a reddit user, but I just think it's interesting that when musk sharply accelerated twitter's multi-year long nose dive, I saw a lot of posts that basically amount to twitter being too big to fail and being salty about migrating -- I haven't seen any of that about reddit so far?
@aeva Twitter was/is a platform where important things™ happen. Politicians run for election to determine how the country is run, and interact with constituents. Companies advertise direction and interact with users. People (from celebrities to journalists to engineers) built brands around themselves that were/are major contributors to their income.
Reddit is just a place to go to shitpost. No one is going to lose an election because it no longer exists. No one is going to worry about bankruptcy. It is basically just 4-chan but respectable.
I'm a pretty heavy reddit user, a very very light user of twitter, and I think losing twitter hurt society a lot more.
(Apologies if I'm repeating points already made, I don't see any of these points made, but I'm not sure kbin is really federating properly considering how much load it is under).