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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • People fall off rooftops fitting solar panels, burn to death repairing wind turbines that they can’t climb down fast enough to escape, and dams burst and wash away towns. Renewable energy is much less killy than fossil fuels, but per megawatt hour, it’s comparable to nuclear, despite a few large incidents killing quite a lot of people each. At the moment, over their history, hydro is four times deadlier than nuclear, wind’s a little worse than nuclear, and solar’s a little better. Fission power is actually really safe.

    The article’s talking about fusion power, though. Fission reactions are dangerous because if you’ve got enough fuel to get a reaction at all, you’ve got enough fuel to get a bigger reaction than you want, so you have to control it carefully to avoid making it too hot, which would cause the steam in the reactor to burst out and carry chunks of partially-used fuel with it, which are very deadly. That problem doesn’t exist with fusion. It’s so hard to make the reaction happen in the first place that any problem just makes the reaction stop immediately. If you somehow blew a hole in the side of the reactor, you’d just get some very hot hydrogen and very hot helium, which would be harmless in a few minutes once they’d cooled down. It’s impossible for fusion power, once it’s working, not to be the safest way to generate energy in history because it inherently avoids the big problems with what is already one of the safest ways.


  • That’s misleading in the other direction, though, as PhysX is really two things, a regular boring CPU-side physics library (just like Havok, Jolt and Bullet), and the GPU-accelerated physics library which only does a few things, but does them faster. Most things that use PhysX just use the CPU-side part and won’t notice or care if the GPU changes. A few things use the GPU-accelerated part, but the overwhelming majority of those use it for optional extra features that only work on Nvidia cards, and instead of running the same effects on the CPU if there’s no Nvidia card available, they just skip them, so it’s not the end of the world to leave them disabled on the 5000-series.






  • Cups can be a nightmare in the UK as it’s usually US cups, but sometimes it’s metric cups (which are just 250ml, so an entirely redundant measurement in the first place), and recipes rarely say which, and if you buy measuring cups, they’ll rarely say which type they are, but more commonly be metric ones, despite those being the least likely that a recipe would use.


  • They have to defend their trademark. They don’t have to defend copyright, and most of Nintendo’s reputation comes from copyright claims. Someone streaming a let’s play isn’t selling a counterfeit Mario game, they’re just showing you things in a real Mario game, so there’s no trademark claim.

    They’re also big abusers of the fact that most of the people they make copyright claims against can’t afford to defend themselves against such a behemoth. Even if you’re sure you’ve not violated their copyright and your lawyer’s sure, too, it’ll be much cheaper to roll over than get the legal system to agree with you.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldMeme.
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    3 months ago

    The instance admins and mods of some of the larger communities are self-described Marxist-Leninists, and sometimes delete comments and ban users who make comments and posts that they disagree with. Sometimes the removed comments are what most people, including most communists, would regard as basic statements of fact, like that Stalin wasn’t perfect, that something bad happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, that Ukraine’s Jewish president isn’t a fan of the Nazis, or that Uighurs are not universally having a brilliant time.

    There’s a second issue that when openly Stalinist instances like Lemmygrad (who at least used to explicitly say membership was only open to users who thought Stalin was good in their instance description) were defederated by major instances like lemmy.world, lots of users made new accounts on lemmy.ml to post exactly the same tankie nonsense (typically along the lines of Russia is fighting a defensive war and hasn’t hurt anyone but even if they weren’t, they’d be justified in annexing the whole of Ukraine and killing anyone who objected) as had led to the defederation in the first place.

    Sometimes this leads to people not from .ml to make snap judgements about comments and posts from .ml users, when really it’s just a vocal minority of nutters posting the nonsense and trying to claim that any criticism they receive is just people being brainwashed by nutters in a more neoliberal/neoconservative direction like Reagan and Thatcher.



  • It’s rational to make yourself feel more good. That’s the final outcome of every aspect of self-interest that isn’t solely to remain alive. If the intention is to act solely in the self-interest of an emotionless unfeeling human-shaped robot:

    • it’s very silly as such an entity doesn’t exist and wouldn’t care about its own interests if it did.
    • it’s inconsistent with many other things Rand advocated for that only make someone feel better, but do so through hedonism rather than charity.
    • it’s such a terrible model for real humans that it can’t inform us of what’s good for humans.


  • If this is Cambridge in the UK, both times I reported a bike theft, they confidently told me that they recover and return most stolen bikes. They absolutely do not recover or return most stolen bikes. Bike theft is so rarely sorted out by the police in Cambridge that nearly no one bothers reporting it as everyone knows their bike is gone forever, even if they parked it in good view of a CCTV camera and the frame was engraved with contact details all over.


  • When people use the phrase rational self interest they’re overwhelmingly meaning what Ayn Rand called rational self interest. If you take the words literally, they apply to any political philosophy as no one’s trying to design a system against their own interests. The disagreements come from people disagreeing what their interests are and how they can feasibly have them fulfilled, not because they don’t want their interests fulfilled. No one else bothers using the phrase because it’s obviously the goal and stating that would be entirely redundant, but risk making it sound like you were advocating for something Randian.


  • All of Ayn Rand’s own examples of rational self interest were irrational and against her interests. It’s such an easy philosophy to mock because it’s just really stupid. True rational self interest would involve creating cooperative structures that give a safety net if anything goes wrong just like how it’s rational to get home insurance even if you don’t expect to burn your house down. Anyone drawing Randian conclusions can’t have thought of rational self interest.


  • The trouble with that is that the Soviets had such a large arsenal that even if only a vanishingly small fraction of it still works, it’s still ruining someone’s day. An ICBM with a dodgy guidance system or leaky fuel tank still hits a populated area even if it misses a city. An H-bomb that misfires is still an A-bomb, and an A-bomb that misfires is still a dirty bomb. It’s plausible that NATO could win a nuclear war against Russia without even firing back just from Russia embarrassing itself and giving an excuse for a conventional war they’d also lose, but that’s a huge gamble that no one wants to make, especially when winning is still worse than the status quo.


  • I think the main draw of a moving vat is that you can tilt it during the film-part separation, so it concentrates the peel force in a line that passes over the part instead of having it spread over the whole thing and needing more force which could warp the part or stretch the film. That should mean you can get away with replacing the film less often. If the film isn’t replaced often enough, it can make the print quality worse, or tear and leak resin into the printer where all the LEDs are, which will kill the printer.

    I think all Elegoo’s machines have at least some Chitu guts, and Chitu-free machines tend to make that their main selling point (and also cost a chunk more than equivalent Chitu-based ones).