Of course they contain their own plastic… how am I not surprised…

Honest question: what about cigarette butts makes them not biodegradable, exactly? To my vague understanding of what they’re made of, I know them to be cheifly comprised of paper and extract from dried leaves. Even after considering all the other additive compounds in cigs added for taste and effect, I can’t picture a lot of it by mass being forever chemicals like plastics.

That asked, I’m not convinced littering is acceptable even for biodegradable things. Far from all “biodegradable” materials completely disintegrate on a short timescale. Even IF cigarette butts degrade like plain paper and dry leaves, they wouldn’t do it quickly. If it’s a place where even a single smoker haunts multiple times a week, smoking and discarding multiple cigs at a time, they can pile up faster than they disappear.

And that’s not even considering all the toxins that would leech out from the things that will remain at elevated levels for as long as the littering continued.

It’s not clear at all, no.

Is this proposal patently ridiculous? Yes. Do I believe there’s at least one legislator in Mississippi who unironically believes in this bill exactly as written, and is playing this completely straight? Considering all that’s happened so far, why not?

Satire doesn’t work when the obvious hyperbolic nonsense is within actual expected behavior of the satirized.

I won’t claim one way or the other that this is or is not satire. I don’t know who this legislator is and I don’t really care. But no, with the whole article you’re pasting everywhere in this thread as my only context clue, I certainly didn’t find enough evidence to be convinced he doesn’t actually believe this.

In the specific case the “boss” happens to be a timer, this is a more or less accurate description of speedrunning.

Worse still, the pattern does not continue like one would expect.

• Nominal: 2x4 – Actual: 1.5" x 3.5"
• Nominal: 2x6 – Actual: 1.5" x 5.5"
• Nominal: 2x8 – Actual: 1.5" x 7.25"
• Nominal: 2x10 – Actual: 1.5" x 9.25"
• Nominal: 2x12 – Actual: 1.5" x 11.25"

There’s just an arbitrary point where they decided to take an extra 1/4" bite out of it. I’m not sure whether that’s more of an effect of shrinkage from kiln drying being proportional to the original length or an effect of industry practice to mill smaller boards to eke out more cuts per tree.

And for the record, yes, I am aware the discrepancy is not entirely explained by shrinkage. They do a planing step after drying. But the shrinkage is a not insignificant part of it. They have to round down to the nearest convenient dimension from wherever the shrinkage stops.

If longer boards shrink more, the finished boards would necessarily have to be smaller. I question whether that’s the effect at play, though, because I believe there was a phase in the industry where that extra quarter inch wasn’t taken off, and they changed their minds about it later.

Why bother reading a curated set of interest-focused articles written by professionals when you can drink straight from the firehose of relentless negativity that is social media, right?

It’s bad for me, but not for that reason.

It’s bad for me because I piss a whole hour or two of my morning away doomscrolling. That makes me late to work. So I end up staying later to make up lost time, I get home late, and then I wonder why I have no time at the end of the day to do anything…

I’m doing it right now, in fact. I will stop.

I’ve yet to see any open lemm.ee prejudice anywhere. AFAIK it’s the largest completely inoffensive instance and that’s exactly what I was looking for.

I got a 1U rack server for free from a local business that was upgrading their entire fleet. Would’ve been e-waste otherwise, so they were happy to dump it off on me. I was excited to experiment with it.

Until I got it home and found out it was as loud as a vacuum cleaner with all those fans. Oh, god no…

I was living with my parents at the time, and they had a basement I could stick it in where its noise pollution was minimal. I mounted it up to a LackRack.

Since moving out to a 1 bedroom apartment, I haven’t booted it. It’s just a 70 pound coffee table now. :/

can you burn a Luigi board?

perhaps they should just lay square eggs

I assume the reflowing solder in the oven trick doesn’t reliably work anymore in the era of the high temp solders that are common in laptop manufacturing these days. Bringing the whole board up to flow temp in something as crude as a home oven is almost certainly going to fuck something else on the board.

I recall trying to do a laptop repair with dinky little soldering iron I got at the hardware store and it could not melt a single thing on the board I touched it to. Definitely not a faulty iron because I used it to successfully solder other things. This was at least five years ago. If that little toy couldn’t do it, then the entire board would need to exceed that temp in an oven, which is probably a bad idea since the iron was still managing to visibly scorch things despite not melting any solder.

Invest in a proper heat gun and learn how to use it, or just give up and give it to someone else who has one, imo.

What is “holiday” on this list for?

There’s lots of software out there that is available to use without payment, but is still license restricted in such a way that you are not permitted to redistribute, modify, use for commercial purposes, etc. To many, these rights are the far more important facet of “free” software, above what it costs.

But since the English language has the same word for all of these concepts, we have all these yucks running around with zero-cost but right-restricted software wearing the “FOSS” badge thinking they’re part of the club. So some people add “Libre” to the acronym to explicitly disambiguate.

I mean, if your goal is to keep the meat experience, then yeah, I get your point.

I think that was indeed very obviously the point. The point of both the comment you were replying to and this lab grown meat idea as a whole.

I’m fuzzy on the deeper details. I think you can do something like this, but you have to be very careful, in ways where you don’t have to be so careful with ✓-1.

One of the more obvious ways to consider: plot a graph of y = 1 / x. Note how as x approaches zero from the right, the graph shoots up, asymptotically approaching the y-axis and shooting up to infinity. It’s very tempting to say that 1 / 0 is “infinity”. “Infinity” is not a real number, but nothing is stopping you from defining a new kind of number to represent this singularity if you want to. But at that point you have left the real numbers. Which is fine, right? Complex numbers aren’t real numbers either, after all…

But look at the left side of the graph. You have the same behavior, but the graph shoots down, not up. It suggests that the limit of approaching from the left is “negative infinity”. Quite literally the furthest possible imaginable thing from the “infinity” we had to define for the right side. But this is supposed to be the same value, at x = 0. Just by approaching it from different directions, we don’t just get two different answers, we get perhaps the most different answers possible.

I think it’s not hard to intuit a handwavey answer that this simply represents the curve of y = 1 / x “wrapping around through infinity” or some notion like that. Sure, perhaps that is what’s going on. But dancing around a singularity like that mathematically isn’t simple. The very nature of mathematical singularities is to give you nonsensical results. Generally, having them at all tends to be a sign that you have the wrong model for something.

You can mostly avoid this problem by snipping off the entire left half of the x-axis. Shrink your input domain to only non-negative numbers. Then, I believe, you can just slap “infinity” on it and run with it and be mostly fine. But that’s a condition you have to be upfront about. This becomes a special case solution, not a generalized one.

I haven’t looked into it, but I believe this singularity gets even more unweildy if you try to extend it to complex numbers. All the while, complex numbers “just work”. You don’t need doctor’s gloves to handle them. √-1 isn’t a mathematical singularity, it’s a thing with an answer, the answer just isn’t a real number.

This is a question I see from time to time, and it’s a good question to ask.

Your question as I understand it can be phrased another way as:

The square root of -1 has no defined answer. So we put a mask on it and pretend that’s the answer. We do math with the masked number and suddenly everything is fine now. Why can’t we do the same thing to division by zero?

The difference is that, if you try to put a funny mask on the square root of -1 and treat it like a number, nothing breaks, but if you try the same thing with a division by zero, all sorts of things break.

If you define i = √-1, that is the only thing i can ever be. That specific quantity. You can factor it out of stuff, raise it to that exponent, whatever. And if it is ever convenient to do so, you can always unmask it back into that thing, e.g. i^2 = (√-1)^2 = -1. All the while, all the already existing rules of math stay true.

A division by zero isn’t like this, because if you tried it, every number divided by zero would equal to the same thing. If we give it a name, say, 1 / 0 = z, then it would also be true that 2 / 0 = z. We could then solve both sides for zero:

1 / z = 0

2 / z = 0

then set them equal:

1 / z = 2 / z

then multiply both sides by z:

1 = 2

which is a contradiction.

i doesn’t have this problem.

Does it even count if you’re advertising on your own platform? If I’m able to see the “ads” in the first place, I’m already using it.

I also wouldn’t exactly call a donation drive “advertising” either. They’re not trying to onboard more users to the service, they’re nagging people who already use the service to give them money. Which is itself leaning a bit on the wall of what is and isn’t “free”.

remilia :)

koishi :)