awalton

I get that it's fun to try to "big time" me with physical explanations for simple phenomenons that anyone who actually owns a kettle can explain, but it's very simple: the filter isn't there to provide any kind of softening. It's there to keep chunks of limescale from falling out of the kettle when you pour the water.

Yep, that's the big mystery you couldn't solve in 30 sentences. It's a strainer.

If you have hard water, you'd know just how silly that question is. Everyone descales their kettles at some point, but we don't want to do it every other day. That's too much effort for making coffee or tea. The filter is there to extend the amount of time you can go between descaling to reasonable timescales.

I went on a similar kettle-quest a while ago and wound up accepting the disco-ball LED enhanced model because it was cheap and did the job (and mine doesn't beep - that would have immediately sent it back). I still think about going with the fancier one with a temp control for that perfect cup, but just waiting a minute for the water to come off the boil is fine enough for me.

Except, in this case, we have a society where one side is spreading very deliberate, demonstrable, objective lies, and then saying the other side is lying as a method of trying to shut down reality-based conversation. We're reaching a point where some people in our society are so poorly informed that they literally cannot make decisions that will save their lives - people are actually dying because of disinformation about injecting bleach or taking chloroquine as a cure for COVID19.

We're not facing a war on "well, my opinion is that increasing minimum wage will harm businesses," or "my opinion is that we are not doing enough for workers' rights in Silicon Valley." We're okay arguing about those points, because there's actual facts either way and it's largely political. These are dissenting opinions, and they're fine to have in a society. It's healthy even to have those discussions in a moderated community setting where conversation doesn't devolve into personal insult.

But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about disinformation. The war on disinformation that we are facing is on complete and total bullshit: "Anderson Cooper drinks the blood of children and eats babies" - a real QAnon conspiracy. This isn't "dissent" - it's a bald faced lie told in attempt to discredit a journalist. "But you can't prove he doesn't eat babies!" is all the evidence they need - they want to believe it, their 'thought leaders' tell them to, and so they do.

The fact that we can't even get some of these people on the same page about what disinformation actually is just shows you how far down the path these people are. That's how articles like this one get written. We can't even talk about "dissent" because people are too busy trying to tell us lies about facts, and distorting the very definition of disinformation to allow space for their lies. How long are you going to stay in a conversation with someone trying to sell you the sky is polka dotted purple and pink, when you can look up at the blue sky yourself? How long should you bother with them?

Craig Mazin asked us a very simple question in Chernobyl: "What is the cost of lies?" At least five people died because of a große Lüge told about the US election - pure propaganda, a lie so big and grotesque that only 'true believers' could accept it. Thousands are dead because of lies repeatedly told about COVID-19. It's hard to even measure how many people would be alive today if the lies about climate change had been stopped earlier. And they will not be the last, not as long as we keep "both siding" and acceding to dissent on objective fact.

> Is there anything that can be done that would satisfy all regulations?

We could go back to having advertisements be relevant to the content audience instead of the specific viewer and end stalkerware for good.

Crazy talk, I know...

Ross's lymphoma was thought to have been caused by dichloromethane exposure from his odorless paint thinner (and him 'beating the devil' out of his brushes aerosolizing it).

It's now banned in paint thinners as a result of some pretty long lobbying efforts. It's a little sad, since chemicals like DCM are hard to replace, but if it saves the lives of our artists at the expense of them having a bit of a harder time cleaning their brushes, maybe we can live with that.

Its oral LD50 was tested to be more than 5000mg/kg according to Shepherd Color Company's MSDS for Blue 10G513 (as it is known commercially). That's well into "non-toxic" as categorized by the EPA. For perspective, that's more than ten times less toxic than caffeine.

So, probably pretty safe when used appropriately. I wouldn't go inhaling it, since any fine powder's not great for the lungs, but that shouldn't be news to anyone. Just wear your N95 when mixing dry pigments as you always should.

'Hecka-' sounds like the giggle-unit version of the 'Hella-'. So let's propose a heckabyte is 1024 yobibytes.

And they released the documentation for the hardware so you can feel free to join in and make the drivers better any time you like.

Which is about all we can ask of companies doing open source work. And it's still vastly more than most are doing.

There's at least 3 different manufacturers that make these things. There's absolutely no reason to point out ChromeCast over Roku or Amazon's FireStick, e.g.

It's going to be ridiculously annoying once the security professionals start finding exploits for smart TVs and have them worming around the internet - the vendors will be glacially slow to respond, if they do at all. It's going to take an act of market regulation to make them even try to patch old tvs and ensure basic functionality of disconnected tvs. Especially if this aggressive autodiscovery and autojoin stuff ever proves out, and/or they take the logical next step of throwing in a low speed cellular modem like auto manufacturers have.

We're going completely backwards by introducing cruftware into tvs that will be thrown away by the vendor in a year or two - however long it takes for a warranty on that batch to run out. Whatever it takes to sell the next TV at Black Friday I guess.

And then Tillis' (Disney) Historical Preservation Copyright Act of 2023 will make sure we won't see that in our lifetimes.

(But seriously, just look at the absolute absurdity that Tillis is trying to push through right now as an example of how broken and backward copyright in this country is. If the companies keep getting their way, there will never be a such thing as a public domain going forward.)

It feels a hell of a lot like the multimillion dollar pen vs the pencil myth - it costs them maybe $20K to send six months worth of clothes to the ISS per astronaut on a Dragon 2. The ISS-rated dry cleaning machine would cost at the very least a million dollars to develop, would still require sending ten grand of fresh solvent every so often (maybe once a year?) and would add new fire/explosion safety concerns, which they can and do put a price tag on. It would probably take longer than the life of the station for the ISS dry cleaning machine to pay itself off.

It's just too easy to not bother. For a moon colony or a Mars base, the economics change, but for near earth orbit it just doesn't make sense.

I'm old enough to remember when reCAPTCHA was first introduced to help with deciphering text from OCR'd books. At that time, it didn't feel so bad answering those, as we were using our intelligence to genuinely help preserve our cultural history.

It then switched to being numbers on buildings and street signs, and it immediately felt worse - we were now doing a job for Google, and an annoying one. Mechanical Turk from Amazon was invented to do this kind of chore.

It's now creating training datasets for whatever else Google wants them to - it appears to mostly be for self-driving cars now, to identify landmarks and road signs.

It's definitely not on autopilot, and it's definitely a real problem.

They get paid from whatever service you bought your music from - be it from CDs, MP3 sites like Amazon or Google Play (RIP), etc.

Scary thought, being able to purchase music these days rather than a streaming service lease, I know...

New users do find it to be a dungeon that's hard to escape from.

The jokes on this one write themselves.