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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Don’t even need that. Meta crosses multiple platforms now - Instagram, FB, WhatsApp, etc. All you need is for someone you know to have you in their contacts list, and the hit the “allow access” a single time. All of that data is then scraped, cataloged, and cross referenced with everyone else. Name, address, phone numbers, birthday, work address - anything your contact felt it convenient to add about you in their phone. From there it’s just a matter of time until data mining of second and third level contact - or outright data leaks - fill in the rest of your profile and demographic information.





  • I think it doesn’t go far enough. Straight up, no one should be permitted to create or transmit the likeness of anyone [prior to, say, 20 years following their death] without their explicit, written permission. Make the fine $1,000,000 or 10% of the offender’s net worth, whichever is greater; same penalty and corporate revocation for any corporation involved. Everyone involved from the prompt writer to the work-for-hire people should be liable for the full penalty. I can’t think of a valid, non-entertainment (parody/humor), reason for non-consensual impersonation - and using it for humor or parody is a slippery slope to propaganda weaponization. There is no baby in this tub of bathwater.


  • Based on videos from one of the major lava-themed entertainment venues who has been posting updates for two months, the “barriers” for Grindavik were barely started, with work only beginning some time after January 4th or 5th. The primary focus of the public work was in building the barriers to protect the regional power plant to the east of the fissures (and hot springs resort area just east and north the power plant). IIRC, those barriers took a month to construct.

    The subsurface dam/inclusion runs pretty much directly under Grindavik, so if an active eruption opens along the southern edge of the magma inclusion there will be no way to prevent damage to those houses adjacent.

    Disc: I’m neither a seismologist nor a volcanologist, but I’ve seen Journey to the Center of the Earth. Oh, and I was in Grindavik in October.


  • Solid fuel for rockets burns relatively slowly at 1 atm and in solid form, much like a flare, though still faster than I would expect you’d want for a hot pot unless these were a hybrid (so no oxidizer in the pellets, just a solid fuel source like modified PVC, with a separate oxidizer like nitrous oxide). The water was replacing the jet fuel, which - assuming it was similar to Jet A - is basically kerosene. Though I’d be worried what modifiers or stabilizers were used for a green flame if I were cooking over it. I’ve made green flames with boric acid and methanol for Halloween decorations (outdoor, of course), but who knows what is causing it in their fuel.





  • My only reason to believe that is not what is happening is that China, and the Chinese, are too smart to using coal as a peaking or emergency source of power. The only thing worse than coal for peaking is nuclear. Oil, Gas, and hydro are all much better for short-to-mid term peaking and batteries - something they’re very good at and have vast resources for - are perfect for short term emergency/failover loads. I believe (without documentation) that they are building extra capacity for the possibility of another expansion - the incubation of so many “third world” economies and partnerships across Asia and Africa to spur demand for their domestic production. If they don’t use it, it was a jobs program; if they find they need it, they will accept short term cash and economic power for a worsening of the world environment. In a way, the largest communist country on earth is also the largest capitalist power. Ironic.



  • his past year, China couldn’t run their hydro at peak capacity because of a drought.

    Well, yes. The simple facts we have are that fossil fuel use is up. What happens next year will be speculation, but what we know is that they are using more coal this year, and they are hedging their future bets by building out their coal generation capacity. So if climate change means a further drop in hydro output, or more cloud cover where they install solar, or they need to make more power than they’re installing because the world wants more steel (I’m in the building industry and steel supply is still a bit tight) - they can start belching out a massive amount of CO2.

    Only time will tell - and I hope you turn out to be the one who is right :-)



  • Yeah, that’s just a shitty (or out of spec) time base. My Seiko watch gains 1-2 minutes a day, but it’s completely mechanical so it depends on temperature and winding/mechanism tension for accuracy. There are electronic timing circuits which are resistance and capacity based, and as the resistance and capacitance of the system drift (time/age and temperature) they also drift. A crystal, made to vibrate at high frequency (piezoelectrically, iirc), will provide a much more stable time base and be accurate to seconds over many days’ time.

    Interesting aside - time keeping is how ships at sea used to determine where they were in the ocean. Latitude can be found from the stars, but longitude can’t so it needs a time reference standard. The book, Longitude tells the story of the search and the competing methods for determining location prior to the invention of crystal/electronic time bases and modern GPS. I won’t say that the storytelling is particularly gripping, but the actual path to discovery is fascinating.



  • That’s probably just fluctuations in the line frequency and the method for keeping time varying between the two (one might use a crystal that drifts). Being on the “wrong” frequency will have it shift by hours every day. I had a (US/60Hz origin) microwave in my apartment in Bonaire (50Hz) last year that never seemed to have the right time, and when I did the math I realized it was the frequency - it was behind by ~4 extra hours every day (50/60 x 24 hours).