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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Penn and Teller do a bit with a nail gun where Penn does a monologue about how they are magicians so there is obviously a trick, and that’s the point - they want the audience to come along and enjoy the show and watch them do things that seem dangerous, while knowing that even if something goes wrong they aren’t going to be complicit in someone getting hurt or killed by encouraging them to take those risks.

    Idk, not really relevant to what you said, but I think about that a lot







  • No.

    But…

    The adage that “the dose makes the poison” is working in your favor here. A large city supply delivers millions of liters of water per day; by the time you dilute your poison into millions of liters of water you’ll either be adding absurd amounts of poison (someone is going to notice massive line of tanker trucks queued up outside the treatment plant), or you are dealing with large - but not unweildly - volumes of something so horrendously toxic that it’s still deadly when diluted that much. There are very few substances that toxic, and someone is going to notice if you start procuring hundreds of liters of botulism toxin or Vx because at that point you are dealing with outlawed chemical warfare agents










  • It does, but it’s super dangerous to do unless you have it wired up properly. Proper installations will use a special connector so you can’t plug anything else into that receptical, and will have it interlocked against the main breaker - you can’t plug anything in without disconnecting from the grid. The dangers of doing it amateur-hour are:

    • You now have a cable that you can unplug and have live ends exposed - which if you don’t realize is connected to an active generator is super dangerous, and even if you do one slip and you are now the ground conductor
    • If you connect the generator while still connected to the grid, your generator is almost certainly going to be out of phase. This will probably cause damage to your generator and anything else plugged in at the time
    • If you don’t have an interlock and run the generator while connected to the grid (say during a power outage) you will be back-feeding power into the grid. This is super dangerous for anyone coming to fix the outage, as things that they’ve isolated to fix can still end up being live

    Note that this interlock is also required if you have solar - although it’s usually in the form of an automatic breaker that will disconnect and put the circuit into “island mode” if it detects a loss of grid supply


  • Not quite an idiom, but one of the senior managers at work keeps talking about Moore’s Law in the context of AI stuff like it’s some kind of fundamental law of the universe that any given technology will double in capability every 2 years

    1. Moore observed that transistor density in microprocessors had historically been doubling every 18 months, and this trend more or less continued for a decade or so after he noted it
    2. Density has nothing to do with the capability of technology that uses those microprocessors. The performance of the chips roughly doubled every couple of years, but there was a lot more going on with that than just transistor density
    3. Moore’s law hasn’t held for at least the last decade