One day we’ll have one more stupid internet meta-meme like Poe’s law/Murphy’s Law/Hanlon’s Razor/Goodwin’s Law, that says something like “Never assume artificial stupidity is necessary to surpass human stupidity” with a dozen links to pre-LLM word salads it’ll be great

I remember reading up on a boring normal ass corporation that was a descendent of the BEIC or DEIC but I can’t remember what it was. It was one of those super conglomerates that have a finger in a dozen pies.

I first read about these as being under development in a kids’ science magazine in like 2008. I’ve been waiting to see this for a while now, amazing stuff.

I would be shocked if it was over even 1000W at peak, but I suppose it’s over provisioned to deal with the very very brief peak when the compressor kicks on.

We have large fridges here. It’s not the volume that matters when we’re looking at peak draw, it’s the compressor’s power rating. The same compressor can cool both, just at different duty cycles.

FWIW there’s probably a lot more auxiliary power being pulled for things like water dispensers and that kind of thing for your fridges. And of course the Palantir-enabled AI Smart Fridge Miner features. In case any of these pretentious commies eats any food correlated with support for the wrong ethnic cleansing victims.

It’s likely the fridges we buy here are simpler older designs with less fragile components, and stuff that runs on lower power. Most people here are not going for the smart fridges. There are a few inverter fridges on the market, but I prefer going with simpler older designs for what should be obvious reasons.

Welcome back friends. How long was the outage? Felt like a good few days

USian here. My refrigerator expects (and is legally required to have) a dedicated branch circuit of fifteen or twenty amps with nothing else on it.

Does any fridge use 1,800W? Even at peak? A small freeze-dryer? I’m holding off on making cheap jokes at the expense of American cuisine, your fridge might be legally over provisioned for some reason, but it’s not drawing this much power. My entire house idles at about 1.1~1.5A, or about 250~350W, if nothing is running but the absolute essentials. And that’s a relevant number for me, I do solar! I do batteries! Every little bit counts. Fridge is the most important thing to power, and literally everything else comes after.

During the financial meltdown/pandemic people ran their fridges for eight or less hours a day because there was just not enough diesel. That’s the time we decided to splurge on solar. If you want more fun anecdotes, during that time I was waiting in line for 3-4 hours for fuel, and then bribing the attendant more than the value of the fuel to let me fill over 20 liters. Not fun times. And I’m someone who was lucky enough to be able to pay his way through the worst of it.

I’m in Lebanon. I too count my blessings. It’s not culturally mandatory to strand your kids at 18 here, nor culturally accepted to have them dodge bullets at school. So you know. Even at the peak of people being harassed by Hafez’s secret police, people were not getting snatched on the street en masse. I don’t have the mental scaffolding to even begin to grapple with your reality my dear. Using the gas because the microwave is unavailable until tomorrow, temporarily stealing my neighbor’s water, angling for favor with feudal lords’ bureaucrats… Problems yes, but problems I understand.

I hope I’m not being too mean here, the US still fascinates me in a way no other potential new home does, even with everything happening right now. How’s that for perspective.

Where I live most people actually do think of household electricity in terms of instantaneous current draw. The power grid is insufficient, so you get rationed grid power throughout the day depending on what area you live in, with the rest filled in by mob-run local power generators.

You pay a subscription based on the maximum amperage and you have to manage your power use accordingly.

🤓☝️ Um that’s functionally the same as a power limit

Yes, but it’s ampere based because it’s managed by a breaker out on the street, and the ampere limit is colloquially understood. “I’m paying for 5A, the bastard won’t give me more” is a perfectly understandable statement. When I was 7 years old I already understood that “we only have 5 amperes during most of the day” and that it meant the microwave wasn’t available during that time. And since the breaker is out on the street, you learn your limit very quickly, since you have to get dressed and go down a few flights of stairs in the freezing cold to turn it back on. If you have an elevator in your building, it sure as shit isn’t running when the generator power is active.

Annoying when you’re using solar to escape this hell electrical system and everyone has to re-learn to think in terms of Watts/VA. I have a table printed out stuck to the wall to “convert” between amps and Watts at 230V. Do you want to explain to grandma which devices are intuitively at 1kW≈1kVA and which are not? No? Then let her keep using amperes, it’s fine.

Yes, the power generators run off diesel, yes, the diesel fumes and generator noise is a problem, yes, we get price gouged by both the generator mobs and the government grid, yes, I hate dieselpunk and think diesel is the most disgusting fuel. The generators give you a much closer wave to 230@50Hz though, so it has that over the grid. Was solar the most expensive thing we’ve ever paid for? Yes. Does it make me feel like a king with a 24 hour battery-backed microwave? Also yes

I’ve expressed this a few times already on Lemmy to little fanfare to say the least, but I use YouTube a lot. I use it a lot on my phone. I’d use it offline on planes. I want to pay for it. But I’m a yucky VPN user and I’m not even allowed to pay a blanket inflated price for it.

The algorithm is still absolutely amazing for music discovery. I already have channels I automatically yank things via YT-DLG from, but like using the service normally is nice too. I don’t see ads on my computer, but I suspect they might be feeding me extra ads on the phone to compensate. Because if this is the standard ad density for phone users it is vomitingly absurd.

Theoretically the folks you watch get paid from the fee. I don’t hate that system. I’m willing to pay, my payment is ready, I’m willing to pay 5 or 20 or however many bucks for it. But using a VPN to watch YouTube on a paid account can get your account banned. Incredible stuff. This is just about the only media subscription I can see myself using. And they’re cutting off all VPN users like that.

I can sound out horrific guttural Cyrillic text thanks to Geoguessr, but this just looks indecipherable to me. The urge to leap at typical Latin script pronunciation is much harder to stave off for some reason, and half of the glyphs just look completely alien to me.

Language really is a fucking miracle

You could say “I wish their executives loved games as much as their developers and artists” or lament that they’re tied to such a cutthroat corporate machine or something. You do know you can express a more nuanced idea than “FUCK X THING” without kowtowing to some of the most high profile corporate bullshit out there, right

My opinion is more or less that we shouldn’t cut ourselves off from big communities if their theme is not centered on endorsing crimes and if they’re not a community solely for whitewashing them / spreading disinfo.

I think a lot of German speaking users are people who have been exposed to only a narrow view of the world and that they can be valuable allies in the long run. Our instance has been relatively successful at bridging many gaps, I think it would be a shame to defederate entirely.

I’ve seen some questionable takes in places like YUROP but it’s no worse than a large enough .world thread or shjw thread.

My thoughts are unchanged since January. Strikes system for external users promoting imperialism (and the lebensrauming of me, I’m in Lebanon!) on our instance, a special text in German because of how prevalent this issue is among German people. And banning Zionists from signing up to the instance. I’m sure a fellow Arabic speaker could imagine a similar situation for antisemitism. It’s the socialism of fools after all. Surely concern trolling about women’s rights in Gaza is a sort of (subtly imperialist) feminism of fools?

I want the tent to be as big as possible. I want those who excuse these crimes to be exposed to as much common sense as possible. I don’t want them to feel like they have the mainstream opinion anymore.

I’ve had to use Office a lot professionally and I have to say you do get to learn its quirks over time if you’re stubborn enough to figure out what triggers each unexpected behavior. Ironically learning LaTeX really helped me figure out what’s happening internally in Word in some of those situations, just understanding how the breaks and spaces might be stored gives you a little extra insight.

AFAIK you can do something similar to what you’re describing in outline mode but I could be completely misremembering.

All the Office suite is bloated but LibreOffice still feels a long way off.

I thought the Notepad > Wordpad > MS Word progression was pretty much perfect. A zero complication plaintext editor, something with a bit more formatting, and outright typesetting for print.

Granted I use a combination of Notepad++, Obsidian, and haphazard LaTeX venvs now so who am I to talk. I don’t represent most Windows users and especially not the Linux daily drivers. I’d like to think there’s still a lot of people in my situation.

It says a lot that none of the reasons I like Notepad++ were brought into Notepad when they changed it. A copilot button in the place where I write immediate notes and edit batch files? What could possibly be the use case? I just need it to be able to open massive text files and have a decent search UI and that’s it

Not to be all “The safest way to ski is not to go skiing”, but throwing together a meal can be a way to exercise some agency during low days. Even if the food itself isn’t very healthy, the process can be good for you.

I’ll soak some beans overnight and be forced to boil them the next day. The steps are individually low effort and spaced apart (and you can cook beans with zero onions etc if you want) and at the end you can find yourself sitting in front of a hot bowl of good ass beans and feel hey that was good for me.

Hell, beans out of a can and tomato out of a can over rice out of a pouch can feel like you at least did something, you know? Delivery is relatively cheap where I live and getting into a cycle of being dependent on mass produced food really didn’t help me feel like I had a lot of control over what was happening in my life.

I really need to flesh out my thoughts on this at some point. But in the social media age especially you get to see a lot of people who’s entire life defined and like “milestoned” by their consumption and interaction with consumer culture.

Their endorsement of brands is the closest thing they have to patches on a battle vest. Your interactions with the world are literally instances of consumption and therefore it’s possible to be so far gone that you need to list out everything every product and property you’ve ever enjoyed and to qualify them as being perfectly aligned with your “identity”. Identity in quotes because if these people even have any culture they can’t fucking see it and they just know they have to point at things and say they’re theirs. It’s Persona, their conservativecore game™, of course.

Someone in my friend group got basically cooked by Twitter over a few years and left the groupchats recently, but there are so many instances of this. I really remember a lot of like distressingly chuddy Tintin edits?

I have a lot of thoughts on consumption-as-identity-as-consumption. I’ve had to visit Dubai for work a few times and good lord has that given me perspective. So many moving parts. Accessibility is a good thing. Being proud of having everything be accessible is a good thing. A lot more people in wheelchairs out in public than I’m used to seeing in Beirut. But when “everything” is 80% buying shoes and buying hamburgers, what are we facilitating really? If I see more types people being included in public because “public” is 70% air conditioned malls staffed by people who earn peanuts… Am I expected to clap for the open mindedness of “Now even people in wheelchairs can purchase products!” and not ask any more questions? (This is a tangential topic that’s kind of like rainbow capitalism for our region)

I know this might seem unrelated and this is just a late rant but god I fucking hate capitalism and how it sinks its mycelia into culture and taste and fucking everything you could ask to enjoy. I don’t want to look at more people being accepted and immediately assume it’s to make more sales. I don’t want to look at every single cultural or political moment, good or bad, and immediately think of the optics. I don’t want to understand the word “hobby” as “consumption community” anymore. Can we not live in the real world for a second? Fuck!

There are like eight cities in the US that give me hope for you guys.

Not a crazy amount of hope, to be clear. But I like seeing this more than the good old find out half of the imperial boomerang.

I have to find a new home at some point and it’s good that not every single community in one continent has decided to continuously shoot itself in the foot at every opportunity. I’ve got friends who moved to Boston and they say it’s nice. Frankly any place where a house costs eight billion dollars better be nice.

The companies that market machine learning tools to investors and the masses have not been set up by people who believe art has value. Everything is content, and content exists to be aggregated alongside advertisements or displayed for a fee.

I genuinely hate that actual artists can’t use a lot of pretty neat novel digital levers to make stuff. Because it’s synonymous with garbage. The ability to leap across the uncanny valley has lost all novelty and is downright banal now.

But the answer to your question is the same as every desperate attempt at getting a “good” use case for slop generators. It’s for cranking out low effort trash.

As a dedicated fan of walking simulators I can already see the amount of shovelware we need to dig through to find the good stuff multiplying by orders of magnitude.

It’s been a year since I played INFRA and I’ve thought about it without fail at least once a week and it damn well isn’t because they haphazardly made boring environments.

That one minute clip reminds me of how much I miss his weirdly hypnotic voice overs.

Remember seeing this in a book as a kid and not knowing if it was real or not. Must have been a Disney-themed encyclopedia I think.