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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t think anyone who ever texted like that is still under 25 anymore. It rapidly dropped off around 2010 as smartphones with full keyboards became widespread, and not using full words was a signal that you hadn’t got one yet. That was fifteen years ago, so to still be under 25, you’d have had to be texting people while aged under ten, and people didn’t give preteens phones back then.


  • There are a fair few troubleshooting things I’ve seen where I could have smugly pointed out a clever way Windows avoids the same problem or an easy way it provides to solve it, so it doesn’t even always need the lol at the end. It’s just an annoying thing to see when you’re already annoyed at a disobedient computer, unless learning the technical details would be an interesting distraction, so should be saved for when you know your audience and know it’s interesting.



  • The article was updated a few hours ago but when it was originally posted and accumulated its first slew of upvotes, the fine hadn’t been rescinded yet and the only statement from the council was that their enforcement officers had acted appropriately and the fine was appropriate.

    Also, in much of the UK, the surface water and foul water drains both go into a single combined sewer system, with areas that have been built up for centuries like this one being most likely to still use that old approach.


  • I’ve seen plenty of news reports say that combined sewers are nearly ubiquitous, but now when I’m googling it, I’m seeing some sites back that up, and other sites saying it’s only about a fifth of the country, so I don’t know which to trust. I can see Ofwat and some of the water companies say that the rules changed (potentially in 1991) so new developments after that point have to use separate sewers, and that wouldn’t be that much of the UK, as most building is redevelopment of existing sites where existing sewers can be reused, rather than new developments, and most things haven’t been rebuilt in the last thirty years, so I’d be surprised if it was 80% separate if it’s only new stuff using it, but less surprised if it’s just the Victorian sewers that are combined (and areas that still use Victorian sewers that have been spilling foul water into waterways) and things have been gradually switched over for more than a century. Do you have a source that explains the incompatible figures?


  • Even if nationalised, our water infrastructure still needs hundreds of billions of pounds investing in it to bring it up to an acceptable standard, and the government doesn’t have the money and has other priorities to spend it on if they magically got a surprise pile of cash. The only financially viable way to fix the problem in a hurry would be to seize past dividends from water company shareholders to cover the cost of doing the things the water companies were supposed to be doing (which would conveniently tank the share prices and make nationalising the water much cheaper), but lots of pensions are propped up mostly by water shares, so doing that would plunge lots of pensioners into poverty, which isn’t politically viable as the government’s already in enough trouble for perceived being mean to pensioners, and they can’t afford to support more impoverished pensioners.


  • It’s only not treated because the UK has a massive problem with not treating sewage. In the UK, storm drains flow into the same sewers as toilets and go to the same waste treatment plants, where everything gets pumped out the same emergency overflow pipe into open water because there are millions more people in the UK than there were fifty years ago, and sewage treatment capacity is virtually unchanged because it’s cheaper to pay the fines for emergency overflow than to build more treatment plants.


  • The UK only has one type of sewer, so the storm drains flow into the same waste processing plants as the toilets. However, those waste processing plants then declare an emergency due to unexpected high volumes and just dump everything into open waterways if it’s rained within the past week, which, as it’s the UK, it almost always has. There are multiple issues at play here, and they’re all dumb and foreseeable if you assume companies will do whatever is most profitable without breaking the law, and none of them are this person’s fault.


  • It’s the UK. It’s a big scandal at the moment that most of the drains lead to rivers, lakes and the sea with only a small fraction of sewage actually being processed before being released from the processing plant. The fines for not processing the sewage were smaller than the costs of building and running treatment plants, so the water companies have just been paying the fines and giving all the money they were paid to build the treatment plants to shareholders as dividends. As no one’s broken any laws they haven’t already nominally been punished for, there aren’t any realistic and politically tenable solutions unless billions of pounds can become magically available.




  • It’s worth bearing in mind that those bar charts on the Nevermore repo are showing the ratio of VOCs rather than the quantity, so make particularly nasty materials like ABS appear comparable to much safer ones like PLA. It’s not going to do you any good if you melt several kilos of PLA in a pan then take the lid off and huff the fumes, but running a single 3D printer with PLA in a large room is going to be pretty safe. The main VOCs emitted by PLA aren’t that harmful - some like acetone and acetaldehyde are produced by the human body and found in food (athough turning alcohol to acetaldehyde is what causes hangovers), methyl methacrylate is used to glue in hip replacements, and isobutanol is often a fermentation byproduct that ends up in alcoholic drinks. That doesn’t mean that PLA fumes are completely harmless, but means that it’s not worth worrying about the level of harm as running a printer in a room with the door open for a whole day is probably somewhere around the level of harm as eating cooked food or having a small beer.


  • Exhaust/intake fans generally aren’t too important - materials like PLA that tolerate the air in the printer being replaced have very low emissions of potentially harmful VOCs and particles, and materials like ABS that emit lots of nasty stuff want the chamber air to stay hot, so having a fan replace the hot air with cold air isn’t great.

    If you do have nasty stuff in the printer chamber that you want to send out a window, then the exhaust fan is the more important one. Unless your chamber is totally sealed, an intake fan is going to increase the chamber pressure and encourage contaminated air to go out any gaps, whereas an exhaust fan makes the pressure lower inside the chamber, so encourages clean air to come in through the gaps, stopping contamination escaping. Obviously, this is only relevant if you’ve got a vent tube or filter on the extractor, as if it’s just extracting into the room, there’s no difference between it extracting the air and it leaking.

    I guess maybe the use case for an intake fan is either if you’ve got a material that wants the coldest air possible, so want to swap the chamber air for outside air as quickly as you can, or if you’ve got the exhaust fan venting into a chamber where you’re filtering the air without letting it cool down much, and the intake draws from that chamber. I don’t think either of these are particularly common situations, though.

    I’ve got a non-max SV08, and I just don’t have an extractor or intake fan on my enclosure, and feed the extractor fan wire to my air filter.


  • Unless you’re a Ferengi or Ayn Rand, a free market shouldn’t allow agents within the market to manipulate each other, as that inhibits trades being done solely based on what gives the best value for the least currency, making the market less free. The regulation here isn’t taking away a choice you want to have as supermarkets that run BOGOF offers just set the unit price to the cost of two units, so your choice is between paying for two things and getting two things or paying for two things and only getting one. Effectively, your choice to just buy one thing at a fair price is taken away by supermarkets, and it’s dressed up to make it look like you’re getting a bargain when you pay a fair price for two things and get two things.

    A parenthood licence is a really common trope in dystopian fiction because it’s fundamentally the most authoritarian thing a state could do short of mind control. If you don’t trust a government to decide whether or not there should be BOGOF offers on crisps, you absolutely shouldn’t trust them to decide who gets to have children. For most of the twentieth century, the British government was actively trying to suppress minority political opinions like it being acceptable for people to be homosexual or anti-pollution. If they’d been deciding what the requirements were to get a parenthood licence, they’d absolutely have made people agree to teach their children that it wasn’t okay to be gay etc…


  • Unless you want to do something dystopian like requiring a parenthood licence before people are allowed to have children and then force them to keep it renewed by attending regular parenthood classes, you can’t force people to receive education on how to be better parents. The state doesn’t have many levers to pull that don’t involve taking people’s children away. Making harmful products less appealing by preventing retailers promoting them is a much better balance of good effect against oppression. The kind of deal being restricted here is something supermarkets do because it manipulates people into buying things they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s not like every time you see a BOGOF sale in a shop it’s because they’re overstocked and are trying to clear things before they go past their sell-by date. If that’s not happening, then the only rational reason for supermarkets to have these deals is to manipulate their customers, and it’s not oppressive for a government to prevent multi-billion pound companies from manipulating its citizens.



  • We’re in a thread that was started by someone complaining that their Windows machine kept waking up seemingly on its own when they put it to sleep, so how wake on LAN behaves for a computer that’s completely shut down was never particularly relevant, and certainly not something to be taken as the only situation we’re discussing. When a computer is asleep, wake on LAN can wake it, and because the OS is still loaded, it doesn’t need to do a full boot before running any wake on LAN handling it has. If wake on LAN is disabled in the motherboard settings, then a computer in a deep sleep like S3 can’t respond to network activity at all.

    Also, I’m not sure where you’ve got the idea that wake on LAN is mainly for fully powered off machines. There’s a reason it’s usually called wake on LAN, not power on by LAN. The ability for a network event to power on a machine from S5 power off is usually a separate setting and isn’t even possible on all hardware that supports wake on LAN.

    I’m also not sure where you got the idea that only the hardware aspect counts as wake on LAN and the OS-side handling for being woken on LAN doesn’t count. Like with many things related to computers, it requires a hardware aspect and a software aspect working together to form a whole system, and in this case, it’s the whole system that’s called wake on LAN.



  • It’s not any packet that’s waking up machines configured to wake on LAN without restricting it to magic packets, it’s any packet addressed to the machine’s MAC. Just like a regular packet when the machine’s fully awake, it’s specific to the network adapter with that MAC, and gets handled by that network adapter. Once it wakes the machine (either to fully on or a sleeping-but-still-doing-things state like S0), the OS starts/resumes and is told why it was started and can choose to access the packet and respond to it. From the perspective of the device on the other end of the wire, it sent a packet to a machine and got the response it expected. It doesn’t have to know whether the machine was fully powered on or whether it woke up to deal with the request before going back to sleep again.

    By default, for most network traffic that partially wakes Windows when the machine has wake on LAN enabled in the UEFI settings, Windows sees it’s been woken by LAN activity, checks the packet, decides it doesn’t care, and goes back to sleep before anyone notices (or remains in S0 sleep if it was in S0 sleep as it wouldn’t need to wake up to deal with the packet). For a few other kinds of LAN activity, it opts to respond to the packet. If you’ve got your UEFI settings set to only wake on magic packets, these won’t make it that far, though. There’s also a Windows setting to force it not to respond to regular non-magic packets and immediately go back to sleep if it’s woken by them.