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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • RegalPotoo@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldForbidden Tech
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    22 days ago

    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



  • At a guess:

    • People with steam accounts and VPNs in countries that steam doesn’t operate in. Steam will block your “foreign” credit card as a fraud risk, but eBay dgaf cos it’s the sellers problem if they get ripped off
    • This is probably a pretty convenient way to send small amounts of money to people in a way that looks pretty legit. Arrange to buy some drugs off someone over telegram, they get you to buy a “steam card” from them, they send an envelope with a blank bit of cardboard and the drugs



  • Beyond just being able to draw a bow, being able to draw it well enough to have a chance of shooting at all repeatably takes a lot of training - it’s not just lifting a 50+lb weight, pulling it towards you with one and and pushing it away with the other while keeping your arms stable requires a lot of strength in muscles the people don’t tend to use.

    Source: former colleague is an international competition level archer - the sheer amount of core strength and coordination and balance you need to be a good archer is wild





  • Many years ago, the university I studied at did some construction work in the chemistry department, which included rerouting the supply lines from the big oxygen and LPG tanks so they could reach the new lab they were building.

    Turns out the contractor was either an idiot or misread the plans, and ended up running the pipes straight through one of the fire-resistant walls designed to compartmentalize the building so fires can’t spread as easily - a hole in one is a Big Deal on its own, but then running pipes full of accelerant through it essentially voided the buildings safety certificate and insurance, and ment that if there was a fire, the main evacuation path would have been a deathtrap.

    I don’t know what happened to the contractor, but labs were closed for a few weeks while they purged the lines of gas, removed the badly installed lines and repaired the wall



    • https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter?tab=readme-ov-file#textfile-collector - which makes node exporter watch a specific directory for files that contain metrics, then re-export them back to the central Prometheus server
    • Some systems have their own metrics endpoints - instead of getting Prometheus to scrape these directly I set up a Cron job to curl these into files for node exporter - this means I don’t need extra config in Prometheus to find the endpoints, and don’t need to mess with firewall rules
    • Other systems don’t directly expose metrics in a format Prometheus can use - in this case I will write/find a script that can do the conversation, then either set it up to write the metrics file directly and run it on a Cron, or run it as a service and another Cron job to do the scrape