I think you’re confusing e85 with 85 octane gas

E85 is 85% ethanol, 15% gas (and e15 is the other way around)

Octane rating is a measure of how much you can compress a fuel before it ignites by itself. Higher octane gas is more resistant to that. (And e85 actually has a pretty high octane rating, usually somewhere north of 100. Regular gas often contains up to 10% ethanol, in part because it boosts the octane rating)

To expand on that a bit, if you compress gas enough, at a certain point it just catches fire on its own. This is actually a big part of how diesel engines work. Diesel is actually pretty hard to ignite, in some cases you can even put out small fires by pouring diesel on it (don’t try this at home) so they rely on getting high enough compression in order to work.

Gasoline is a lot more flammable though, you don’t really need to compress it at all for it to burn. Sure, ideally you probably want a certain compression ratio because something something stoichiometry but gas is more forgiving in that regard. As long as your air-fuel mixture is about right, it’s gonna burn when your spark plug goes off.

In fact, gas is maybe a little too forgiving, if your octane rating is too low and your engine compression is too high (mostly a problem with higher-performance engines) that gas can just kind of go off too early before the spark plug goes off, which causes “engine knock” which will cause damage.

But the other way around, high octane in a lower compression engine, basically does nothing spectacular. It still goes boom when the spark plug goes off and not until then.

The real shame is that the coffee table isn’t really visible because it’s pretty cool itself, it’s a hatch from a ship (I believe a WWII Liberty ship)

Bit of family history with it too. My dad originally had it, but my mom hated it, so eventually it went to live with my grandfather. He died, and it ended up back in our basement. My sister and I both really liked it, and we had a bit of an agreement that whoever moved out first got the table, and I won.

EDIT: Also for anyone else who likes my setup, the entertainment center and shelves in the wall are IKEA Fjallbo, no pretty affordable. The shelf of the far right is just an IKEA Kallax.
And I have the TV synced up to Phillips hue lights behind it and in the ceiling

I’m not totally sure where the bottles came from, we don’t really drink chianti, and they’ve just kind of been hanging around on a shelf somewhere, but they ultimately ended up on this chandelier

I started reading it just before COVID hit. My reading habits are very sporadic, sometimes I’ll devour a book in a day, other times I’ll read a chapter or two once a week and it takes me months to finish a book. This happened to be one of the later cases

It was really good, but holy shit that was not the book to be reading when people were getting into fights over toilet paper.

So I did not finish it, I intend to eventually, but it had to go on the back burner.

Everything about it just kind of oozed bleak hopelessness. I’ve caught myself starting to say I enjoyed it, but “enjoyed” is really the wrong word, there is no joy to be found in that book, perhaps you appreciate it, maybe you feel it, maybe you just read it and acknowledge that it’s a good book.

I find it pretty weird that you’re obsessing over this so much and have posted about it several times tonight.

Yeah, it’s a bit strange, and it warrants investigation, and as the article says it is being investigated.

But also as someone who has spent a lot of time around water fishing, boating, swimming, etc. there are a whole lot of ways you can get yourself in trouble in or in the water, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that it was just plain bad luck.

My friend got an ouya, I think he mostly got it as a bit of a curiosity since he was a game dev student (and now does it professionally)

It absolutely didn’t do anything particularly different or better than any other gadget we could have hooked up to the TV to game on, but we did have a lot of fun with it for a while. It was kind of nice that it was so small so he could carry it around easily if he wanted to take it somewhere for a party or something.

And a few of the games we first discovered on the ouya are still mainstays of our parties when we manage to get together as busy adults.

Through a series of moves, roommate swaps, and marriage, that ouya (though not the controller) has actually now ended up in my possession

It’s on the left with my small collection of retro consoles and handhelds. Couple other cool bits of geeky paraphernalia scattered in there too. Disregard the mess on the coffee table and such, this was taken in the middle of some renovations, turns out I don’t take many pictures of my entertainment center.

I keep a fake Facebook profile around because some businesses and such don’t have any online preference besides their Facebook page so if I want to know about deals and events they’re running that’s the only place I can find them

I do admit that I occasionally get sucked into scrolling through the feed, but especially over the last few months it’s becoming increasingly full of nothing but AI slop

I never really had much of a social media presence besides that. Was on Reddit for a long time, deleted my account over the API bullshit, once upon a time I had a twitter, never used it much, deleted it when musk took over. Never had an Instagram or tiktok.

I have some friends who used to have a really shitty apartment, first floor and basement of a shitty rowhome that by all rights should probably have been condemned.

The basement was two rooms, a larger room with nothing much but an old claw foot bathtub (that appeared to be hooked up to a drain but had no faucet or any obvious pipes nearby where it could have ever had water running to it)

And the spider room. I shit you not this room was almost nothing but floor to ceiling spider webs. Being a bunch of broke college kids with little enough use for the basement in general, they decided that they weren’t going to do anything about it. They just placed a sheet of plywood in front of the doorway and let the spiders do their thing.

And the spiders, accepted and respected this arrangement. They lived there for several years and not once did they ever see a single spider in any other part of the apartment.

The centipedes were another story, they frequently ventured into other parts of the house. One of those friends still likes to go on about how you can reason with spiders but not with centipedes.

But, I can only assume due to the high spider and millipede population in this apartment, there was basically no other bugs to be found there. The house was in the sort of perpetual state of squalor that you’d expect from 3 guys living on their own for the first time. The pipes leaked, everything was drafty, there was often a thin coating of grime on nearly everything, they had mice and maybe the occasional rat, but there was not a single roach, beetle, or fly to be found.

Mi komencis per duolingo, sed nun mi plejparte nur legas vikipedio en Esperanto.

Mi instruas min mem jam ĉirkaŭ 3 jarojn, mi ankoraŭ ne estas tute flua, sed mi progresas.

I’ve been learning Esperanto, which is basically just all loanwords from different European languages, one thing I’m a little embarrassed to have learned that way is that “Peking” as in Peking Duck, is just a different/older spelling/transliteration of “Beijing” since it’s “Pekino” in Esperanto

Been eating Peking Duck for years, never really stopped to consider where or what Peking was until then.

Alright, so what do we do with that “slightly” (infact quite a bit) warmer water?

Can’t just discharge it into a river. That hot water is gonna cause all kinds of havoc on the environment. Even if the temperature doesn’t outright kill things, warm water holds less oxygen so that’s going to harm fish, it’s probably gonna fuck up their spawning cycles because suddenly they have warm water in the middle of winter, it might cause algae blooms, etc.

So we have to cool that water down. How are we gonna do that? We can spend even more money and energy to refrigerate it I suppose, but of course that would be stupid since these data centers are already using ridiculous amounts of energy.

So most likely we’d just put it in some giant holding tanks and wait for it to cool off or maybe run it through a massive radiator to cool off. That’s even more land being taken up by these monstrosities, more maintenance needed, and at the end of the day, that’s still water sitting around somewhere besides in our aquifers and waterways where it’s needed, and we’re probably going to be losing even more to evaporation in the process.

And while it’s being pumped around in those data centers, I’ll bet you it’s being run though all kinds of plastic pipes and such, maybe coming into contact with lead solder and such because these aren’t potable water systems, sounds like a great way to introduce more heavy metals and microplastics into the environment to me.

And that 2% or so that’s being lost to evaporation? Some of these large data centers are using well in excess of a million gallons a day, so that’s 20,000 gallons a day lost to evaporation, so roughly every month you’re losing an entire Olympic sized swimming pool to evaporation. Again, that’s water that’s supposed to be in rivers and aquifers that’s now not.

And what doesn’t evaporate? Well now any minerals, heavy metals, etc. that were in the water are now concentrated by that much. Hope your water treatment is prepared to handle that.

I’ve never owned a car personally with less than about 150,000 miles on it

My parents did get a brand new Kia sportage during cash for clunkers so pretty close to 0 miles on it

After that, the runner up is my dad’s truck. It’s a '93 forD ranger, and it just hit 100k within the last year (I’m proud to say I was driving when it happened)

He’s the third owner, my grandfather had it until he lost his license and he basically never went anywhere, and I have no idea who had it before him.

For a lot of the time after that my dad also worked less than a mile from home and other than that my mom does most of their driving. They also had 3 cars for much of that time so that further cut into how much use the truck got.

Edit: did a dumb, read this as lowest for some reason

I’m currently somewhere around 220,000 on my '07 4runner, and I believe that’s about the highest I’ve had.

Oh absolutely, I have 0 faith in this administration to do this in any kind of remotely sensible way

But in general, with different people at the helm, I could really get behind more hunting opportunities in national parks as a conservation tool.

Really I’d like to see predators like wolves reintroduced, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon, and realistically for it to work in the parks around me that I have in mind for this we’d probably need to bulldoze and reforest huge swathes of suburbia to support those predators, so nothing that’s going to happen in a hurry, even if we somehow got the people living there to agree to move or eminent domained their properties (which isn’t going to happen) we’d probably be looking at years if not decades just to replant and regrow the forests.

I live near a national historic park in a suburban area. They have struggled with deer overpopulation since we have basically no predators left in our area.

A few times a year they have sharpshooters doing deer culls after hours, and it’s helped a lot, you see some of those ripple effects where since the deer aren’t eating all the vegetation you’re seeing more and different kinds of plants returning which has brought back populations of other animals that used to be pretty uncommon.

And the deer are generally healthier with less competition from each other, I remember seeing a lot of sickly-looking deer there when I was a kid and I don’t see that as much anymore.

But even though the culls have helped, there’s still a bit of an overpopulation problem, and allowing some hunting could help with that, and maybe eliminate the need to pay sharpshooters for culling. We have other, similar-sized parks in our area where hunting is allowed with few to no issues and in this part of the state you’re basically limited to bows and shotguns which helps to limit how far a stray shot could go.

I wouldn’t want the whole park to be opened to hunting all through hunting season, but I think allowing it in certain parts of the bark on certain days could be very beneficial.

We have one of the Samsung frame TVs, it’s a nice TV, it fits a specific need for us in a bit of a weird spot in a bedroom where a regular TV would look out of place.

But man is the software trash. It’s laggy, a lot of the apps seem really poorly-optimized, and half the settings are just randomly unavailable for no apparent reason.

And since I had to install a box in the wall to hide the one connect box behind it, I kind of don’t want to use it with another streaming device, something about putting too much stuff in that box kind of rubs me the wrong way.

A whole lot of people just seem to have absolutely no sense of timing/rhythm.

A really weird place I’ve noticed that is at my work as a 911 dispatcher.

Once in a while we have to give CPR instructions over the phone, and a big part of that is counting with the caller to make sure they’re doing the chest compressions fast enough (100-120 beats per minute)

I was in band back in high school, I can keep that sort of rhythm in my sleep (though my throat starts getting pretty dry depending on how long it takes responders to arrive and take over)

But a handful of my coworkers really struggle with it, they count too fast or too slow, speed up and slow down, it’s a little terrifying to be honest.

The ones who do manage to keep good time have mostly had at least some music training, or are at least keeping an eye on the seconds counting by on the clock on our computer to keep time.

I just tried counting Mississippis with my eyes closed and a timer going, and I nailed it within a second. But I think I definitely went a little faster for the first 19 and then slowed down a little after that because there’s just less syllables in the numbers until you hit that point, and more after it.

Sorry, but I think the point about local AI not necessarily being evil is the tangent here.

The OP is about motherboard shortages, which is being driven by the big AI companies and is making hardware unaffordable for normal users

The top level reply to that is about how that’s bad because it removes the ability for people to be in control of their own computing

Then someone comes in, saying “yeah, but you can host your own AI so that it’s not evil so not all AI is bad”

Then someone points out that you can only host your AI if you can afford the hardware to do so which, as the OP and the comment you replied to pointed out, is getting really hard to do.

Until you have received the product or service, there is no actual debt. They don’t have to serve you if you won’t pay cash, don’t have to let you walk out of the store with merchandise, etc.

Arguably at a sit-down restaurant where you’re ordering and being served before you pay, then there is a debt and they may have to accept cash payment

But, and I’m not a lawyer so take this with a big grain of salt, I think it’s still their right to only accept payment in whatever form they want to, you’re effectively agreeing to their rules when you choose to patronize their business, and the thing about it being legal tender only really comes into play when they get the courts involved to collect on that debt- if you refuse to pay with electronic payments, gold coins, crypto, shiny beads, or whatever they insist on, and they take you to court over it, then they have to accept cash to settle that debt once that’s all sorted out.

Appalachia

That’s going to give you a big selection bias. A lot of Appalachians are “Scotch-Irish” (also called “Scots-Irish”) who came from Northern Ireland, which is more heavily Protestant than the rest of Ireland.

Before that, their ancestors were from Scotland and northern England before immigrating to Ireland. In the UK and Ireland I believe people with similar ancestry are usually called Ulster Scots (for the Ulster region of Ireland, if that wasn’t obvious)

And in addition to that, there were probably a lot of Catholic people/families who converted along the way after arriving here since the US is overall mostly protestant of one flavor or another, and they just sort of assimilated into that or wanted to avoid anti-catholic discrimination (which has been a thing at different times and places around the US, the KKK for example has historically been very anti-catholic, and even as recently as JFK there was a decent amount of people concerned that since he was a Catholic that he’d be taking orders from the Pope or something)

In other parts of the country you’ll probably find more Catholics of Irish ancestry. Anecdotally, growing up in the Philly suburbs, myself being partially of Irish Catholic descent, I only remember one protestant Irish family being in school with me, but plenty of Irish Catholics (there may have been others, but I only remember them, we didn’t exactly go around discussing religion all that often)

That’s one way to say you don’t understand how tires work

Sure the tires are expensive, but replacing a valve stem is only going to cost maybe about $50, if you call around a little you might even find somewhere that will do it for like $20.

Now if it’s not just a stem and has a tire pressure monitor, that gets a little pricey, that might be over $100. Most of those aren’t just a rubber stem but made out of metal, so not as easy to just “snip.” But usually it can still be replaced with a plain stem as long as they’re willing to ignore the light on their dash.