Fat fingers. Thank you for catching that.

TheDude did some server maintenance on the 9th, but other than that I’m not aware of any issues. Everything works fine on my machine, so obviously there aren’t any problems (j/k).

Did you have issues at a particular time? Maybe we can find something in the logs and trace down the issue.

Edit: you can also catch us on our Matrix channel for more timely tech support.

Here’s a zoomed-out version:

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/the-picture-show/2025/01/09/g-s1-41784/los-angeles-fire-photos

Thanks. Corrected. I want to give some excuse about my memory not being what it used to be, but I should have gotten that one right.

To shreds you say

Also, consider going past the first page on FediDB and picking a smaller instance. I’m not knocking the big instances (I volunteer my time to two of the biggest, after all). It’s just that the whole point of this Fediverse experiment is for things to be distributed. Going by the numbers on FediDB, fully half of all monthly active Lemmy users are concentrated on the three largest instances.

god knows what it is captivating his attention now.

If he’s anything like my dad (and a bunch of other relatives) Rush was replaced by Fox News, the Epoch Times, and various garbage published by Hillsdale College.

There are a handful of repost bots and automod bots around. If there is no haiku bot or remind-me bot it’s only because nobody has taken the time to write and host them.

There are medical applications where ultrasound is used to ablate small areas of tissue (see High Intensity Focused Ultrasound). It only works if you focus all the energy in a very small area, though. Sound is not an efficient way to heat a large mass. I would be impressed if you could warm a kilogram of plastic more than a few degrees above ambient. The waste heat coming off of your driving electronics (the amplifier, and the speaker/transducer itself) would dwarf whatever heat is generated by the sound waves hitting a target.

deleted by creator

I thought it was a typo, but no. They really are releasing the 2023 annual report in the last few days of 2024.

That makes a lot more sense. I thought the number seemed huge, but everything I could find said they have closed-loop cooling at this particular facility.

Also, the first printing presses that came to England were accompanied by Dutch type setters. They sometimes made spellings more Dutch (changing gost to ghost for example). They were also paid by the line, so would occasionally add unnecessary letters to words.

I went looking for some number for fun. (Every work day needs a good distraction, right?)

The nuclear plant that provides some of my electricity supposedly intakes 24 million gallons of water per day. As far as I can tell, that is entirely to make up for cooling water that is released as steam. There is a lot more cooling water present in the system which is recaptured and reused.

24M gallons/day = 16,667 gallons/minute. That’s a significant amount of water. However, it’s several orders of magnitude less than the flow through the smaller hydro power dams in my area. A few that I looked at have average turbine discharges in the ballpark of 6,000,000 gallons/min.

So for the cost (and vast regulatory headaches) of adding a secondary generation unit onto a nuclear cooling tower, you can just dam a nearby river and get 360x the energy.

Edit: I was way off on that 24M gallon/day number. After more reading, it looks like only around 2% of that water becomes steam leaving the cooling towers. So condensing the steam would give us a flow rate of 333 gallons/min of liquid water. That’s barely enough flow to operate a water slide at a theme park, let alone generate significant electricity through a turbine.

The oddities of the English language will lead you down a strange and fascinating historical rabbit hole. It’s great reading, but be ready to spend some time.

It’s not worth it. The energy you would generate is proportional to the vertical drop and the mass of water. If it were a river’s worth of water then you could generate a significant amount of power, but there just isn’t that much water mass in the steam.

You can use the leftover low-pressure steam for other purposes. For example, some places have combined heat and power (CHP) plants that use the steam to heat buildings, or run industrial operations that need a lot of heat energy. Though that requires you to live or work next to a power plant, which many people don’t like.

There is a giant hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.

It’s more evidence that hexagons are the bestagons.

One of my favorite truisms: One thing the flag stands for is you don’t have to stand for the flag.

As an American who is undoubtedly contributing to the US-centric tone, I encourage you to post more non-US content. Especially from your particular corner of the globe. It’s nice to see things from other parts of the world!

The Reddit API exodus in 2023 brought hundreds of new instances and tens of thousands of new users to Lemmy. Unfortunately, many of those instances had open registrations, Lemmy’s moderation tools were very basic (they still are), and there were not enough mods/admins to provide 24-hour coverage on the larger instances. A handful of trolls took advantage of the situation by posting grotesque stuff for lulz: CSAM, scat porn, racist memes, etc. Sometimes it would stay up for hours until someone with the right permissions noticed and took it down.

The situation is better now. Though there is still plenty of room for improvement.