evasive_chimpanzee
@evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
- Comment on YSK Your smoke detectors should be replaced every 7-10 years 1 week ago:
According to the one i just had to replace, combo carbon monoxide detectors need to be replaced. I don’t know how the carbon monoxide part works, but i wonder if it’s a reagent or something.
- Comment on I'm glad i grabbed this wii fit balance board from the trash a decade ago, wow! 1 week ago:
I saw a stack of like 20 of them at a thrift shop for really cheap a few years ago. I saw that there would be a big potential with those for someone who knows what they are doing. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those people, lol.
- Comment on Is this good 2 weeks ago:
The explosion of hops onto your ceiling is practically a right of passage for a brewer.
- Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money... 2 weeks ago:
I’m not even close to the type of person where this strategy is an option, but the magic is in the stepped-up basis from what I understand.
Let’s say an asset is purchased for $1 million, held until it’s worth $10 million, and used to secure a $5 million loan. If you sell the asset, you owe taxes on the $9 million capital gain. If you die, the asset’s value “steps up” to the new baseline of $10 million. Your heir could then sell it with no capital gains tax, and pay off the loan and pocket the rest. If they hold onto the asset, and it appreciates to $11 million, they would only owe taxes on the gain of $1 million, not $10 million.
The whole scheme makes sense when it’s applied to a random farmer inheriting land from his parents: you dont want to force him to sell the land to pay capital gains. It makes a lot less sense when it’s someone inheriting stocks worth the GDP of a country.
- Comment on How does a person get on the No Gun List without commiting a crime? My brother was diagnosed with BIpolar and others he doesn't even want the option ten year down the road. 2 weeks ago:
Assuming you mean in the US, there is a national system called NICS that basically has the FBI run a background check. Some states have additional systems to augment that.
The conditions that get you put into the “no” list are things like committing a felony, domestic violence, drug use, etc. Being committed (against their will) to a mental institution is on that list. A mental institution would have to report you with evidence to get you added to the list. Potentially, he could ask his psychiatrist to do that for him. It may not be an option, but if you brother is worried himself, that is good evidence, I think.
When you buy a gun, you have to check boxes on a form to say you aren’t a felon, addicted to drugs, a fugitive, etc. They can check the felon and fugitive part, so if you lie, you get in big trouble. Drugs, though, they obviously dont have a list, so really it’s just a way to add penalties if they can later prove that you lied (e.g., hunter biden). You couldn’t just do a drug and automatically pop onto a list.
- Comment on What would happen if a person proved in a lab they're gaining weight while in a verified calorie deficit? 5 weeks ago:
Hormone imbalances can’t overcome thermodynamics. In people with hypothyroidism, the set point of their resting metabolic rate is lower, leading to fatigue and often being too cold.
So it’s not that they gain weight despite a deficit, it’s that a deficit for them would be less calories than someone with more activity who isnt cold all the time.
In a perfect world, calorie needs match with hunger, so with decreased calorie needs, you would naturally eat less, but it’s not always perfect so some people with hypothyroidism have “normal” hunger when they actually need less food. It ends up with 1/4-1/2 of people with hypothyroidism experiencing weight gain.
- Comment on What would happen if a person proved in a lab they're gaining weight while in a verified calorie deficit? 5 weeks ago:
In addition to failing kidneys, stuff that messes with the lymphatic system. Everyone’s cells and bloodstream is slightly leaky, and whatever leaks out gets picked up by the lymphatic system, filtered through lymph nodes, and returned to the circulatory system. A break in that chain due to injury/disease can cause fluid to accumulate upstream. Look up elephantitis.
Also, liver/heart failure can create ascites, which is fluid accumulation inside the abdomen (looks more like pregnancy belly than obesity belly).
Similarly, malnutrition in kids in poor areas often results in kwashiorkor, which makes them have big bellies but really skinny arms and legs. Its basically a protein deficiency from eating only corn or whatever.
- Comment on What would happen if a person proved in a lab they're gaining weight while in a verified calorie deficit? 5 weeks ago:
That’s mostly a step up in water weight, but it doesnt keep increasing.
- Comment on What would happen if a person proved in a lab they're gaining weight while in a verified calorie deficit? 5 weeks ago:
Unironically, yes. Lots of off the shelf diet pills are literally just caffeine pills (e.g., hydroxycut). Old school diet pills were literally amphetamines before governments made it so you couldnt get them off the shelf (e.g., obetrol), and technically you can still get it prescribed (desoxyn is methamphetamine).
The problem is, a normal dose of caffeine just makes you a little warmer, and burn a little bit of extra calories, but amphetamines and especially 2,4-Dinitrophenol (other banned weight loss drug) can literally cook you by making you burn so many extra calories.
- Comment on Built a partition to separate two rooms 5 weeks ago:
Balancing a door in a frame is annoying, but you can actually buy prehung doors. You still have to get it level/square in the roughed out space, but it eliminates the worst part which is getting the door right within the frame.
- Comment on What would happen if a person proved in a lab they're gaining weight while in a verified calorie deficit? 5 weeks ago:
By definition, that wouldn’t be a deficit. You could have a “predicted” calorie deficit that ends up being off by some percentage. The models for energy expenditure typically just use pretty simple demographic info like BMI, sex, age, and activity level. If someone burned less calories than predicted, that basically means that they are less fit than the average person of their demographic cohort.
You could use more advanced models with more information, but they would still be predictions. Drugs also come into play: uppers like caffeine, nicotine, amphetamines, etc, increase the amount of activity in your body so you are literally warmer from burning more calories, everything else equal.
- Comment on Cold weather stud finder 5 weeks ago:
A string of small magnets generally works pretty well. They stick to the nail/screw heads fixing the lath to the studs, and then you can draw a line.
- Comment on My friends are by my side 1 month ago:
- Comment on Snitches get switches 1 month ago:
Usually, on land that is intended to be preserved, they don’t want random people hacking away at vegetation, so they will have rules about it. If a park ranger or someone like that sees you cutting down trees or whatever, you are probably going to get yelled at or fined or something.
It’s also highly dependent on species and location. Some invasive species will basically multiply if you try to tear them out, either resprouting vegetatively, or through seed spread. Species like tree-of-heaven or paulonia also become huge trees, so they probably don’t want you cutting those down.
Some places like Oahu are basically 95% invasive species, so if you remove that, you have nothing left. Oahu is basically all guava and mesquite trees, and without that, the soil washes away, and there’s no hope of recovery, so invasive management needs to be done in consultation with experts.
- Comment on Is it mold? (More pics in body) 2 months ago:
That looks to me like the shells of the drupelets of the raspberries that have been squashed, so all of the colored juice has come out. Presumably racking it over also liberated some co2 which caused it to float. I would refrain from opening the fermenter cause every time you do, you let in O2 and roll the dice on infection.
- Comment on Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) 3 months ago:
Yeah, I’m probably what you’d call a patient gamer. Usually not playing anything more recent than 5 years old, and often way older.
- Comment on Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) 3 months ago:
I’m sure I have seen it before, but I can’t think of a single game that lets you pause during a cutscene. It really sucks for turn-based games where you need to watch whats happening when it’s not your turn in order to respond correctly.
I remember a game I used to play years ago that had no ability to pause, so what i would do is alt+tab to the task manager and suspend the process, and then resume it later. Obviously that’s way more clunky than just hitting a pause button.
- Comment on DIY Retained Heat Stockpots for efficient slow cooking? 3 months ago:
I’ve cooked a lot of steaks and fish by pouring the correct temperature of water into a cooler and dropping vacuum sealed bags in. Basically a poor man’s sous vide bath.
That only really works up to a certain temperature, though, so you probably couldnt do boiling hot.
- Comment on A few photos from yesterday's brew up (beer) 3 months ago:
For most brewing salts, hot water works best to dissolve them. Gypsum specifically works the other way around, where it dissolves best in cold water (retrograde solubility). I always used to just throw the gypsum in before I started heating my strike water, and any other salts after it was hot but before grain.
- Comment on Be safe this Halloween¡¡¡ 4 months ago:
The way i look at it is that they make it real easy to seek and destroy trees-of-heaven, even in a forest where all you can see is the trunk.
- Comment on Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” 5 months ago:
They literally did that with Facebook. Yeah, plenty of people left, but it worked.
- Comment on How To Argue With An AI Booster 6 months ago:
I think the main thing that’s happening is analogous to what’s happened with a lot of electronics over the past couple of decades. It seems like every electronic device runs off of a way more powerful computer than is necessary because it’s easier/cheaper to buy a million little computers and do a little programming than it is to have someone design a bespoke circuit, even if the bespoke circuits would be more resource efficient, robust, and repairable. Our dishwashers don’t need wifi, but if you are running them off a single board computer with wifi built in, why wouldn’t you figure out a way to advertise it?
Similarly, you have all sorts of tasks that can be done with way more computational efficiency (and trust and tweakability) if you have the know-how to set something bespoke up, but it’s easier to throw everything at an overpowered black box and call it a day.
The difference is that manufacturing costs for tiny computers can come down to be cheaper in price relative to a bespoke circuit, but anything that decreases the cost of computing will apply equally to an LLM and a less complex model. I just hope industry/government pushing isn’t enough to overcome what the “free market” should do. After all, car centric design (suburbia, etc) is way less efficient than train centric, but we still went there.
My work would be improved by the dumbest of dumb retrieval augmented models: a monkey with a thesaurus, ctrl+f, and a pile of my documents. Unfortunately, the best they can offer is a service where I send my personal documents into the ether and a new wetland is dried in my honor (or insert your ecological disaster metaphor of choice).
- Comment on 3D Printing Patterns Might Make Ghost Guns More Traceable Than We Thought 7 months ago:
If there is a demand for a forensic capability, there’s someone willing to sell it to a police department (and a jury).
- Comment on xkcd #3118: iNaturalist Animals and Plants 7 months ago:
People usually don’t log stuff that they see every day. So a person who lives in Oregon (statistically more likely to be in doug-fir country) goes east and notices that a different tree predominates and they want to know what it is, they’ll log it.
Personally, I log stuff that I don’t normally see cause there’s a chance that it’s either: a rare native plant, a native plant on the edge of its range, or a non-native. Those are all things that I’m less likely to know off the top of my head, and I think it’s probably more important to tag for scientific purposes.
- Comment on Is possible to learn to swim, just by reading a lot about it? 7 months ago:
Yeah, it’s really frustrating when someone with higher body fat that floats like a cork tries to tell you how to do it.
Technique can’t overcome density. I will say that I got slightly better at it after learning to SCUBA dive (or maybe I just got fatter). In scuba, you move up and down in the water column by adjusting the range of your breathing. You basically try to get your neutrally boyant setpoint at 50% lung capacity. To go down, you try to control your breathing from 0-50% and to go up, you breathe from 50-100%. It made me slightly better at keeping my lungs really topped up with air.
To float, I basically have to hold my lungs at max capacity, and then exhale-inhale as fast as possible, which is unnatural and takes concentration. I usually have to use my arms for a little bit of upward thrust through that breath.
There’s no lungs in my legs, so those will sink no matter what. People claim you can “use your core” or some other BS to keep your legs afloat, but the fact of the matter is that if your upper body is positively buoyant and your lower body is negatively buoyant, there will be a rotational moment pulling your legs down, and it can only be counteracted by external application of force (i.e., kicking your feet). I can either float on my back with a mild amount of kicking, or i can do like a face-in-water deadman float, and just pull my head out of the water occasionally to quickly breathe.
- Comment on Is possible to learn to swim, just by reading a lot about it? 7 months ago:
I’m going to disagree with everyone here. Loads of people throughout history have learned to swim by literally being thrown in. It’s not a good way to learn, but people do it. Even babies can do it.
Given a little bit of reading first, you’d do just fine. Yeah, the motions might be a little off cause it’s hard to learn a complex movement from a book, but it would be good enough.
- Comment on Wild kangaroo harvests are labelled ‘needlessly cruel’ by US lawmakers – but backed by Australian conservationists 7 months ago:
I’m not sure. I know in a lot of those places, the rationale is that the terrain is too flat, so rifle bullets can travel too far.
The problem is that I don’t know if that actually corresponds to increased risk of death. It sounds plausible, but idk if there are real stats to back it up.
A quick search for some plausible data turned up California’s official stats, and going back a few years, I never saw more than 5 deaths in a year. Extrapolating the rate to the whole US, that’s like 50 per year. Other sources just say “less than 100 per year for the whole US”.
Without a specific study, it’s just as plausible to attribute the fatalities to sheer proximity of the shooter to the victim rather than bullets traveling far. Bigger targets are easier to hit. Just looking at the California data, which includes injuries, this seems to bear out, and most injuries and fatalities are due to close range shotgun bird hunting (i.e. the Dick Cheney).
And really, if you wanted to completely eliminate the risk of rifle bullets traveling further than intended, you could mandate the use of any elevated shooting position (which some places do for archery).
- Comment on Wild kangaroo harvests are labelled ‘needlessly cruel’ by US lawmakers – but backed by Australian conservationists 7 months ago:
Here’s an example: Delaware only allows shotgun, pistol/pistol caliber long guns, and muzzleloader, no true rifle.
www.eregulations.com/delaware/…/deer-seasons
Connecticut only allows rifle on private land.
portal.ct.gov/deep/hunting/…/deer-hunting#PVSHOT
Iowa has no rifle allowed.
www.iowadnr.gov/things-do/…/iowa-hunting-seasons
Lots of states have restrictions against modern (and by modern, i mean bottlenecked) rifle rounds, and if you want to use a rifle, you have to either find a 150 year old cowboy gun, or buy a really expensive new gun using one of several specialized cartridges that cost like $2 a round.
And then when it comes down to it, if you live in a state where it is legal to hunt with a regular rifle, you end up finding that half the time any public land that you can hunt on is restricted to archery only, so unless you happen to be a large landowner, you can’t hunt with a rifle.
- Comment on Wild kangaroo harvests are labelled ‘needlessly cruel’ by US lawmakers – but backed by Australian conservationists 7 months ago:
There are a lot of differences between how the US and how Australia do hunting. For one, there is no commercial deer/elk harvest in the US. Commercially sold venison can only be from farmed deer/elk. I think deer leather can be sold, but there are a lot of hoops to go through.
Also, in the US, most hunting regulations exist not for ethical or conservation purposes but to prevent people from being able to subsistence hunt. They wanted hunting to be a rich man’s game like in the UK. The existence of hunting seasons is a good example. Another is regulations on method of take; for example, you often must use outdated equipment like bows and muzzleloaders, and the use of modern, effective rifles is severely curtailed. Compare that to Australia where you can use night vision/thermal scopes and rifles with supressors, and i believe there is no “hunting season”.
The reality is that both countries have an overpopulation of large herbivores in areas, and the answer anti-hunting people give is the reintroduction of large carnivores. While we should do that in more rural areas, it’s not feasible in urban/suburban areas where deer proliferate.
Many municipalities actually have to pay to have deer culled, and they do that rather than making it easier for people to hunt.
Tl;dr, i think there are some things I like better about how Australia handles hunting, but theres also things about the US’s method i like.
- Comment on Slrpnk.net outage 8 months ago:
Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.