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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • I've recently been thinking a lot about the recyclability of plastic. I have several stacks of plastic drink cups from various fast food joints in my kitchen; as much as possible, I try to save up and bundle together similar types of plastic before I throw it in the recycling bin, to try to save some sorting effort. And in doing so, I noticed something.

    The thing is, a lot of single-use plastics have very similar properties. PETE, HDPE, Polypropylene, solid polystyrene, they're all used to package similar or identical products. I think they're more or less interchangeable, and the choice of a given plastic for a given application has more to do with cost, availability and the preferences of the product engineer than any specific material properties of the plastic itself. There's obviously going to be some exceptions, but I think those are going to be few and far between, and a lot of them could be addressed by switching to other materials.

    I think a great first step would be for regulators to encourage/force industries to standardize on one or two types of plastic at most, and eliminate plastics that aren't worth recycling, like polystyrene. That should reduce the manual labor required by a significant amount once the other plastics are eliminated from the waste stream, and make it feasible to recycle plastics locally instead of shipping them off to a third world country.

    I think companies should be taxed or otherwise penalized for the plastic waste they foist on consumers, because often there's little choice involved unless you want to boycott a company entirely. If I wanted to eliminate plastic cups from my life, I'd pretty much have to stop getting fast food altogether (yes I know I should probably do that anyway, but that's beside the point). A tax on bulk purchases of plastic may end up being passed down to consumers, but the revenue could be put towards subsidizing production of more renewable materials.

    I think food stamp programs could be a strong driver for change on this, as they could refuse to cover products that generate excessive waste. With enough warning, there should be enough time for companies to switch their products to be compliant with little disruption to the consumer.





  • Technus@lemmy.ziptoHome@lemmy.zipLemmy.zip Turns One!
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    20 days ago

    A former coworker would constantly pitch Ansible whenever a discussion about an ops problem came up, in a kind of joking-but-not-joking way. It eventually got rather annoying to keep having to shoot it down.

    I spent thirty minutes reading the website trying to figure out what the hell Ansible actually was and what you could do with it, and I still didn't have a straight answer.

    As far as I can tell, it seemed like it was created as a tool to automatically SSH into servers and run commands, but through one of the most egregious examples of scope creep in software engineering history, it was eventually extended with modules that could do everything from provision cloud resources to, idfk, control smart home appliances or whatever. It's like the poster child of "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

    By comparison, the value proposition for Terraform is immediately obvious. It certainly has its own drawbacks, but I could instantly understand exactly what it was and what I could do with it.

    I hate dev tools that try to do everything at once, because most often they don't do a single thing very well at all.






  • Technus@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzSalt :)
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    edit-2
    1 month ago

    You can apply this same logic to basically all of chemistry:

    H: explosive, the main ingredient in stars

    O: literally the reason fire is a thing, causes rust and kills cells via free radicals

    H2O: I'm so wet, UwU


  • This only happens when both network connection on the host are active.

    I'm not a networking expert by any means but this seems like a pretty strong hint that it's a routing issue.

    Check the routing tables on the host? I'd bet that the internet is only reachable on the LAN interface (again, not an expert but one of them has to take priority, right?). I'm guessing that disconnecting the LAN interface changes the routing to go through the WLAN interface instead.

    You could possibly add a static route to work around this: https://libvirt.org/formatnetwork.html#static-routes




  • Technus@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzIt's a mess in here
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    2 months ago

    I have a theory hypothesis notion that the concept of hallucination in artificial neural networks is not a failure mode that is unique to ANNs but is an inherent property of any neural network, artificial or biological.

    Essentially, I posit that a neural network by itself is incapable of maintaining coherence without a rigid external framework, such as consistent feedback in training an ANN, or the laws of physics for biologicals.

    This would explain why people start tripping balls in sensory deprivation chambers. And it provides a counterargument to any thought experiment or philosophy that involves a disembodied brain vividly hallucinating reality.