The pole is just an ordinary pole. In 1977, after measuring land subsidence over time, they put the signs up on it to illustrate how far the land had sunk. They could have put the signs on anything tall enough to provide enough space.

The nation’s fastest-sinking city is Houston, with more than 40% of its area dropping more than 5 millimeters (about 1/5 inch) per year, and 12% sinking at twice that rate.

kagis

https://texaslivingwaters.org/groundwater/subsidence-houston-galveston-region/

Understanding subsidence in the Houston-Galveston region

Since 1836, groundwater withdrawals have caused about 3,200 square miles of the Houston-Galveston area to subside (or sink) more than a foot, with some areas subsiding as much as 12 to 13 feet.

Noob-tier numbers, Texas. Here’s a photo from 1977 in California showing land subsidence on a telephone pole from 1925 to 1977.

https://water.usgs.gov/ogw/pubs/fs00165/Images/fig2.jpg

From one of my comments in a thread three days ago when discussing Meta’s new glasses:

https://lemmy.today/post/28724654/16057604

I don’t totally get the use case for cameras plus single screen on lens. I guess maybe you could take a picture of someone’s face, upload the photo to Meta, do facial recognition on it, and then have personal details sent back to the screen at the bottom of your right eye. Like, maybe that’d be useful for people who don’t want to be in a position of awkwardly forgetting names or security personnel or something.

From the article:

This time, Lee attempted a viral launch with a $140,000 scripted advertisement in which a young software engineer, played by Lee, uses Cluely installed on his glasses to lie his way through a first date with an older woman. When the date starts going south, Cluely suggests Lee “reference her art” and provides a script for him to follow. “I saw your profile and the painting with the tulips. You are the most gorgeous girl ever,” Lee reads off his glasses, which rescues his chances with her.

Ah.

Congress dislikes fun things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_Submersible_Seaplane

The Convair Submersible Seaplane (or “Subplane”) was a United States Navy project to produce a seaplane which could travel underwater as well as fly.

Convair made detailed designs and built scale models which were tested, and averred that the craft would work, but the project did not get beyond that stage and was cancelled by Congress in 1965[2] or 1966.[1][3]

Last month, Trump claimed to have already struck 200 trade agreements with foreign countries, a remark so outlandish it sent members of his administration scrambling to make it make sense. (There are also only 195 countries in the world.)

The vile foreigner swine must have pulled out of all of them over the past month.

https://homemicrowave.com/microwave-with-alexa/

Want to set up your microwave with Alexa for plenty of cool tricks, but didn’t know how to pick the best microwave that works with Alexa?

Having an Alexa compatible microwave in your kitchen, you can control the microwave and adjust the cooking setting simply via Alexa’s voice control feature.

Speaking for myself, I don’t really want Internet dependency, much less a microphone sending data to the Internet on my appliances.

I’m guessing a tankless water heater involves some electronic controls. It probably could be designed to use low-voltage DC with a battery backup, but that would be fancy.

It definitely has to if it doesn’t have a pilot light, else its electrical ignition won’t work, but if it has that, there are various ways you could make it work, including just using the heat from the pilot light to drive a thermoelectric generator to get a small amount of juice.

Dogs love chewing on ice cubes, especially in the summer.

Just as a warning — I don’t know if it’s an issue for dogs, or as much of an issue for them — I once chipped a tooth by chewing on ice. I liked chewing on ice too. Would sometimes put a little black pepper on it. The dentist told me to knock it off, not good for teeth.

That being said, at least the icemaker ice I had was softer, much easier to crush, probably would have been much less of an issue, so if you’re giving 'em ice from one, maybe that avoids any potential issue.

and worst of all, there’s no goddamn place to put your phone so you can watch Netflix.

kagis

Hmm.

Yeah, I was thinking that it’d have some kind of bike-style handlebars or something, but nothing quite like that.

thinks

So, there are these…I don’t know what they’re called. “Gooseneck leg camera tripods”? They’re intended to let you mount a camera anywhere, but if you feel strongly enough about this, I’m sure that one can get one of those and I’m sure that someone makes a quarter-inch-bolt — which camera tripods use — adapter to a smartphone holder. Can probably stuff a phone on pretty much anything with that.

goes looking

Okay, I don’t know if anyone else makes this. I thought it was a whole class of devices, but maybe it’s just one manufacturer. Basically, three gooseneck legs with grippy things down them, “Joby Gorillapods”. Just wrap the gooseneck legs around whatever you want to mount the thing to.

https://www.amazon.com/gorillapod-original-tripod-point-cameras/dp/b0087fftt2

And once you have your quarter-inch tripod mount from that, there are a ton of different products that will let you mount a phone on a tripod bolt.

https://www.amazon.com/phone-tripod-mount/s?k=phone+tripod+mount

Can probably even get some sort of telescoping counterweighted-arm thing that’d let you jam it right in front of your eyeballs — I have a mic boom like that on a tripod — though I dunno if you want to deal with lugging something like that into a gym. And if the treadmill is vibrating at all, an arm would amplify the vibrations.

Oh, so this is like, a timer for an alarm rather than to control the microwave’s operation. Gotcha.

I can’t think of anything that quite fits that off-the-cuff, at least not in the US. A quick search doesn’t turn anything up. I can think of some related things:

• The AC signal is used as a clock in a number of devices. This isn’t a “clock” in the common-language sense of the word, but in the electrical engineering sense – it provides a reliable frequency over the long run. Some (common-language) clocks and timers have used this to keep them running at a steady pace, but it’s not really a time signal, wouldn’t help restore an on-device clock setting after power loss.

• X10 is a low-speed networking protocol that runs over local power circuits for home automation. I’m sure that at some point, someone has made some product that permits setting a clock with it. The limitation is that your signal doesn’t span across household circuits, which I suspect one would want for a “whole house time signal”.

• There have been powerline-based ISPs, where the power company shovels data over the line using high-frequency modulation. In theory, you could use one of various Internet time protocols over that. I think that that was kind of a dead end, technology-wise — there’s just not that much data that you can push over an unshielded, non-twisted-pair, metal power line.

• I would not be surprised if there’s some data protocol that power companies use to talk to smart meters that includes pushing a time signal out specifically for them – they do push and pull data over that – though I don’t think that that’s accessible to other devices.

That being said, could be some company out there that did that locally. Not technically impossible.

Aside from security and privacy issues, and the issue of dependence on cloud services, a lot of those go obsolete. Like, a fridge from 1950 is still gonna work pretty well today. Networking has changed a lot more quickly, and I suspect will continue to change quickly.

I’d be okay if they want to have some kind of simple, industry-standard interface that lets me expose it to a computer’s control. Like, furnaces have that standard four-wire interface, and then you can just replace an (inexpensive) thermostat with a newer one as technology marches on, leave the furnace in place. But I don’t want a lot of short-lived technology being baked into longer-lived appliances.

Pancakes also work better than waffles with embedded blueberries or similar, if you’re into that.

I do think that most people would be happier with lasers, especially on the “clogged nozzle and requires regular use” front (though now there are also lasers that also do the “razor and blades” sales model, with a cheap printer and more-expensive toner).

However, there are legitimately some people who do need inkjets for one reason or another.

• Lasers, and especially inexpensive lasers where the manufacturer wants to shave down power supply costs, have a brief period of very high electrical draw when they are powered on. This is why you’ll typically see UPSes with warnings saying “don’t plug laser printers into this device”. This probably isn’t more than a minor irritation for most people, but I bet that it can overwhelm small inverters; there are probably people living full-time in RVs or something for whom this a problem.

• Even relatively-inexpensive inkjet printers today can produce what I’d call pretty impressive photograph prints if paired with fancy photo paper. Color lasers — and I’ve never bothered to even get a color laser — do not print photos that look remotely as nice as inkjets do. I don’t print photos — I have screens that can display photos perfectly well — and if I really wanted to do so, I’d go to one of the many stores around that do have the ability to do really fancy photo prints. But if someone were into that, they can’t really substitute a laser printer or most other types of printers for that. Maybe dye-sublimation printers, if those are still a thing. kagis Appears so.

There are spiders in the garage. And they are prolific with their webs, especially where I need to walk to get to the breaker panel.

https://old.reddit.com/r/homeowners/comments/tqpqjh/how_to_keep_spiders_out_of_garage/

bugs such as flies , gnats, mosquitos, beatles, etc. are attracted to the light and just fly in when the garage door is open. Spiders are just a natural consequence of having bugs there.

I don’t know to what degree that light attraction is the cause, but if they’re eating light-attracted bugs (which I think would really be moths), one solution might be leaving a bug zapper in the garage. If they’re getting fried by the bug zapper, they can’t be food for spiders.

I’ve had issues with moths getting into the house. I had a tiny zapper that ran off UV LEDs; those faded and became less effective in a few years; the device was clearly overdriving them. But I’ve been pretty happy with a larger one that has UV fluorescent tubes that just keeps trucking. I set that up on a (battery-backed, so doesn’t reset on wall power loss) timer to only run at night. Seems to work well enough for me.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bug+zapper+uv

If people in the UK hang their clothes to dry, you can too

This is something of a thing in places in Europe, though not much in the US today.

I don’t really like line-dried clothes. I’m sure that it’s gentler on the clothes, but in addition to the convenience, machine-dried clothes are considerably softer; line-dried stuff is stiff by comparison.

I used to really want an icemaker for convenience, because invariably I’d run into a mostly-empty ice cubes tray when I wanted ice cubes. Or I’d fill the ice cubes tray before it was empty, but then I’d partially-melt the ice cubes there and make them unusable until they refroze.

I didn’t care that much about chilled water, because I can throw ice in it. But the ice cubes were a pain.

I even got a dedicated icemaker at one point, when I wanted softer ice to run a small shaved ice machine.

But…finally I figured out what I needed to do differently. Instead of freezing water in ice cube trays and taking the ice cubes directly out of the tray, just go stick a container in your freezer. Whenever you get ice cubes, if the ice cube tray is full and there’s space, just dump it into the container and refill it. Now you have a big container of ice cubes that’s always full. Just replicates what freezer-integrated ice cube makers do. Haven’t had any issues since. Maybe this is obvious to some people, but it wasn’t to me.

You can get little containers that will fit into the door shelves if you want to stick them there:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ice+cube+container

looks puzzled

Hmm. What are you doing with that? Like, you want to be cooking for a certain amount of time, then after the cooking completes, have a timer trigger to start a second cooking period?

I’d also add – I think that a better criticism is not his lack of technical familiarity, but rather that he also worked at at Reddit when it was a startup, co-founded it, and despite having sold off his stock and left once before returning, I’m sure has some form of company-performance-linked compensation today. Basically, when he’s starting out, if Reddit goes under, he loses pretty big. If Reddit becomes big, he makes a ton of money. Today, if the company does well, so does he. The result is that he has a tremendous incentive to do everything he can to make Reddit successful.

In addition, his personal actions will have always been a substantial portion of determining what makes Reddit do well. If you’re one of a very small technical team making early technical decisions, those calls can determine whether the company sinks or swims. Later, he’s holding a high-level position where there’s a lot of impact.

So he gets compensation tightly tied to company performance, and his actions have a large impact on company performance. His interests are tightly-aligned with the company. And in that environment, yeah, you’re gonna care more about company performance and the impact of your actions on that performance.

That gets harder to do as companies grow. Sure, you can give employees stock options or have an employee stock purchase plan. I think every tech company I’ve been at has done that. And to some degree, yeah, that’s gonna align your interests with that of the company. Problem is that any one engineer, if you’re at a company with thousands of engineers, just doesn’t have as large an impact on the stock price. And usually, the proportion to which your compensation is stock or something tied to stock falls off as the company grows.

Stock in the company is a pretty good incentive when you’re a ten-person company. It doesn’t work as well as an incentive in a large company, not outside of the people near the top.

You can have companies set up bonus programs with milestones or something to try to replicate that alignment, but I don’t think that any bonus program works as well as stock. Lot of issues.

• Say someone doesn’t meet a milestone. Then maybe it’s the fault of the person who planned and structured the milestone: maybe it wasn’t realistic.

• There’s information disparity between the people setting the milestone and the people accepting it as compensation, and how much compensation someone gets is always going to have some level of a zero-sum aspect, outside of wanting to have happy employees that are retained. With stock prices, the only people on the “other side of the fence” are the competition.

• Might be ways to game the system, or to influence the people who set those bonus milestones (“Kathy down in accounting is sleeping with Bob who is running the bonus program”). Even if that doesn’t happen, if someone feels that there is — and I’m pretty sure that missing a bonus is disappointing — I bet that there’s potential for ill will.

I’ve thought about ideas before to try to figure out how to replicate some of that “startup” alignment of company and employee incentives for larger companies. But they usually smack into one of a number of problems; it’s really easy to create misincentives. I wasn’t able to come up with something that’ll align company and employee incentives as well as a startup. And this is not a new problem, so a lot of people have thought about it; if there were an easy solution, I’m pretty sure that companies would have done it by now.

But point is, I suspect that he’s comparing how much time and effort he’s willing to put in to what a random engineer is when Reddit is a larger company. And I’m pretty sure that at least some of the difference is that their personal incentives are different; he’s gotta take that into account. Maybe Reddit did have people not putting in the effort in 2015 relative to similar companies — I don’t know. But I still really suspect that at least some of the factor is going to be the personal incentives issue.

I bet his yearly salary he can’t name a single facet of what he iS referring to as ‘work’ and has no earthly idea how the tech behind Reddit works or is maintained.

You’d lose that bet. He was around when Reddit was pretty small, and I’m pretty sure wrote some of the original (Common Lisp, IIRC) codebase at least, if not the later Python rewrite.

kagis

Yeah, sounds like he was working on the Python codebase too.

https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/67bjm8/im_steve_huffman_programmer_and_reddit_ceo_ama/

I’m Steve Huffman, aka u/Spez. I founded both Reddit and Hipmunk (where I was CTO). Until about a year and a half ago, I was a full time engineer. I started programming as a kid, and worked as a developer through high school and college at Virginia (CS major).

That was from 2017.