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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Tipping is bad culture because we as customers should not need to directly subsidize the employees paychecks. There is too much variability in that. I’ve worked in restaurants where there is a slow day. I’ve seen servers on busy nights leave with $10 in tips because tables just refuse to tip anyone.

    The restaurant should raise their prices and pay all employees a livable wage regardless of position. It’s not about being bad at math. It’s about some people not wanting to tip and the only one getting fucked over is the person on the very bottom with no control. It’s about that same person having to spend 8 hours on a slow Wednesday morning with maybe 2 customers all day just not getting the tips to feed their family. It shouldn’t matter how many customers a server gets. They should get paid for the hours worked, not the customers served


  • Except they literally couldn’t? Official documentation for 3.0 is 100 up and 1G down in a lab setting. As someone who’s actually tested that with an ISP it doesn’t work in the real world. 500/50 was what was achievable in most cases. Then 3.1 pushed the download with OFDM splits, but practical applications still couldn’t hit the 1G they got in lab environments. 3.0 was never advertised to hit 200 up and 3.1 hasn’t actually hit it in real world. 4.0 will get us closer to symmetrical max.

    I will say that Comcast being the biggest ISP does likely mean they’ll reach true d4 first but to my knowledge they haven’t achieved it yet.


  • Apple has very explicitly stated in very clear terms that the health app does not share data with other apps or devices unless you give permission. And as someone who has given that permission (twice, once to give a meal tracker write permission and once to link to my doctors office’s application for read and write) it’s for every application. It’s not a “hey you need to let everyone have access or no one”. You can get fairly granular.

    There’s always the possibility of lying but usually when a company goes that hard on saying the same thing is so many different ways it’s legit. They don’t commit like that unless they know they won’t get in trouble. Those kinds of statements could open them to false advertising claims if it got out they were taking your health data.

    Here’s a link to their privacy document which reviewed a good bit of info: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Health_Privacy_White_Paper_May_2023.pdf




  • The technology is there, but we need to free up that space. Cable companies don’t just do things to their own beat. Cable Labs is the one responsible for organizing how that bandwidth is used and removing the cable frequencies to open up more internet frequencies is literally the next step.

    But you need to do entire markets at a time. We can’t just upgrade the people that move to IP tv because at a certain point they share lines with people who haven’t upgraded so that bandwidth is already used.

    Everyone needs to upgrade in an area to allow the business to reallocate that bandwidth. What you described is literally what is in progress right now. It just takes time


  • The asymmetrical aspect of cable will be here to stay. Fiber can do it because it was build on a different foundation.

    Copper cable transmits data using electric signals in various frequencies. There are a batch of frequencies reserved for phone and TV. ALL of the tv programming is constantly streamed to your lines whether you have TV or not and whether you pay for it or not. It’s encrypted and is only decrypted by your cable boxes when your provider says they can decrypt it. The phone frequencies are reserved so you can make phone calls and still max out your download.

    So what about the rest of the bandwidth? Well, way back in the early days of cable it was pretty much everyone for themselves. Every company did things its own way. That’s where DOCSIS came in. It’s a platform that allows modem manufacturers to make modems that will work on any cable network that supports Docsis. And the key part is that DOCSIS is always backwards compatible. The network upgrade to 3.1 did not break the old d2 devices.

    When it was developed the download was extremely more necessary than the upload. You’d be sending small single line commands on upload and receiving entire files in download. So more frequencies went to download than upload. In a lab setting 1.0 could reach 40mbps down and 10 up. That’s not what was sold because real life isn’t a lab and there’s loss over large distances. Realistically most people got 10 mb down and upload wasn’t even listed.

    Whats changed? Well today those same download and upload frequencies are still used. We’ve added more around them to deliver higher speeds. But we’ve also kept the same principles that people need more download than upload. Docsis 3.1 was released in 2013. We really didn’t start stressing over upload until Covid and work from home had us on zoom calls all day.

    Docsis 4.0 is technically released but requires quite a bit of overhaul to work with existing networks. We pretty much need to do away with cable tv. That’s why many ISP’s are pushing IPTv. It removes the need for all that bandwidth devoted to just TV. If everyone in a region drops traditional cable for IPTv they can easily switch to d4. D4 does increase upload but does not make it symmetrical.

    Your cable company does not decide their highest tier realistically. It’s the most that medium will offer. It’s gonna be a while too for d4 to be available everywhere. Everyone would need to drop traditional cable (which is honestly a nice move regardless) and people don’t upgrade plans very often. When I worked in tech support I would frequently deal with customers complaining about slow speeds while on plans from 2002.





  • Your electric bill absolutely will not go up by as much as your saving on gas. It’s tough to figure out how much because it depends on your electric rate and how much you drive as well as your charging habits.

    I charge my car to full every night and live in western PA, but not sure of what the rates are for electric. My bill is under $150/month though. Gas is almost $4/gallon. Before our first EV in 2018 we spent about $200 a week on gas and gas has only gotten more expensive. We spend less on Electric per month for the entire house (not just the car) than we did on a week in gas.

    As for long trips, that’s an area seriously lacking. I use ABRP which is a mapping software that uses your specific model, battery charge, distance, elevation, traffic, and weather to figure out when to charge and for how long. You can also link up a OBDII sensor to get live data for more accurate route adjustments. I’d recommend giving that a look and mess with different cars to see what cars fit the routes you drive the best.

    I drove to Kentucky from western PA and only had to stop three times for about 2 hours of charge total in a Kia Niro 2022 EV. But we then didn’t stop to eat at other times we would have because we stopped in places with restaurants so it wasn’t 2 hours lost.

    We also did a trip to Washington DC to see the pandas before they left and made it the whole way with no charge. We only had to charge on the way home.


  • Every form of production will have defects. The goal of perfecting production is one to be sought, but never achieved. We should always try to make food production more efficient with less loss, but there will always be loss, and always be waste.

    Even new means of production like lab grown beef can have waste and loss in batches that don’t “grow” properly because they didn’t mix hormones correctly or whatever. I actually don’t know how the science behind that works, but I do know it’s a process. And where there’s a process there’s room for error. That’s where we get loss from.

    We’ll never make something fool proof. Perhaps lab grown meats will be the most efficient form of product in that they have the lowest loss and production can be tweaked fairly quickly so there’s not a lot of loss and ramped up for shipments to areas with food shortages. Honestly, lab grown in my opinion has the best chances of being a major breakthrough but it’s still too early to be sure.


  • I can answer yes to all of these questions but still use a spreadsheet. I understand your point, but I feel even with these the line is still gray.

    I just checked and my largest spreadsheet currently has 14,300 lines across 12 tabs. Each tab contains the same information just pulled from a separate form. So each tab is linked to a form to update automatically when someone submits a new response. We then process these responses periodically throughout the day. Finished responses are color coded so a ton of formatting. Also 7+ people interacting with it daily.

    Then we have a data team that aggregates the information weekly through a script that sends them a .csv with the aggregate data.

    The spreadsheet (and subsequent forms) are updated twice a year. It was updated in June and will be updated again in December. It’s at 14k now and will continue to grow. We’ve been doing this through a few iterations and do not run into performance issues.


  • Stars can appear red or blue depending on the direction they are traveling. It has to do with the frequency of light they put out. As they move away the frequency gets lower, which we interpret as red. As they get closer the frequency gets faster which we interpret as blue.

    I am not an astronomer or even a casual stargazer. I took a single class in Astronomy in college and this was a neat fact I picked up. I remember next to nothing else from the class other than the fact that you can fit every planet between the earth and moon.




  • Just bought one recently. We walked in and the guy immediately started showing us ones for as low as $200. I asked what the difference was between those and the display models and he started showing us some of the floor models. We really didn’t feel much difference between any of them. The ones leaning up were absolutely not worth it and uncomfortable but we went with a $1k hybrid because it felt the same as a $5k premium Stearns and Foster. We got a Sleepy with a medium stiffness. It’s a combination of memory foam and springs. It helped my back pain and I got the best night sleep in years the day we got it.