TechConnectify

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@vykend Indeed. Couldn't... resist.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@qgustavor Whether it's a law depends on your jurisdiction, but I don't care about that. It's just the right thing to do and I want to help people understand why.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

A point of clarification:

If a new lane appears which you have to enter in order to exit, once there I consider that "on the ramp" - your choice to move into it is clear enough.

I'm mainly talking about lanes which become exit-only up ahead.

To describe this more generally, if there's a situation where an inattentive driver could find themselves on a path they don't mean to take, then if you, the attentive driver, intend to take that path - signal to confirm this.

Don't make people guess.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@admin In fairness, I think that's an edge case which is effectively impossible to solve. Reckless drivers gonna do reckless things.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@andrewt Yeah, in turns lanes - signal on, no exception.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@wonka Oh to live in a country where I could assume everyone A) understood the rules of the road and B) actually followed them.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@TomF I was on a road trip through Washington about a year ago, and there were some signs on two-lane country roads explaining this but with the most confusing verbiage I could imagine. It took reading three of them for me to parse!

(edit: well, not specifically this but something about slow vehicles must use pull-offs if they're causing a blockage)

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@CrisLuengo In fairness, I simply do not understand how signaling that you're entering a traffic circle is helpful. Any car at the entry points WILL enter, they have no choice.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@skolima You should be. We all suck. It's a miracle there aren't more traffic fatalities.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@bhtooefr @CrisLuengo I have effectively zero faith that Americans, who barely understand roundabouts in the first place, could manage this and I'm certain this is not taught.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@TomF I think it was even worse. I tried googling for it but since search is crumbling I didn't get anywhere useful

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@darwinwoodka (this is one of the reasons I'd be OK with us ending right-on-red. It's very pro-car and anti everything else)

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@jmht You know you don't have to advocate for the devil.

You're not wrong, but we should all strive to be as helpful and clear as we can be.

TechConnectify , vor 2 Monaten

@thomasfuchs I had this thought recently. It does freak me out a bit that my nostalgia for the 90s is equivalent now to that era's nostalgia for the 50s

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

"why aren't you running, you should be running, I put a bunch of sparkle water and crap inside you"

"yeah, chief, I noticed that but golly gee right this very moment I think I'm gonna need to just stop for a half hour and melt the ice on my coils. please enjoy the slurpy hissy sounds"

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@dragonarchitect All signs point to yes, but I choose to be annoyed at the fridge

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@KayOhtie legit the first time I caught my new fridge in a defrost cycle I was extremely confused by what I was hearing.

It was making the sort of short hissing sounds of coffee dripping onto the hot plate of the coffee maker, with about the same cadence, too!

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@gigantos you probably just haven't noticed it before. All refrigerators build up ice on the coils which has to be dealt with in one way or another. That's typically accomplished automatically by stopping the compressor for some period of time and switching on heaters to melt that ice.

The only refrigerators that don't need to do this don't have freezer sections

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@yrlf I'm honestly not sure. I'm assuming that newer refrigerators have a way to tell when they actually need a defrost and aren't just using a dumb timer, but that's just a guess.

Since it's normally closed up and not exchanging air, I would imagine they don't need to defrost more than once a day - it might only be every couple of days.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@tomlegamer Not being familiar with your fridge I can't be certain, but usually the key determinant for me is that it becomes completely silent for an extended period of time.

Samsung fridges often have separate fridge and freezer evaporators which confounds things, but if you hear any mechanical noise at all, say from a fan, it can't be defrosting. Any airflow through the evap would heat up your food and also slow the defrost.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@tomlegamer if you can log that, then its power consumption is definitely going to be highest in a defrost, by a lot. The compressor usually will use 100-200W at the most and the defrost heaters are around 500W

I myself don't know if there is any logic behind when it happens. Prior to microcontrollers, it would have just been a clock-based timer, maybe once a day. But newer fridges may have a way to detect ice buildup - there's tons of ways that could be done but I don't know particulars

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@gigantos ah, you're in Norway?

The European fridge market is very weird to American sensibilities. Our standard kitchen refrigerators have been "frost-free" as a rule since about the 1970s, but that really just means automatic defrost.

It is still relatively normal for chest freezers and upright freezers to be manual defrost, and some mini-fridges. But any "real fridge" needs absolutely no attention from its user over its life

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@gigantos now I very much suspect that whatever marketing copy Samsung has created is conflating frost-free with automatic defrost. I had a very similar conversation over discord with one of your compatriots.

There is literally no way to prevent ice from forming in a freezer, unless some miracle of physics has occurred. So my money is on it being a conventional automatic defrost system labeled as if it's magic

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@tomlegamer oh wow, that's a tiny heater! But cool, now you know ;)

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@tomlegamer that's a cool label, I've never seen one here distinguish the defrost heaters as a load. All the ones I've seen just list a max current draw, which is always during defrost.

IIRC my fridge says it's a ~4A device, 400-500W ish, but plugged into a power meter it only draws about 100W when running

TechConnectify , vor 2 Monaten

@foone I submit a Scantron form is a punchcard-RW

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@EddiKat I'm genuinely curious to see if I do get roasted for this.

I'm not showing you what this is powering, and for the purposes of the video that this was required for, I will not be showing how I powered the thing.

Those of you following me here may be able to connect the dots, but we'll see.

In any case, this was all done with everything de-energized, rigged together, set up, including the camera, then the breaker was flipped on. Got what I needed, switched it off, all is good.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@teotwaki Oh I strongly believe there's a UX issue but it's not from hastags:

I believe it's from Mastodon's almost total lack of tools for the wider audience to signal bad behavior.

There are technical ways this manifests (cross-instance weirdness), but even when all things are working as intended, new replies end up in the bottom. Which means people can be assholes to posters with nobody else seeing that occur to push back on it.

That seems to have gotten better but it's not gone.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@teotwaki Oh. Oh ho ho. This will be rich if you were following along when I was talking about the need for a filter.

Because YouTube has a filter and turns that sucker on once your channel starts getting big. With no action on my part, I went from getting pinged for every comment, then pinged just for replies, then pinged only when other large YouTube creators comment on my videos.

And that's just the notifications side. The comment algorithm also does a great job of keeping me sane.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@teotwaki There is only one place where YouTube sometimes forces me to see inane, awful comments: The main screen on the dashboard where the three most-recent comments on YOUR ENTIRE CHANNEL are always visible.

That can be particularly nasty when I'm between uploads. Because on those days, the main people commenting are new to my channel. And boy are they unkind.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

@teotwaki And, not to put too fine a point on it, but when you approach the scale of a 2-million sub YouTube channel - algorithms simply are a must.

Mastodon leadership needs to engage with that fact if they want the platform to be usable for folks like me.

It's still alright for me at the moment, but I think that's purely down to how small Fedi remains at this point. I've got something of a reputation here when across all of YT the vast majority don't know who I am.

TechConnectify OP , vor 2 Monaten

And consider what that looks like from the other side:

"Suddenly this person is bringing up outside issues to muddy the conversation! The people I watch on the news warned me about this. They won't stay on topic because they're disingenuous and they know it."

We have to listen to each other and engage with the individual things we are wrong about. We have to be very careful about labeling an entire person as "wrong." That presumes they cannot change or improve themselves: a very dangerous idea