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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • If you have a bunch of people guess how many M&M’s are in a jar you can average the guesses and you’ll come very close to the correct amount. A recommendation system can be very democratic in that way. When reddit still had their public API I would take advantage of this fact and use it to decide if something was a “deal” or not on PC parts. I was tracking the prices of computer ram at the time as an experiment. It worked very well. If they are federated properly, then their content can be filtered and appear on an instances front page.










  • The worst part about plastic bottles is the energy required to make them.

    They go through a 2 stage process where the plastic is melted and injection molded into a “pre-form”

    Then they get fed into a blowmolding machine where they are heated in different areas by many 2k watt halogen bulbs. Once they’ve been heated properly they go into the blow mold where they are pressurized with ~500psi air.

    The molds are liquid cooled through an industrial pipe system with an extremely large refrigeration system. The energy required to run all of the equipment is insane. A factory can consume as much energy in one hour as a standard home will in an entire year.

    This doesn’t include all of the energy required for moving materials around since performs can be made at one factory and shipped to another and empty bottles are often shipped to warehouses and then off to the plant where they will be filled, then warehoused then distributed etc.










  • I program mine to run less when we’re not home. On top of that I set a “super cool” routine on weekends when it’s going to be hot outside.

    You see, the a/c is most efficient when it’s cooler already. So in the last hour of darkness in the summer I set it to run down to 68 or so. Then it doesn’t have to run as long to do that. Then it doesn’t have to run again for several hours as the temperature is set back to 72.

    I also clean the outside coils annually and put up a sun sail so that the outside unit is shaded all day. This has helped save a lot of money along with the thermostat programming.