• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I used to work on turbines, and I can attest the bird argument is very blown out of proportion. In my time working on turbines I never saw a single dead bird near the bases. We had a farm of Vestas V112-3.3mw turbines. Noise i can see, those blades whip through the air and cause almost the same sound as a distant jet as they whip by. Its not too loud unless winter then its very noticeable when the blades ice up. The hydraulics and such can be loud as well but its not terribly loud.

    However the biggest thing I noticed was how not green they are when it comes to the lubricants. Its not uncommon to have the pitch cylinders leak, and fill the hub and spinner with oil. Lots of times the blade bearing grease would overfill the cups and throw grease in the spinner. Another thing is the hydraulic systems would leak and cause excessive oil spillage, which sometimes would make its way out into the world. We could only clean with rags and pig mats so its super oily and greasy everywhere. The cooling systems would also leak and usually spill many gallons of coolant out into the wind.


  • There are plenty of Systemdless forks of distros. People do maintain and it works well. However, the issue is to make the forks its incredibly labor intensive for coders and while not impossible to remove systemd, it’s extremely hard. When base apps require systemd, it locks you down to that one system which is why people hate it so much. It centralizes code and the systems and prevents ease of choice. Does it work? Yes. Though even if it doesn’t affect you or your thoughts, its good to understand why there is a divide. I personally use Artix Linux at the moment with S6 as my init system and it works great. I get why people like Systemd, but I feel it sterilizes our freedom of choice like a frog in a pot of water.





  • Yes, cell/radio towers operate on Line of Sight. In flat, no vegetation lands you can see for data towers maybe 5 to 10 miles of range radius from the tower. In more realistic conditions you see 2 to 4 miles at best range. You’d be surprised how many cellular towers there are everywhere hiding in plain sight, since the high frequency bands such as 1900mhz don’t have penetration like 600mhz bands do. Lower frequency tends to not be as fast as higher frequency bands so its usually a tradeoff for speed or range. Before I was running Starlink I used to run 4G internet, and because where I live is rural, hilly, and full of trees, I had no direct line of sight. 1000 dollars in special parabolic radio antennas were required to focus on signal reflections to get data signal and even then I only had 3 bars roughly of signal. The tower is about 3.5mi away as the crow flies.


  • While I think Musk is an idiot, Starlink before I had fiber ran to me for some ungodly reason was a godsend. Also, space is big. 42000 satellites is still super insignificant in spaceborne objects over the planet. Also their design is so they burn up relatively quickly, and do not hang out in orbit for long, iirc only a couple years and constantly need to burn to maintain altitude. Sure they look like shit in the sky, but having the network like this is great for rural areas where there is no cell phone or internet service. But, the whole thing isn’t very sustainable



  • John Oliver is a good sport about it, one, secondly he is a goofy motherfucker, third he has a track record of calling out things for being shitty/bad in ridiculous ways. So, it’s totally a John Oliver thing to do, to make all of Reddit about John Oliver because of the API change. It’s silly, it calls out the shitty practices, and honestly the whole practice will stick in the minds of people better than just a blackout/complaining. On top of all this, it has the possibility of being brought to his show when the strike is over, which’ll further the goal of the protests