Lumafield scanned 1,054 batteries – around 100 from each brand – and found 33 of them had a serious manufacturing defect known as negative anode overhang. The defect “significantly increases the risk of internal short-circuiting and battery fires” and can reduce the overall life of the battery,” according to Lumafield. All 33 of the batteries with the defects came from the 424 sold by low-cost brands or brands selling counterfeits…

For two of the counterfeit brands that were reporting impossible specs, the percentage of tested batteries from those brands that were found to have the defect were even higher – upwards of 12 and 15 percent. None of the name brand OEM batteries were found to have any problems…

Defects like negative anode overhang and bad edge alignment don’t mean an affected battery is guaranteed to explode or catch fire, but they can increase the risk of those incidents occurring, particularly when combined with other factors such as being left in a hot car or an accidental drop causing additional damage.

I have read some analysis that right-wing propaganda gets the most engagement when there are liberals in the community to provide the “liberal tears”. Yes, there is a core group happy to be in an echo chamber with only imagined liberal tears, but the majority find substitutes unsatisfying. Potentially the diminishing of non-right content volume will also diminishing the right content by making the comments less interesting.

Somewhat encouraging at least some public community is being built elsewhere, instead of the only widespread options being X and group chats. Hopefully the momentum keeps going and more types of users also make the switch.

The increase in diagnosis has happened in less than one generation. Genetic drift from altered reproductive behavior would take multiple generations. The speed of the diagnosis shift rules out social changes to mate selection and childbearing rates.

VBA for Word is bad, but VBA for Excel graphs is worse. At small companies that can’t justify the cost of any software outside Office, people will go to great lengths to get Excel to support data analysis. Not being in that situation anymore is one of my top satisfaction items with having changed jobs from a small to a large company.

I used to work at a place where one of their test machines generated a cert in Microsoft Word with test results. They were having their lab technicians manually type in something like eight fields of information to flesh put the cert. I managed to hack together a Word VBA plus Python script to interface with the OpenOffice database I had set up so the techs only had to type in one field, and the script filled in the rest.

It was kind of a monstrosity under the hood, but it worked pretty slickly, and given the available tools I was glad the option existed.

Thanks for sharing. I’m glad you are feeling less miserable now.

Before it was collected as a compendium of official parts, sure, but most of the individual books (both the ones that made it into the current version and additional ones that ended up being rejected) were around. The Old Testament ones were already written down, and most of the Gospels were at least oral tradition very early on.

I believe it was over one hundred years before the Gospels were all written down, and early Christian sects had passionate disagreement over which texts were official or hearsay, but it’s not like they were completely without religious texts.

Mob violence has been a thing for all of human history. Before humans, even: chimpanzee groups, if they get large, will split into two groups. After a few months apart, if the groups encounter each other, the stronger group will murder every individual in the weaker one.

I think we had settled on a regulated and normalized system in pre-internet media that moderated the mob violence tendencies. Our current polarization is not really that social media created this new thing in society, it’s that it removed the guardrails in traditional media that were suppressing natural human tendencies. I hope we can figure out and implement some new guardrails sooner rather than later.

Our brains are hard-wired to be susceptible to specific patterns. Ancestral humans who stayed in good graces with their social group, even when the leaders of that group were factually mistaken, survived at higher rates than humans whose respect for facts drove them to reject or be rejected by the group. The details of which and to what degree we have these triggers override our rationality varies by genetics and environment, but we are all susceptible.

That a very significant percent of humans respond to their system by adopting specific harmful behavior is not something we can fight by moral condemnation. Labeling them as bad people is unproductive. If the goal is to actually reduce the harmful behavior, addressing the system - not the individuals - is the only effective strategy.

"One thing I’ll say about DC not only canceling Red Hood, but recalling the first issue and refunding stores for buying it, is that you can still get Neil Gaiman’s work through them. They still work with Otto Schmidt. Eddie Berganza worked there for years AFTER the formation of a policy that no women were to be around him at any time for any reason due to his habitual sexual harassment and assaults.

“Frank Miller released one of the most savagely Islamophobic comics of all time, HOLY TERROR, and still works with DC. There are pedophiles, war criminals, confessed sexual predators on staff.

“You can still buy all their work.

For those unaware of the specific cases involving the creators named by Felker-Martin:

• Gaiman was recently accused of grooming and sexual assault by a number of women, and is currently facing a related lawsuit from one of them. DC still publishes his Batman and The Sandman work.
• Schmidt drew a graphic propaganda comics on behalf of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. DC continues to commission him for cover work, his most recent gracing the front of this month’s Batgirl Vol. 6 #9
• Berganza was fired from DC in 2017 following numerous accusations of inter-office sexual harassment, prior to which the aforementioned ‘No women around’ rule was confirmed by Sensational Comics Vol. 2 writer Alex DeCampi. His run as an editor on a number of Superman-related titles, including Action Comics Vol. 1, Advenutres of Superman Vol. 1, and Worlds’ Finest Vol. 1, are still widely available in various trade collections.
• Miller, as noted by Felker-Martin, wrote and drew Holy Terror!, a post-9/11 anti-terrorism that presents both the War on Terror and the Islamic faith as cartoonishly evil. From The Dark Knight Returns to its third-sequel, 2019’s The Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child, Miller’s collected work remains a mainstay of comic book retailers.

While Felker-Martin did not provide any specifics as to the supposed “pedophiles” and “confessed sexual predators on staff”, it’s currently presumed that the “war criminals” include not just Schmit, labeled as such for his Putin propaganda piece, but also current DC golden boy Tom King, himself an ex-CIA agent who helped plan and facilitate America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.

I’ve read good things about the lawyers at Democracy Forward https://democracyforward.org/

Automation replaced hand knitters, and people in that career suffered for a generation, but most people now value mass produced socks more than they value paying a premium for hand knit. Automation replaced telephone operators, and people in that career suffered for a generation, but no one now wants their phone call to be manually switched by a person.

The pain of automation is real and lasts the length of the career of everyone impacted, but the societal benefit lasts many generations. More support is needed for people who are displaced, but I don’t see fighting the technology as the effective way to achieve that.

If you don’t say anything, they assume you agree with them. It’s a fine line between letting them know you (maybe respectfully) disagree, vs. actively debating, but in some cases I think it’s worthwhile to try to let them know you aren’t inside their bubble. Agree outright dickishness is unhelpful, but so much depends on the specifics of the relationship and circumstances of delivery.

True in Europe and the US, but not everywhere. Corvids are a hugely successful animal class, and there are related species all over the world locally called crows and ravens. Some places the local species called ravens are bigger. Other places the local species called crows are bigger.

As late as the 19th century? Belief in “like cures like” alternate medicines is still widespread today!

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7253376/

A European survey conducted in 2014 examined the use of homeopathy and other popular forms of “alternative/complementary” medicine… This survey covered 21 European countries and Israel and provided data from structured interviews with 40,185 individuals.

…the use of homeopathy is highly prevalent (≥10%) in France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

The principles of homeopathy were first introduced in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann… One core tenet is “similia similibus curentur” (like cures like), i.e. the principle of similarity: compounds, which can produce symptoms (at high doses), can cure a disease with similar symptoms (when administered at low doses).

By what metric? Recycling gives a new use to discarded materials, so the material might be 100% not-discarded, but new energy is still consumed in the recycling process. This is why reducing and re-using are more powerful levers than recycling.

There is also the detail of whether a material is truly “re” cycled back to the original use, or is “down” cycled to a use with less rigorous technical requirements.

I hope the AI-chat companies really get a handle on this. They are making helpful sounding noises, but it’s hard to know how much they are prioritizing it.

OpenAI has acknowledged that its existing guardrails work well in shorter conversations, but that they may become unreliable in lengthy interactions… The company also announced on Tuesday that it will try to improve the way ChatGPT responds to users exhibiting signs of “acute distress” by routing conversations showing such moments to its reasoning models, which the company says follow and apply safety guidelines more consistently.

I hadn’t previously come across the printing press as an influence on witch hunts, interesting. It is pretty far down the Wikipedia article, though, and a different book printed almost two hundred years later is also cited as highly influential. I devoutly hope we are not in for two hundred years of unchecked social media and AI driven misinformation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt

…in 1487, Kramer published the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (lit., ‘Hammer against the Evildoers’) which, because of the newly invented printing presses, enjoyed a wide readership. It was reprinted in 14 editions by 1520 and became unduly influential in the secular courts.

The 1647 book, The Discovery of Witches, soon became an influential legal text. The book was used in the American colonies as early as May 1647, when Margaret Jones was executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts, the first of 17 people executed for witchcraft in the Colonies from 1647 to 1663.

Anti-intellectuallism is a repeating story in world history. Something about human genetics makes our communities susceptible to this. Khmer Rouge and China’s Cultural Revolution are a couple of examples of these movements gaining control of a government. Witch hunts (any woman with knowledge perceived to threaten church teaching must burn) were a long standing practice often driven from non-governmental actors.

It always passes, but previous iterations have taken decades or hundreds of years.