AC units do not typically pull in outside air.

With all the ads that get shoved to our eyeballs, looking forward to the options.

Blocking ads on Youtube is fairly easy. uBlock Origin does it without any tinkering, for example.

There were also reduced fuel economy requirements for trucks and off-road vehicles, which contributed to the rise of SUVs.

You can’t. You can, however tell if a particular URL is believed to be dangerous by any of several organizations that track such things.

Your browser probably has something built in; Firefox and Chrome do, for example. If you attempt to visit a known-bad URL, the browser will warn you and make you click through the warning before you do. Some other comments in this thread suggest third-party services that will also do this, and may even attempt to check the content found at the URL for known malware.

If I do not have or cannot easily get root access to a computer, I don’t really own it.

Heat is bad, but the battery could be positioned below the oven. Disposable would be cheaper.

I guess manufacturers could embed the protection circuit in one of the terminals but that’s expensive so surprise surprise no one does it.

Battery OEMs don’t do it, but adding a protection circuit to the end is extremely common in the flashlight industry. Ideally, the springs in the battery compartment provide some flexibility about battery length so both bare and protected cells work.

The burner valves operate mechanically. It has an additional shutoff valve that closes when there’s no electrical power. A battery backup for the igniters would be a great feature though - a Li-ion battery stored at half charge would last pretty much forever.

I encountered an infuriating example of the opposite a couple years ago: a gas stove that wouldn’t work without electricity.

A gas stove normally operates with a mechanical valve to control gas to each burner, and while modern ones have electronic igniters, it’s possible to use a match or the like instead. These assholes went out of their way to add an electronic valve that shuts it off when there’s no power. It’s probably in the name of safety, but the scenario where someone leaves the valve open without igniting the gas is possible even with power by failing to engage the igniter correctly, and gas is smelly.

I should be able to use a gas stove when there’s no electricity or the igniter is broken if I supply my own source of ignition.

For your example of a flashlight, consider one with USB charging. If the charging port or circuit fails, I should be able to easily take out the battery and charge it in another charger (Li-ion charging is pretty standardized). If the battery is dead but the USB port works, I should be able to use it as a USB-powered lamp.

I don’t like it because:

• I want to look at the oil and smell it, not just check the level.
• I don’t know the failure modes for the sensor, so I can’t trust that the absence of a complaint from it means the oil level is correct.

You, in particular know that’s not a requirement for using modern batteries, but a user-hostile decision companies make.

Quite. Unfortunately, most devices that use modern batteries have the battery sealed inside with an onboard charging system, such that when the battery wears out, the device becomes e-waste. There are many standard, or semistandard sizes of cylindrical lithium-ion cells, and devices could be designed for field-replaceable versions, but the only product category where it’s common is high-performance flashlights.

Even in common consumer form factors, there have been improvements. Here’s a test of one of the best alkaline AAs. Note how the capacity drops as the load increases - by a factor of about six at 3 Amps. Contrast the Eneloop NiMH rechargeable, which has less capacity under light load, but barely loses any at 3 Amps and can handle 10 Amps while retaining most of its capacity.

The best Li-ions in a form factor similar to AA, called 14500 have even better performance with over 5 Watt-hours of energy, but devices have to be designed for them since the voltage is much higher; putting one in most devices designed for AA will result in damage, if not fire.

We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular.

That’s not quite it. The founders made a few of throwaway accounts and posted a bunch of links that exemplified what they wanted people to post. It was fake activity, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t automated. It was maybe 50 posts and I don’t think it was a bad thing to do.

I just wish the modern things would use standardized, field-replaceable batteries.

you need a different account for every single Lemmy site

What are you talking about? You are using a lemmy.world account to comment in a lemmy.ml community right now.

That seems likely to work.

# ls -l /dev/video0
crw-rw---- 1 system camera 81,   0 1974-07-26 10:09 /dev/video0

Android doesn’t handle users and groups like standard Linux, but the user account assigned to Termux is not a member of the camera group.

I prefer the American version of freedom of speech, which places very strict limits on the government’s ability to punish speech. Display of any flag in this way would be protected. We’re currently seeing that play out with the US president taking various actions against people who have expressed opinions he doesn’t like and getting blocked by the courts at every turn.

That said, Hezbolah is bad and Liam O’Hanna is an asshole for supporting them.

I’ve driven a couple cars with electronic door poppers and I’m having trouble understanding why anybody would want them. The novelty of accomplishing a routine task by pressing an electronic button instead of pulling a mechanical lever should have worn off in 1985.

Yes. I could talk about quantum indeterminacy as a scientific argument for it, but fundamentally, I believe in it because I want to[1]. I don’t like the idea of being a deterministic machine with a fate I can’t influence with active choices. It’s not provable either way with the current state of science, so I choose to believe my preferred option is the correct one.

[1] Of course such a statement presumes free will. I think I want to, anyway.