We have e. coli as part of our gut biome right? Curious how dangerous, if at all, it would be to get this modified version in there. I have a hard time beliving it is very efficent so doubt it would somehow electrocute you from the inside, but could cause other issues.
I wonder how it compares to something like methane digesters in production and ease to maintain. Seems like it would produce less energy and not make nearly as good fertilizer, but be much less finicky and not require an anaerobic environment or careful temperature control.
One helpful way to think of it is that having a wide variety of bacteria is what matters for a healthy gut biome.
If one species like e. coli flares up, maybe from food poisoning, it can overwhelm the immune system. The other type of food poisoning (like with botulism I think?) is where the bacteria have already contaminated food with their waste and it overwhelms the organs so the toxin reaches the body. But with so many variations of e. coli already in existence, I would expect the risk from an engineered version to be low.
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That said, I lost my gut health in late 2018 due to a number of factors including work stress, too many beers/cocktails and ignoring my body's response when I ate stuff like almond butter which I didn't know I was sensitive to. That punched holes through my intestines and gave me leaky gut. Which allowed gluten, lectins and lactose to pass the gut lining and trigger my immune system. Now I'm sensitive to foods containing those compounds, and they are in almost everything and especially processed foods. It took me at least 3 years to recover and I must largely avoid wheat and fast food now, which is.. annoying to say the least.
Gluten sensitivity has reached such levels that many people can only drink hard seltzer now, not beer. And having to offer gluten-free options has become a burden on restaurants. What most people don't realize is that gluten sensitivity can occur at any age unexpectedly. I look at it now like smoking: every time we eat grains, we run a small risk of becoming sensitized. IMHO that's mostly due to the increased use of wheat and gluten in processed foods, incentivized by the lowered cost of GMO crops:
This was all predicted by a small minority of scientists in the 1990s and armchair activists like me who warned that GMOs would have unintended consequences. TANSTAAFL except with GMO foods.. right.
I'd choose GMOs for industry over messing with our food supply any day.
Engineered microbes are almost always far less fit than wild-type. They will survive best in a monoculture, and if they are forced to compete with less hobbled strains they will usually find a way to get rid of the engineered modifications in order to grow faster.
I've always wondered how quickly this effect would ruin the monoculture.
Suppose you're treating the engineered microbes like sourdough starter: Add them to nutrient solution, wait for desired effect, take a small sample, add to next batch.
You'd expect a selective pressure away from the engineered outcome, such that after X batches, your samples are overrun by wild-ish type mutants. But is that a merely academic concern, something that might happen after 500 batches, or are you out of luck by batch three?
Haven't used lemmy in particular. But in theory defederation exists to block bad actors. Since anyone can host a server themselves and no one can stop the servers outside some kind of government intervention, each server needs the ability to block a spammy or even illegal content filled server.
In reality, it is used for that and the censorship of ideas server owners don't like... or even just blocking a server because the admins of each server had a spat. It has been likened to little fifedoms each with their own flavor of tyrant, a little drematic imo but not wholely wrong either.
Another use is if you want to use the software, but don't want/need connections to the greater network. So you fully defederate and only allow your friends to have logins to your isolated server.
I agree with you. I was happy to jump to Lemmy right away then after only a few days they were talking about the defederation of some of the biggest instances. I originally liked the idea of federations since it allow a way to deal with problematic instances, let the steam blow temporarily. Then, I followed some of the discussion and was appalled by how folks some folks were using federations as way to curate their echo chamber and censor political idea. This is just what we need, another social media that shows recomforting opinion and demonize anything else.
I personally don't have the time or the energy to follow stupid turf wars and trying to find out who is federated with who.
My family always hit the construction dumpsters. You can get a lot of decent pine lumber that gets tossed because it was cut wrong or stained with mud/ptty/etc. They throw a lot out because time is mor valuable to them then the wood. Even short end peices are useful for burning or turning into charcoal. Pretty rare that you get decent lengths for building though. Usually 6 feet and below are fairly common, with the rare 7-10 foot boards, and nigh unheard of 11+. And the builders are usually happy about it too, since they pay to have it emptied so everything you take is a bit less they have to pay, and no skin off their nose.
We have built a number of animal houses and even a few sheds around our land with the salvaged wood. Saved us a lot of money.
Dumpsters in front of new construction are my favorite. Lots of good pine studs, OSB, and other stuff. I built a whole workbench (with a spot for table saw and storage) out of materials I pulled from dumpsters on the street when they were building a new subdivision behind me. Some of my favorite picks were unopened bundles of shingles (heavy!) that I will use for a shed some day, a bunch of brand-new pex tubing, and an entire case of caulk.
Be careful if it’s been sitting in the sun. Lived in a building that had its hot water recirc lines fail one after the next like 5y after construction and I suspect that was why.
Note that not all dumpsters on a construction site are trash. The best example is metal, where a full dumpster brings significant money instead of costing to dispose of. When I was working in a construction company, on a regular basis some dudes came along "offering" to empty the metal dumpster for free.
So it's always better to ask first, otherwise it's technically stealing.
This is textbook safe that is lacking in street smarts.
You can't ask because then you're pushing the responsibility of you being there onto someone else. They don't want some ambulance chasing lawyer to come bitching at them if you get hurt so they have to say no. But if you're discreet can just pretend that you're trespassing.
So just don't ask and know what is or isn't fair game.
Additionally, scrap of the mixed random stuff variety that is worth picking through is cents a pound. They won't care if you're not taking serious volume.
We usually asked with only a few turning us down, though we are fairly rural/small town so the builders we interacted with may not have been burned by people that are sue happy or maybe are just smaller and didn't consider that legal aspect.
I'd be careful with this advice. First of all you don't know what else has been put into the dumpster. There could be toxic or hazardous materials. Especially if it's a renovation project.
Secondly, be careful with the wood if you don't know precisely what it is. For instance, making charcoal (or even burning) pressure treated wood is a horrible idea.
Generally, there _shouldn't_ be anything toxic in construction dumpsters. Not a lot of home construction deals with anything highly toxic anyway. Plus, if the disposal company finds something in there that shouldn't be there, they will refuse to take it, or levy a fine, or won't work with that contractor anymore.
Conversely, some randos see an open dumpster and think its a great place to chuck their old car batteries and whatnot.
Pressure treated woods scraps are generally thrown in dumpsters and they are toxic if burned. You never burn pressure treated wood.
You just never know though. For instance, it could be thought that there isn't any asbestos in the home being renovated. But maybe there were a couple pieces of drywall or pipe insulation that happened to have asbestos and it wasn't noticed. It happens.
There is also a very good chance that there's lead dust and chips from old paint or pipes that's being thrown in as well. Probably don't want to make charcoal or anything out of that or any new SPF/Doug tossed in there that maybe got some of it on it you don't notice.
Good point. Never ran into anything problematic myself, but we are fairly rural so construction is usually houses with occasional apartments. But definitely be wary of other stuff that may be in with the wood.
As for pressure treated wood, it is pretty obvious what has been treated and what has not, at least in my experience. Not sure if it's the process, or if they intentionally dye it, but treated wood has a strong green tint, though could probably have other colors too depending on the treatment method. But fresh untreated pine has a pretty obvious color.
The old CCA treated stuff got the green from the copper in it. It's hard to tell if the A (arsenic compound) is still in there if it's weathered. Not a good idea to burn scraps from demolished old outdoor stuff.
Grow plants > feed to goats > collect menure > anerobic decay (aka methane digester) > natural gas (pretty close anyway) + good fertilizer.
That's the system I'm interested in. The only real issue is needing to filter out a sulfer based gas (forgetting the exact thing off the top of my head, but it's corrosive to metal)
Haven't seen these two so thought I'd add them to the list.
Minetest is a block building game engine (like minecraft) built around the idea mods add all content. There are a bunch of games built for it, and last I checked a active modding community.
https://www.minetest.net/
The other is AlephOne, a engine to play all the Marathon games (story FPS, pre-halo bungie made games) along with a bunch more community created ones. I've sunk a good bit of time into both the trilogy and the additional 6 big community made ones.
https://alephone.lhowon.org/
I played Minetest a lot with my kids too. We still have tons of those old maps from our co-op on various computers.
Now that they are playing other games, I still find that I occasionally log into Minetest servers just to look around at all the amazing builds.
In one of them I found a working MS Paint emulator (a wall with the icons and canvas on it), as well as a very impressive and huge ancient Greek temple.
Minetest is kinda crap, honestly. Unless it has radically changed since I played it, the game feel is just lightyears behind.
It has lots of mods and customization hooks, way more than Minecraft, and if that works for you that's great. But for a lot of people the experience just can't compare.
I think what you are looking for is the MineClone2 game for MineTest. It is basically a recreation of the Minecraft mobs, items, realms, etc in MineTest. I have played it a lot and it is great if you are looking for the MC experience!
Just in general, that there's a lot of stuff to do. I can make a base and slowly do various upgrades, try to finish the game as quickly as possible, or just fool around in creative mode.
myself i only play minetest on a public server without attacking mobs, so there is no hurry to build a base, and i can focus on building interesting stuff. i still have to get food, mine for materials and fix my tools so there is plenty to manage while building. and with other players on the server we can also build in collaboration.
my son likes to add mobs, so he is building and fighting mobs.
Ironically I'm rolling out a new documentation initiative at my workplace this friday after about a year of work.
I'm using mediawiki with quite a few extentions to meet our needs.
I designed the structure around use cases since the documentation is for me and my coworkers to make us more effective. I'm also making it clear that if they have any issues or frustrations to contact me and I'll try to fix them quickly. I.e. lower the bar as much as possible to get people to use it.
As a general rule if someone is asked a question (internally) more then twice it should be documented to help save them time.
For our structure we use a heavily formatted main page with the 1st half focused on handeling emergancies, req/report forms, and general quick links. The 2nd half categorises all pages into 3 functional groupings. Guides to handle step by step process pages, notebooks for longer explanations for training etc, and referance for lists/tables of data.
These are then further divided into department focused groups.
Tl;dr IMHO do a bottom up design based on use cases like emergancies, quick lookup, normal day to day tasks, edge cases, etc.
In my experience, Xbox controllers are actually fairly common for large robotics. It is relatively cheap to buy a controller and USB wireless dongle plus there are lots of software libraries to help interpret controller input.
My main experience being my participation two years in a row in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC). A college competition to develop self-driving rovers and "cars" (golf carts). There were around 40 teams from various colleges (several international, not just usa) and many of the teams used xbox controllers for manual control including my team.
Same, I have two personal domains with them and the free Whois guard sold it for me.
We use namecheap at work. Recently they have been messing up dns (I think it was a one time thing). Not a huge amount only like 3-6 domains out of 400ish, but it's silent. We caught most with monitoring, but have found several that slipped through the cracks since.
I wonder how it compares to something like methane digesters in production and ease to maintain. Seems like it would produce less energy and not make nearly as good fertilizer, but be much less finicky and not require an anaerobic environment or careful temperature control.