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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I’ve read a bit about Teflon. My understanding is that the big health hazard is during the application process, primarily for the factory workers - you really don’t want to breath aerosolized uncured Teflon, or get it in your eyes. It’s not the most hazardous industrial chemical out there, I don’t think there’s any particular ethical issue with manufacturing products with Teflon as long as workers are provided PPE. If it’s a sweatshop product well then there are obviously a lot of ethical issues.

    Once it’s cured it’s chemically inert (which is kind of the whole point) - I’m not aware of any research showing that the human body can absorb any harmful chemicals from cured Teflon - basically your stomach acid and digestive tract bacteria can’t do anything to it. You shouldn’t worry overmuch about being harmed by cooking in a Teflon-coated pan, it’s not a heavy metal or anything like that.

    That said, a deteriorating Teflon coating can be a hazard. The material is fairly stiff and again, your digestive system can’t break it down. Any small particles should (hopefully) pass through, but larger flakes could get stuck somewhere and then… well your body can’t break it down. It’s going to be there causing a blockage until something dislodges it, it’s not going to bend very much, and it might have sharp enough edges to irritate or damage the surrounding tissue.

    And yeah, nothing breaks it down naturally, so it is just going to be in the world forever, gradually eroding into smaller and smaller particles along with all of the other plastic pollution, so yay.

    I can’t point to any specific sources on this, it’s from reading various articles over two decades, I’m definitely not an authority.


  • This concept is inherently flawed. There is no static form of ‘true’ self.

    Who you are now is different from who you were five years ago, and who you are tomorrow will be different from who you are now. Who you are changes depending on who is in the room with you, because your relationship with that person changes the context of your actions and interactions.

    This is not to say that personality or identity is fungible, but that it is not fixed and there is no end state (no goal).

    We do tend to reflect and repeat behaviors that we observe, and I think there’s some truth in the idea that you become the average of the people you spend the most time with. With this in mind, think about who you feel most comfortable with in your life - the people who, when you spend time with them, you feel most at peace with yourself - then try to arrange your life to spend more time with those people.

    In regard to “masking”, I’ll just point out that privacy implies that some things are not shared with others. Therefore, to have any privacy in your life some things must be hidden, including some thoughts, feelings and opinions. Having a private life is healthy and normal and doesn’t mean that you are suppressing your “true self”.


  • DuPont. Here’s just a little tidbit:

    Between 2007 and 2014 there were 34 accidents resulting in toxic releases at DuPont plants across the U.S., with a total of eight fatalities.[93] Four employees died of suffocation in a Houston, Texas, accident involving leakage of nearly 24,000 pounds (11,000 kg) of methyl mercaptan.[94] As a result, the company became the largest of the 450 businesses placed into the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s “severe violator program” in July 2015.

    Monsanto:

    In Anniston, Alabama, plaintiffs in a 2002 lawsuit provided documentation showing that the local Monsanto factory knowingly discharged both mercury and PCB-laden waste into local creeks for over 40 years.[220] In 1969 Monsanto dumped 45 tons of PCBs into Snow Creek, a feeder for Choccolocco Creek, which supplies much of the area’s drinking water, and buried millions of pounds of PCB in open-pit landfills located on hillsides above the plant and surrounding neighborhoods.

    These are the kind of companies that inspired the cartoon villains of the 1980s that just dump pollution because.


  • Beyond your eventual technical solution, keep this in mind: untested backups don’t exist.

    I recommend reading some documentation about industry-leading solutions like Veeam… you won’t be able to reproduce all of the enterprise-level functionality, at least not without spending a lot of money, but you can try to reproduce the basic practices of good backup systems.

    Whatever system you implement, draft a testing plan. A simpler backup solution that you can test and validate will be worth more than something complex and highly detailed.











  • The issue is more that trying to upgrade everything at the same time is a recipe for disaster and a troubleshooting nightmare. Once you have a few interdependent services/VMs/containers/environments/hosts running, what you want to do is upgrade them separately, one at a time, then restart that service and anything that connects to it and make sure everything still works, then move on to updating the next thing.

    If you do this shotgun approach for the sake of expediency, what happens is something halfway through the stack of upgrades breaks connectivity with something else, and then you have to go digging through the logs trying to figure out which piece needs a rollback.

    Even more fun if two things in the same environment have conflicting dependencies, and one of them upgrades and installs its new dependency version and breaks whatever manual fix you did to get them to play nice together before, and good luck remembering what you did to fix it in that one environment six months ago.

    It’s not FUD, it’s experience.



  • I recommend getting familiar with SMART and understanding what the various attributes mean and how they affect a drive’s performance and reliability. You may need to install smartmontools to interact with SMART, though some Linux distributions include this by default.

    Some problems reported by SMART are not a big deal at low rates (like Soft Read Errors) but enterprise organizations will replace them anyway. Sometimes drives are simply replaced at a certain number of Power-On Hours, regardless of condition. Some problems are survivable if they’re static, like Uncorrectable Sector Count - every drive has some overhead of extra sectors for internal redundancy, so one bad sector isn’t a big deal , but if the number is increasing over time then you have a problem and should replace the drive immediately.

    Also keep in mind, hard drives are consumables. Mirroring and failovers are a must if your data is important. New drives fail too. There’s nothing wrong with buying used if you’re comfortable with drive’s condition.