• 2 Posts
  • 211 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • As someone who has avidly been reading manuals since the early 90s, car manuals have always been pretty good. Home audio/video equipment has also had great manuals over the years too. I don’t recall a time these turned to shit.

    Motherboards / BIOS documentation comes in dead last, and has always been shit. Dozens and dozens of proprietary settings that are not described by the manual nor the built in help, and there’s only conjecture online. At least now the English is mostly correct, but they’re still very bad at describing what niche settings do.






  • It is, old cars don’t do well with ethanol gas but it doesn’t affect modern vehicles. Ethanol is great in modern turbocharged direct injection engines as it increases the latent heat of vaporization of the fuel, which cools the charge when fuel is injected. I had a Ford Fiesta ST that ran E40 (mixed E85 and 93 in the tank) and it allowed me to run the boost to the limits of what the turbo could do. That little 1.6L engine had 300ft-lb of torque at 2000rpm, it was wild. All that ethanol did a great job preventing detonation at high boost / low rpm. The downside is higher ethanol makes for worse gas mileage as it’s not as energy dense, and I believe it emits more CO2. There’s also food vs fuel and corn subsidies issues with ethanol as fuel.




  • The style in which that post by Ophelia_SK is written seems exactly like chatGPT. I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly makes me feel so strongly, but it’s something to do with how sentences and paragraphs are constructed. They always have the same cadence with the commas and how thoughts are laid out. It’s got that generically positive tone as well.

    Kinda cool though, I feel like I’m becoming able to spot these. It’s like being able to spot a photoshop by the pixels. I’ve seen quite a few shops in my time.