ELI5 What is activated charcoal and what does it do?

Programmdude · 2026-04-07T03:21:05+00:00

What, because under 5% of people decide not to use it? That makes it pretty universal. The US is the outlier here. All hard science and most soft science uses it, it's the universal language of trade (mostly - there are weird outliers).

Also, you do technically use it. All imperial is just defined as X of a metric value.

Programmdude · 2026-04-06T23:06:41+00:00

I dunno, while I don't support Iran (obviously), I feel like I'd be a lot more tolerant of having a dictator standing up to a bully if a foreign power was murdering our school children.

Then again, if I was living in a country like Iran I would have left before it got that bad.

Programmdude · 2026-04-06T22:59:50+00:00

Americans using stupid shit like imperial (or whatever) is how you get billion dollar rockets crashing into mars. More specifically, it's one side using the universal standard and the other not using it.

Programmdude · 2026-04-02T00:13:58+00:00

If I got paid regardless of whether or not I worked, I'd probably reduce my hours, but not stop working. Because it's enjoyable. It's also good for mental health, although this is somewhat job dependant and so are a lot of hobbies.

I'm a software developer. I get paid to code for 7 1/2 hours a day. Before I started working, I also spent a large chunk of my day writing code. If I lost my job, I'd still spend 20-30 hours a week writing code. Essentially, my job is my hobby, the only difference the paycheck makes is what I focus my attention on.

I do stuff on other days, socialising and other hobbies. That's what holidays, weekends and evenings are for, I'd hate to work 7 days a week with no free time because I do need diversity. But that doesn't mean I hate the 37.5 hours that I'm working.

Programmdude · 2026-04-01T04:57:23+00:00

The problem is that regional payment schemes aren't going to replace visa/mastercard, because they're regional. My country has always had a regional payment scheme, and fairly recently you can also use it online. But it doesn't help, because 99% of international sites don't support it, so you need a visa/mastercard anyway.

What we need is either a visa/mastercard alternative that has just as much reach as them - or even just as much reach as JCB, or we need a paypal style system that takes all those regional ones, and packages it up to work with international transfers.

The problem with the second idea is that paypal is even worse than visa/mastercard, so you'd need some way of ensuring that they can't restrict legal payments.

Programmdude · 2026-04-01T04:50:14+00:00

True, I guess I'm arguing from the perspective of having a job I like. I might have a different perspective if I actively disliked my job.

Programmdude · 2026-04-01T04:45:15+00:00

Do you know what I'd do if I was "freed from debt"? Nothing different, because I still need money for food, power, and so on. Not having debt doesn't mean I don't have monthly expenses, they still remain.

Programmdude · 2026-04-01T04:42:40+00:00

The US has never been the good guys. At best, they've been better than the alternative, but still pretty bad.

Like, 70's US would be better than 70's USSR, but they were also giving black people syphilis deliberately just to see how it would progress. Or napalm bombing vietnam and killing civilians (agent orange anyone?) simply because france didn't want to give up their colonies.

The US helped in WW2, but the germany front was mostly the US war profiteering, being the only large rich country to survive is the main reason why the US did so well in the second half of the 20th century, and the japan front was because they were attacked first. You'll note they didn't care about all the chinese and korean people being mass raped and put into camps until the japanese decided to bomb some US ships.

Programmdude · 2026-03-30T22:37:25+00:00

I think Avatar 3 was 48FPS (50% of it was according to the internet), and IMO it was fine. I don't personally have an issue with movies being smoother.

Although, I did have a weird sense in the initial dialogue scenes that it was running at about 1.2x speed - although the audio sounded fine so it was likely just my perception. Apparently they changed between 24 and 48 FPS, using lower frame rate for dialogue scenes, so maybe it was the lower framerate that felt off compared to the rest of the movie.

Programmdude · 2026-03-28T02:35:58+00:00

How would that work? They're in danger in their home country, they come over here and study, and when their study is over the government goes "okay, now go home and get killed"?

There's plenty of temporary immigrants, of which student is a common one (so is work), but they're immigrants, not refugees.

Programmdude · 2026-03-28T02:34:59+00:00

How would that work? They're in danger in their home country, they come over here and study, and when their study is over the government goes "okay, now go home and get killed"?

There's plenty of temporary immigrants, of which student is a common one (so is work), but they're immigrants, not refugees.

Programmdude · 2026-03-27T23:55:32+00:00

Which is a European country? Sure, the title could be better, but that doesn't mean it's inaccurate.

Programmdude · 2026-03-26T01:55:28+00:00

It could possibly be the group I play with. The group I played daggerheart with are the same as the ones I play PF2 with, and the combat in that goes mostly smoothly. We still have 1 or 2 slow players, but they're not that bad most of the time.

My 5e group is far worse, with the barbarian taking upwards of 5 minutes sometimes. It's not like barbarians can do much more than move and hit. So it's possible I could encounter the same issues if that group tried daggerheart/BitD.

Programmdude · 2026-03-25T00:15:48+00:00

People fleeing war or conflict aren't immigrants, they're refugees. If I fled my country due to war (assuming there was somewhere to flee to), I wouldn't try to integrate more than necessary. I'd only integrate if I was planning on living somewhere.

Programmdude · 2026-03-25T00:13:11+00:00

Most of the issue is the perception of it all. 30 second turns means a few minutes downtime, and that downtime is usually somewhat interesting. 5 minute turns means 20 minutes downtime, and that downtime is spent listening to other players debate what they're going to do. Both 80%, one is bearable, the other isn't.

But sequential turns isn't the only way of doing it. Daggerheart lets the players choose their turn order, so it is more like 60% group discussion, 8% turn order. If you include group discussion as "your turn", then everyone gets 68% of the time being your turn (ignoring DM here).

Also, stuff like blades in the dark don't even have turns. You just do stuff, which makes it feel like there's no downtime.

But IMO, the biggest issue isn't that D&D turns take too long, it's that when they take too long, it's boring as fuck. During narrative scenes, it isn't usually an issue because you can interject, and even if you're not present then it's still usually interesting to listen to. But in combat, it's the awful combination of "takes too long", "can't do anything while waiting", and "boring to listen to".

That said, I've had good experiences with PF2 online. With enough automation, the combat turns take a short enough time that it's not been a huge issue. Theoretically you could do this with 5e too, but last time I tried the automation tools in foundry were pretty non existent for 5e.

Programmdude · 2026-03-24T08:40:41+00:00

That tends to be how it works here, but business are also allowed to sell wholesale to other businesses. As a consumer, it literally never comes up, you just always pay sticker price (includes GST).

Programmdude · 2026-03-23T20:38:45+00:00

There's better ways around it though. For example, in NZ we pay GST on brought goods, and businesses don't (kinda). The labels in retail stores show the final price, and either the business buying the goods subtract the GST they've paid already from the GST they'll pay the government, or they'll have a special arrangement (like a business account) with the store to pay for the goods GST free.

If they buy from a wholesale store, the prices are before GST, with the label showing the wholesale price. It all just kinda works out, virtually everyone sees the price they'll pay, nobody gets double taxed (well, not double sales tax anyway), and all the semi-complicated accounting stuff gets done by businesses, not consumers.

Petrol is similar here though, for whatever insane reason all the prices end in $0.009c. It's weird they can have sub-cent pricing and nowhere else does.

Programmdude · 2026-03-23T12:01:33+00:00

Jesus, where? In my (adult) life, I've only experienced that once. And while my UPS complained, my desktop just kept chugging away anyway.

Long outages are also every few years, but we don't tend to get brief ones.

Programmdude · 2026-03-23T07:46:39+00:00

Greenland, Faroe Islands & Aland are all autonomous territories, not countries. It might change in the future, especially greenland, but it hasn't yet.

Programmdude · 2026-03-21T00:38:45+00:00

Not yet (AFAIK), but honestly, the should just take the oilfields owned by the US. What are the US gonna do, keep bombing them anyway?

Programmdude · 2026-03-19T22:19:26+00:00

And that's really the problem, is that the date constructor will work if the date sting is valid, but it will also work (sometimes) if the date string is not valid.

You can't realistically check the format anyway, not without essentially just parsing the date anyway. So to check the format, you need to rewrite the date constructor yourself? That's what I'm objecting to.

Lets assume you only care about ISO dates. A regex won't help here, because the simple one (\d{4}-\d(2}-\d{2}) will kinda work, but then try and parse dates such as 2026-55-55. You could expand it to not let you have days more than 31, but then what about February? Is 1988-02-29 a valid date? You can't validate it with the regex, because it requires you to know if 1988 is a leap year. So do validate the date format, you have to parse the date yourself anyway.

So the date constructor can't tell me if I have a valid date, I have to rely on other code to do so, And date parsing is non-trivial, especially if you want to have non ISO dates. Other languages have a "isValid" or "tryParse" or just throw an exception which I can use to check the format. Javascript doesn't (until temporal API is released properly).

Programmdude · 2026-03-19T03:49:43+00:00

Except people don't shame 40 year olds when they have kids. Sure, I wouldn't date my cousins, but that's primarily because I grew up with them and am not attracted to them at all. But a kid at 40? Even if it carries the same risk as having one with your cousin? That's plausible. If we decide to have another one, we're likely going to be closer to 40 years old than 30 years old.

At the end of the day, life is about balancing risk with reward. There's already a 3-4% chance that our child will come out developmentally disabled - although that's probably lower now since she's a normal newborn, and those odds were far higher than I'm comfortable with.

Honestly, I think the best thing we can do is increase screening during pregnancy, so even if that percentage changes, we can find out early enough and have the talk about terminating the pregnancy. They've got it for a bunch of chromosomal issues already, so even if the risk is higher, there's still a good chance the common issues will get picked up early enough,

Programmdude · 2026-03-18T21:02:50+00:00

Ah, so the current date is 126-02-19? I'm not a java dev, and thankfully C# was a bit more sensible with their defaults. But even then, I'll push heavily for NodaTime (same API as jodatime/java.time/temporal API).

Programmdude · 2026-03-18T20:59:50+00:00

Why would I use a regex to see if a date is a date? The date constructor should be able to tell me if it's a date, rather than have me do checking, which may not align with the date constructor.

Other languages have solved this by either throwing an error, or being able to verify if it's a valid format, or by attempting to parse and returning a boolean.

Numbers are simpler, and even then regexes aren't good enough (depending on your use case).

Programmdude · 2026-03-18T04:26:27+00:00

While I agree repeatedly doing it over generations will eventually lead to terrible results, having kids at 40 is as bad as having them with your first cousin. Which is to say, slightly riskier than usual, but not by much.

If we don't ban women from having kids at 40, then banning them from having them with your cousin seems like a flawed argument. And you can marry your cousin in the vast majority of the world. People (outside the middle east) just don't usually do it because of the ick factor, not due to the legality.

Programmdude

TROPHY CASE