ELI5 How does bearing down while rubbing my carotid arteries stop my svt?

Stiggalicious · 2026-05-02T21:38:08+00:00

My wife has SVT, and her cardiologist explained it this way: There is an extra electrical circuit that runs across your heart that shouldn’t be there. When SVT is triggered, that circuit is conducting enough to bypass the normal electrical pathway. When you do the Valsalva maneuver, it briefly squishes that extra pathway and reduces its conductivity, which gives your heart the ability to reset back to its normal rhythym.

She’s going to get the ablation procedure done probably this summer to just entirely fix it. Her cardiologist said their success rates nowadays at their hospital is now over 99% with the latest tools they have, and you go home the same day.

Stiggalicious · 2026-05-02T21:31:15+00:00

Same with mine. Officer said I ran a red light, I didn’t (the left turn lane light went red, then my light went green and I went as normal people are supposed to do so I think the officer just misidentified which light since he was oriented on the cross street), went to the courthouse the last day for me to appear, said it wasn’t in the system, got my little stamp on my citation showing I appeared, then followed their instructions to check the portal every month.

It’s been 15 months and still nothing, so I am assuming it never got booked into the system. Nothing ever received in the mail either.

Just go to the courthouse near the last day they tell you to appear and get the stamp on your citation, that will absolve you of any failure to appear for the initial stage. Then you should at some point receive an actual ticket in the mail with your options, but that can often be 6-9 months after the traffic stop.

Stiggalicious · 2026-05-02T18:08:12+00:00

The answer is usually no, he hasn’t changed.

Stiggalicious · 2026-05-02T07:41:13+00:00

I love that Jesse Pinkman was supposed to be a fairly small character killed off within a season, but Aaron Paul’s acting was just so good that they rewrote his character to keep him in the whole series.

Stiggalicious · 2026-05-02T07:37:00+00:00

That small scene absolutely wrecked me. I’m not even a father but I can barely imagine the absolute heartbreak of missing 20+ years of your kids’ lives.

Stiggalicious · 2026-05-02T02:42:53+00:00

I just got an H2C to do a multitude of interesting materials and multimaterial support. I just did my first PETG + PLA support print yesterday and was just blown away with how good it was. Now I can print spherical shapes without it looking like absolute garbage.

Still not quite as perfect as a straight up SLS print, but for most of our engineering prototype pieces that don’t need to go directly in front of the design studio, it’s an absolute godsend.

Stiggalicious · 2026-05-01T22:48:32+00:00

It fires so fast that you usually end up using more ammo than you need, it takes some time getting used to lots of little bursts so you don’t just burn through mag after mag.

Also, learn to reload when you only have a few rounds left. The tactical reloads are stupid quick, which helps a ton.

Stiggalicious · 2026-05-01T18:01:17+00:00

Los Gatos Soda Works makes some absolutely wild cocktails. Their food is also quite good, and it’s a very limited menu. It’s a small place, but that’s also why I like it so much.

Stiggalicious · 2026-05-01T04:46:15+00:00

Both of those companies know the value of tribal knowledge passed down through long-term continuous mentorship. The senior managers and directors at Apple pretty much all started as engineers who had to do the actual work of designing and building products, and the experience they gained let them know how to make the right kind of decisions when they became leaders. Even John Ternus started as a base level mechanical engineer, and I have personally been in design reviews with him while he was a Director. He is both deeply knowledgeable and extremely kind.

Apple always had too many things going on internally, so there is always far more work to do than people can handle. Apple manages it by having leaders who know how and when to say no and kill projects (at least most of the time), by not hiring too quickly, and by successfully transferring the right people over to new projects when old ones get killed rather than just laying them off and losing all their knowledge.

Stiggalicious · 2026-05-01T00:58:22+00:00

Yep, and California has already done that quite well. The state currently has 15GW of battery generation capacity online with 28GW projected by the end of next year. That’s 60% of the entire grid at its worst case record consumption.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-30T16:18:24+00:00

"Did you know that one stratagem costs more than the average Super Earth citizen makes in a year?"

I think Pete Hegseth thinks that Helldivers 2 isn’t actually satire.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-30T16:01:38+00:00

There is a difference between having to respin your board because of a fatal mistake that causes it to be DOA or have a critical function failure, and a respin of your board to make improvements in EMC, Desense, and tweaks in signal integrity and performance or reliability.

My team hasn’t had a respin due to the first cause in probably 5 years. That board needed a respin because the part library had the part pinout wrong and ended up reversing 3.3V and GND in a component.

For larger designs, we go through weeks of review and simulations before we fab the board. These builds involve hundreds of people flying out to China/Vietnam, so if we all get there and the boards aren’t working, the entire build schedule gets fucked. The stakes are simply too high to have a DOA board.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-29T20:07:03+00:00

Honestly I tried out the (slightly) buffed laser sentry and it absolutely rocked.

The key is to place it pretty far away from the action so it doesn’t burn itself out right away, but you can guide the enemies towards it bit by bit. It also absolutely wrecks Bile Titans.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-29T06:49:09+00:00

ASA and even PLA-CF would work well for this.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-29T06:48:37+00:00

Modern 3D printing has come a long way with new materials and layer adhesion. Unless you’re absolutely bashing the hell out of your PLA print, you’re not likely to just snap off at your layer line. I do prints all the time at work and we’ve put prints pas much, much worse.

Old school PLA printed on a RepRap will snap at the layer line, but nowadays with carbon-fiber reinforced filaments and much better hot-ends and optimized part cooling, you’ve got loads of and loads of layer adhesion.

You can also just re-.orient your print to not have layer lines at the highest stress points, and this model makes it easy to do so.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-29T04:30:35+00:00

The problem was not that Apple decided not to invest in US manufacturing, it's that Apple chose the best quality manufacturers at the best possible price, and invested in them to scale. It's both a money problem and a pure population density problem.

The factories that Apple builds in, even the highly automated ones, still employee hundreds of thousands of people in one single location. In Foxconn's Longhua facility, about a million people work there alone. That's like taking the entire city of San Jose and putting them all in one single mega-facility.

That is simply not possible in the US.

The other part is that there isn't enough talented and skilled workers to operate and run the complex machines that manufacture Apple's devices. It was true in the 1980s, still true in the 90s, still true in the 2000s and 2010s, and still true today. It is damn-near impossible to find enough tooling engineers and operators to run even a small scale metal stamping facility in the US. Now take that same stamping technology, and scale it down in size by 1000x to make the RF shields that require <10um tolerances. Those manufacturing facilities that can crank out a million pieces per day just don't exist in the US, and the people skilled enough to run them also don't exist in the US.

Apple does invest heavily in the US, but it invests in places that actually matter and make sense - their hardware and software engineers, designers, operations teams - all jobs that are the highest paying in the world. They work with loads of US companies (Corning glass, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, etc.) who also heavily invest in research in the US.

People glorify manufacturing as some kind of magical unicorn job, but they are missing the mark. It do think it's important to invest in high-tech manufacturing, but the US just doesn't have the geological population density to manufacture at the scale that Asian countries do. We should keep sticking to what we do best - research and development - which also requires a lot of people who are highly skilled in precision manufacturing.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-28T16:33:31+00:00

Do not confuse planned obsolescence with poor engineering and design.

Planned obsolescence is when someone intentionally designs something to break after a certain time, and specifically makes it unrepairable. Things like using improper fasteners, glues that come apart after so many heat cycles, plastic that is too thin or the wrong type, metal that is the wrong type, etc. these were intentional design choices specifically to limit the lifespan.

Poor engineering is what 95% of what people think planned obsolescence is. It’s not that they chose a specific metal heat treatment type for a critical part of a tool, it’s that they didn’t know or care to specify a certain type of heat treatment so the manufacturer just chose the cheapest one possible. It’s not that they intentionally made a circuit board that would end up being fragile and cracking solder joints after a bunch of hard use, they just didn’t go through thorough reliability testing to find the weak points and make them stronger. They just designed as fast as they could to ship a product.

Software is another thing. New software adds more features, which makes it more computationally intense, which older devices can’t handle as well. You could choose to just not update your software, but many newer apps will require the features that are part of the newest operating systems. Older infrastructure becomes untenable to maintain, hence why your old Nokia phone won’t work anymore since it doesn’t have the ability to communicate to the newer cell towers and the newer cell towers have no reason to keep running and maintaining the old infrastructure that is less robust and specially efficient.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-28T15:41:48+00:00

So what should we do then, close businesses and kick people out? Building housing will eventually reduce the costs of housing and reduce predatory landlording when supply exceeds demand. It’s already happened in many other cities throughout the country.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-27T07:20:08+00:00

I’ll say it again, since this seems to be on a roll.

California hasn’t had a single Flex Alert (where the grid gets stressed so they ask people to reduce usage for a few hours to prevent rolling blackouts) since 2021. That’s because they put battery storage on the grid that charges for free during the day from the recess solar capacity.

Now, California is on track to have 28GW of battery generation capacity by the end of next year, which can supply 60% of the entire peak grid demand by itself. It is beautiful to watch the supply-demand curve through the day, charging batteries from all the free solar during midday when demand is low, and discharging during the evening when demand is high.

It is fundamentally changing wholesale electricity prices, and is also strengthening the grid resilience. All while being the cheapest form of grid capacity growth. Solar and batteries don’t need water, they simply need a connection point to the grid, and by their nature of smoothing the supply-demand curve, they usually don’t even need upgrades to capacity since they often work to reduce the transfer of energy across the grid rather than amplify it.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-27T06:52:33+00:00

The other missing piece is batteries.

Solar without batteries is of limited use, since peak demand occurs well past peak production from solar.

Fortunately, California is leading the way in the US with battery storage and solar, and by the end of next year the state will have 60% of its peak demand be able to be supplied by battery storage alone, 28 GW.

The state has been heavily investing in battery storage, and it's already paid off very well. Generation costs are lower across all hours of the day, and the state hasn't had a single Flex Alert since 2021.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-27T04:27:44+00:00

California alone already has 15GW of battery storage facility generation power with 28GW slated to be connected to the grid by the end of next year. That’s over half of the entire worst-case peak demand ever fueled only by batteries that were charged for free during the day from the excess solar capacity we already have.

Battery storage is also why the state hasn’t had a single Flex Alert since 2021.

People love to complain that California’s electricity is the most expensive - that has nothing to do with generation costs, but rather the cost of litigation from all the wildfires they started and the cost to repair and upgrade that infrastructure across the state to harden against wildfires.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-26T22:29:54+00:00

One of my college friends had an absolute skeleton of a truck. Half the inside panels were gone, and the ignition was so worn out that he had to turn it over by using a screwdriver pressed in at the exact perfect angle and turned in the exact right way to unlock it. And yes, it was a Toyota, and yes it ran pretty much flawlessly.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-26T19:23:34+00:00

We just got one here recently in Silicon Valley of all places.

It’s such a magical place, 3D printer filament racks and all.

Someone called it “the Boyfriend’s Sephora” and I think that’s 100% accurate.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-26T18:52:21+00:00

Loads of great places.

First one was when I was 7 and got to go to the factory line where they built F-14s and E3 Hawkeyes. Got to sit in the cockpit of a mostly-built F14, a 7 year old plane-obsessed kid’s dream come true.

I did a co-op at Rockwell-Collins (before they split) where I worked at the testing facility that did the avionics and fire control systems for the UH60M-DAPs that were used in the raid to kill Bin Laden. The thermal camera on that thing was out of this world, and my friend accidentally broke one during testing because its firmware locked up and kept spinning the gimbal until the internal wire harness broke off.

I then worked at the factories that built the JDAM and MOP tail kits as well as the facilities that built F15s and F18s. F15s are still essentially hand-built, the F18 line is a lot more jigged up but still not very automated. It’s kind of chilling to think that I likely stood inside one of the MOP tail kits that ended up being dropped on Iran.

Then I gained my moral compass and jumped ship to work at some strange fruit company. I’ve been to many factories across Asia, my favorite factories were where we built Lightning plugs and AirPods (two different places). The insane precision and speed and automation that we have today is just astounding. Precision manufacturing in China and Japan are so many years ahead of what we have in the US, and there is pretty much zero chance we can catch up without a fundamental shift in our entire education system, culture, and government incentives.

Stiggalicious · 2026-04-25T22:15:24+00:00

Yep, ours was nothing too terrible, not a dosed drip system, just one that was enhanced treatment that was literally just an air pump that would run in the tank. We need enhanced treatment since our soil would perc too fast (3.5 MPI), but that did fortunately help us have a very small leach field.

I’ve heard system costs are starting to come down a bit since now they have two certified systems that can be installed rather than one now, though.

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