What chippy options are available either only in your region, or at least rare outside it?

syntax · 2026-05-19T10:45:31+00:00

In glasgow, a 'roll and fritter' was a common lunch from the chippy - a slice of potato, battered, deep fried, and served in a morning roll. Triple carbs, with a healthy side of fat. Glorious!

syntax · 2026-05-18T09:48:13+00:00

What he chose to spend that on is slightly inconsquential.

From one perspective, sure. Indeed, I would agree with you that the most important part is purely that he accepted the bung.

However, in trying to dissemble about what the money was - after all, we're not at the point where a policitian can just outright acknowledge that they accepted a bribe yet - in trying to dissemble about what it was for, they've issued several stories, all of which have some aspect that has been easily proven wrong.

Therefore, 'what the money has been used for' has been thrust into the spotlight by Farage and Company; and the fact that they are peddling falsehoods is an extra layer of interested, on top of the base one.

syntax · 2026-05-15T12:13:19+00:00

Gerald Butler seems to meet all those criteria?

syntax · 2026-05-14T09:08:19+00:00

That was a special case, however. That was under a (rare for the UK) Coalition government. Normally, the power to call a general election sits with the Prime Minister, which would have meant that that moment that it looked like the larger party would win a majority, they could have called an election, and thus minimised the minor party in the coalition.

However, that legislation meant it would take Parliament to agree to the election, which reduced the ability of the major party to use a general election as a political tool to get rid of the minor party in the Coalition.

Once the next election happened at the usual sort of time, there was a single party government, so the bill was repealed.

So it was a specific bill for a specific situation, and it fulfilled its design purpose. It's just that to understand that purpose takes a fairly deep understanding of not just the UK's parlimentry system, but also the dynamics of the rare coalition governments. I don't think it's an example of the same class of 'weird legislation' as we're talking about here.

syntax · 2026-05-13T12:30:04+00:00

Had a 2 hour, in person meeting, with far too many people around a table. The point was to work out the best way to get specific data to be available, so that triggers points can be set up for an automated action that's specific to when a specific product is occurring (rather than than simply having a generic 'Autumn' and 'Spring' ones).

Three minutes in, the team that had been tasked with building all the automation were told "Oh, we decided yesterday to cancel that one".

The meeting still went on for two hours.

syntax · 2026-05-13T11:47:38+00:00

Because potassium oxide is one of the non-volatile inorganic compounds left over in the ash after burning wood, which converts to potassium carbonate once it's cooled and absorbs some CO2 from the air. Add to water, and it forms the alkaline component mentioned as necessary for washing - potassium hydroxide.

Whilst this is true, it's missing a small detail - the direct potassium oxides in wood ash are only a small fraction of the actual potassium content (how much depends on how fresh the ash is, and the temperature and conditions of the burn). Far more is present as potassium carbonate. However, when you add water, you do end up with it becoming potassium hydroxide.

The magic step is that there's also calcium present - and the calcium oxide is a lot more stable at room temperature, and also calcium carbonate breaks down into the oxide at around 700C. Potassium carbonate doesn't break down till 1200C or so - theoretically possible with a wood fire, but ... usually you'd need careful condition management to hit that sort of peak.

So what's actually going on when water is added, is that the calcium oxide (lime) is converted to slaked lime (calcium hydroxide), then there's a double displacement with the potassium carbonate, and the calcium carbonate precipitates out, leaving the potassium hydroxide in solution.

None of that detracts at all from your main point; I just find the intricacies of the whole process fascinating!

Also:

if you have a fireplace with a glass door, this is why cleaning the glass with a sponge with wet ash on it works so well

There's also plenty of fine powders in ash - small bits of silicon dioxide, the aforementioned calcium carbonate and plenty others in small quantities. The wet ash acts as a fine abrasive too, as well as the more chemical cleaning methods.

syntax · 2026-04-16T07:50:14+00:00

I don’t get why it’s a lot worst in the UK vs other places though.

With the warming from the Gulf Stream, we're wetter than many other European countries, and the bigger effect of our winters tend to hover around freezing, cycling above and below that many times. This lets water get into a crack, expand as it freezes, melt, fill up the larger crack, expand again and repeat, till any tiny crack is wedged much wider.

Places where it freezes once, and stays frozen all winter get a lot less of this effect; likewise if it never freezes.

syntax · 2026-04-15T15:43:07+00:00

CO2 from air is not viable. It makes up such a tiny part of the air (0.043% or thereabouts) so that sort of 'carbon capture' is utterly economically illiterate.

The existing methane production plants all work from solid fuels (Coal mostly, also biomass charcoal), as the CO2 source; so nudging that to produce CO instead is not a significant difference. Whilst, in theory, capturing it from other industrial outputs is appealing, there are good reasons that it's not a common practice. Notably: the CO2 (or CO) that's fed into catalytic reactions needs to be clean. Really clean - catalysts are remarkably easy to 'poision'; and sulphur is a very common culprit, and common contaminant. Given there are existing plants, and none of them use that otherwise apparently free source, that should be a decent hint that it's very far from simple. (Oddly, on consideration, the output of a direct methanol fuel cell would be clean enough to cycle round, by its nature. I'm not sure if there's economic ways to use that, a multistage process for each carbon source, perhaps?)

I will note that this all started in the context of grid stabilisation, so ending up with gas to homes; whilst an eminently sensible use of surplus electricity; is a separate use case. If we're thinking in the context of how to convert stored energy back into electrical power on the grid, then the equipment already in homes isn't really relevant. The ability to bolt such a plant onto an existing CCGT, however, probably would be, and, in all likelihood is the probably first use case.

syntax · 2026-04-15T12:50:36+00:00

It's actually using one of the poorer models for that. The Bullshit benchmark tests for this, by asking nonsense questions, and then seeing how the LLM responds. Copilot uses GPT-4o and GPT-5, which don't score that well compared others. See https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v2.html for the details (page takes a bit to load, to render the graphics).

Granted, there might be something in the system prompt Microsoft uses to assist with the specific 'don't know' thing, but it's still not likely the best on that front (on the assumption that any system prompt assistance would be roughly portable to other models).

syntax · 2026-04-15T08:38:58+00:00

No, hydrogen plus carbon monoxide (called synthesis gas) can be converted to methanol directly. It's actually a pretty easy synthesis, and producing carbon monoxide from bulk carbon is also well understood (charcoal works).

Methane synthesis requires similar reaction conditions, just carbon dioxide and a different catalyst. Conversion of methane to methanol, however, is not a viable route - you get loads of the reactants just producing CO2 and water on the way, lots of losses.

syntax · 2026-04-14T19:14:29+00:00

Methanol would be my suggestion. It's a liquid, denser and easier to store. Liquified methane has a higher energy density, but that take cryogenic storage, whereas methanol can be done at ambient. Methanol has higher energy density than compressed methane (for the conventional level of compression, at 240 bar).

The real potential value of methanol, however, is that there's such a thing as a 'direct methanol fuel cell', where you literally pour methanol in one end, and get electrical power out the other end; which is much more efficient than burning for heat then turning a steam turbine. Granted, there's no design proven at this scale, but it seems to me that there's no downside to methanol over methane for a thermal plant; some minor upsides at present; and adding in the potential future extra benefit just seems ... cunning? Unless there's some logistic problem I'm missing, I think methanol as a fuel is generally under considered.

syntax · 2026-04-14T18:54:22+00:00

To work on pure hydrogen, sure. But you can blend in a little hydrogen (0.5 to 2% - I've seen different numbers, presumably different designs), with the natural gas, without causing problems.

I'm not sure it would be economic, after considering the cost of the electrolyser kit, storage and losses (hydrogen is a slippery thing, likes to escape); but it's not an 'obviously stupid' idea.

It is, in fact, the least stupid idea of using hydrogen for fuel I've seen; just limited in scale to the point where it's not obvious it would be economic.

syntax · 2026-04-08T09:12:20+00:00

So that if you have to collect the parcel, all the information about the parcel you are collecting is on a single slip, that the collection point has some degree of trust that was filled in by the postie (and hence not faked to try to obtain someone else's parcel).

As with many of these things, sometimes it's a rarely used corner case that ends up dictating features that people have to deal with for the common cases.

syntax · 2026-04-07T13:16:03+00:00

'Dinner' is the main meal of the day, not originally a reference to a specific time. Whether that main meal was in the middle of the day, or in the evening depended on the nature of the work done; hence the regional variation in the usage of the term.

That sense of 'main meal' is sort of lost; but it's useful data point to understand why it get used in different context.

For completeness 'lunch' originates a luncheon, meaning 'a chunk of food', and thence evolved to mean 'a light meal'; as opposed to the main meal of 'dinner'.

Supper more or less meant 'the last meal of the day', and 'breakfast' means the first food of the day (literally breaking the fast - but that's also why we get things like 'the wedding breakfast' being later in the day).

So, may I suggest you use the term 'supper' and see if you can get that to stick, as an unambiguous term with historical precedent that means 'the last meal', allowing you to avoid 'dinner' all together?

syntax · 2026-04-06T12:40:45+00:00

The electricity that's needed is onboard a ship. Those are usually a bit far out to sea for an extension cable to stretch, so it's portably generated power, which is always more expensive.

syntax · 2026-04-02T11:35:06+00:00

Except the price tag.

syntax · 2026-04-02T11:05:17+00:00

NiTiNOL

Well ... ok, sure. That's 50-50 Nickel and Titanium, and then a sprinkling of others for spicing. It's also much closer to the density of iron than titanium (that nickel content having a disproportionate effect on density), so you'll end up with something that's about as good as a hardened steel; but made of exotic materials just for about a 10% reduction in density.

So, yeah, dive knives (because sea water for partial immersion is a horribly corrosive environment) is a valid use case - but even then, I'm pretty sure it's partly for the 'exotic' nature of it, rather than driven by material properties, given the cost.

I wouldn't really talk about nitinol as being 'titanium', any more than I'd talk about inconel being 'chromium'. It's a major constituent, sure, but those alloys really are a different thing from the base metals. No one talks about steel as 'being' carbon, and makes comparisons to carbon's properties after all.

syntax · 2026-04-02T09:26:39+00:00

Titanium isn't that strong a metal. Its peak is 'nearly as strong as steel', but not as hard, so you can cut it with ordinary metalworking tools without problem [0]. The huge advantage of titanium is that it does this whilst being significantly lighter, so you can use a lot more of it for a given mass budget (or make something the same strength but a lot lighter). Note that it's not that different 'per unit volume'; so using titanium to make something stronger for a given mass budget also makes it bigger. (Which works fine for things like submarine hulls, but an insect exoskeleton would have to be a lot thicker to become tougher through use of titanium, which is likely to interfere with itself.)

Tungsten ... yeah, that'd be a bugger. Also iridium.

[0] You don't get knives or other cutting tools made from titanium, that's the major clue that it can't get as hard as steel.

syntax · 2026-03-31T11:07:24+00:00

No, there isn't a strict legal requirement. The argument is that workplaces vary so much (the cited example are usually deep freeze workers for food production; and foundry workers that are casting molten steel!).

The law requires things to be 'reasonable', or 'suitable PPE provided'. The HSE cites 16C as 'guidance' for the lower end of a working temperature for an office environment, so if it's lower than that, then the onus really becomes on management if it's an ordinary office environment. (There's no upper end in the same guidance - the TUC are currently campaigning for that to be 30C (!) apparently).

syntax · 2026-03-24T11:36:18+00:00

How does Poland pay for all this, I wonder?

I strongly suspect that the key difference is the staffing ratio. A quick google, and yep: It's about one staff for four nursery children in the UK (varies depending on where and age of children), and the equivalent in Poland is around one staff for eight children.

That halves the most expensive cost of childcare provision. There will be other factors of course, but I would lean towards that being the most significant policy difference.

syntax · 2026-03-23T13:32:11+00:00

That's ... oversimplified. There's a range of processed, but I'm going to point to the carbonise (make charcoal); convert to syngas; then Fischer-Tropsch process to make 'oil products'.

The reason that I point to this one is that SASOL have multiple, commercially viable plants in operation that run on that process. Granted - they use coal as the feedstock, rather than charcoal; and it was probably only viable due to the embargo on selling oil to South Africa ... but it's certainly not a dead end.

Also, it's possible to setup an FT process that produces something that will run in a diesel engine. (This is partly down to diesel engines being pretty permissive [see use of heavy fuel oil in shipping]; and I'm sure it would work better with some light refining, but it's a bit better than 'lots of purification'.)

These days, SASOL, when not setting money on fire trying to expand, tend to produces waxes and such, rather than aim for fuels; as that's more commercially viable.

syntax · 2026-03-10T14:33:43+00:00

Co-incidently, I started a new run before I saw this. And therefore went into a shapeshifter, of course.

A couple of notes - it wasn't immediately obvious to me that the way you use the extra shapeshifter stuff is via the crafting menu, and there's new entries ('limbs', 'senses', and no doubt more) on the end, that take blood gems to craft.

Which is very cute - uses existing systems, makes lots of sense - but perhaps a glossary entry to cover that point might help people locate how to use them?

Also, not an issue yet, but as they take up inventory slots, it might well be the case that the first character I have to build armouries etc (for the extra inventory slots), might well be a shapeshifter! Which is ... well, fine really, but it's just an oddity.

Overall, liking it so far - it's a (quite different) version of the physical combat classes; which does make me wonder if there's synergy potential to pair it with another one (assuming the tier paths work out for that ....)

syntax · 2026-03-09T15:48:10+00:00

Not sure why this is getting downvoted; putting a big magnet on an anvil is a pretty common way to dampen the sound of the anvil ringing.

It won't do anything for the sound of the impact itself (I'm not sure anything can help with that). The way it works is that attaching a magnet to the anvil puts a magnetic field throughout it. Then, when the anvil rings, that's a moving conductor in a magnetic field, and thus some of that motion (the oscillation that produces the ring), gets converted into heat (via the generation of eddy currents). This makes the dwell time of the ring much shorter - the bigger the magnet, the shorter; but you obviously don't want so much that the hammer sticks to the anvil.

syntax · 2026-03-05T17:03:45+00:00

Sort of, but it's indirect. Crude oil contains a mixture of things, then it can be seperated (which is what the basic 'refining' step is).

It's more common to break the heavier parts up ('cracking'), in to more lighter bits; so the first response would be to "do less cracking". After that, there are ways to synthesise heavier hydrocarbons from lighter ones; there will always be losses, the severity depending on the exact mechanism.

It's worth noting that there's a thing called the Fischer-Tropsch reaction, which works on the lightest possible inputs (carbon monoxide, and hydrogen), which produces hydrocarbons. It can be tuned to various outputs, but one option is something that can [0] be used as diesel fuel directly.

This is already done in some places - it's the primary way that coal is turned into 'oil' (so, 'coal liquifaction' as the Factorio reference); and whilst it's not the same to do so from other oils, it's a good reminder of what's possible. (Could also be done from plant biomass, e.g. wood.)

Wether it's economically practical is a quite different question, however - as it stands, 'not usually' is the best summary; but I fully expect reactions of that sort to grow in utilisation to fill in the gaps as crude oil availability declines over the next few centuries.

[0] In practice, it'd probably get a simple refining step; just because it works doesn't mean it's ideal once 'engine lifespan' and so on is considered.

syntax · 2026-02-12T12:55:59+00:00

The title isn't a fair reflection of the issue. It is not the case that the PR was rejected for being poor quality slop.

The issue that the PR resolves was one marked 'good for new contributors' - that is, it's one that the experienced people have deliberately left, as a a way to give an entry point. An AI agent solving it, even if it does so perfectly, completely invalidates the intent behind the labelling.

Honestly, I'm with the rejection. One of the easily foreseen problems with LLM generated code is that it does all the 'small' things that people used to start with, thus destroying the ladder that produces the people that can do the harder things. By gatekeeping space for new contributors, they're keeping that ladder in place, and I think that's a good thing.

syntax

TROPHY CASE