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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I imagine it’s a combination of a thermometer plus the bi-metallic switch mechanism to prevent the kettle from boiling dry, with the assumption that you’ll generally just be boiling water near sea level in them. I wonder if the nicer ones have like a calibration mode or something where you can adjust the temperature setting for different altitudes though 🤔



  • Interjecting with some slight pedantry, but only because I think it’s interesting.

    There may be some kettles that just switch off at 100C, but those would be pretty terrible kettles, as they could only boil water at sea level. Go up to 10,000 ft. of elevation, or put something in them that boils at a lower temp than water, and that kettle would just keep running until all the liquid is evaporated.

    Most kettles (I think, this is totally based purely on anecdotal evidence, I haven’t actually gone out and examined most kettles) detect the presence of boiling in general, rather than a particular temperature. This allows them to work on a variety of liquids at a variety of pressures (or elevations). They do this with some clever piping and a bi-metallic strip. Basically some of the vapor of whatever liquid you’re boiling is directed through some piping down to the bottom of the kettle, where it passes over a bi-metallic strip and heats it up. Once the strip heats up enough (to a temp much less than the boiling point of water or most other household liquids you find yourself in need of boiling), it buckles, and does electrical circuitry things that end up turning off the heating element.

    There’s a Steve Mould video on the topic with a much better explanation that’s super interesting, for those of you into nerdy sciency type stuff: https://youtu.be/VzqN4Cn8r3U




  • I know it’s a one-of-a-kind game, but it still amazes me that Roller Coaster Tycoon released in 1999, a game where you could have hundreds of NPCs on screen at a time, unique events and sound effects for each of those NPCs, physics simulations of roller coasters and rides, terrain manipulation, and it was all runnable on pretty basic hardware at that time. Today’s AAA games could never. I’m glad some indie games are still carrying the torch for small, efficient games that people can play on any hardware though.


  • We may have worked at the same shitty McDonald’s as teens lmao. I once requested off one single day several weeks in advance, because I had some school trip that day and wouldn’t be in the state. A week from the trip I looked at the schedule and saw I was scheduled for that day, even though I had it approved weeks earlier. I asked my manager about it and made it very clear that I would not be able to come to work that day. They told me I needed to find a replacement or I’d get a “point” or whatever they did to keep track of people’s “fuck-ups”. I told the manager that I didn’t have a way to contact any of the other people that worked at that McDonald’s because I had just started working there and didn’t have any of their numbers. The manager went and printed out a spreadsheet of every employee that worked at that location and their phone numbers (probably without their consent), and I called every single person on that list. There were probably close to a hundred names (I think it was a list of literally every person who had ever worked at that location, past or present), but no one was available to cover my shift. Trip day comes, I got a point, and then was “quiet fired” a couple months later when they just stopped putting me on the schedule (except for after I submitted a two weeks notice, where they scheduled me for an 8 hour shift on my last day 🙃). I too have avoided McDonald’s ever since then.












  • It cant do enterprise, performance heavy, commercial stuff.

    It can, I’ve been doing it for almost a decade. I’ve never noticed a lack of dev tools, and I’m not sure why .NET style project management is a prerequisite for creating enterprise applications. Obviously you can write more performant code in other languages, but I’ve found that 90% of the time, python’s performance is good enough.

    Agree on picking the right tool for the job though. Most of the time though, unless you’re dealing with an extreme edge case (like writing embedded firmware for the space shuttle), that just means picking the language your team is most comfortable with.