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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Yeah for new installs but service for the existing unit might be like $200 for a cleaning and it’s certainly going to be cheaper to run in the long run

    No, it’s not necessarily.

    From an electricity usage standpoint, it’s cheaper to inefficiently cool one room than it is to efficiently cool a whole house.

    Cleaning it also may solve nothing, it’s $200 on a chance of it solving the problem. If cleanliness wasn’t the issue, then you just wasted $200. On the flip side, you can find a used window AC for $200 easily, or buy a new one for $400 and then sell it when you’re done with it and get $200 back, and it is guaranteed to solve your problem assuming you’re concerned with a specific room.





  • This isn’t actually necessarily true if you just need specific cooling.

    If for instance, you just care about cooling your bedroom for sleeping, then it can be more efficient to install a window unit in just that room and let the rest of your house be warmer. A mini-split would be more efficient than a window unit for that role, but they’re also a lot more expensive and permanent.


  • So you have three options, I’m going to break them down just because I think comparing all three is helpful for long term planning, but skip to the end for advice on a specific window unit.

    1. Upgrading your central AC and/ or it’s duct work.
    • Cons:
      • 💰 Expensive - central units are expensive
      • 🧑‍🔬 Installation - these require professional installation from certified technicians.
      • 🪚 Duct work - if it requires duct work changes then modifying the house to accomodate is a whole nother headache.
    • Pros:
      • 😸 Efficiency / long term electricity savings - a newer central AC will be more efficient for cooling the whole house down. They typically have SEER ratings in the 15-18 range.
      • 🔇 Noise - you might hear them start up, but most rooms of the house hear nothing from the vents.
      • ☀️ Light - they don’t impact natural window light at all
      • 🌡️Heat Pump - newer units are typically heat pumps that can efficiently and economically heat your house in the winter or at least shoulder seasons.
    1. Getting a window unit.
    • Cons:
      • 🌥️ Light Reduction - Blocks some of the window
      • 😿 Efficiency - Typically* lower efficiency ratings
      • 🔊 Noise - You’ll inherently have more noise from a fan blowing cold air into the room (compared to a central vent), and because the outdoor compressor unit is so close, most window units* also have quite a lot of sound coming from the outdoor portion.
      • 🥶 AC Only - Typically no heat pump capabilities.
    • Pros:
      • 🫰Cheap - Lowest up front cost
      • 👨‍🔧 Easy installation - DIY
      • ↪️ Portability - Can be removed or sold later if it’s not needed.
      • 😸Efficiency? - while central AC units are typically more efficient on a per unit of cooling basis, if your window AC is in the right room it can actually be more efficient overall. i.e. if it’s in your bedroom, even if the window unit is less efficient than a central one, you might use less electricity just cooling your bedroom and letting the rest of the house get warmer.
    1. Mini - Split Systems - install a compressor outside your house and a blower unit in a specific room or hallway
    • Cons
      • 💲💲Expensive - these are more expensive than window units up front by quite a bit.

      • 🙇/👩‍🔧 Installation - Potential DIY - while they do sell DIY mini-split systems that don’t require professional installation, you’ll be limited by the length of pipe / hoses they provide, so need a suitable spot for your compressor unit. Otherwise you’ll need a pro to install it.

      • 🔉Noise - since the compressor is outside and separated by a wall you shouldn’t hear it if it’s mounted properly, but you do still have an indoor blower unit. It’ll be quieter than a window unit but louder than a vent.

    • Pros
      • ☀️ Light - no light blocking
      • 🐸 Efficiency - Mini splits often have efficiency ratings that meet or exceed central units, on top of the fact that they can be used to just cool the needed room.
      • 🌡️Heat Pump - these are also typically heat pumps.

    If it were me personally, and I owned the house, and I was worried about cooling my bedroom, and I had the money and somewhere to mount the compressor, I would buy a DIY mini split system. I will always want my bedroom to be cold for sleeping and the rest of the house doesn’t need to be that cold (and vice versa in winter since they’re heat pumps that go both ways). The only real downsides are the very light fan noise from the blower unit, and the upfront cost, though that can potentially be mitigated if you live in a jurisdiction that offers some type of home retrofit or heat pump grant (worth checking!).

    That being said there’s a bunch of caveats and criteria there that I personally didn’t meet, so I bought one of those Midea U shaped units that everyone talks about and am honestly very happy. There was a massive recall recently, but they’re adding drains to fix the issue, and these units otherwise are way better than most other window units, though they only work with windows that slide up and down vertically.

    *But unlike most other window ACs, the U shaped units have the window sit between the outdoor unit and the indoor unit which blocks most of the noise from the compressor, lets more natural light come in, and doesn’t require blocking the sides. They’re also very efficient with a CEER rating of 15.

    Even despite the recall they’re still what I’d personally recommend, you might be able to find one second hand.

    Also note that I don’t consider a portable air conditioner an option. They’re terrible.


  • Take your pet for a walk.

    Personally I find biphasic sleep pretty normal and easy to do when I’m working a job in a timezone that’s behind mine by a few hours.

    Go to bed at 12:30, sleep 4.5 hrs til 5:00, wake up with the cat at dawn, take them outside and enjoy the morning tranquility for a bit, go back to bed at 6, sleep til 9, get up to start my job at 10 or 11.

    I don’t do it when I have to be up early though, I both always struggle to go to bed early, and I find waking up and being up in the middle middle of the night, to feel more stressful than doing it at dawn.


  • Lol did it solve anything though?

    If you actually watch the full episode, the timeline of events is:

    • Someone rents a new house and finds a skeleton in the marsh behind it. It’s a ~30 year old woman who died in the winter and was bludgeoned and stabbed repeatedly.
    • They send away for DNA sequencing but the lab doesn’t get back to them for like a year and half.
    • In the meantime they look at missing persons cases (over 100 in North Carolina they state, though presumably ~half that once you filter for skeletal women)
    • They determine that this woman’s case seems most likely based on all the other details about her case. The forensic tech who’s oddly interested in how much pain people feel as they die is interested in using “impose an image of a skull on a face technique” to see if it matches.
    • She reaches out to a skateboarding computer science professor who uses gimp to paste a semi transparent layer of the skull on top of a picture of that victim’s face and thinks it probably maybe matches.
    • They get fed up with the DNA lab and send it to a second one that responds in three weeks confirming it was who they thought.
    • They talk to the victim’s friends who point out what party she was at the night she disappeared.
    • The people at the party say that she was hanging out with this one big truck driver after everyone else. His story has been that she walked home after everyone else left, in January, for 7 miles.
    • They interview him a few times and he eventually says that they had sex that night and she belittled him for not getting it up and he pushed her and she he hit her head on the nightstand and he left and she was fine when he left.
    • He’s convicted of murder and dumping her body because that’s an obvious crock of shit.

    Kinda feels like the whole GIMP escapade was just a waste of everyone’s time and all it took to solve the case was basic police work in terms of interviewing people who saw her last. By the time they tried GIMP they already had a prime missing person that they thought it was, and they wouldn’t have had to try gimp if they just went to a second / competent DNA lab immediately. The way they present it is a little unclear, but it sounds like they didn’t even pull the suspect in for further interviewing until they finally got the DNA confirmation for who it was.



  • masterspace@lemmy.catoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.works3 Wishes
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    3 days ago

    To talk with human words requires a bump in intelligence which would end up in severe depression once it realises the dynamics of ifs existence.

    A bump up in intelligence that allows for speech, doesn’t mean it inherently becomes aware of all the existential dread in the universe or becomes unhappy with its station.

    See: children.


  • Uh, yes there is, by the inherent nature of how addresses (i.e. public identifiers) work.

    An IP address, email address, physical address, etc, is a mechanism to have a string of text, become a unique identifier for something, so that you can just share that piece of text to refer to it.

    Once you give out that piece of text, you no longer have control of it. I can give it to someone and then someone else could ask them about it, and they pass it on, and now I have no idea who has this unique identifier that represents me anywhere out there in the world. I can ask the first person to update their records but I have no guarantee that they’ll do it successfully or that they’ll remember every single person who they gave it out to you update.

    By the very nature of being an identity provider, you are inherently offering your users something that they should be able to fully own in perpetuity. In those circumstances, it’s problematic if an identity provider insists that you always have to pay for its services, just to have communication from your old identity forwarded.


  • I think OP is overblowing things, and is especially misguided in recommending gmail, but at the same time, they do have a valid point and I think you’re somewhat misrepresenting what they said.

    For one, they specifically said that the proton domain email addresses are problematic (protonmail.com, pm.me), and weren’t talking about custom domains that sit in front of Proton mail.

    For two, their point is valid. Auto-forwarding being paid, does create vendor lock-in and make it hard to switch away from Protonmail if you use the OOTB addresses. It’s something worth considering.

    As you said, the recommendation should be to use a custom domain that sits in front of Protonmail rather than switching to Gmail, but paid auto-forwarding is a valid criticism.



  • Precisely, flirting signals to someone else that you’re potentially attracted to them.

    If they’ve written you off as a potential romantic partner for whatever reason (they assume you’d never be interested, they thought you had a partner, they thought you were only ever going to be just friends, etc), then that signal can cause them to start considering you as a romantic option.



  • Honestly have to disagree pretty hard.

    Our smartphone addiction really seems to exacerbate attention span issues and fucks with our reward systems.

    Go for a few weeks or a month without using a smartphone to see the difference, or get an e-ink android phone to try and break the reward loop and see how you feel.

    Like, start by outlining the effects of smartphone use and addiction, then lay those effects next to the symptoms of ADHD, and notice the significant overlap.

    There are definitely a lot of undiagnosed parents who were forced to develop coping strategies and think their kids need to too in unhealthy ways, but there are also a lot of undiagnosed parents whose symptoms have gotten worse with smartphone use.