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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • It’s about $50 a month. Nothing gets released at my house, which is nice. I’m a little out of my depth with the chemical reaction, but the idea is inside the tank are a bunch of resin beads impregnated with stuff calcium and magnesium ions will bind to. So as water flows through the tank the calcium and magnesium is removed and stored in the beads. So the beads store it, but can’t store an infinite amount. The tank gets switched out every 2 weeks and culligan takes the old tank back and reverse the process. I’m sure this involves nasty stuff, but hopefully economy of scale and regulations make it a cleaner process than just dumping the salt in the ground.



  • I’ve had success with trivial things, like write a log file parser with this pattern, or give me a basic 3 part left-right-center header in html. Works ok for trivial side projects. I would never trust it in production. Its a tool, nothing more at this point. Like an electric drill, better than a hand crank, but you still need to know how to use it.




  • It’s software that lives in the hardware. It provides low-level control and functionality specific to that device. It runs on the hardware itself, not the CPU of the computer.

    For example, a hard drive. We don’t want the OS to have to know how to interact with every type of hard drive. Seagate does things differently than Western Digital, an SSD works very different than a hard drive, etc… The OS sends the same commands to all types of hard drives, but each hard drive needs to know how to actually comply with the commands. If the OS is asking for a dozen different files all over the drive, it would be dumb to try and read them all at the same time. The OS doesn’t really know where they are on the spinning disk, but the drive does. Firmware written specifically for the device can do a much better job planing how to fetch the data so the read head doesn’t need to go back and forth a bunch of times, but instead make one good pass fetching all the data as it comes to it.

    Hope that helps.