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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • We’re excited to announce the new Sony WH1000XM6 headphones, enhanced by the power of spanners!

    I don’t see why my headphones need a sp-

    Conveniently built in to your headset, you can use the spanner to adjust bolt tightness on-the-go!

    Okay, but that’s not wh-

    We’re proud to be leading the market in spanner-augmented products to bring a new level of convenience to your life.

    Spanner may sometimes only appear to tighten bolts. Please don’t ask us the energy cost of manufacturing the spanner.










  • The only real issue with OpenStreetMaps is that the quality varies significantly town-to-town depending on how much love it’s had by local, knowledgable contributors. Road directions are one of the more complex things to configure in OSM, especially with complex multi-lane junctions, and so densely-populated areas and major roads are likely to be quite good, whereas more rural areas can be hit-and-miss.





  • Very much looking forward to V2! I’ve had to switch to Voyager for working spoiler markdown – it’s also excellent, but I generally prefer Mlem.

    Cheeky questions while I’m here:

    1. Voyager also seems to handle GIFs in comments better, is that something on the cards for Mlem?
    2. Is there a plan to introduce swiping forward? I frequently accidentally swipe back to the community list and lose my place in the feed.


  • The excerpt from Peter Brannen’s 2017 book The Ends of the World, to save a click through to Twitter:

    “The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn’t notice any atmosphere whatsoever,” said Rebolledo, “It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometers per second, 10 kilometers-probably 14 kilometers-wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away.”

    These numbers are precise without usefully conveying the scale of the calam-ity. What they mean is that a rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun.

    “The pressure of the atmosphere in front of the asteroid started excavating the crater before it even got there,” Rebolledo said. “Then, when the meteorite touched ground zero, it was totally intact. It was so massive that the atmosphere didn’t even make a scratch on it.”

    Unlike the typical Hollywood CGI depictions of asteroid impacts, where an extraterrestrial charcoal briquette gently smolders across the sky, in the Yucatán it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next. As the asteroid collided with the earth, in the sky above it where there should have been air, the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere. As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond all within a second or two of impact.

    “So there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone up on the moon?” I asked.

    “Yeah, probably.”