Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

boingboing.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 609 posts

Re: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

#561

Post by Nextgrid »

jsiaajdsdaa wrote: post #70

Never trust corporations (or anyone for that matter), even the most well intentioned of ones, to always make rational decisions, even when they hire rational people and write down rational policies.

Disagreed. I see this as perfectly rational in given their business model and regulatory environment they operate in.

Their business relies on ad revenue (derived from video views) and they are no regulations that hold them liable for hosting dangerous content, nor for mistakenly-deleted content.

Therefore the rational thing to do is let the mistakenly-deleted videos down (reviewing them manually would cost too much) while leaving anything else that doesn't trip the spam filter up (since they generate ad views).

Re: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

#562

Post by tailspin2019 »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #494
tailspin2019 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that link: > “2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) from the World Health Organization (WHO) released a statement adding RF electromagnetic fields (including microwave and millimetre waves) to their list of things which are possibly carcinogenic to humans.” WTF. This was the exact opposite of my understanding until today… ie that non-ionising radiation from the likes of microwaves was not…

Possibly carcinogenic. Some things we know for sure are carcinogenic, but even then what we know is that exposure increases risk in a population by so-and-so percent. It's much harder to work backwards from one individual case of cancer and finding out what the cause was. It's highly irresponsible and downright cruel to accuse the husband of killing his wife by botched microwave repair based on so little evidence. Wh…

Yes completely agree regarding blaming the husband. Without the - likely unobtainable - certainty that that was the cause, why even suggest that…

Re: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

#563

Post by throwaway0a5e »

trelane wrote: post #343
jermaustin1 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of a 3 foot buzz saw, my grandpa is rebuilding a sawmill with a 54-inch blade powered by a 1990's corvette engine. Fairly certain someone is going to get hurt on that one.

Is he angling for a spot on _Top Gear_?

1990s Corvette engine is just marketing wank on top of "boring 90s smallblock V8"

It was probably just what he had sitting around.

Re: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

#564

Post by Gordonjcp »

83 wrote: post #525
hamburglar wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m also gonna pick a nit here and say “like a hot glue gun” is what you say about a MIG weld that is done entirely improperly. If the filler material is just acting like glue, you might be sticking metal together but you’re not welding. So this tongue-in-cheek description also misleads newbs into creating bad welds.

That is picking a nit. Bad welds are still welds, you just need more of them :p

"A grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't"

I discovered when I first bought a MIG that there's a world of a difference between "I have a welder" and "I am a welder". I used to be bloody good at oxyacetylene, too...

Re: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

#565

Post by stormbrew »

411111111111111 wrote: post #529
stormbrew wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a real oven for this is kind of a massive waste of energy. I got a smallish countertop convection oven and it's basically replaced nearly all uses I previously had for a small toaster oven and our proper mounted oven that takes 8 million years to preheat, along with a good chunk of microwave uses. The big one only gets used for really big stuff now, maybe once every few months at most.

Dunno man, mine takes less then 5 minutes to get to about 150°c. I never measured it but just activating it before I take a pizza from the freezer is enough time to get it fully preheated. It really depends on the quality of the oven i think. There isn't that much more Air to heat so the wasted energy is less then you'd intuitively expect. And regular sandwich irons take at least as much energy, because it's not an e…

Your oven is miraculous compared to every fixed oven I've ever had access to.

At any rate we're talking about toast here and an oven broiler only has one setting (usually): all the way on, so you're using as much energy as it takes to brown a steak just to crisp up a bit of bread.

It's not really about heating up the air, anyways, toasters and broilers mostly directly heat things. A toaster (or toaster oven or countertop convection) just has the elements closer so can direct more energy into the bread and less to.. everything else.

Re: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

#566

Post by 1-more »

cwkoss wrote: post #506
1-more wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not to mention, the burnt wood looks so gaudy and uninteresting. I would hardly call it fractal as it only goes 2-3 levels usually, and artistically doesn't usually make sense on furniture etc. There's some point I could make about how this is the worst art anyone has ever died for in history, but we'd end up in the weeds.

I'd be interested in trekking through those weeds. Anyone have a contender for worse deadly art?

My weeds were a bit more like how in our current cultural moment our (US centric) romantic ideas are now their worst versions. Entrepreneurship: join an MLM or become a crypto weirdo or try to start a drop shipping business as advertised in a YouTube preroll ad; Self sustenance: make a bunch of consumer choices that mark you as an individualist while doing nothing to make yourself self sustaining; political engagement: be a shitposter or maybe become a conspiracy freak since it's mainstream now; passionate self expression: die making high effort, high risk, zero reward, looks-worse-than-woodburning-by-a-mile arts and crafts that are on top of it all incredibly cliché.

At least Luis Jiménez's deadly mustang sculpture looks cool!

Re: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

#567

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

justAlittleCom wrote: post #544

I am sorry but I strongly disagree with most comments here. I do a lot of things potentially extremely dangerous, like burning wood with a microwave, or driving a motorcycle, or playing with hydrogen and oxygen in stoichiometric ratio, I tried to melt a wrench with a 12V battery, and all that makes me a better engineer and a better person, more aware of the weakness of flesh and how reality is scary and how it dont c…

Trying to be charitable but this is insane.

I'm not against people taking risks as long as it's very clear what risks they're taking, and as long as the reward is worth it (for any reasonable definition of "worth it").

Pretty much everyone knows how dangerous motorcycles are, and plans (or doesn't, but still their choice) accordingly. The whole point of Ann Reardon's video is that tons of people tried this, and at least 60+ died, without having any concept of how dangerous it actually is. That is also evidenced by many of the videos showing, for example, bare legs and bare hands inches away from lethal contact.

On the "worth it" side of things, obviously that's subjective, and I think the original patterns are neat, but it seems very much a "you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all" type of effect. Are you honestly saying that you think a substantial risk of death is worth it here?

Re: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

#568

Post by xen0 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #490
rcxdude wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard to figure out: microwave oven transformers are generally considered one of the most dangerous things you can find in a household appliance when misused because they put out enough voltage to reliably punch through even dry skin (which is usually a fairly good insulator which mitigates a lot of the severity of most mains voltage shocks), while still able to generate enough current that when it does form…

"Only one mistake needed to kill you" applies to other things we do every day such as crossing the street or driving a car. I don't understand why the warning videos were banned, and don't know what potentially dangerous practices that the "fractal woood burning" videos show, or what safety practices they omit, but working with electricity at mains voltages or higher obviously requires due care and attention.

This is a false equivalence.

When crossing the street, other people in cars don't want to actually kill you, and those crossing are generally aware and cognizant of the danger. The biggest mistake you can make is 'forgetting to look before crossing'; a lot of the time that won't kill you.

The setup here is very different.

The voltages involved in the wood burning process is far outside of most people's familiarity; your intuition for electricity just doesn't apply.

We're not just talking 'mains supply can be dangerous'; electricians routinely work on switches and such without bothering to shut off the circuit (even though this is typically ill-advised). Mistakes with mains, whilst they _can_ kill, usually just result in big bangs and breakers being tripped.

What you think 'protects' you just doesn't; your insulating gloves, shoes, wire covers, even air gaps; they could just fail you, and badly.

Even aware of this, knowing 'touching the probes kills me', a tiny mistake, such as 'brushing my insulated leg on the piece of wood I am working on, easily made despite being careful, has a very high chance of instantly killing you.

The only way I could see to make this process 'safe' is to not be in the same room as the equipment when it's connected to the power.

Re: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

#569

Post by bufferout »

joshstrange wrote: post #326
tzs wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The outlet was stuck in the wall box so I reached a flathead screwdriver in to try and pry it out, and turned my screwdriver into an arc welder for a second. I've got a screwdriver that incorporates a non-contact AC current sensor. Mine is a Gardner Bender SDT-354 [1] that I think I bought at Home Depot or Lowe's. When the current sensor is turned on if you bring the tip of the screwdriver near a live AC wire an LE…

Yeah I have the standalone tool and it's a must-have for electric work. While replacing some switches in my house I thought I had the right breaker (sidenote: those breaker-detector tools are like magic, much better than the "is the light still on?" method). The lights went out but when I jammed my tester in the gang box it started beeping. I ended up needing to flip off 2 breakers (took me a while to find the second…

An important habit when using testers: test the tester first on a known live wire. You don't want to find out the hard way if your tester has stopped working.

Re: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

#570

Post by mulmen »

hammock wrote: post #531
mulmen wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have some links to this? A few cursory quacks turned up nothing. My family loves those channels but it would be interesting to see how the structures hold up and how/if they are ever used.

Can I ask what you tried searching? Because "Jungle Builders' channels" pulled it up immediately.

I was looking for the aftermath specifically. Not just the channels where the structures are built. So I searched “jungle builders aftermath” and “jungle builders today”.
Post reply on HN