This might be the best (at least most useful) post I have everr read.
If I change my mind I will let you know.
I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
231–240 of 331 posts
Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
dishwashers normally dry the dishes by heating them with an electric heating element; this is more likely to damage electronics than the water there are also some electronic components that won't deal well with water, especially strong streams of water. microphones and speakers come to mind, because they commonly include exposed paper, thin membranes, and sponges. i'm thinking an ocxo would also be a problem both bec…
Right about the heat, definitely something to be careful with for the mechanical parts. (The electronics, not really so much... anything that can survive the lead-free reflow profile has some pretty solid heat tolerance.) And also right about not washing speakers and microphones, I'd never put those through a water or solvent wash once their protective taping was removed. Surprisingly XOs are not really known for was…
thanks for the tip!
Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
#233Love the distinction between "Conventional Wisdom and Conventional Ignorance" :)
Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Few things in my career have granted me more power faster than taking ownership of decisions. Some people are so terrified of having to say "I was wrong" that they either will do nothing, or just happily follow decisions that someone else makes. It's one thing when that's a line employee behaving that way, but there are managers so terrified of making a mistake that all they really are is scribes, tracking who said w…
Taking ownership of decisions in this way breeds another problem: people love to police when they perceive other people taking authority that's not rightfully theirs. I had your view until 7 years at Google. Showing this to 80% of people there would garner tsktsking and quips about delusions of grandeur and seeming unbalanced. In performance reviews, you could count on this person saying you collaborate poorly and do…
One of the things that impressed me at my time at Google (2011-2015) was the culture of blameless post-mortems, and of general transparency of many (not all) things.
Sadly, this culture must have deteriorated; my friends who are still at Google say that it's become literally the stuff of Dilbert comic strips :-(
Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
#235I was once involved in a similar (unintentional) experiment with a multi-billion dollar defence radar. A several metres deep underground bunker, containing several 19" racks full of electrical/electronic gear, filled to ground level with a combination of mineralised surface water and mud during a storm. What we wanted to do was cut the power, pump the water out of the bunker ASAP and immediately clean the whole lot w…
I wonder although wasteful, isn't this better than accelerated failures taking the defense radar offline at random times in the future? Reminds me of a friend of mine who somehow blew a shift in his car and did something bad to his engine. Instead of pulling over and stopping, he just drove it home and ended up destroying the engine. So he got a whole new engine instead of having insurance pay to dismantle the engine…
If your friend did a money shift the damage happened at the shift moment and driving home didn't change the outcome.
Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even cheap toasters (I take toaster apart for fun) have true electronics these days because it's usually cheaper to implement things like timers electronically and if the toaster has a display it certainly has some electronics. But I suspect that the absolute simplest toasters are purely mechanical and electrical.
Most toasters these days actually use a PT8A2514A ( https://www.diodes.com/assets/Datasheets/PT8A2514A.pdf ) microcontroller. But it is still safe to wash, for the same reason as it is usually safe to wash a keyboard.
It's not every day you see a datasheet with a "bagel" in the diagram.
Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is that if you want to put metal in a microwave keep it away from the walls . If not, you can get an arc jumping from the metal to the wall and it can burn a hole in the wall of the oven. You should also put something (eg. a cup of water) in the oven to absorb some of the microwave energy. The metal doesn't absorb much energy so without an additional absorber the microwaves can get reflected back int…
A while back on a whim I put my stainless steel coffee cup in the microwave and it just warmed the coffee. No sparks or drama. The metal didn't even get hot.
If your piece of metal is sufficiently thick, the eddy currents will not overheat it to the point of failure. If its surface is sufficiently smooth, there will be no arches jumping off the sharp edges. Crumpled foil is usually very much unlike that, and it gets violently destroyed. A steel coffee cup with a smooth top would likely do just fine.
My microwave oven comes with a metal stand that you're supposed to put into it when doing certain kinds of baking. Likely it's engineered to be massive enough, it has rounded edges everywhere, and is supposedly sized so that there are no pieces that would resonate at 2.4 GHz and thus consume a lot of energy and overheat.
Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking ownership of decisions in this way breeds another problem: people love to police when they perceive other people taking authority that's not rightfully theirs. I had your view until 7 years at Google. Showing this to 80% of people there would garner tsktsking and quips about delusions of grandeur and seeming unbalanced. In performance reviews, you could count on this person saying you collaborate poorly and do…
One of the things that impressed me at my time at Google (2011-2015) was the culture of blameless post-mortems, and of general transparency of many (not all) things. Sadly, this culture must have deteriorated; my friends who are still at Google say that it's become literally the stuff of Dilbert comic strips :-(
Hah, somewhat perversely, I'm glad to hear that: it's exactly how I sum things up in a sentence in my head, then I think I'm being overdramatic / personalizing it, because I kinda grew up learning about tech via Dilbert, I was a big fan of Dogbert at 7 years old.
But I'm not.
I did Aug 2016-2023. Of course it's a complicated story, and you've heard a lot already I'm sure, but when you mention blameless postmortems, it remind me of my pet peeve: promo committees done within teams (basically 2 levels up, i.e. skip is doling out promo, with no recourse or real outside input) was a horrible, wretched idea.
There was this odd obsession with saving time on perf, but they kinda just needed to tell people to chill and recognize that it really is important for management. With all promos being judged by people next to you, what we might call "being agreeable" became a necessity.
I distinctly remember in 2018 being told if things were how they had been, that I should just do a blameless postmortem, but with things as they are, that was a quick way to end up on the bench for the rest of my career.
Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still wonder how electrocution is not a big issue. My local electricity codes say absolutely no electricity within zone 0. I get a bit nervous about hooking up IP 65 rated lights to a IP X4 rated switchbox a meter away from the shower head
Electricity takes the path of least resistance. If things are done right, that means through the metal heating element and the ground wire, and not through your body.
This is a dangerous myth. Electricity takes all available paths, with less current flowing through the paths with greater resistance.
As far as I understand, the main reason people don’t get electrocuted even with improperly grounded shower head heaters is that (as noted in the post), tap water is generally not very conductive in the first place, so you’ve effectively got a gigantic resistor between you and the wires (assuming there’s a continuous path through the water at all). So even if the least resistance path is through you, the amount of current will be tiny due to Ohm’s law.
Re: I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's quite impressive it kept working for that long, and even more amazing someone was capable of saying "no, let's not cut the power, there might be a problem if we do"
Honestly, that doesn’t surprise me at all. This seems perfectly in line with “I don’t care what it is, or how well I perform it, as long as I have a job.”
Because that's what companies incentivize for, sadly.
The handbook or SOP somewhere probably does call for a risk assessment.
So they have two choices. Choice A is to do what's obvious, cut power and get to work. That has two branches. One branch is saving the day and potentially millions of dollars. For what? A side mention at the next all hands, maybe. Branch 2 is something goes wrong, and the company says you didn't follow the handbook, and you're fired or worse, found liable.
Choice B is following the handbook, knowing everything will be ruined. But, you keep your job, and maybe the handbook gets updated.
Both choices provide no reward. Only one provides no risk.