241–250 of 331 posts
Please, please, clarify this bit for me. > All that day, kids got to see Mr. Stillwater’s hair dryer running under water in a fish tank. I thought I knew about electricity and water, but what I possessed was Conventional Ignorance posing as Conventional Wisdom. Humbling. Should I put the wifes running hairdryer into our fishtank to entertain our child?
Never the less, I would still argue to kill the power before stepping into water with an active mains line running through it.
Just a question. How about doing this experiment in 240 land? I would assume the result would be different?
Edit: replaced rated power with amp-age
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I've always put my (dumb, wired) keyboards in the dishwasher and they have always come out great. I'm a statistic of one, though. I don't know if I just got lucky.
Are they dumb? Isn't there a microprocessor in every keyboard?
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> But as a physics teacher he probably has heard about galvanization, oxidation and similar chemical things.. I hope. As the post says > I learned two things [...] (2) GFIs only trip off when in bodies of water that are grounded. They won’t work in an aquarium sitting on a lab table, or in a plastic laundry sink with plastic drainpipes, or in a plastic shower with plastic drainpipes. I'm neither an electrician nor a…
> Why else do all electrical devices with a metal case or a metal structure have these metal bits connected to ground, if not so that most shorts will lead to the circuit being closed towards ground? That predates GFCI, it's to ensure that in the event of a short the metal case/structure will always remain safe to touch by a (presumably grounded) person. Tripping GFCI is just a bonus.
Yeah, sounds about right.
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Also, corrosion/oxidation and any chemical interactions with Dish powder (if that was used) that might not be noticeable at first
This is a detergent selection problem. There are many detergents (like enzyme based) that are specifically designed for not corroding metals.
I used to ask electrical engineers who design building utilities if they ever touched a live wire with voltage running. If not, "how do you know it is really dangerous? How do you know it will electrocute you?" They don't. EVER. Want to talk to me again if they don't have to. #ConventionalIgnorance For reference, I touched 10k volts with microcurrents. It hurts! I touched 240 volts wire and felt the vibrations run up…
> That hurts too much but doesn't kill. It didn't kill once. Not enough of a sample to draw a firm conclusion from.
That's the single best conclusion I've read.
On a related note, I wonder if people around the world are familiar with electric showers. Essentially, it's a resistance similar to the one found in a toaster, placed right inside the showerhead. It heats the water as it flows through. People hearing about it for the first time are usually shocked that we don't die from electrecution.
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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…
Looking back, IMO the seeds of its downfall had already been planted by the time I was there, including the culture of blameless postmortems.
There was this idea that any problem—any outage or whatever —reflected not stupidity on the part of the perpetrator (Google hires the smartest people after all) but a process failure. Blameless postmortems avoided blame by ending with a process recommendation.
I’ve worked at startups since, and I do think that creating an environment where people are comfortable taking risks is just a fundamentally hard culture problem, and you don’t even have to be big to have it (though it doesn’t help). I’ve seen 15-person startups where engineers wouldn’t fix something because “I’m just an engineer and this is really a product decision” while the PM says “we need to get the engineers together in a meeting and come to a consensus on this.”
IMO Google’s hack of giving people space to take risks by letting them pass off failure as a process problem did sort of work, to their credit, until they got to where it sounds like they are now, where you can’t do anything without being accused of bypassing “good process,” which means going to endless lengths to get everyone’s opinions and placating everyone who disagrees with you.
It seems like at Meta they solved the problem by regarding failure as good and just. At my current company, to do something risky, you have to write a design doc and have a comment period, and then you’re free to do whatever the doc proposes. Idk what other approaches there are—I’d pay to read a book about it, though.