Do you realize this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda done by the government during prohibition, right?
We know how to distill from millenniums, and selling poisonous alcohol isn't a very sustainable business model...
I remember reading an article about the success of this campaign (was one of the first of this kinda). I'm mobile, but I'm sure someone can find a post a link.
> Do you realize this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda done by the government
Methanol poisoning is a VERY real thing. Methanol is easily accidentally produced when using a poorly calibrated still and not throwing out enough of the early product, particularly while processing alcohol made from corn where pectin helps create methanol. It’s very real and very dangerous.
The problem is ethanol (the good alcohol) laced with a small amount of methanol won’t immediately cause obvious health issues, they tend to creep up over time especially given continued consumption.
The government did however also purposely release horribly adulterated alcohol into the black market during prohibition and literally kill people, which is probably where your belief of it all being propaganda comes from.
>Methanol is easily accidentally produced when using a poorly calibrated still and not throwing out enough of the early product,
Easily? Yes.
Easily done unintentionally? No way in hell.
You don't even need to calibrate anything, just throw out the first bunch of stuff that comes out of the still. There's a ~10deg hop after the methanol is done boiling during which the still almost stops producing. You just throw out everything that comes before (and during) that reduced flow.
> Denatured alcohol (also called methylated spirits, in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom; wood spirit; and denatured rectified spirit)[1] is ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating to discourage its recreational consumption. It is sometimes dyed so that it can be identified visually. Pyridine and methanol,[2] each and together, make denatured alcohol poisonous; and denatonium makes it bitter.
> In many countries, sales of alcoholic beverages are heavily taxed for revenue and public health policy purposes (see Pigovian tax). In order to avoid paying beverage taxes on alcohol that is not meant to be consumed, the alcohol must be "denatured", or treated with added chemicals to make it unpalatable. Its composition is tightly defined by government regulations in countries that tax alcoholic beverages.
> Do you realize this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda from the government, right?
Eh, I'm not sure about that. There are stories in the newspaper every few years about a corner stop selling cheap bootleg alcohol that has caused someone to go blind (or die) because it contained too much methanol. I for one am quite glad that alcohol production is well regulated.
> There are stories in the newspaper every few years about a corner stop selling cheap bootleg alcohol that has caused someone to go blind (or die) because it contained too much methanol. I for one am quite glad that alcohol production is well regulated.
Can you find a case of methanol poisoning for beer or wine brewing where the maker hasn't deliberately added in something extra that contains methanol (e.g. from fluids sold for industrial use)?
I find when the news reports stories like this, they bury in the story where the methanol poisoning came from so the general public are led to believe that all alcohol brewing is incredibly dangerous, including making non-distilled drinks yourself.
"Man pleads not guilty to manslaughter and grievous bodily harm following home brew tragedy...Mr Meredith said Lynam bought methanol to use as industrial weed killer and confused it with ethanol when the home brew was made."
I haven't researched this, but all the cases I remember were vodka or a similar spirit. It may well have been because someone was adding something containing methanol.
> Do you realize this idea of poison alcohol was propaganda from the government, right?
Do you realize that:
> During prohibition, the US Govt added poison to industrial alcohol to discourage consumption. People continued to drink it, so the government added more and they killed 10,000 people.
Purely anecdotal, but my brother has a small (illicit) still and has walked me through the process - it's fairly simple, and neither of us can figure out how these methanol poisoning cases could happen by accident.
Simply, the "heads" (which are high in methanol) come out of the still first, so it's easy to remove them.
In addition, methanol test strips are cheap and easy to use.
Discarding the heads is obviously best practices, but from discussions with serious scientifically minded distillers (ie chemists that enjoy brewing gin and artisanal vodka at home) the amount of methanol contained in the heads of your home distillation is hardly enough to harm you. In the worst cases if you consumed a significant volume it might give you a harsh headache (and this would be a truly large amount). If you were to collect the heads from several batches and drank that all in one go, you could probably make yourself sick.
Now say you're a shady corner store owner and you take some denatured alcohol or other spirits and dump it into some cheap vodka and sell it under the table as 'moonshine' or something else to make a quick buck...yeah you're going to hurt people. And not just a little. You could easily kill someone that way, or permanently damage them. But at home with your own still? You're way more likely to start a fire than you are to kill someone with your distillate. Unless you start cutting your output with other not-for-consumption spirits.
Aside from removing the heads to avoid death and blindness, it's also done for flavour and aroma - they have a nasty, "chemical/solvent" smell (and I'd assume taste).
If I’m very sensitive to food borne illness concerns, maybe I make the choice to go to a grocery store with vacuum sealed product, versus buying at a farmers market?
Similarly, folks who want “safe” booze can buy the bottled stuff from the big boys, not the corner store swill.
Of course, the weakness in this position is that the corner store swill is often substantially cheaper, and thus disproportionately affects low income communities.
No good answers. I’m not a smoker. So I have no dog in this fight. But I can’t help but read this article with a degree of schaddenfreude and frustration. The gov’t is so poor at executing sometimes, it’s astounding.
Not just the idea/ propaganda, but the govt mandate that methanol be added to ethanol to make denatured spirits, aka the "poison alcohol".
It was literally a government created problem, with the same government claiming to be the only layer of security protecting John Q Public from this super dangerous product.
Prohibition is a case study in so many different ways of how to badly govern with the best intentions.
> this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda done by the government during prohibition
imagine believing propaganda about propaganda.
congrats, man, you've come full-circle. methanol poisoning is very real, and methanol is definitely present in the "heads" of distillations (speaking as someone who's done this), and since there isn't a clear delineation between what is the "head" and what is the "body", it's entirely too easy (especially if you don't want to waste any of the good stuff) to accidentally include too much methanol in your distillation... which is exactly why alcohol is regulated
> and since there isn't a clear delineation between what is the "head" and what is the "body"
At any appreciable scale you get a reduced flow/pause in output as the mixture finishes boiling off the methanol and has to increase in temp before boiling the ethanol. It's a 10+ degree temp change so it's not instant. You need to be creating a small batch on a heat source that's way overkill to not have a defined difference.
I'm reminded of that XKCD where every day, 10000 people are learning for the first time something that everybody knows...
No person alive today has known how to distill alcohol safe for human consumption for longer than about 100 years. The median experience among current distillers will be substantially lower than that age.
I hate how complex it to write a decent zsh completion. It is not something you can realistic do in a weekend.
You can implement a simple one without much effort. But doing anything a bit more interesting need to dig into zle, and there is only a few resources available online.
Fish has sane defaults. I don’t think using shell scripts is a great idea. The creator of oil shell pops up pretty often, he has some default scripts that might be useful for some. Also I should add you can use it interactively in bash. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/fish#Setting_fish_as_intera...
I've though about using tree-sitter DSL to generate zsh completion.
Your project seems to be a better candidate for this. Tree-sitter DSL, with some extra annotations, could be used to generate the specification. With the added bonus of being a format that can provide syntax highlight on text editors (in commands in sh files).
If I not mistaken, tree-sitter also uses TS.
I only gave a quick look at fig (only use HN on mobile). Will have a better look when at the desktop.
I just joined twitter a month ago, after seeing their redesign, and deciding to follow a person I heard on a podcast. Never could make heads or tails of the old UI, and I thought it was ugly as sin to boot. The new interface seems like a massive improvement to me.
The parent post used the number of papers at the top conferences in their respectives fields.
It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken.
I see your point though. This is a recurrent discussion.
I think the change of paradigm was positive. Nowadays, papers are published in interactive and incremental way, instead of, doing a parallel with software engineering, with the waterfall methodology.
Publising the research incrementally allows more people to get involved, create more branches, and spot errors earlier.
In sofware developement, the change of the process lead to huge advanvements. I believe this is also true for academia.
> It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken.
I agree with this statement: the system is completely broken.
I've peered inside top level conferences and I can tell you that publishing there does not mean you are pushing the state of the art. Instead you may be: popular, good at playing the political game, lucky (when acceptance rates are low, luck plays a huge part - and why they are low is a story in itself), good at writing marketing copy rather than doing science, engaging in corruption to get your paper accepted, or playing to the gallery in a way that might even harm science.
More widely, if your field is 99% politicians and 1% scientists, then the _scientific_ barrier to entry at an elite conference is not going to be a good endorsement of your work.
For instance, last year there was a whole debacle at one of those top conferences because someone from nvidia, that was in the board of this conference, made (and posted on twitter!) a black list for people who said something that was not alligned with hers ideology. (I wonder what happened after the whole thing went quiet).
Yet, I do still think those conference, and their sponsors, have interest in only selecting the papers based on their content. I don't think you can get them to publish your papers so many time only with influence. Also, things like blind peer review exists to mitigate that (although, it favors writing quality over content).
Also. Politics isn't intrinsically evil. One of the great success of Einstein was spreading his idea. Argbly, others made more important achievement, yet didn't amass the same level of fame as him.
In my experience, people who are good at politics, usually persue others path. Doing so only to get publication is not the most rewarding thing for those kinda of people.
What exactly was the sort of stuff people are blacklisted for? It could be claiming that racial segregation is a great thing (which should be shunned and kept away) or it could be supporting multivitamin consumption (for which it seems like an overreach).
The problem isn't the incremental nature of the papers or the collaboration, it's the equating of scientist quality with numbers of publications (or something like it).
By your own analogy, it would be like saying "someone is a great computer scientist" based on the number of commits they or their colleagues make.
I might even argue that regardless of how the product is or is not improved by the process, the way we attribute credit is worse.
If you move to a collaborative incremental process but still talk in terms of specific individuals as the source, rather than a group, there's a problem.
That doesn't sound right? Dynamic power is consumed by toggling wires, and memory cells are going to be one of the places where toggling is rare because you can't access all memory all the time.
The comparison of power usage is often done in the context of external memory. When talking about in-chip memory it becames an apples to orange comparison.
For start, it doesn't make sense to power gate a SRAM. So they are always leaking power. And despite writes not being common, reads are. Most application with SRAM reads all the metadata in parallel looking for a match (and often the data too due timing constraints and increased size of control logic because the extra complexity). And reading uses power.
Volatile memory consumes constant power to remember its value. Processing circuits only consume power when activated. And it's difficult to get the memory bandwidth saturated in a way that keeps all circuits busy. Computers do work in bursts; Then they wait for data. And practically all classical computer science data structures trash cache, like linked lists and OOP in general.
Most articles seems to be about VMS. I want to use cgroups and namespace to manange apps I use daily and that can be easily compromised.
Things like, neovim plugins, the terminal (kitty now edits the zshrc) etc.
I am aware of sandbox tools, like firejail. But wish there was more resources on how to manange local apps.