[HN Gopher] YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood ...
___________________________________________________________________
YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but
leaves up tips
Author : PretzelFisch
Score : 624 points
Date : 2022-07-01 12:21 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (boingboing.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (boingboing.net)
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| At what point do we say, "automation as a reason for failure is
| no longer acceptable"?
|
| Edit: That is, when the published information is wrong, false,
| and was not taken down, or was taken down...
| wmeredith wrote:
| I'm not sure why that was ever an acceptable excuse. If you
| automate something and it gets people killed, where does the
| absolution come in, exactly?
|
| "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Fantasia is quite
| illustrative about the dangers of automation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DX2yVucz24
| danso wrote:
| > _It is extraordinarily dangerous, and dozens of people have
| been killed following instructions contained in viral videos._
|
| Thought this might be an exaggeration (classic "well _I've_ never
| heard of this" brain), but here's a case that happened just a few
| months ago:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna26109
| zitsarethecure wrote:
| The AAW have banned the practice because it is so dangerous and
| have been maintaining a list of the people killed by it,
| including at least one professional electrician.
|
| https://www.woodturner.org/Woodturner/Woodturner/Resources/S...
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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).
| whiddershins wrote:
| 34 people killed is a pretty surprising number.
|
| Is it fair to refer to the makers of the videos as murderers?
|
| On a moral, if not legal, level?
| kazinator wrote:
| If they contributed to the takedown of the critical video which
| informs about the dangers and deaths then I don't find myself
| able to casually dismiss the accusation of murder (as I would
| were that not the case).
| bedast wrote:
| That's 34 known and only in the US, as noted by Ann. Her new
| video notes 30 in the UK and more in Australia (where she
| lives). And it can't be reiterated enough, this is those that
| are known to be caused by this. It makes you wonder how many
| other electrocutions or fires were caused by this without
| noting this as the source, whether known or not.
|
| Unfortunately, I don't think there's precedence nor law that
| places liability on these people.
| wmeredith wrote:
| I'm not sure murder is the right crime here. Seems more passive
| like willfull neglect or something. Not a lawyer.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Is there any way to filter out certain Youtube channels such that
| they cannot be viewed in your house? My kids like some of TheSoul
| channels and I'm not particularly happy with them watching
| content created by Russians.
| YeahNO wrote:
| h2odragon wrote:
| Censorship sucks but when its it YouTube's responsibility to
| protect idiots from themselves? If they removed these videos are
| they still responsible for people attempting the stunt because
| they heard about it there six months ago?
|
| I demand the freedom to suffer the consequences of my own
| actions.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| YouTube has _their own_ policy of taking down content they call
| "harmful & dangerous," this person is complaining that they
| are enforcing it incorrectly by taking down her video talking
| about the dangers and not taking down or age gating the videos
| of people showing how to do it.
|
| > I demand the freedom to suffer the consequences of my own
| actions.
|
| You will absolutely suffer the consequences of whatever actions
| you take, I'm not sure why you seem to think YouTube would
| prevent that.
| hedora wrote:
| "harmful & dangerous" to whom?
| robonerd wrote:
| People.
| CM30 wrote:
| YouTube's moderation is ridiculous, and it demonstrates the
| problem Google has in general. They don't like paying actual
| people to moderate their sites, and rely on automated systems and
| bots to do everything for them. So, if there's ever an issue (or
| you have a bunch of scammers mass reporting you because you
| debunk their 'work'), then YouTube/Google seems to think you're
| the problem instead of the scumbags.
|
| We need things to change here. We need Google to moderate their
| services properly, and we need these scammers to get
| arrested/sued/whatever for misleading info, and putting people's
| lives at risk.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > we need these scammers to get arrested/sued/whatever for
| misleading info
|
| Don't you think that it's the broadcaster that should be
| penalised? It is Goo/YT that is promulgating the misinfo. The
| scammers/creators would go away, if Goo/YT moderated as if
| their income depended on it.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| I would agree that at a certain point there's a
| responsibility of Alphabet recommending videos that can
| literally cause viewers to accidentally kill themselves.
| CM30 wrote:
| Eh, both are to blame here. The platforms/broadcasters for
| hosting this content and not removing it when it's proven to
| be dangerous/illegal/whatever, and the creators for making
| such content and putting people's lives at risk. It's like
| the situation with fake products on Amazon; yes Amazon shares
| some of the blame for not policing their marketplace, but we
| can't let the scammers/counterfeiters off the hook either,
| since they're deliberately trying to scam people.
|
| Plus these folks likely wouldn't go away, they'd just go to
| other places to distribute their 'wares'.
| iso1631 wrote:
| The greatest trick companies like google and facebook made
| was to remove themselves from blame.
|
| If a newspaper publishes something like this, they are
| liable and have punitive punishment. If a TV channel does
| the same applies.
|
| If google publishes it, they just say "not our problem",
| while continuing to rake in the cash.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| What's beyond belief is that even the auto moderation is
| useless. I've cost count of how many video's I've seen the
| comment:
|
| "It's finally here: someurl"
|
| *On every single video comment*
|
| Or: "(Username:Whatsapp+-SOMENUMBER): Chat up for more info"
|
| Again, on every comment. It seems like Youtube just doesn't
| care in the slightest to bothered with the most basic auto
| moderation of the most overtly obvious spam.
| hedora wrote:
| This case pretty clearly crosses the line into criminal
| negligence / manslaughter / murder. If they were are book
| publisher or TV network, someone at Google would be facing jail
| time.
| [deleted]
| deepstack wrote:
| Or instead use specialised communities that does do moderation
| like peer tube, odysee.
| bergenty wrote:
| Paying actual people to moderate a platform as large as YouTube
| is not reasonable.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I would love to know how many hours of video get appealed
| each day. I'd be willing to bet there isn't even close to
| enough money to pay people to make decisions on all of that.
| [deleted]
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > We need things to change here. We need Google to moderate
| their services properly,
|
| Human moderation isn't perfectly consistent, either. It would
| be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans
| moderate everything manually.
|
| What are people willing to give up in exchange for a human-
| moderated version of YouTube? Would we be okay if they charged
| a $3 "moderation fee" on every upload to cover the cost of
| paying someone to watch the video and evaluate how it fits
| YouTube's rules? The big creators wouldn't care, but the small
| time videos would immediately stop being uploaded and
| competitor websites would become popular overnight.
|
| I don't see demands for perfect human moderation of YouTube
| uploads as realistic in any way.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| What about a $3 fee that automatically comes out of the ad
| revenue when your video exceeds $Arbitrary limit (they could
| start at 200,000 views to start with).
| CJefferson wrote:
| I'd be happy with a law that said Youtube were responsible
| for people who hurt themselves copying videos which they were
| recommended which were wildly unsafe.
|
| If the result of that is Google has to charge people a
| moderation fee for videos they then recommend, then fine,
| that's the cost we have to pay.
| realusername wrote:
| > Human moderation isn't perfectly consistent, either. It
| would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have
| humans moderate everything manually.
|
| Those aren't just random channels though, they are top
| youtube channels, surely they can manage to review the most
| popular ones at least...
|
| And we're talking about tips which can make people die if
| they follow them, that's the most clear cut case, there's
| nothing opinion based.
|
| There's just no excuses there.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I don't see demands for perfect human moderation of YouTube
| uploads as realistic in any way.
|
| Then don't add the word "perfect."
| Majromax wrote:
| > It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to
| have humans moderate everything manually.
|
| You could flip this around, however? Why is YouTube
| _promoting_ videos that no responsible human has reviewed?
|
| These videos don't just trip and fall into people's feeds.
| They're selected by YouTube's recommendation algorithm,
| presumably targeting maximum engagement. That decision is
| automated, but it's still an editorial decision -- it's not
| based on an objective, chosen criterion like "most recent" or
| even "most viewed."
|
| This isn't how YouTube is currently structured (nor the other
| social media platforms), but I think it's fair to suggest
| that if a platform is in the business of picking and choosing
| winners, it should bear at least a moral responsibility for
| the content it promotes.
| Retric wrote:
| YouTube could set a views threshold to make manual reviews
| scale. My guess is 99% of what people watch is the top 0.1%
| most popular videos which makes things manageable.
|
| Highly dangerous video seen by 5,000 people not a big deal.
| Highly dangerous video seen by 5,000,000 people is.
| protonfish wrote:
| And this small percentage of popular videos are made by a
| smaller amount of reputable or disreputable channels. Give
| me the tools and a few months and I'll clean up the
| English-speaking toxic content by pruning it at the source.
| But that won't happen because removing these dangerous,
| stupid, click-bait farms hurts the business. Fine,
| whatever. But stop claiming moderation is "impossible" or
| "too expensive." That is a heinous lie.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > Would we be okay if they charged a $3 "moderation fee" on
| every upload to cover the cost of paying someone to watch the
| video and evaluate how it fits YouTube's rules? The big
| creators wouldn't care, but the small time videos would
| immediately stop being uploaded and competitor websites would
| become popular overnight.
|
| That would actually be pretty ideal - most consumers watch
| YouTube for the bigger channels and popular content anyway,
| so they would stay on the platform, which would validate that
| revenue model. The smaller producers and consumers would both
| leave, which would help build competitors to YouTube. The big
| producers who remain will be slightly disincentivized to spam
| low-quality videos (including those text-to-speech automated
| ones that some people here have found). And, Google will have
| no excuse for not using humans to moderate videos anymore
| (can't cite "cost concerns" when you're literally pricing it
| in).
|
| Seems like a win-win-win to me.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| No one expects things to be perfect or that there will be no
| mistakes, but there's a whole lot of space between "perfect"
| and "braindead stupid".
|
| The worst part isn't so much that mistakes get made, but the
| way those mistakes are dealt with, which is often a
| frustrating and silly experience.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > No one expects things to be perfect or that there will be
| no mistakes, but there's a whole lot of space between
| "perfect" and "braindead stupid".
|
| There is but I am not terribly convinced the difference is
| employing a badly paid human.
| fho wrote:
| Could this be a browser plugin? No idea how "invasive" a
| plugin can be, but ad-blockers and privacy plugins seem to
| be able to change a lot on webpages (including blocking ad
| videos on Youtube).
|
| So theoretically it seems possible to build a plugin that
| moderates comments on web pages ... "No one expects things
| to be perfect" ... so it does not hurt to try?
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Exactly. A rogue moderator might make the wrong call on a
| video, but unlike an algorithm that call won't affect
| hundreds of videos at once. And also unlike an algorithm
| the moderator might be a different person the next day. So
| mistakes are not magnified the way they are with an
| algorithm.
| AlphaOne1 wrote:
| Moderation is very complicated especially since it can be
| subjective based on the background and skill level of who is
| watching the video. Would it be possible to crowd source
| this? For example, I could add a filter to my search saying
| exclude 'profanity' and videos with profanity would be
| removed. Or exclude videos that are 'dangerous' or 'for
| entertainment only' and those would be removed. My thought is
| that we should use the shear numbers of persons watching the
| videos to our advantage. Honestly, I sort of do this by
| looking at the comments since many times you can gather the
| flavor of the video based on the comments. This could also be
| used to political bias. Videos with a right-wing leaning
| would get tagged as leaning right and vice-versa. Also,
| content creators would be incentivized to accurately tag
| their videos and perhaps the algorithm could penalize content
| creators with discrepant self-tag versus what viewers tag as.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Anything "crowdsourced" can and will be gamed by spammers.
| Such tags would become useless very quickly without
| traditional moderation.
| usrusr wrote:
| Yeah, it's not just about moderation being automated, it's
| about automated moderation being based on crowdsourced
| flagging. The debunked will always have stronger incentives
| than the debunking. Actually the debunking don't even have any
| incentive to flag at all, because they require the scandal to
| vlog about. It's worse than the SEO battles.
| corrral wrote:
| Youtube shouldn't exist. Video hosting and discovery should be
| separate, like they (largely) are with podcasts.
| chrisjc wrote:
| The "moderation" for Shorts is just spectacular! And I don't
| mean good.
|
| The amount of back-to-back "Hi I'm Elon Musk and I'm something
| something bitcoin something something..." deepfakes is
| astounding. There are a handful that are seemingly pixel for
| pixel identical, yet as much as you report them over and over
| again, they only seem to shown more and more.
|
| Then there are the countless sexually inappropriate ones that
| also fills the stream.
|
| The gruesome ones showing rats/mice getting spiked to death,
| animals suffering on the side of the road after they've been
| hit by a truck/bus/car, so on and so forth.
|
| It's just horrible.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Okay, so assorted cryptocurrency scams have obvious financial
| incentives, and I assume the sexual ones are trying to get
| people onto a paid site. What's driving the animal gore
| videos? I can't think that there's anything to sell there; is
| it just people uploading stuff for the shock value?
| robonerd wrote:
| > _I assume the sexual ones are trying to get people onto a
| paid site. What 's driving the animal gore videos?_
|
| The latter is sexual for psychos.
| chrisjc wrote:
| It's 4-5 distinct animal gore videos but through different
| user accounts, so i don't think it's just people uploading
| stuff. Maybe there are accounts (compromised or just bots)
| racing against each other bringing content over from
| TikTok?
|
| And who knows what happens when you click on links in the
| description or follow instructions in the overlays. I swipe
| away before the gore comes and haven't read any of the
| descriptions or overlays.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I am SHOCKED that Google wants to make money and does not care
| if they hurt people in the process! SHOCKED!
|
| If google had to moderate YouTube in any meaningful way they
| would go broke, not only because of how much it would cost, but
| also because of the lawsuits.
|
| There is a reason we have regulations in the United States. It
| is so things like YouTube never happen in the first place. If
| they were treated as publishers in the first place we would not
| be having had this problem.
|
| YouTube is a broadcaster with millions of independent program
| directors. Until it is seen as such my the Feds nothing will
| change.
|
| P.S.A.: Don't let your kids use YouTube.
| lrem wrote:
| https://mashable.com/article/youtube-human-content-moderatio...
| anujkumarscom wrote:
| thanks
| elif wrote:
| It's terrible how little basic electronic safety is practiced in
| virtually all of these videos. When we handled high amps in
| university, we had 3 hours of lecture first simply explaining
| safety precautions and how to handle accidents.
|
| 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.
| effingwewt wrote:
| I think the people replying to you to nitpick are missing the
| forest for the trees.
|
| You (and many people) have to wait until university to learn
| this stuff if you didn't seek it out yourself (how-to's and
| electives in school). This kind of knowledge should be taught
| at a young age to demystify it.
|
| A few hours in uni (and how many people never even go), to
| learn life-saving information
|
| When I did appliance repair microwaves were treated as bombs.
| You didn't test your components live, you always unplugged
| first, etc.
|
| Still walked into another tech working on one (cabinet-mounted
| up high), with the cover off, barely on a wobbly stove-dolly
| and his expensive Fluke multimeter out with leads in hand.
|
| I noticed the plug still lifted up into the cabinet so I peeked
| in and sure enough it was plugged in.
|
| Big red warning signs on the power cable, the covers inside and
| the cover outside all had warnings. Dude had been through the
| same training I had, and still thought it was a good idea.
| "I'll just stay away from the high side",he said.
|
| _edit to add_ this microwave had an external fuse. All you had
| to do was unscrew it and check the fuse inside- which was bad.
| He hadn 't had to do _any_ of the stuff he 'd done prior to my
| arrival. They'd had an electrical surge when the power had gone
| out and the fuse had caught it. This tech had been on the job
| longer than I. _end edit_
|
| Even people trained and with knowledge make mistakes and
| sometimes are just plain stupid.
|
| People without knowledge can be dangers to themselves and
| others.
|
| Texas had a rash of house explosions a few years ago from
| people raiding copper and power wires from empty houses with
| live gas lines.
|
| I think the answer is educating and many people as possible,
| from as young an age as possible.
| hedora wrote:
| A friend of a friend disassembled a microwave to repair it,
| and accidentally put one of the radiation shields back on
| backwards. It ended up killing his wife (lots of cancers) a
| few years later.
|
| So, yeah. Don't repair microwaves. It's really not worth the
| $100's you'll save on a replacement.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| How would he know the microwave was the cause?
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| Why was the cancer attributed to the microwave incident?
| After all, it's not ionizing radiation.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| Ultraviolet light causes skin cancer, yet it is not
| ionizing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
| ionizing_radiation#Lower_f...
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| 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 carcinogenic.
|
| I don't know how to keep up with this stuff.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| 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.
|
| What was the location and extent of the original
| microwave injury? Did the cancer originate in the same
| spot? What is the proposed mechanism of action? How long
| is "a few years later"? Can it be ruled out that she
| didn't have cancer at the time of the microwave incident?
| What other causes has been considered, other known
| carcinogens, or a family history? Who made the claim in
| the first place, did the oncologist blame the husband?
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Yes completely agree regarding blaming the husband.
| Without the - likely unobtainable - certainty that that
| was the cause, why even suggest that...
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| Near UV isn't, but the photons still carry considerable
| energy to push chemical reactions over the edge. Whereas
| microwaves are far, far below the visible spectrum, and
| none of that causes cancer.
|
| A microwave injury is serious stuff, but it seems like a
| huge stretch to attribute a later cancer to that exact
| incident.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| > _Near UV isn 't, but the photons still carry
| considerable energy to push chemical reactions over the
| edge._
|
| In my opinion (I am an amateur biologist) there is no
| need to deploy considerable energy to mess things at the
| cell scale: Most interactions there occur because of
| thermal noise.
|
| Furthermore most protein interactions depend how they are
| folded which involves different fields, including Van der
| Waals forces. Van der Waals forces carry an energy of 4
| to 40 meV per bond which is in infrared range.
|
| So even infrared can mess up the internal working of
| cells. It could be that even lower frequencies also have
| a biological effect:
|
| (Non-thermal effects of radiofrequency electromagnetic
| fields)
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7417565/
|
| Yet cells have many "quality control" mechanisms so
| usually the is no permanent damage.
|
| But infrared exposure could bring benefits to cells also.
| 1-more wrote:
| > 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.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I'd be interested in trekking through those weeds.
|
| Anyone have a contender for worse deadly art?
| 1-more wrote:
| 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 cliche.
|
| At least Luis Jimenez's deadly mustang sculpture looks
| cool!
| api wrote:
| Wait until more DIY EV servicing videos start appearing. If you
| short something across a decent size EV battery it will be
| converted into plasma and deposited on your face.
| xxs wrote:
| EV is DC, and DC sparks are a thing of beauty as they lack
| self-extinguishing properties unlike AC sparks.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| why is that? I couldn't find any info about this
| 1-more wrote:
| Caveat: I'm kinda dumb and this is a Cunningham's law
| situation.
|
| tl;dr Because in a DC situation the current is always
| high so the temperature through the air is always high so
| the air remains a plasma and remains a good conductor the
| whole time.
|
| OK I = V/R is how we talk about currents. Current (I)
| equals the potential (V) over the resistance (R).
|
| An electrical spark is where the potential across an air
| gap is high enough that the air--normally a good
| insulator and thus a poor conductor--breaks down into
| plasma. In that state, the air is hot enough that the
| electrons that would be bound to the atomic nuclei can
| flow the way electrons in metal do. This means that the
| resistance of that air gap goes from being a high number
| to being a low number.
|
| In the case of a DC spark, we have a constant high
| potential and with the plasma state a low resistance, so
| I = V/R = big/small = big current. Since we are putting a
| high current through a conductor, the temperature of the
| conductor goes up, and the plasma remains a plasma. It
| stays a good conductor the whole time.
|
| In the case of an AC spark the AC potential goes from
| some big positive number of volts, to zero volts, to some
| big negative number of volts, to zero volts, to some big
| positive number...you get the idea. At some point I=V/R
| goes from being big/small to zero/small, which can be
| long enough for the air to cool off and stop being a
| plasma and be a bad conductor. So when V is a big
| (positive or negative) number again in 1/4 of the period
| of the signal (probably 1/60/4 = 1/240 seconds) the air
| might be too cool to conduct the current. Then V/R would
| be Big/HUGE = effectively zero current.
|
| Remember: I'm just some weirdo online. This is not
| advice. Don't mess around with electricity.
| kragen wrote:
| 50Hz AC drops to zero volts 100 times a second, which
| makes the arc easier to extinguish. "Self-extinguishing"
| is a deadly exaggeration, though, as you know if you've
| ever seen a high-tension line being connected or
| disconnected. Arcs are only self-extinguishing when they
| deplete their energy source or destroy what they're
| arcing to.
| ngvrnd wrote:
| where your face recently was.
| tantalor wrote:
| Electronic -> electrical
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| It probably should have been more than 3 hours given that you
| likely mean "voltage" not "amps".
|
| Before everyone jumps on me, "it is the amps that kill you, not
| voltage", I understand electricity quite well and in this
| context, saying something like "handling high amps in a
| university" is almost certainly not what was taught.
| elif wrote:
| Lastly, I would encourage you to consider tasers, which
| deliberately deploy (nonlethally) upwards of 20K volts for
| multiple seconds.
| tarsinge wrote:
| Maybe they meant high voltage amps
| xxs wrote:
| I dont know what they did in the uni, I thought it was some
| wielding or power delivery (CPU and GPUs nowadays deal with
| 200A+)... So I honestly thought it was high amps, all of them
| are proper fire hazard.
|
| But you are right, likely it was high voltage.
| elif wrote:
| I'm glad you assumed a very limited scope of danger being
| direct electrocution death because in my class I learned
| there are many compound forms of electrical accident. To
| quote NEC textbook:
|
| "Even low-voltage installers can still experience unsettling
| shocks, especially if they are working in an unsafe
| environment, such as if they are ungrounded or standing on a
| wet spot," Johnston said. "While it's unlikely that such
| shocks will cause serious injury by themselves, they
| certainly could literally knock someone off balance, which
| could be a real safety risk if an installer were standing on
| a ladder.
|
| "In addition, an arc in a low-voltage system has the same
| potential for igniting explosive materials as one in a
| 120-plus-volt system. Chapter 5 of the NEC provides rules for
| installing electrical wiring of any voltage in a hazardous
| (classified) location, specifically those locations with high
| concentrations of flammable or combustible liquids, flammable
| or combustible vapors, conductive and combustible dusts, and
| so forth."
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Yeah, usually when someone parrots the "it is the amps that
| kill you, not voltage" line, I have to remind them that the
| amps _depends on_ the volts.
|
| A car battery is capable of hundreds of amps, but if you
| touch the contacts with your hands, you won't feel a thing,
| because the voltage is too low to overcome your body's
| resistance.
|
| I imagine if you wired the leads to your tongue, your tongue
| would probably explode though.
| philistine wrote:
| Also, it's not electronic safety, its straight up electrical
| safety. There are no electronics in a magnetron.
| kragen wrote:
| A magnetron is a vacuum tube which works by swirling space
| charge around. Vacuum tubes are "electronics"; the word
| "electronics" was originally invented to distinguish vacuum
| tubes (where it matters that the charges are being carried
| by electrons) from previous electrical devices such as
| relays, resistors, condensers, motors, generators, and
| inductors, where you can pretty much ignore the nature of
| the charge carriers.
| robonerd wrote:
| Surely the magnetron itself is an electronic device.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Even with power electronics we still say electrical safety
| elif wrote:
| It was a class on embedded electronics and robotics.
| There are more hazards in electronics than merely
| electrical hazards. e.g. exploding capacitors, toxic
| fumes, etc.
| elif wrote:
| It's also possible for low voltage shocks to cause your hand
| muscles to seize the hazard and be unable to release it.
|
| In fact, my TENS unit, specifically designed to cause muscle
| contraction, runs on 9V.
|
| Edit: ah... I see a throwaway account was used, so you will
| never have to confront your mistake. I wish these were
| banned.
| xxs wrote:
| I cant see how 9v dc can shock you aside touching the leads
| with tongue... or using any step up electronics.
|
| As a kid we used to test batteries voltage with the tongue,
| 9V had a distinctive bite, compared to 4.5V. Even today I
| can tell the output voltage of a multimeter (in its ohm
| mode)
| hedora wrote:
| Once I charged a 1F (not a typo) capacitor with either a AA
| or 9V battery (can't remember), then touched the leads.
|
| Youch!
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| You must have charged it through some step up device,
| otherwise the max voltage on the cap is the battery voltage
| which isn't going to shock you.
| raldi wrote:
| Rather than admonishing everyone for wondering the obvious
| question, why not just explain your reasoning?
| shkkmo wrote:
| High amperages are really only dangerous (in terms of
| electrocution) with higher voltages. As voltages get low
| enough, our bodies' resistance means that there won't be
| enough current passing through you to hurt you. The dryness
| of the contact point makes a big difference (several orders
| of magnitude), but even with wet hands, it is pretty much
| impossible to hurt yourself with < 12 volts.
|
| The risks with low voltages and high amperages are from
| shorts causing rapid heating.
| xxs wrote:
| It's the Ohm's law: V=IR. Amps (I) kill you but your body
| has rather high resistance, at least kilohms (even when
| wet), and it depends on the voltage partly. So low voltage
| even with high amps current do nothing to you.
| tarsinge wrote:
| And the corollary is high voltage with low amps do
| nothing to you too, neither amps nor voltage kill you
| alone.
| xxs wrote:
| The issue is that low voltage is guaranteed not to shock,
| can burn of course.
|
| High voltage is inherently dangerous.
| kragen wrote:
| High voltage is not inherently dangerous. In a dry
| climate you can easily develop ten thousand volts by
| lying down in a bed without bedsprings with a long
| acrylic blanket and pulling the blanket over your head
| hair with your feet. You can get multiple-centimeter-long
| branching sparks of static electricity from your finger.
| The only danger of the activity (to you) is that you
| might produce enough ozone to irritate your lungs. But
| the energy of those sparks is limited by your body's
| capacitance to the blanket.
|
| If you do this in a vacuum you could get X-rays, and if
| you do it near your cellphone or laptop you can kill
| them. But it's not dangerous to your body.
|
| However, high voltage with enough power behind it to burn
| a Lichtenberg figure through your body can kill you
| pretty darn quick.
| xxs wrote:
| electronics die off ESD w/o the xray. I didn't mentioned
| ESD on purpose as indeed what really matters is
| energy/joules. If you have a source capable of high power
| but for too short time it won't be that dangerous either.
| dpratt wrote:
| An analogy: while technically what kills you due to a fall
| is called "gravity", that's not the whole picture. In
| actuality, it's the height you fall from, which allows
| gravity to build up enough velocity to kill you when the
| fall ends.
|
| Despite the fact that you're experiencing the same
| gravitational acceleration from both, a one meter fall,
| while being potentially dangerous if you're not prepared
| and allowed to land right, is not likely to kill you. A 100
| meter fall, on the other hand, is likely not survivable by
| any means.
| raldi wrote:
| This seems like the opposite situation. Gravity doesn't
| kill you from a fall (just like voltage doesn't kill you
| from electricity). Gravity makes possible the sudden
| acceleration that kills you, which is analogous to the
| voltage-induced current.
| iso1631 wrote:
| The ground technically kills you. People have fallen for
| months, even over a year, without harm
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| Current flowing through your body is what kills you. But it
| doesn't flow through you just because it is a high-current
| supply (think car battery for example). It flows through
| you because the source voltage divided by your impedance is
| what controls how much current flows through you. Impedance
| is the general concept for resistance and basically
| indicates how current and voltage are related. The higher
| the impedance, the less current flows. Wearing rubber
| gloves would increase your impedance from hand to hand
| significantly.
|
| So while high current does kill you, what _causes_ it is
| high voltage. What is considered high? Depends on your
| impedance (ex. are your hands sweaty or dry?).
|
| When dealing with high-current systems, there are safety
| procedures and concerns, but they are generally different
| than high-voltage. The systems I have dealt with are more
| about burns than electrocution. For example accidentally
| shorting out a fork lift battery can be spectacular in a
| bad way.
| kragen wrote:
| Relevantly in the case of microwave oven transformers,
| your impedance depends on the voltage because a high
| enough voltage can and will arc right through your skin
| into your soft, low-impedance innards. You can do this
| safely with a commonplace Tesla-coil-driven consumer
| plasma globe by putting just enough aluminum foil on top
| of it to arc through your skin, leaving cute little black
| charred spots, but in short enough bursts that it won't
| stop your heart.
| iso1631 wrote:
| There's no particular safety concerned when you're
| playing with hundreds of kilovolts in a typical school.
| You need it when the thing you're messing with has the
| capability of delivering a lot of amps.
| timpattinson wrote:
| 415 volts on a 30A breaker, like you might find in an
| undergraduate electrical engineering lab, is very lethal.
| I'd hazard a guess that's what the OP is talking about.
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| What you care about is how much charge is at that high
| voltage potential because current is charge/sec. Charge
| due to stray capacitance can be quite dangerous because
| if you don't know what you are doing, the amount of stray
| capacitance can be higher than you expect. I would be
| very careful doing anything with kilo-volts using a
| circuit, as opposed to a static charge device, such as
| Van de Graaff generator.
| planede wrote:
| When you get shocked by a Van de Graaff generator, you do
| get high voltage, as well as high currents. The missing
| ingredient is time. The shock takes a very small time, so
| the energy delivered by the shock is very small. Skin-
| effect also helps.
| jeshin wrote:
| What they're getting at is that while it is the amount of
| amperage that goes through your heart that determines your
| likelihood of dying, you need a certain voltage to overcome
| the resistance of your skin to achieve such an amperage.
| Anything under around 50v is generally safe to touch, and
| often high amperage applications are under that limit.
|
| So the reason high voltage is more dangerous, if it has
| sufficient amperage backing it up, is that the higher the
| voltage, the better its ability to pierce your skins
| resistance and flow through your body to begin with.
| elif wrote:
| lmao you couldnt figure out how to turn off your tv...
| spoilers, hold the power button for 2 seconds.
| [deleted]
| seedless-sensat wrote:
| Would have loved to see a source of "34 fractal wood burning
| deaths in America"
| doubleunplussed wrote:
| Here's a list:
|
| https://www.woodturner.org/Woodturner/Resources/Safety-Mater...
| musingsole wrote:
| Example from the parent's link: """ Upper Caboolture,
| Queensland, Australia Reported by: Energy Source &
| Distribution Death: Liam Keegan, age 17 March 23, 2021 """
|
| ^ Many don't list the age, but this one did. And it made me
| sad.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| So are the authors of the fractal wood burning videos criminally
| negligent?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| What of the publishers?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Imperfect moderation is inevitable at the massive scale of social
| media companies. YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video
| every day and it's clearly impossible to have humans review all
| of it. If we humans did review every single minute of video, the
| subjective element of moderation would still lead to headlines
| like this where someone could identify instances of
| inconsistencies.
|
| Given that she re-uploaded the video and I'm watching it on
| YouTube right now, I assume the initial moderation strike was
| more of a mistake. Or more likely, maybe it was reported by a
| number of people who were upset by it for some reason and it
| entered an auto-moderation queue.
|
| I have a hard time getting too worked up about news stories of
| singular moderation mistakes. Does anyone realistically expect
| YouTube to have perfectly consistent moderation? Even HN, a
| significantly smaller community, has very uneven and inconsistent
| moderation due to the user-influenced flagging features.
| jameshart wrote:
| > YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video every day and
| it's clearly impossible to have humans review all of it
|
| But not all of that content gets picked by the algorithm to be
| shown to millions of people.
|
| They don't have to manually check everything. But if they are
| considering putting something at the top of their homepage for
| a large number of people, would it kill them to have someone
| give the content a once over to see if it might be dangerous?
| wmeredith wrote:
| > Imperfect moderation is inevitable at the massive scale of
| social media companies. YouTube receives an enormous quantity
| of video every day and it's clearly impossible to have humans
| review all of it
|
| Then maybe they shouldn't spread it across the globe?
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video every day and
| it's clearly impossible to have humans review all of it.
|
| Micro moderation might not be possible, but meta moderation
| certainly is. If a story such as the fractal burning has made
| the news that means it has passed through plenty of human
| brains along the way. That sort of thing should be noticed by
| meta moderation. This reminds me of the YouTuber who uploaded
| _2 Million Videos_ over the course of years and was not shut
| down.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olkb7fYSyiI
|
| The only way for that not to be dealt with is by gross
| negligence.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| nothing is perfect but google has a market capitalization of
| 1.5 trillion dollars, i'm sure they can afford to remove of put
| warning on dangerous videos
| Zigurd wrote:
| That's true. However, bad moderation is most harmful when
| clickbait-for-profit gets profitable enough to have their
| boiler room crew mass-report responsible people debunking the
| clickbait.
|
| This is the bad stuff. It's also the stuff that can be caught
| with enough anti-spam effort. The example in this article fits
| that model: A toxic creator farm getting away with a
| coordinated mass-reporting campaign against an individual. It's
| just bad anti-spam and YouTube deserves the criticism.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Imperfect moderation is inevitable at the massive scale of
| social media companies.
|
| If social media companies can't function well at that scale,
| what's the reason for having social media companies at that
| scale? We should set and enforce expectations, and when
| companies get to the scale where they can't meet those
| expectations, fine them until they "rightsize."
| hedora wrote:
| I'm a fan of removing legal carve outs for social media
| companies. If it's hosted on your domain, then you are
| liable, just as a book publisher would be.
|
| If people want to publish stuff, they can buy a raspberry pi
| or an s3 bucket.
|
| If people want to moderate content, they can hire an
| editorial staff (like magazines and podcasts do).
|
| I'm not sure how to handle Wikipedia. It's a net positive for
| society, and this proposal would effectively ban it. That's
| the only impacted site I can think of that I think is worth
| saving.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > I'm not sure how to handle Wikipedia. It's a net positive
| for society, and this proposal would effectively ban it.
|
| The rule could only apply when you profit from impressions
| from the content. Platforms that rely on ad revenue tied to
| views would be covered (as the forbidden content is
| directly driving their revenue), platforms that are either
| free or use an alternative monetization model not dependent
| on impressions (flat monthly fee regardless of which
| content was consumed or how many times) would be exempt.
| JCharante wrote:
| How hard is it to use manual review for videos that have at
| least a million views?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| What makes you think they don't use manual review for highly-
| viewed videos?
|
| The video in question wouldn't have triggered that manual
| review threshold because it's not even close to a million
| views. I would actually assume that highly-viewed videos are
| moved up much higher in the manual review priority queue, as
| it only makes sense.
|
| The controversies like the one in the article are generally
| among moderately popular channels with 10K - 100K views, not
| in the millions.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > The video in question wouldn't have triggered that manual
| review threshold because it's not even close to a million
| views.
|
| What makes you say that? I don't have a source on that
| specific video, but socialblade says her channel was
| getting hundreds of thousands of views per day in the week
| after that video went up, three weeks since her previous
| video.
|
| Edit: Bing cache says 720k as of some point. Archive.org
| says 1.5 million as of three days ago.
|
| I would have set the manual review threshold no higher than
| 100k anyway.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > Imperfect moderation is inevitable at the massive scale of
| social media companies. YouTube receives an enormous quantity
| of video every day and it's clearly impossible to have humans
| review all of it.
|
| Yes, this is the root of the content tech boom of the last 20
| years: we'll cut corners to make publishing and distribution as
| cheap as possible and displace the remaining cost to third-
| parties (advertisers, data buyers) so that nobody actually
| involved in the content has any accountability.
|
| And the negative consequences of this approach are rapidly
| becoming clear to society. We'll be spending the next 20 years
| trying to bring those consequences back in line with our values
| and societal needs.
|
| It's like technical debt, but for societal projects instead of
| engineering projects.
| dazzawazza wrote:
| Big Clive has a good video on why this is dangerous and how to
| make it more safe. Note: not safe safe, just more safe.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeSKL9zVro
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Safe by Big Clive standards, who had (on his original website)
| a "chandelier" made from GU10 bulbs, bare stainless rod, and
| the little terminal blocks from choccy block connectors, all
| gloriously exposed and at 240V.
| JTbane wrote:
| Big Clive will be fine, everything is safely in his
| explosion-containment pie dish.
| danuker wrote:
| "slightly less dangerous"
| melenaboija wrote:
| It is interesting to see that also exist channels that monetize
| how to make these experiments less likely to kill you using a
| 15 minutes video explaining some physics and one diagram.
|
| More legit than the ones that kill you faster but still part of
| the same game, specially seeing the title "The most deadly
| project of the internet"
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| There is no need for cynicism. (Did you watch the video?) Big
| Clive is giving quite strong warnings, safety advice, and,
| this video is not monetized.
| imtringued wrote:
| It is a sin to tell people about dangers and a virtue to be
| quiet about them.
| [deleted]
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| I like Big Clive (and Electroboom) because they know how to be
| safe, but do the stupid thing anyways (safely) to show how bad
| the ideas are.
| foobarian wrote:
| It's disappointing how most of the articles and videos
| criticizing the dangerous content don't explain why exactly
| something is dangerous. They just scream "omg high voltage"
| "one mistake you're dead" and so on. I honestly think they
| are worse than the source; it reminds me of the medieval
| experimenters and alchemists being oppressed by the
| conformist public.
| bentcorner wrote:
| If you read the article, Reardon's video goes over exactly
| why fractal wood burning is dangerous. She doesn't go into
| extreme detail but I think it's enough for the layman to
| understand (i.e., you can get electrocuted easily, and a
| gfci won't save you). bigclivedotcom's video above also
| goes into why fractal wood burning is dangerous.
|
| > _I honestly think they are worse than the source; it
| reminds me of the medieval experimenters and alchemists
| being oppressed by the conformist public._
|
| I can kind of see where you're coming from here but in this
| case I think the right thing has happened.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| There's not much more than that to it: high voltage, high
| current and exposed wires. It does not take a PhD to
| understand what can go bad.
| foobarian wrote:
| It actually does "take a PhD." Having insulated wires can
| still be dangerous with a high enough voltage because of
| dielectric breakdown. Furthermore even if you don't get
| electrocuted but have a vacuum chamber with high voltages
| you can get irradiated.
|
| What I would have liked is, "OK this here wire is where
| the high voltage is, if you touch it you will get hurt
| and possibly die. If you need to manipulate it use long
| wooden or plastic tongs. Do not use gloves because of
| dielectric breakdown possibility." You get the idea. Not
| "just don't do it."
| rcxdude wrote:
| 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 a circuit through you it will not only
| hurt because cause your muscles to tense up rigidly, burn
| you badly, and depending on how (un)lucky you are, cause
| cardiac arrest. It also (as explained in the Big Clive
| video) bypasses the safety equipment in most houses
| designed to mitigate shocks from mains-powered devices.
| Fractal wood burning also involves a bunch of salt-water
| which only increases the risk. "Only one mistake needed to
| kill you" is not hyperbole (it's possible to survive shocks
| from MOTs, but it's not the norm).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "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.
| xen0 wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Personally I'm a fan of a warning "This will kill you and
| it will hurt all the time you are dying.".
| krisoft wrote:
| > It's disappointing how most of the articles and videos
| criticizing the dangerous content don't explain why exactly
| something is dangerous.
|
| Which videos are you talking about in particular?
|
| Both the Ann Reardon and the Big Clive video explains
| exactly what makes this experiment more dangerous than
| others people do.
|
| The Big Clive one in particular goes into interesting
| details about how a ground fault circuit interrupter works,
| and why it doesn't protect you in this case.
|
| > They just scream "omg high voltage" "one mistake you're
| dead" and so on.
|
| The ones I have seen don't scream. They calmly explain that
| the voltage generated in this setup is much much higher
| than the voltage the average experimenter has experience
| with.
|
| About the "one mistake you're dead". That is the crux of
| the matter. People should be aware of how thin the margins
| are, and how few guard rails protect them in any particular
| situation.
|
| > it reminds me of the medieval experimenters and
| alchemists being oppressed by the conformist public.
|
| Who is oppressing anybody here?
| kzrdude wrote:
| I can't watch Electroboom because he always gives himself
| shocks in every video. Don't care that they are small or it's
| set up, I can't stand watching it, makes me ill. Seems to be
| interesting stories he's telling otherwise though, so it's a
| shame.
| donatj wrote:
| Why so? That's honestly the whole reason I started watching
| him years ago, he was the dude who shocked himself.
| jakear wrote:
| They're an empath
| wongarsu wrote:
| I think he's great. Often you have people preaching cargo-
| culted safety rules without communicating the reasons for
| them, when you then see other people blindly disregarding
| those rules without apparent ill effect that reinforces
| people to do stupid things.
|
| Mehdi/Electroboom shows you what you can do, and why it's
| dangerous; usually by shocking himself, blowing something
| up, or having stuff catch fire. He isn't teaching mindless,
| disprovable safety culture, but showing you the actual
| boundaries you have to respect. As such he has both videos
| of "let's shock me with lowly increasing voltage to see
| when it starts to hurt" and "ranting about badly wired wall
| sockets and lack of GFCI in this hotel room".
| quasarj wrote:
| It's supposed to be funny. Why does it make you sick?
| hef19898 wrote:
| Because promoting baf safety habbits around potentially
| dangerous stuff to clueless people is a bad idea?
| imtringued wrote:
| Are you really saying that telling clueless people that
| they will get painful shocks encourages bad safety
| habits?
|
| If you show a kid a video about someone intentionally
| putting e.g. a fake hand on a stove and it getting severe
| burns and faked screams, what's the likelihood of a child
| following the video to get the same sick burns vs a video
| showing that it is perfectly safe to touch the stove?
| hef19898 wrote:
| A video showing work, while ignoring safety pratices,
| promotes bad safety practices. People that know to work
| save will still do, people wothout a clue will start DIY
| projects ignoring safety. And get hurt. I consider this
| to be a bad thing.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Not everyone is the same or thinks the same way. Maybe
| I'm more scared of electricity than others, don't know?
| (Extended) family have died in accidents, too, so it's a
| well-respected hazard in my family.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Some of the shocks are completely fake. For example, in the
| classic electric guitar video [0], if you advance frame-by-
| frame and capture the frame containing the flash [1], it is
| obviously Photoshopped in. Poorly, I might add.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwIvUbOhcKE
|
| [1] https://imgur.com/KBOX11K
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| I'm a fan of ElectroBoom, but I have to agree, some of them
| are pretty horrifying to watch. The Jacob's Ladder video
| sticks out in my mind - I still can't decide whether it was
| staged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g1z47U_kZQ
| kzrdude wrote:
| That's the one where he has said it was not staged, if
| I'm not mistaken. According to comments here https://old.
| reddit.com/r/ElectroBOOM/comments/7gnt46/that_ja...
| zrobotics wrote:
| The Amp hour podcast interviewed him, and he confirmed
| that that wasn't staged; he considered leaving it out
| since it was legitimately dangerous.
|
| https://theamphour.com/562-electroboom/
| kouteiheika wrote:
| IIRC in one of the interviews he had he said that it
| wasn't staged.
| willcipriano wrote:
| One of the funniest videos on the internet is Electroboom's
| "how to make a electric guitar", it looks like it changed the
| title at some point, I guess for the reasons in the article,
| but I was on the floor the first time I watched it and he
| panned down to the plug.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TwIvUbOhcKE
| blocked_again wrote:
| I think YouTube/Google has a big leadership crisis at the moment.
| Removing the dislike counter was the obvious sign.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| With a dislike counter at least that could signal something is
| amiss with these videos, but now you just see thumbs up
| everythings cool guys and the comments can be moderated by the
| uploader to remove anything negative.
|
| Still don't understand why they removed it.
| hedora wrote:
| Money. Lots of dislikes imply lots of ad views.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I've worked in advertising on the creative/client facing
| side, no one cares if their ad gets disliked. Engagement is
| engagement.
|
| Don't think that's the reason.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| He could've meant that dislikes are a signal to people to
| not watch the video and those represent a lot of lost
| engagement.
| robonerd wrote:
| Downvotes hurt the feelings and egos of enough people with
| the power/leverage to get it changed. Particularly:
| politicians, corporations, and youtube executives themselves
| (e.g. Youtube's _Rewind_ videos getting trashed with mass
| downvotes.)
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Thank you for reminding me that viewers can't even vote down to
| try to inform others of how bad those videos are. YT's
| leadership needs to be replaced.
| rvz wrote:
| The whole point of the _' trusted news initiative'_ [0] is to
| combat the so called 'fake news', and disinformation and to
| replace that (or at least flag these videos as 'misleading') with
| actual fact checked articles, videos, etc.
|
| What is happening here is the direct opposite of the TNI [0] and
| especially YouTube is removing videos unveiling the dangers in
| these fractal wood-burning videos and are instead promoting these
| absolutely hazardous and high risk videos whilst still aiding and
| _' sharing dangerous falsehoods.'_.
|
| This isn't the only occurrence but it's quite clear that YouTube
| as well as the rest of the TNI is a giant failure in stopping
| disinformation and are instead doing the exact opposite.
|
| The TNI should not be trusted in the first place and is now a
| disinformation source.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-
| initiative...
| headsoup wrote:
| Just about all occurrences have been so, it just depends what
| you believe.
|
| Entirely obvious irony in naming it 'Trusted News Initiative'
| like a good old 'Honest Al's Second-hand Cars!'
| hedora wrote:
| Marketing 101: Any adjective with a positive connotation in a
| brand name or marketing copy is a lie.
|
| "Easy to assemble", "quiet operation", "durable nonstick
| coating"," trustworthy computing", "digital rights", etc,
| etc.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Why is this so hard for these massive companies? A single
| reasonable person can make better decisions than this.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There's only so many videos a single reasonable person can
| watch. And once you scale it it's no longer a _single_
| reasonable person but a vast army of low-paid content watchers.
| wmeredith wrote:
| A person is smart, people are dumb. - Agent KA, Men in Black
| (https://quotes.yourdictionary.com/author/quote/127467)
|
| See also, "None of us is as dumb as all of us."
| (https://despair.com/products/meetings?variant=4375841505301)
| carrolldunham wrote:
| I noticed I feel literally unsafe watching any DIY video on there
| now that the dislikes are gone. I realize I'm proceeding in a
| place where I relied on a warning system that has been taken
| away.
| usrn wrote:
| Don't you have empathy for poor creators like the executive
| branch of the US federal government though? The dislike button
| was making things rough for them.
| toxik wrote:
| I swear, the YouTube staff was just salty about the ratios on
| their cringe-fest Rewind videos.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It was probably turning corporations off the platform
| entirely since turning the likes off looked bad and leaving
| them on created risk.
| gruez wrote:
| But you could already disable likes/dislikes if you want
| toxik wrote:
| Turning them off, like turning comments off, makes you
| look like you're afraid of what people will say about
| your video.
|
| ... Which is exactly the case, but they don't want it to
| look like that.
| pjc50 wrote:
| What?
| subjectsigma wrote:
| Videos of Biden (speeches, etc) were regularly seeing
| abysmal like/dislike ratios, esp on official news channels
| like CNN. Then suddenly YouTube removed dislikes because of
| "dislike bombs". There was some speculation they were
| specifically pressured by someone (Biden or the media) to
| remove dislikes so their ratings would stop being
| negatively affected.
|
| This is really silly because the theory assumes that A)
| Biden cares or even knows about people disliking YouTube
| videos of him and B) that CNN doesn't already receive
| preferential treatment from YouTube and couldn't just ask
| for an algorithmic boost regardless of how many
| likes/dislikes they have
|
| Most likely it was because YouTube's own content (such as
| Rewind) was getting dislike bombed.
| Aunche wrote:
| >Most likely it was because YouTube's own content (such
| as Rewind) was getting dislike bombed.
|
| If Biden or CNN don't care about dislikes, why would
| YouTube? The most obvious explanation is that some data
| scientists noticed that removing dislikes tends to
| increase ad revenue or watch time.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| YouTube got a massive amount of bad press about it,
| whereas I don't think the average person knew Biden was
| getting dislike bombed. But you're probably right.
| viraptor wrote:
| There's a workaround:
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis...
| orangepurple wrote:
| There are browser extensions which crowd source YouTube
| dislikes now that the API is completely gone like "Return
| YouTube Dislike"
| avsteele wrote:
| It could easily be the case that a popular channel warning 'DON'T
| DO THIS' could make the situation worse by telling more people
| about an idea they would never have heard of otherwise.
|
| The fact that some (presumably less seen) videos haven't been
| removed (yet) doesn't change this calculus.
| kevingadd wrote:
| The new video shows lots of examples of comments on the
| original video where people thanked her for warning them not to
| do it, so it's worth factoring that in. Certainly a couple
| people will go 'wow, getting killed to make cool wood? sounds
| sick' and do it but I suspect the number of people scared away
| is higher.
| mcherm wrote:
| That is a very creative excuse but it cannot explain why this
| video which described the dangers of the practice and did not
| explain in detail how to go about doing. It would be removed
| when none of the videos that demonstrate how to do this were
| taken down.
|
| I think a much more plausible explanation is that YouTube
| simply does not have an effective mechanism for deciding what
| videos to take down and which ones to leave up.
| headsoup wrote:
| And yet they've decided they should have the authority and
| mandate to do so. You can't automate good moderation.
| starkd wrote:
| Thats an extremely negative view of people's ability. There's a
| point where you have to realize you can't protect people from
| themselves. A video that simply provides knowledge in an
| accessible way without preaching and condescension does far
| more than an outright ban that gives the viewer no information.
| [deleted]
| m0llusk wrote:
| Knowing that microwave oven transformers are extremely dangerous
| is critically important, so this represents a serious failing of
| basic education.
| sh4rks wrote:
| Exactly. I can't sympathise with any of the people who mess
| around with stuff like this. Surely if you had even the
| littlest bit of common sense, you would know not to mess around
| with high voltages without training.
|
| To the people saying "mass report all fractal burning videos" -
| why not also take down videos on surfing, outdoor rock-
| climbing, and other dangerous sports?
| geocrasher wrote:
| BigCliveDotCom has an excellent video about this:
|
| "The most deadly project on the Internet"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeSKL9zVro
| justAlittleCom wrote:
| 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 care about our stupid
| meaty body.
|
| I feel I see a lot of class contempt here, "those stupid people
| dont know that it's dangerous, they should stick with devices
| conceived by us. We educated people put stupid warning labels on
| it just for them". Of course, those poor soul should have been
| more aware of the danger, but censuring those video, or
| forbidding them to play with microwave, is that really what we
| want ? Anybody should be aware about the basic physics, that's
| the real problem here. I dont want to see moral video "dont do
| that because it's wrong", I would more video like "look at that
| how dangerous it is, and also, how cool is that".
|
| About electroboom, I am the only one to think that being zapped
| again and again does a really poor job at passing the message
| "electricity is dangerous and can kill you"? If some people dont
| understand the dangerousity of electricity, maybe they just
| learnt from electroboom. I much prefer the channel "diode gone
| wild".
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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?
| exar0815 wrote:
| When I was young and stupid, I did this. Suddenly felt some
| tingling sensation in my fingers, threw the leads away and jumped
| back. Most certainly saved my life and drilled in my head how
| dangerous it is. Still get a sinking feeling in my stomach
| whenever I am at some switching station below the 380KV leads,
| remembering that day. Especially after knowing people who got
| into 120KV, and what happened to them...
|
| Electricity is dangerous. In every form. Period. Keep your
| fingers away from it when you don't know what you do. Household
| appliances can not only kill you on the mains side. Microwave
| transformers, flyback circuits, burner igniters, HV Car Ignition
| Systems...
| gravypod wrote:
| > Still get a sinking feeling in my stomach whenever I am at
| some switching station below the 380KV leads
|
| If you would like to get into the psychology of someone like
| this I am a big fan of watching photonic induction:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/Photonvids
|
| He is, seemingly, a power company tech from the UK who just
| really loves high voltage and messes with it in his home with
| his buddy.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I had one the other week where I was replacing an outlet in the
| kitchen. I flipped the kitchen breaker and the lights and
| appliances all turned off. I skipped the important step of
| actually testing the outlet and stupidly assumed it no longer
| had power. Turns out it was on a different circuit from the
| rest of the kitchen. 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.
| Fortunately I wasn't hurt and only got a melted screwdriver tip
| and a smoky smell out of it, but I'm definitely not going to
| let myself make that mistake ever again.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| It amazes me how often strange anomolies slip through safety
| procedures. I use a voltmeter to check before working on
| wiring, and like you, have still managed to grab a live wire
| more than once. Last time, it was a situation much as yours -
| had the breaker off for the circuit I was certain I was
| working. And I checked with the voltmeter. But like a damned
| fool, I only checked the hot to ground voltage, and not the
| neutral to ground, or hot to neutral. Yep, you guessed it -
| the outlet was on a circuit for a different room, and was
| miswired in a junction box, reversing neutral and hot. I got
| the full benefit of the 120v. Fortunately, standing on a dry
| wooden floor in rubber soled shoes, I was a lousy path to
| ground, but still a dangerous situation I have no desire to
| repeat.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| I have one of those little screwdrivers with a small light to
| detect current; I always use it on everything electric before
| I actually touch anything.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| I made the mistake of not testing _all_ of the wires in an
| outlet a couple of months ago.
|
| I used a non contact voltmeter, and had shut off the breaker
| to the outlet I was working on. Little did I know that the
| jackass that did some previous wiring in the house had run
| wires from a different breaker in to this box. It was done in
| such a way that I didn't fully realize it could have separate
| live.
|
| My palm below my thumb touched the live and neutral and gave
| me a pretty solid shock.
|
| I'll definitely test every single freaking wire in a box from
| now on. F people who try to play electrician without knowing
| what they are doing!
| robonerd wrote:
| Look at the slotted screw heads on outlet face plate. Are
| they both aligned vertically/horizontally, or are they at
| odd angles?
|
| If they are both aligned, the outlet was _probably but not
| necessarily_ last worked on by a real electrician. If the
| screws are at odd angles, the outlet was _probably but not
| necessarily_ last worked on by a DIYer.
|
| Real electricians align the screws, as a sort of
| professionalism and a nod to any future electrician who
| might work on that outlet.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| It isn't against code to have different lines inside one
| box (at least at any of the places I've lived).
|
| Easiest way is to flip the mains everytime. I wouldn't
| trust those pencil testers though (the non-contact ones,
| the light ones yes).
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| I discovered an outlet like this in my house. Had a lamp
| plugged in to the outlet (since I could see it from the
| breaker box) and was sequentially going through and
| flipping each breaker off, then on again. The light never
| turned off...
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I saw an electrician who did know what he was doing change
| a fuse board incorrectly. He accidentally swapped one end
| of two different ring mains so that they were in different
| breakers! Same result as yours. Always test every live
| wire. Those glowing voltage sniffer screwdrivers can be
| pretty handy.
| masterbee wrote:
| I have one even better, just to show how you can't be sure...
|
| Replacing an outlet. Shut off the 2-pole breaker for the
| shared-neutral circuit it was on. Outlet tester showed the
| outlet was off. Pull the receptacle out. Used a multimeter to
| test each wire contact to ground; all were 0v.
|
| Only when I disconnected all the wires did one of them
| develop potential because somebody had apparently tied a
| neutral wire to a hot in another box, but I still don't
| understand the situation and had an electrician address it.
|
| So even testing each individual wire isn't certain unless
| they're all hanging free, unless you make the assumption that
| things were wired correctly in the first place.
| scotty79 wrote:
| When I'm working with home circuits I use indicator
| screwdriver all the time and I'm touching everyting metal
| with it at every step of the way.
|
| I'm very rarely surprised with what happens but it still
| happens occasionally.
|
| For example today I was surprised when RCD tripped when I
| shorted ground and neutral on a circuit that was
| disconnected by its own breaker.
|
| I had to think for a brief moment to understand that yeah,
| it's perfectly reasonable that this happened and no, I'm
| not in any danger.
| tzs wrote:
| > 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 LED in the handle
| starts rapidly blinking and a beeper starts rapidly beeping.
|
| It once may have saved me from a nasty shock. I have an
| outdoor light over the garage that is controlled by a light
| sensor, and the light sensor was going bad. It would turn the
| light on when it got dark but not turn it off in the morning.
| So I'd flip the breaker for that light off and then back on
| every morning.
|
| When morning when I went to open the electrical panel in the
| garage I got a shock from the panel door. I went in and got
| the current sensing screwdriver and went back to the garage
| to see if I could get an idea of what the heck was going on.
|
| As soon as I stepped into the garage the screwdriver started
| blinking and beeping. A little experimenting showed it would
| go off anywhere in the front half of the garage that was more
| than about a meter above the floor.
|
| It turned out that the metal garage doors and the metal rails
| their rollers rolled on and the metal tracks the garage door
| openers pulled the doors on were all connected to live AC.
|
| I got the fuck out of there and called an electrician.
|
| What happened was that in the shed next to the garage that
| houses my well some critter had chewed through some of the
| insulation on some of the wiring for powering the well pump.
| I'm not sure how but that somehow made the cover and door of
| the electrical panel and all those metal parts of my garage
| door system electrified, but without stopping the well pump
| from receiving power.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Circuit-Alert-Blade-Screw-
| Driver/dp/B...
| hedora wrote:
| Cool story! I have a brand new screwdriver set from the
| other end of the safety spectrum.
|
| Every one had a warning sticker saying 'non-insulating
| handle' on the plastic/rubber handle.
|
| I'm not sure where they found conductive plastic, but had I
| known before purchase, I'd have gone with a different set.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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 one) before it finally stopped beeping.
| From that moment on I promised myself that no matter how
| "sure" I was, I would ALWAYS stick the tester in before
| reaching in, even if I hadn't touched the breaker box
| between working on a switch.
|
| I've been bitten enough times in software alone by things I
| was "sure" about, I don't take any chances when it comes to
| electricity.
| bufferout wrote:
| 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.
| thedanbob wrote:
| I had a similar experience in completely different
| circumstances. I was hiking in the mountains with my dad and
| some friends when a storm cloud rolled over us. It wasn't
| raining yet, but one of us noticed that if he raised a metal
| hiking pole above his head there was a tingling feeling. We all
| were trying it when my dad caught up and said "what are you
| doing you idiots, drop those poles, crouch down, and start
| praying".
|
| Thankfully there were no strikes, and after a couple of minutes
| the cloud had passed. Electricity is dangerous!
| toxik wrote:
| And remember that RCDs or GFCIs are not the panacea they may
| seem like at first. All it takes is an unreferenced secondary
| and voila, ground faults are invisible.
| hattmall wrote:
| Can you explain what you mean by unreferenced secondary in
| this context?
| jeshin wrote:
| a galvanically isolated transformer, i.e. a voltage that is
| not referenced to ground, meaning an RCD/GFCI will not be
| able to trigger if you touch it and it starts zapping you
| eqvinox wrote:
| > Electricity is dangerous. In every form.
|
| Well -- so is an empty room, because there is no air to
| breathe.
|
| Pretty much everything is dangerous in _some_ form. You can die
| from excessive water ingestion. You can die falling from a
| bicycle.
|
| I don't think blanket statements like yours are helpful in
| actually making things safer. Safety low-voltage electrical
| systems are designed to be safe - not perfectly safe, but
| comparably safe to other ambient risks of life. We can't
| bubble-wrap everything. There is no 100%, only a question of
| how many nines you want after the dot on 99%.
|
| But regardless, the videos at issue are quite obviously not in
| the "99% safe" category and YouTube's behavior is egregiously
| inacceptable.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Such as a gun is always loaded, my take is electricity is
| always dangerous.
|
| Even professionals can get into accidents, moreover us
| uneducated plebs.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember watching some electricians rewiring some stuff at
| my old workplace. We were moving into a new office, and had
| to have some light switches changed for the new zone.
|
| The electrician popped open the switch plates, yanked out the
| old switches, clipped the wires, stripped the wires, wired up
| the new switches, and screwed everything back together.
|
| It was all live (like 300 volt live), as the lights turned on
| (queue spark), as he wired the new switches. He was not
| wearing gloves. It was all barehanded.
|
| It was quick, though. Took, like, a minute.
| foobarian wrote:
| Meh, for 120V or 220V worst can happen is you get a little
| shock or trip the breakers. I don't bother shutting off
| power to household circuits either.
|
| I heard from HV vets that one acquires a habit of keeping
| one hand in the back pocket when working on substations,
| industrial installations, and such. :-)
|
| Not sure where there would be 300V for light
| switches/fixtures though. Some bespoke factory setup?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The lights were using some higher voltage. The Operations
| Manager mentioned it to me, while the work was being
| done. Apparently, it's standard. Something like 320 volts
| (don't remember the exact number). I had not heard of it,
| beforehand.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| 230V AC is the RMS (root mean square) voltage; if you
| rectify it to DC, it comes out to 325V. Put another way,
| the /highest/ absolute potential difference between line
| and neutral in a 230VAC system is 325V.
| mikestew wrote:
| It obviously can be done, and I've heard folks more
| experienced than I say "all ya gotta do...", and I'll admit
| that I might have even wired a switch/outlet myself without
| flipping the breaker. And a pro could probably get away
| with it for a long time.
|
| But it just sounds like something that is one distraction
| away from a bad day.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| In the UK, as far as the Health & Safety Executive goes,
| who are the people who will be hauling you up in court if
| your screwups cause injury or death, they go to great
| lengths to discourage working live if at all possible.
|
| That said, it is sometimes necessary. I've replaced a
| circuit protective device in a live electrical panel in a
| commercial setting before. As you point out, avoiding
| distraction is a very important factor. That means no
| chit-chat, no-one overlooking and critiquing what you're
| doing, noise to a minimum, all of the tools you'll need
| prepared up-front, etc.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Every electrician I have met, has had some kind of shock in
| their career. Mostly it is a small induced current issue,
| which can easily kill you if it knocks you off a ladder....
| fendy3002 wrote:
| No matter how many times I see someone changing computer
| parts while the power is still connected, if I'm doing it I
| always unplug the power then pressing the power button to
| ensure it's unpowered
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| While that's a good idea because of potential part
| damage, I don't think that 5/12 volt supply counts as
| dangerous in any meaningful way.
| rocqua wrote:
| The idea is also that pressing the power button will also
| help discharge some capacitors as the power-supply tries
| to supply power. Not sure to which degree this works to
| make things safer, but trying it won't hurt.
|
| (Note this will _not_ make a powersupply safe to open up)
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Unlikely to have effect on a PC.
|
| On a dumb device where the power button is part of the
| actual circuit, let's say an old radio this will work.
|
| On a PC, the power button isn't hooked to anything but
| the chipset or some micro or an upstream circuit that
| tries to start a micro. Which means to have any effect,
| that processor needs to be executing code, or needs to
| have enough power to start the chipset itself. Both of
| these are unlikely to have any effect on CPU capacitors
| or caps in the power supply.
|
| I'm fairly certain this is placebo at best on a modern
| PC.
| hedora wrote:
| It definitely kicks the power light on for a bit under a
| second on my 2010 era desktop. The (high end, low
| wattage) power supply is delivering enough voltage to
| keep the motherboard power controller up.
|
| I have no idea if it discharges all the different voltage
| rails. I don't like having the fans try to spin up while
| I'm mucking about, and it stops that from happening.
|
| Of course, from an equipment damage perspective,
| grounding yourself to the case ground is much more
| important than discharing the PSU capacitors.
|
| I usually physically unplug the computer, push the power
| button, then open / touch the case (I'm in a humid
| climate).
|
| I've never had an issue (ignorging fires, but those
| happened when the computers were intentionally
| energized).
| itsyaboi wrote:
| You need about 24 volts to overcome the skins resistance.
| Most PCs use some combination of 3, 5, and 12 volt rails
| so you should be fine, as long as you avoid licking
| anything.
|
| Edit: Some PSUs have -12 +12 rails, I suppose if you were
| really unlucky and grabbed both at once the 24v
| differential could give you a zap.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The -12v rails are typically low current though. The real
| danger is a poorly built supply or an electrolytic
| capacitor exploding in your face (had this happen once).
|
| Incidentally, does anyone know what the -12v rails are
| used for? Some kind of reference?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Typical recommendation for DRY skin is ~50V.
|
| You can wet your fingers and get way lower, but I've
| never had anything much at 24V even when trying. At that
| low a voltage it may come down to frequency of the
| source.
|
| Obviously your tongue gets way lower, as is 9V lickers
| know already.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| You won't get hurt working on a live computer unless your
| power supply is dangerously engineered (stick to well
| known named brands) or wide open (don't open it up unless
| it's been unplugged and sitting on a shelf for months)
| for the same reasons pointed out elsewhere in these
| comments; the voltage simply isn't high enough. It won't
| even induce a perceptible amount of current (unless you
| do something stupid like stick your tongue on it), much
| less a harmful amount.
|
| You'd be surprised at all the stuff you can get away with
| on a live computer. For example, did you know that AHCI
| (SATA) and PCIe (and thus NVMe) are both hot-pluggable
| and hot-swappable? ... and that you can hotswap RAM (with
| a cooperating motherboard and OS) and even CPUs (on
| multi-socket boards)?
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Hdd or ssd are hot swappable? thats cool, thanks for
| sharing.
|
| as for ram I have tried it once and it freeze the pc, I
| forgot if I have another plugged in or not though.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Sata is hotswappable. IDE was not. And I believe m.2
| would be if the connector was designed a little
| different, because that's all u.2 is. Compact Flash
| Express is, but again, that's NVMe and splitting hairs
| between u.2.
|
| Typically on hot swappable devices it's been common to
| make the ground pins a little longer than the rest,
| ensuring that those will make contact first. The issue
| with hot swappable devices aside from a sharp initial
| draw is "grounding" the circuit to an IO pin before real
| ground is made. Most default low potential IO pins won't
| enjoy taking the full load of the device while the ground
| plane is missing connection.
|
| Oddly to me, many new PC BIOS ship with SATA hot swapping
| disabled. IDK why. You can plug the drive in it'll spin
| up, but no data transfer will happen until you reboot.
| Safe, just ineffective. I recently had to learn this the
| hard way.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > no data transfer will happen until you reboot
|
| I think this is something the OS can override. If I
| remember correctly I could discover a hotplugged SATA
| device in Windows by using "Scan for new hardware" in the
| Device Manager.
| cge wrote:
| >Electricity is dangerous. In every form. Period. Keep your
| fingers away from it when you don't know what you do
|
| An additional problem here is that the risks are _different_ in
| different forms. Here, it sounds like people are approaching
| the technique based on their experiences and assumptions about
| mains electricity, or even car batteries.
|
| 2 kV is high enough voltage that arcing is a risk. Things
| they'll assume are insulators and safe, or even usable as
| protection, may be conductive through dielectric breakdown: in
| the case of wood, that's the whole point of the technique. Even
| air won't necessarily be safe if they're handling things so
| closely, especially if it's humid, in which case they could get
| breakdown at well over 1 mm. Meanwhile, GFCI/RCD is useless,
| because of the transformer.
| bell-cot wrote:
| At scale, whack-a-mole take-downs and trying to idiot-proof the
| internet just feel kinda futile.
|
| A suggested ( _IANAL_ ) alternative, for "dangerous ways to maim
| or kill yourself" YouTube content:
|
| - A "Report Being A Dangerous Thing To Try" YouTube page - with a
| few drop-downs, to summarize why it's dangerous. (High Voltage,
| Poison, Explosive, Fire Hazard, Dangerous Animals, Motor Vehicle
| Stunts, etc.)
|
| - Verified-as-dangerous videos stay up, but get a few seconds of
| skull-and-crossbones warning. With a death count, and "report yet
| another death" link. That last has a high enough bar ("crippled-
| for-life doesn't count, include official death certificate _and_
| certified police or medical report, ... ") to make it clear that
| there are real dead bodies behind that body count.
|
| Unstated goal: Encourage less-stupid people to realize that
| following cool-sounding directions from the internet could maim
| or kill them. _Whether or not_ anyone has yet gone to the effort
| required to get a specific video flagged as deadly.
| mihaic wrote:
| I'm only now leaning of this phenomenon, and I'm absolutely
| floored that something like fractal wood burning has claimed the
| lives of 34 people (known), and there's a general laisse-faire
| attitude around it.
|
| By itself this is close to the deadliest mass shootings in the
| history of the United States in terms of human casualties, even
| though the emotional impact is not the same.
| chmod600 wrote:
| Some kinds of deaths are more "media-ready" than others.
|
| Deaths from mass-shootings, terrorism, plane crashes, and shark
| attacks are given too much weight. Deaths from falls, drowning,
| and medical mistakes are given too little weight.
|
| Even within categories it's inconsistent. Most deaths by
| gunshot are suicides. And almost all murders by gunshot are
| ordinary pistols as part of ordinary criminal activity (not
| mass shooters).
| briandear wrote:
| mberning wrote:
| justcodin wrote:
| Youtube is an increasingly hot mess.
| pornel wrote:
| There is a massive YouTube and Instagram industry of outright
| faking craft and cooking tips. They're not just bad or a stretch,
| they're intentionally fabricated, made at scale by TheSoul
| Publishing with 550 employees. That's because making cool things
| looking surprisingly easy goes viral way better than actual
| reality-grounded instructions, and for the adtech giants nothing
| matters except the number of clicks.
|
| Before people realize that they can't really make a 3-layer cake
| in a toaster, the fakers already cash in on the views. Usually
| the risk of these faked craft hacks is just cut fingers and
| kitchen fires, but the "just grab 2000V, it's so easy!" videos
| take it to another level of lethality.
| skummetmaelk wrote:
| A glaring example of how the advertising business model
| incentives lead to the worst outcomes for everyone. People
| working at TheSoul Publishing literally waste their lives
| producing straight up harmful content and the consumers either
| get brainrot from watching it or risk serious injury and death
| from replicating it.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| What incentives would you put into place?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Banning advertising (or using strong regulation to make it
| non-profitable) so that people can directly pay for the
| content they want to consume. Content that provides value
| will survive, clickbait and this kind of crap will die off
| since nobody would pay for fake crafts (and those who did
| will ask for a refund when they try replicating it and it
| doesn't work).
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > for the adtech giants nothing matters except the number of
| clicks
|
| Yet another example why advertising is a cancer on society.
|
| In a market not corrupted by advertising, this kind of garbage
| content wouldn't exist because nobody would pay for it since
| the content they show is false and misleading.
|
| But with advertising, the payment is automatic, non-refundable
| and happens preemptively even if the person doesn't consume the
| majority of the content (sometimes a single click is enough),
| therefore it becomes more profitable to mass-produce fake
| content designed to solicit clicks rather than content that
| provides true value such as information or entertainment.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Wait until youtube recommends you to click on "How to start a
| fission reactor in your garage".
| vibrolax wrote:
| The first man-made fission reactor was built in a squash
| court.
| queuebert wrote:
| By actual physicists.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Just like the Radioactive Boy Scout.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
| hattmall wrote:
| What I don't understand is the posting of these videos on
| Facebook by seemingly fake accounts. I'm in a bunch of yard
| sale groups and random unrelated accounts are constantly
| posting these hack and engineering type videos that are like 20
| seconds of 50 different useless things with no explanations or
| other information. There's no ads displayed, there's nothing
| being sold or promoted and no links or way to find out more
| about the video.
|
| Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money or
| why is this being done?
|
| I guess my theory is somehow facebook rewards total views and
| then they are monetizing some other content.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money
| or why is this being done?
|
| Could they be building an audience to exploit later? IIRC,
| that's the tactic the Russian Internet Research Agency used
| -- build an audience with memes and cat pictures, then pivot
| to political propaganda.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money
| or why is this being done?
|
| I suspect these are trying to build reputation for the
| account posting them. The bizarre, inexplicable videos will
| get watched by a lot of users wondering WTF they are, which
| may cause further content posted by those accounts to be
| ranked higher in feeds.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The account can later be resold, used to post ads or even
| sell courses to become a "successful" social media
| influencer using the account's own metrics as selling
| points.
| cush wrote:
| Certainly there must be some kind of liability here. One could
| never air these kinds of instructional videos on TV.
|
| As the defacto online video experience, YouTube has both become
| the FCC and NBC - both the governing body and the distributor,
| yet they take none of the risk and assume no liability of
| either.
| rozab wrote:
| Ann Reardon, the subject of this article, is a good scientist
| who's been debunking these 'food hack' videos for years. She
| eventually branched out into debunking other things like this.
|
| I've always been impressed with her tenacity in challenging
| this sort of thing while also managing to educate and
| entertain. It must be soul destroying trying to fight this
| endless tide of misinformation, which is constantly boosted by
| the youtube algorithm.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Glad to see this comment. I'm a huge Ann Reardon fan, and her
| original video that got her into this "debunking" theme is
| still great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6abePkXncCM
|
| Still, it's a little depressing that someone who made great,
| inspiring, detailed and _actually feasible_ cooking /baking
| content found that they couldn't really pay the bills with
| that content, but instead it turned out that debunking all
| the BS on YouTube was a better way to actually get paid.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| I'm a huge fan as well. She does an amazing job, and seems
| to be one of the only people on YT who is actually pointing
| out all the BS a lot of these "crafts" and "baking"
| channels are.
|
| And she communicates a lot with YT trying to get them to
| remove some of the more dangerous "hacks" and I believe has
| also been successful with certain attempts in the past.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| "That's because making cool things looking surprisingly easy
| goes viral way better than actual reality-grounded
| instructions" <- I feel like this might be the soul of the
| whole "no code" movement and why it bugs me a bit.
| [deleted]
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > the "just grab 2000V, it's so easy!" videos take it to
| another level of lethality.
|
| The problem is, they're thinking too small. The 2kV supplies in
| microwaves aren't big enough.
|
| If you used the PSU from an old single-digit-megawatts klystron
| TV transmitter, then you'd have about 50kV at 50A or so. Now
| this sounds dangerous, but believe it or not, this would be far
| safer to work with than a microwave transformer.
|
| What, you don't believe me?
|
| Of course it is! If you got a shock off it, your arm would
| vapourise long before your heart stopped!
| GLGirty wrote:
| This plausibly might not be sarcasm O_o
| honkdaddy wrote:
| I just looked into it.. Ugh, this kind of content is just
| abysmal.
|
| 25 GLUE GUN HACKS YOU HAVE TO TRY
|
| 24 SIMPLE BEAUTY TRICKS TO MAKE YOU LOOK FABULOUS
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/5MinuteCraftsYouTube/
|
| Who are the people watching this stuff? I assume it's largely
| women and parents, as a lot of the "hacks" are beauty or
| parenting related. I watched a few minutes and all the ideas
| were just... terrible? Ranging from silly to impractical to
| dangerous.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Plenty of people hate this shit and still watch it because
| they got tricked. I watched (skimmed) like 12 videos
| yesterday trying to find a hack to locate my empty AirPods
| case. There's apparently no way to do it but each video had a
| more infuriatingly false title than the last.
| smegsicle wrote:
| they really invited that sort of thing by tossing the
| dislike count
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It would never even occur to me to watch a video on finding
| my AirPods case. Either there is an article or forum post
| for it, or I need to post a question on a forum, but no way
| am I sifting through the garbage that is YouTube.
| InefficientRed wrote:
| Same. It's probably a generational thing, with the split
| at maybe 20 or something where video became both
| searchable and trivial in terms of bandwidth.
|
| But, to be fair, the Google-as-front-door internet has
| become totally useless for these types of tasks as well.
| Those wiki-style pages with huge walls of text offering
| nonsense advice are a plague.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, I filter out all that garbage too, but because it is
| text, I can filter it out 100x faster than video.
| InefficientRed wrote:
| If you don't mind explaining: how? I constantly find
| myself on those (very heavy) pages and haven't found a
| good way to avoid them except to restrict my search to
| certain domains (SO, Reddit, etc.)
| tehwebguy wrote:
| It just depends on the subject matter I think.
|
| Plenty of my searches will lead me to a solid
| stackoverflow / reddit / quora / forum answer but another
| large percentage only seem to lead to the blog equivalent
| of the offending YouTube videos, hyper tuned to show a
| description that leads me to believe it's what I want but
| delivering nothing.
| meigwilym wrote:
| I'm exactly the same as you, but my adolescent children
| all turn to TickTock or YT when searching for an answer.
|
| They can't google for shit, unfortunately. My fault
| probably, but as I managed to learn all of this on my
| own, I expected them to do the same.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I am hoping I can teach mine to be sufficiently literate
| and good at reading to prefer scanning through text
| rather than watch video. I assume many others have
| thought the same, who knows if I will be successful.
| 83 wrote:
| to be fair I can't google for shit anymore either. Try to
| find an actual review or more information about an item
| and the first 90 results are SEO spam and places selling
| said item.
| mypalmike wrote:
| I'm curious what theoretical mechanism might there be for
| an airpods case to be findable?
| robonerd wrote:
| He merely needs to apply Bayesian search theory:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_search_theory
|
| 1. Formulate as many reasonable hypotheses as possible
| about what may have happened to the object.
|
| 2. For each hypothesis, construct a probability density
| function for the location of the object.
|
| _..._
| compiler-guy wrote:
| AirPod cases have Bluetooth and report battery levels to
| the paired iPhone.
|
| From there, one could imagine it working like any other
| Bluetooth tracker.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'm not sure cases have Bluetooth - I think they use
| either of the inserted AirPods as a proxy to communicate
| its status to the phone (the power pins must have a
| minimal communication protocol to allow the case to talk
| to the pods).
| InefficientRed wrote:
| Stay At Home Mom is a massive market segment with a lot of
| purchasing decision power. Long-form advertising targeted at
| SAHMs is nearly as old as the advertising industry itself.
| This is just the next iteration.
|
| Video does particularly well with this segment (as opposed to
| text) because of the nature of parenting and housekeeping --
| lots of time spent on your feet with busy hands and
| occasionally available eyes. The same reason radio/long-form
| podcasting is popular with truckers. Or text with office
| workers (relatively speaking). It's entertainment you can
| engage with during work hours between or during tasks.
| usrusr wrote:
| Soap opera of the YouTube era, you might be on to
| something!
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Little kids. My 7 year old _loves_ five minute craft videos.
| DIARRHEA_xd wrote:
| Children and ESLs. I personally tune in to see just how far
| they'll go this time.
| cupofpython wrote:
| I sometimes find myself watching similar content for a bit
| like a kind of engineering "reality" show. no real goal in
| mind and absolutely no intention of doing any of the things
| though. Knowing now that they put out videos suggesting
| people mess with live transformers... i think im over it.
| iasay wrote:
| There's also a lot of really really bad "electrical engineers"
| on YouTube, particularly from India I notice, who build stuff
| that runs directly off the mains with no isolation.
|
| Oh and the anti 5G maniacs ripping people off for magic
| stickers
|
| Reported them both and YT did nothing.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Now I want to try to make a three layer cake in a toaster. I'm
| sure it can be done with the right technique and tools. Even if
| it's wildly impractical and will yield a tiny result.
| dpmitu wrote:
| It's a good thing they removed the dislike button!
| circa wrote:
| TrikTok is not too far behind with those videos either
| astura wrote:
| Ann Reardon's (subject of this article) channel calls out these
| other channels and she even tries to recreate these fake crafts
| to prove they are fake.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| Yes! The fact that one of Ann Reardon's main interests is in
| debunking stupid/dangerous craft and cooking videos, and yet
| her video is the one getting taken down, is an important
| irony that seems lost on the author of the boingboing post,
| and many other commenters here.
|
| My kids and I love watching her videos, especially for iron-
| stomach Dave eating whatever she cooks, and learning the
| occasional Australian slang ("<adjective> as" == "very
| <adjective>")
| tonfreed wrote:
| I feel sorry for Dave. How many times do you think he's come
| home to an absolute mess, weird kitchen smells and Ann has
| just mumbled something about YouTube?
|
| She's definitely one of my favourites, and I have a copy of
| her cookbook that I use a lot.
| ericmcer wrote:
| I see these constantly on instagram, and usually comment
| something skeptical, but it is drowned out beneath 500 comments
| of just heart and fire emoji's. Maybe these recipes existing as
| just theoretical things you could do are enough for most
| people.
| fredophile wrote:
| If people are curious about these, the YouTube channel "How to
| Cook That" often does videos exposing the fake cooking tips.
| glogla wrote:
| Yes. But also, since the giants do only the bare minimum of
| automated moderation with no oversight and no checks and
| balances, the systems are easy to game by bad actors.
|
| See the example of someone on HN saying his wife lost Whatsapp
| account for reporting spam - the spammers probably retaliated
| from hundreds of fake accounts. Same with this youtube video.
| Same with people gettong reported az spam ehrn criticizing
| certain nations.
|
| And the giants of course do not care, why would they.
| mcv wrote:
| If YouTube leaves up the dangerous videos, but removes the
| videos warning of that danger, then they should definitely be
| held liable. This is literally the worst thing they can do.
| Doing nothing would be better.
|
| Automated moderation is no excuse; they designed that
| moderation, and they did a really poor job of it if it leaves
| the dangerous videos alone but removed those warning of the
| danger.
|
| It reminds me a bit of YouTube removing original content videos
| because of fraudulent copyright claims by Big Content, except
| this time people can actually die. YouTube needs to clean up
| its act and be held liable for this stuff.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Just the other day youtube suggested me this cutsie "what to do
| with old microwaves" video that just had the corporate jingle
| music over a video of a guy building various things out of
| microwave transformers without any kind of narration or warning
| of the danger.
|
| Considering people are actually dying trying these microwave
| tricks, this is no longer a theoretical concern.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2UfglFeOH8 (much later the
| author added a warning saying this is for entertainment only)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Salad is pretty dangerous and I don't see anyone putting
| disclaimers on cooking shows.
| t_mann wrote:
| Care to elaborate? I've been eating salad my whole life and
| I'm just fine. But then again, I also cook eggs with runny
| yolk, so I guess I'm just a renegade in the eyes of the
| food safety folks.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I see the people who don't appreciate the dangers of
| uncooked vegetables have showed up.
| kragen wrote:
| Contact with live microwave oven transform secondaries has
| about a 70% fatality rate, if we believe bigclivedotcom.
| Eating salad has about an 0.001% fatality rate.
| kragen wrote:
| Actually I think I have overestimated the salad fatality
| rate here by orders of magnitude. If one out of every
| hundred thousand salads killed the eater then many, if
| not most, people who eat salad regularly would die of
| food poisoning or choking on salads rather than (as they
| in fact do) of heart disease, cancer, and infections.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, or if you actually
| live in a country with poor safety standards on produce and
| it is a risk for food-borne diseases to eat uncooked food.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I'm clowning on safety culture. It is not very dangerous
| to disassemble a microwave. Many people have died from
| eating salad, because fresh greens arrive liberally
| coated in goat shit. Also, you do not need to cook pork
| to 160deg, that is an abomination.
| [deleted]
| cush wrote:
| These videos are produced in giant production houses in
| China. That's why there's no voiceovers. They're designed to
| be distributed in every language.
| daemin wrote:
| "For entertainment only" is such a cop-out, do whatever
| dangerous thing and show step by step instructions but then
| slap on a "for entertainment only" on it so you're safe from
| legal repecussions.
| b3morales wrote:
| > you're safe from legal repecussions.
|
| Not necessarily: no way to tell whether it's sufficient
| until it actually goes before a court.
| daemin wrote:
| I was being sarcastic with that, should have written it
| as: you're "safe" from legal repercussions.
| b3morales wrote:
| Fair enough :)
| starwind wrote:
| Excellent point. As a matter of legal principle in the
| United States you can't unilaterally disclaim liability
| for future injuries. Signs that say "not responsible for
| accidents on these premises" don't hold up when you run a
| retail store where people are expected to freely to come
| and go as they please.
|
| More concretely: a perfectly reasonable judge could
| decide a dangerous step-by-step how-to guide negates the
| prior "for entertainment purposes only" warning. There's
| a reason Jackass frequently had skull-and-crossbone
| warnings and didn't show much of their set up, just the
| results
| Tao3300 wrote:
| the dryness of the top comment is perfect
|
| > Remember, if you've got lathes and welders and assorted
| tools and materials, don't throw out an old microwave because
| you can use part of it to make a wire hot.
| Arrath wrote:
| Child me figured out how to make a wire hot with a 9v
| battery. Why fuck with a HV transformer.
| diydsp wrote:
| exactly! Plus, they do throw out 98% of the microwave...
| just to save a clump of iron which is one of the more
| easily recycled materials. Admittedly, it's in layers with
| resin between, but I'm sure that resin will cook right off
| in the massive slag crucibles.
| jeshin wrote:
| these are with a low voltage high current winding, instead of
| the standard 2000v winding, though, which is much safer. The
| danger of the unmodified microwave transformer isn't really
| so much that it has exposed mains voltage (although obviously
| you should be careful around that, too), but that it has
| 2000v+ and it's galvanically isolated, meaning no GFCI/RCD
| will save you (and obviously the 2000v will also do a much
| quicker job at passing lethal current through your
| heart/other organs)
|
| Comparatively, a spot welder is "just" as dangerous as any
| other mains-based experiment. Not safe, but you have a pretty
| good shot at surviving, even if you get zapped.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I'm getting flashbacks of UnderDunn's home made battery
| spot welder built with a microwave transformer.
| jeshin wrote:
| It's a really common project for them. Certainly a better
| option than a jacobs ladder or fractal wood burning,
| since you have to just take the usual mains voltage
| precautions, and not worry about arcs and other high
| voltage schenanigans
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Seems like their DIY / craft vids have moved from glue guns to
| angle grinders and (tack) welding lately.
|
| Anyone with even the smallest amount experience with either,
| know that these things are accidents bound to happen.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > and (tack) welding
|
| To be fair, Gasless MIG is basically a glue gun for grown-
| ups.
| hamburglar wrote:
| ... where the glue gun has orders of magnitude more power
| and speed and the "use electrical resistance to create
| heat" portion of the show necessarily happens OUTSIDE the
| housing. It's a cute comparison but a MIG welder is a lot
| more dangerous than a glue gun.
| hamburglar wrote:
| 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.
| 83 wrote:
| That is picking a nit. Bad welds are still welds, you
| just need more of them :p
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| "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...
| guggleet wrote:
| Dunno, I have used both since I was like 13. Also, we used to
| weld and do all sorts of things (acetylene torching, lathe,
| casting, grinding, sawing, milling) mostly unsupervised with
| very little instruction in middle/high school metal shop. I
| don't remember any accidents.
| winphone1974 wrote:
| Well if you got through high school without any accidents
| it must be a risk free activity...
| deelowe wrote:
| Aren't lathes extremely dangerous?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Not nearly as dangerous as the cars those kids were
| driving a year or two later.
|
| It's deeply unfortunate that the parental attitude
| towards tools these days is never "learn to use it
| safely" but rather "Hide it away! Don't you dare let MY
| kid near filthy manual labor!"
| distortedsignal wrote:
| The college that I went to had all the engineers learn
| how to run a metal-turning lathe. ME, EE, BME, I think
| even the Computer Engineers had to learn how to run a
| lathe. They put us through a safety class first, which
| mostly consisted of how not to run a lathe (no loose
| clothes, no long hair, no jewelry below the elbow, no
| necklaces, etc). The only injury that I know from that
| class was from when we learned how to run welders - one
| of the guys caught his shirt on fire with an oxy-
| acetalene torch.
|
| Yeah, lathes are dangerous, but no more or less dangerous
| than a lot of other things in the world. Cars are
| dangerous. Turning on a light switch in the wrong context
| can be dangerous. If you approach this stuff with the
| proper respect and caution, you should be fine.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Yes, but lots of things are dangerous. This is mitigated
| through awareness and mitigation of risk.
| praptak wrote:
| Lathes are only seen this way because they can go very
| big. The instant death accidents happen with the big
| ones, especially the ones designed to quickly remove lots
| of material from big metal pieces.
|
| Otherwise lathes aren't more dangerous than any other
| piece of machinery with exposed moving pieces. In
| particular the ones designed to turn small pieces of wood
| can't do much harm.
|
| Don't leave the chuck key in, wear eye protection, no
| loose hair, no loose clothes, don't be stupid and you
| will be fine.
| [deleted]
| mikestew wrote:
| Hello, Mr. or Ms. Survivor Bias! I used to cut firewood
| with my father using a 3 foot buzz saw made over 100 years
| ago*, and had but only the most token of safety guards
| (ignore the giant power take-off belt that's just waiting
| to consume some of your loose clothing, and you with it),
| yet I still have all limbs, fingers, and toes!
|
| And yet I still think it asinine to shrug shoulders and
| say, "I dunno, nobody I know ever got hurt, yuk, yuk, yuk."
| If one cannot see the potential for harm in such scenarios,
| you are one of those accidents waiting to happen.
|
| *yes, really
| pessimizer wrote:
| > If one cannot see the potential for harm in such
| scenarios
|
| This is a strawman. Nobody claimed that any activity was
| perfectly safe.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > > these things are accidents bound to happen > Dunno, I
| have used both since I was like 13 ... I don't remember
| any accidents.
|
| Seems like their response is kind of implying an
| inaccurate level of safety, along the lines of "Well I
| didn't have issues, so..."
| Treblemaker wrote:
| Nothing is "perfectly safe". Many things are egregiously,
| unnecessarily unsafe.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| 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.
| trelane wrote:
| Is he angling for a spot on _Top Gear_?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| 1990s Corvette engine is just marketing wank on top of
| "boring 90s smallblock V8"
|
| It was probably just what he had sitting around.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Maybe you hit your head?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Me, too. The class was called Agri-Mechanics, and it
| covered everything technical that farm boys were expected
| to do regularly.
|
| Of course it's an unnecessary danger for the children of
| parents who would consider them failures if they grew up to
| work with their hands and backs.
| viraptor wrote:
| Not just fabricated for the views, but reactions too. For each
| debunking video, some will follow the actual videos to see how
| bad they are. But the viewer intention doesn't matter - clicks
| are clicks.
| logifail wrote:
| > Not just fabricated for the views, but reactions too
|
| I regard videos which include the word "reacts" in the title
| as having a huge red flag.
|
| The signal-to-noise on this junk content is simply appalling.
| viraptor wrote:
| I meant reactions in general, not just the reaction videos.
| "hey, look at this stupid video I've found" is a click as
| well.
| hef19898 wrote:
| The one reason I still have Youtube, after getting rid of
| everything else Google, is the effort I out over time into
| getting rid of a whole bunch crappy content proposals on my
| attached account. Every once in a while I have to block
| some channels, overall it is acceptable. Once in a while I
| end up on Youtube without being logged in, man is it a
| mess. As bad as the proposals on Internet Explorers
| starting page I see at work.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| My wife thinks it is weird that I watch so much YouTube,
| because when she goes to YouTube (not signed in), she is
| inundated with so many spammy/scammy videos. I told her
| it has taken me almost 15 years to curate the feed I
| have. And some days I have no new videos I want to watch,
| so I rewatch old ones.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And that curation is an on-going effort... YouTube music
| is better in that regard, and is the second YouTube app I
| still have on my phone.
| [deleted]
| t_mann wrote:
| Really? I kinda like the '[discipline X professional]
| reacts to [relevant movie clips]'-type videos (like 'Navy
| pilot reacts to new Top Gun movie'). You find them so
| terrible?
| tpxl wrote:
| That's simply an appeal to authority, right in the title.
| I'm an programming professional and most react videos I
| could make about the art would be better served in
| another format. Not to mention it's tailored to
| clickbait.
| t_mann wrote:
| Appeal to authority is a good point. In terms of
| clickbait, I feel that applies only when the content
| doesn't live up to what's promised, and I found the
| content quite decent in several cases.
| logifail wrote:
| > I kinda like the '[discipline X professional] reacts to
| [relevant movie clips]'-type videos (like 'Navy pilot
| reacts to new Top Gun movie').
|
| Those are exactly the ones I'm talking about
|
| > You find them so terrible?
|
| Yes. All noise, no signal!
|
| If you want to watch videos about Navy pilots doing their
| jobs, go right ahead. Why watch Navy pilots "reacting" to
| a Hollywood movie?
|
| The average Navy pilot must know as about as much about
| filmmaking and acting as Tom Cruise knows about
| _actually_ flying a fast jet (as opposed to being filmed
| sitting in the back seat and not being allowed to touch
| anything[0]) ?
|
| [0] https://fortune.com/2022/05/26/top-gun-maverick-
| studio-paid-...
| t_mann wrote:
| Tom Cruise is a really bad example, because he actually
| does have a pilot license since 1994 and is allowed to
| fly some jets. [0]
|
| I'm not looking for advice on how to make a good movie
| (or how to fly a plane, for that matter), but on some
| perspective how (un)-realistic those movies are. I think
| overall that sort of scrutiny does some good in terms of
| making movies less unrealistic (compare 80's action
| movies like Rambo to modern productions), producers
| consulting not only ex-soldiers but also physicists,
| doctors,...
|
| [0] https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/tom-cruise-can-fly-
| fighter-...
| logifail wrote:
| > Tom Cruise is a really bad example, because he actually
| does have a pilot license since 1994 and is allowed to
| fly some jets
|
| Some jet ... but _not_ the jets in the movie!
|
| So what's the point in getting a Navy pilot to watch him
| "flying" them? Apart from - of course - being able to
| make clickbaity videos showing their "reactions".
|
| > perspective how (un)-realistic those movies are
|
| Erm, why? Movies are movies.
|
| There's loads of excellent stuff to read/watch about
| _actual_ fast jet flying. Far more interesting and, well,
| real.
| t_mann wrote:
| > So what's the point in getting a Navy pilot to watch
| him "flying" them?
|
| They don't comment on _his flying_ but on other aspects,
| like the training scenes, mission tactics, and also on
| the flying (by professionals) that is depicted.
|
| > Erm, why? Movies are movies.
|
| You might feel that way, but even then you'll have to
| admit that a lot of people don't make that distinction to
| that extent (especially kids) - so they'll end up
| imagining they have an idea what it would be like to be
| in certain situations.
|
| > Far more interesting and, well, real.
|
| How would I know what's realistic and what's not (in
| areas so far outside of what I do) if I didn't rely on
| people with this knowledge?
| logifail wrote:
| > How would I know what's realistic and what's not (in
| areas so far outside of what I do) if I didn't rely on
| people with this knowledge?
|
| If it's realism you're after, how about listening to a
| professional talking about their profession? Why bring
| Hollywood into it?
|
| Watching a clickbaity-titled video of a professional
| "reacting" to a movie just seems ridiculous. It's all
| done for the clicks.
| t_mann wrote:
| > If it's realism you're after, how about listening to a
| professional talking about their profession?
|
| I actually do that too, why the false dichotomy?
|
| > Why bring Hollywood into it?
|
| Because I've already watched the movie and now I want to
| know what to make of it. Claiming that it's all
| completely unrealistic 'because Hollywood' is a far more
| uninformed position than listening to an expert give a
| balanced account. Watching a documentary and then
| assuming that that gives me the required knowledge to
| make a realistic assessment sounds completely delusional.
|
| And why do you care so much that the title is designed to
| induce clicks? Every outlet from solo influencers to
| NYT/WSJ-style media giants creates their online content
| with this mindest nowadays. It's only clickbait if the
| content doesn't live up to what's promised in the title.
| robonerd wrote:
| I've seen a few videos recommended to me that are
| _psychologist /therapist reacts_. I'm pretty sure
| psychology and therapy _without ever meeting and talking
| to the subject_ is generally considered unethical
| quackery.
| t_mann wrote:
| Psychology/therapy may be a bit of an outlier in that
| sense, we wouldn't expect a nuclear engineer to have
| physically inspected a failed reactor before talking
| about accidents. And even they may have relevant things
| to say, psychology/therapy isn't only about individual
| diagnosis.
| [deleted]
| logifail wrote:
| > Before people realize that they can't really make a 3-layer
| cake in a toaster
|
| Our 12-year-old recently tried to make himself "cheese on
| toast" by putting both cheese _and_ uncooked bread into the
| (almost brand new, upright) toaster. Aaargh!
|
| Cue the house full of smoke, a stern reprimand, then a couple
| of hours of my time wasted on removing every last piece of
| burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster, followed by
| several empty runs with it outside to let it get properly hot
| and burn off the last of the fatty residues.
|
| He was, at least, quite sheepish about his learning experience.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| As annoying as that is, these kinds of events are very
| helpful for young folks.
|
| That's how we learn.
|
| I still do dumb stuff all the time, it's just more
| complicated dumb stuff :D
|
| But at least it is complicated and -novel- dumb stuff.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| > then a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every
| last piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster
|
| Should have been a couple of hours of his time
| flir wrote:
| Toaster pockets! A whole new world of bread-related
| experiments awaits.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| We had an employee who once tried cooking bacon in a toaster
| oven and it caught on fire. Filled the office with smoke, so
| it happens.
| julianlam wrote:
| Well then this employee must've done it wrong, because I
| cook bacon in my toaster over (and now an air fryer) all
| the time.
|
| However, you do need a tray on which the bacon sits, which
| was perhaps your employee's mistake.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Are people using the word toaster to refer to two
| different appliances in this thread? In American English
| a toaster is a device that holds bread vertically between
| heating elements. There's a similarly named device called
| a toaster oven which is essentially a standard electric
| oven that's been shrunk down to countertop size.
| notdonspaulding wrote:
| Both the parent and grandparent to your comment were
| referring to a toaster oven.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Hey now, I envision a device which slides into a vertical
| toaster slot, and toasts bacon, whist catching the
| grease.
|
| Anyone want to coin in?
| bbarnett wrote:
| Well that sounds like a jolly good idea! What, you
| suggest a kickstarter?
|
| Go for it!
| dantyti wrote:
| I was that 12-year-old. My brain still works this way when
| tackling novel problems.
|
| If I may suggest, instead of reprimands (I'd imagine your kid
| knows they'd messed up and won't try this experiment again),
| use these situations to teach your child about forming
| hypotheses, questioning assumptions and doing reality checks
| before starting an experiment.
| civilized wrote:
| Waffle iron. It's a horizontal toaster and applies enough
| pressure to cook faster. Leaves cool marks.
|
| Just don't burn yourself! (Technically applies to the toaster
| as well though)
| aceazzameen wrote:
| Same as a panini press. We've never owned a toaster, which
| seem weird to some. We use our panini press instead. It's a
| flat model without any grill marks. Easy to clean and makes
| perfectly even toast.
| conductr wrote:
| Tbf the texture and mouth feel is completely different. I
| prefer toasted as the bread dries out a bit and gets
| crispy in the process.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| The bread dries out in our press also. You can see steam
| being released before it gets hot enough to smoke.
|
| One bonus way I like to make it for myself is keep the
| lid open and only cook one side. This leaves one side
| moist and other crispy. Downside to toasting one side is
| it's slower due to no pressure.
|
| Cooking both sides with lid down is quicker, but you have
| to be careful with the height setting you use. We know
| how to make it perfectly now, but when we first got it we
| were making squished cracker-like toast.
| [deleted]
| conductr wrote:
| It's still different though, enough for me to have a
| preference. Maybe I didn't or can't articulate that
| difference or you find it a close enough substitute (or
| outright preference). Moisture content aside, toasting by
| warm air and radiant heat and toasting by direct contact
| with hot metal plates creates enough of a difference for
| me to have a preference. Minor differences in cooking
| methodologies can make significant changes to mouth feel
| and other aspects that factor into taste/flavor.
| blntechie wrote:
| Horizontal sandwich toasters are the popular kind of
| toasters around my parts. It can make from plain toasts to
| fully stuffed sandwiches and are not that hard to clean
| either. I guess Americans will consider them more as a
| grill though.
| mcv wrote:
| We have one too. It's great. You can put anything in
| them. Super simple, though I suppose it lacks a timer.
| tempest_ wrote:
| In North America you would be more likely to encounter a
| panini press.
|
| I have seen that fancy horizontal mitsubishi toaster on
| youtube but never one in store.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Panini presses are less common here only* because they
| take up more kitchen real estate than a smaller upright
| appliance and can be reasonably replaced by a skillet.
| "George Foreman grills" were in vogue for a few years in
| the 2000s, but I rarely ever see them now.
|
| *Probably also because American bread is awful.
| account42 wrote:
| > Probably also because American bread is awful.
|
| Except grilling it is the best thing you can do to
| oversugared white bread.
| kergonath wrote:
| I disagree. Throwing them away is the best thing you can
| do. These things are nasty.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Yup. And we put 2 slices of bread with some cheese in
| between into them all the time. Easy to clean too.
|
| The only thing that seems weird to me is "uncooked bread"
| reference by GGP - did their 12year old put a dough in
| the toaster?
| testesttest wrote:
| Ahhh, yea did that as a kid too. Although, I tipped it on its
| side. The trick was to make toast then microwave the cheese
| :)
|
| But seriously, my mom was furious. No YouTube required.
| fho wrote:
| Same ... but for me it was plastic sleeves in a laser
| printer ...
| NickRandom wrote:
| Or the other trick is to microwave the uncooked sandwich
| slightly (10-20 seconds) so that the cheese starts to melt
| and then toast it so bread and cheese both get toasty
| without burning.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The trick was to make toast then microwave the cheese
|
| Just use a toaster oven. They're horizontal.
| aendruk wrote:
| "Just" procure a new kitchen appliance as a child
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Far more versatile.
| queuebert wrote:
| Did he learn it from YouTube or some other social media?
|
| If so, why is he on there unsupervised?
| sinsterizme wrote:
| Do you remember being a kid? It's not feasible nor
| desirable to monitor your children 24/7
| ajross wrote:
| > Our 12-year-old recently tried to make himself "cheese on
| toast" by putting both cheese and uncooked bread into the
| (almost brand new, upright) toaster. Aaargh!
|
| I know it's tempting to blame modern technological
| monstrosities for this nonsense, but kids were lighting
| toasters on fire before the internet.
|
| Source: lit a toaster on fire, prior to the January 1983 IPv4
| migration on the ARPANET (and long before I knew what any of
| that meant).
| framapotari wrote:
| I don't think anyone was blaming modern technology, or
| anything specific, for this nonsense?
| undersuit wrote:
| The "cheese on toast" anecdote was told in response to
| someone blaming modern technology for "outright faking
| craft and cooking tips". Contextually I gathered that
| modern technology might be part of the conversation.
| framapotari wrote:
| That's one way to read it, but it might just be a related
| anecdote that the poster wanted to share. Without any
| explicit mention of blaming modern technology I don't
| think it's fair to make the assumption that the text is
| doing that.
|
| Just because you respond to something doesn't mean you
| are either refuting it or agreeing with it.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I've been putting cheese in the vertical toaster my whole
| life... he just did it wrong.
|
| You have to put 2 slices of bread, cheese in between, and of
| course take it out before it all starts burning.
| [deleted]
| anonymous0 wrote:
| You are not alone. Moreover, I was honestly thinking that
| was the way _everybody_ did it.
| LandR wrote:
| Would never have occured to me try and make cheese and
| toast in a toaster, although the cage someone mentioned
| is something I need to check out!
|
| I make my cheese and toast in a frying pan (I honestly
| thought this was way _everybody_ did it :D )
| trelane wrote:
| I make grilled cheese that way. If you want a
| toasted/baked option instead, toaster ovens exist and are
| fabulous for this sort of thing.
| pgCKIN wrote:
| Pro tip: position your cheese slice as per leaving some
| margin at the bottom of the toast and press that zone.
| cupofpython wrote:
| > then a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every
| last piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster
|
| Do you have a fancy toaster? I wouldve just replaced mine,
| although mine is pretty basic
| rtkwe wrote:
| That's a super wasteful solution to this. The toaster is
| perfectly salvageable.
| cupofpython wrote:
| So drop it off at a salvage location. OP was complaining
| about salvaging it, like it was necessary. If you want to
| do is as a fun personal project, go for it, but it is
| wasteful of human time to salvage something that cheap
| rather than add it to a scrap pile for a professional
| salvage company to process in bulk.
|
| As a bonus, the kid learns that if you arent careful with
| your items they may break and be gone. you dont waste
| _hours_ of your time on something that should cost about
| 1 hour of your time at work max.
|
| Edit: Agree to disagree, but my post is still a valid
| position to hold and im open to conversation. but sure
| use downvote as a dislike button - we are all familiar
| with where that gets us.
|
| okay guess im an asshole. go use a salvaged toaster in
| your kitchen. for $20, id rather not risk burning my
| house down or teaching my kids to put their hands inside
| the toaster but to each their own
| c22 wrote:
| It's only monetarily _cheap_ because it 's been built,
| like most modern things, with a massive externalization
| of its waste-cost.
| cupofpython wrote:
| Same for toilet paper but we flush it anyway. Everyone in
| this thread is suddenly zero-waste zealots.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| Presumably until it comes to incremental updates to a
| phone, laptop, video game system, etc
| Grustaf wrote:
| Seems better to teach the children to value their
| possessions.
| cupofpython wrote:
| What better way to teach that than have them understand
| if they dont respect the way something is supposed to be
| used, they might break it?
|
| Could be fun to sit with them and take apart the toaster
| and assess it together and see if its worth cleaning or
| replacing and explaining why. But I wouldnt spend 2+
| hours cleaning it by myself and then complaining about it
| Grustaf wrote:
| I'm not American so I will never understand the
| dusposable-everything mindset.
|
| I will happily spend hours repairing something that costs
| 15 minutes of my time to buy.
|
| Throwing away salvageable things is just wrong, it's not
| an economic question for me.
| cupofpython wrote:
| there's a lot of relevant things i could get into on it.
| in short though, disposable items are cheaper and despite
| what a lot people think - most of us are broke.
|
| after you adjust to dealing with disposable items a lot..
| you kind of grow out of the feeling that every item is
| special and needs to be repaired to max extent and kept
| for as long as it can. It feels anthropomorphic / overly
| sentimental to do that. the moral argument gets the
| curtain pulled back and there's very little
| substantiating it. imo, at least. Curious if you can shed
| better light on your moral stance here tbh. im not die-
| hard on this subject and would happily update my views if
| convinced otherwise
|
| I respect that you have a productive hobby interest in
| repairing items, and for the most part I share that. But
| I dont see anything wrong with throwing something away
| that could be salvageable. Once it stops working, it is
| just parts and material and I now become part of the
| demand for toasters. What's wrong with letting toaster
| specialists handle toaster demand? In the time it takes
| me to repair a toaster, the specialists can produce 100
| of them. and thanks to people like me buying from them
| rather than doing it myself, they remain productive
| members of society and get to feed themselves. And I get
| a couple hours back to do something else to potentially
| improve society or my personal life.
|
| All that said, I do think there is a lot more we can do
| with waste management to better deal with disposed parts
| and materials, though. A lot of how we handle disposed
| goods is definitely wrong. we mix materials with food
| waste and it makes everything gross and expensive to work
| with. food waste really should be a hard split from
| everything else but maybe one day
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| It's totally reasonable for an individual to say "it's
| not worth my time and effort to fix this, I'll just
| replace it." Taking a moral stand against repair-and-
| reuse _in general_ is weird. Some people are on a budget
| where replacing even a $25 toaster is not a painless
| expense. Some people don 't like producing unnecessary
| waste.
|
| And throwing it away without replacing it punishes
| everyone in the house for the kid's mistake.
| cupofpython wrote:
| >Taking a moral stand against repair-and-reuse in general
| is weird
|
| Nowhere did I do this, and the claim is confusing because
| I am a supporter of repair-and-reuse in general. People
| are extrapolating from me saying specifically that a
| toaster is not worth it. Toasters cause house fires. I
| would always sooner replace it for $25 than salvage one.
|
| >And throwing it away without replacing it punishes
| everyone in the house for the kid's mistake.
|
| A lack of a toaster for a day or two hardly punishes
| anyone, and the child sees that other people can be
| impacted by their recklessness.
|
| > Some people are on a budget where replacing even a $25
| toaster is not a painless expense
|
| Yeah, I am one of those people actually. I have an
| emergency fund that I would happily use for this 1-off
| incident.
| bombcar wrote:
| Replacing it teaches the kid that if you break something,
| it magically comes back like a respawn in a video game.
|
| I'd be _very_ tempted to work with him to help clean it;
| let him do much of the grunt work whilst I helped and
| supervised (though to be honest I wouldn 't be that hard
| on my kid for doing this unless he had been told _don 't
| do it_ beforehand. I've done enough boneheaded things in
| my day!).
| cupofpython wrote:
| the point is that OP was complaining about the time he
| didnt need to spend cleaning it
|
| >I'd be very tempted to work with him to help clean it;
|
| how is this being hard on your kid, but you doing it by
| yourself is totally normal and replacing it a total
| economic waste? Is it easy to fix or not?
| ryukafalz wrote:
| It's also wasteful of energy and materials to scrap and
| replace something that's still perfectly functional.
| cupofpython wrote:
| except it isnt functional. it is covered in burnt cheese
| that will take hours to fix. it's a huge waste of time to
| clean off burnt cheese from such a tiny piece of
| material.
|
| collect a bunch of similar materials from the dump and
| bulk clean them all into workable materials again with a
| pressure washer in the same amount of time.
|
| Work an extra 2 hours, use the money to buy a new
| toaster, and spend the rest on food for the homeless.
|
| the moral argument is bullshit. it's a waste of your
| time, and the only reason you dont think so is because
| you get personal enjoyment out of fixing things (i do
| too)
| t_mann wrote:
| The salvaging actually helped the learning experience
| immensely - shows the kid that carelessness can have
| lasting consequences.
|
| Replacing the toaster and yelling 'We had to spend $X to
| get a new one now!' will be forgotten by the end of the
| day.
| cupofpython wrote:
| >The salvaging actually helped the learning experience
| immensely - shows the kid that carelessness can have
| lasting consequences.
|
| If the kid was present for it. Otherwise, its very much
| just another "oopsie" they did that mom and dad clean up
| behind the scenes and they have no idea what the
| difference is between ruining a toaster and spilling a
| glass of milk.
|
| >We had to spend $X to get a new one now!
|
| I would never say this to my kids.
| t_mann wrote:
| > I would never say this to my kids.
|
| So what would the learning experience consist of then?
|
| > If the kid was present for it.
|
| OP mentioned several hours of work + dry runs in the
| garden. Pretty hard to miss that, unless they're
| perpetually glued to their screens (which would be the
| bigger concern). PS: Also, unless you take your kid to a
| physical store, the new toaster will pop up even more
| magically than the cleaned one.
| cupofpython wrote:
| the learning experience is that the toaster they were
| familiar with is gone because of what they did. very
| simple. I guess I am the only one here that doesnt want
| to fuck with toaster repair. they arent worth it. they
| can cause fires and give electrical shocks.
|
| honestly, the last thing i want my kid to think in that
| situation is that it is okay for them to put their hands
| in the toaster. Which they might do if they see me do it
| while cleaning
| toss1 wrote:
| >> can cause fires and give electrical shocks.
|
| which is why you unplug it before working on it and make
| a BIG point to the kid of both hazards, and how essential
| it is to remove power before working on something, AND to
| do test runs in a safer area like outside, etc.
|
| >>the last thing i want my kid to think in that situation
| is that it is okay for them to put their hands in the
| toaster
|
| I'd say that you don't want them putting their hands in
| WHILE IT IS POWERED or HOT. Important distinction, and
| best started early and often. They'll see it sometime,
| better to have them have a context so they can tell the
| difference between doing the same thing when it is smart
| (powered down and repairing), vs Darwin Award candidate
| level stupid (when powered); then they can evaluate
| other's actions and draw the right conclusions.
| cupofpython wrote:
| If you are confident enough in your ability to convey the
| entire full safety message to your kid and take full
| responsibility for anything they do as a result of that
| information, then go for it. I'm just saying for $20 it
| isnt really worth it. I dont want my kid fucking with
| electronics outside the designated use-cases it was built
| for, period. Cheese in the toaster? item needs to be
| cleared by a professional again. I dont care if I feel
| personally competent enough to clear it myself. I have
| very easy and safe alternatives.
|
| Odds are the toaster company doesnt want you mess with it
| either. This isnt the old days where you can just use
| some elbow grease and fix everything on your property.
| Liabilities need to be managed. Electrical items need
| certifications. Doing it yourself takes hours. It's just
| a lot of things that are unnecessary to deal with over a
| toaster.
|
| If I am going to teach my kid anything about fixing
| electrical items it's that if it isnt working then he (or
| she) should unplug them and then he shouldnt touch them
| until certified to do so. It'll encourage them to look at
| the bigger picture of the problem.
|
| Sure, as an adult we can see through red tape and feel
| cool about it and want to teach the same to our kid.. but
| it's really not worth it. Kids that are smart enough to
| learn the will likely experiment with new things they
| learn. Just because they safely unplug the item before
| working on it doesnt mean it's safe to plug back in
| afterwards.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rglullis wrote:
| cupofpython wrote:
| are you okay?
| gpvos wrote:
| Are you?
| baggsie wrote:
| I would have made the kid do it
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every last
| piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster
|
| I'm not (currently) a parent, so this may be off base, but I
| am currently in the crunch part of the process so looking to
| learn:
|
| Is there not a better opportunity for this to be a learning
| experience by making it a couple of hours of your kid's time
| to do that cleaning? I know my adult life has benefited from
| my parents' insistence that I clean up my own messes, and
| 12-year-olds are certainly capable of generating elbow
| grease.
| iSnow wrote:
| Yes and no. Punishing your kid for some dumb but innocent
| action has the potential to make them too cautious.
| Additionally, they might damage the toaster because they
| have no experience on how to properly open and clean it and
| that would make things much worse. That's especially true
| if your kid might be neuro-divergent - e.g. kids with ADHD
| tend to be clumsy but cannot help it, they might be 30%
| behind in motor coordination. So your 12yo might have the
| eye-hand coordination of a 7-8yo, and I would not let a kid
| that age clean a toaster on their own.
|
| IMO, the best course of action would be to not ridicule or
| reprimand them but explain how this wasn't the best course
| of action and then clean the toaster together with the kid
| - that way they learn how to do it and don't feel like an
| idiot. And you don't have to fume over what your kid did
| wrong but spend some time together.
|
| Obviously, if your kid actually IS dumb and reckless,
| things would be different.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I certainly agree that modulating the level of
| supervision of the cleaning to the kid's abilities is
| warranted, but I still think they should be involved to
| the end.
|
| I don't see it as a punishment to make the kid stick
| around and help with the cleanup to the extent they can;
| rather, it's an attempt to practice conscientious habits
| (if you make a mess, you stick around to see it cleaned
| up even if you need help to do so), in addition to the
| specific learning experience that some things are really
| hard to clean, so we should be careful in our experiments
| with those things.
| iSnow wrote:
| No, no I wouldn't disagree they should be involved, I
| maybe misunderstood and believed you'd make the kid do
| the whole cleaning as a lesson.
| growt wrote:
| As cleaning a toaster most likely involves sticking things
| into it (like a brush, maybe even a knife to scrape off the
| burnt stuff) and you also don't want your kids to stick
| stuff (especially metal) into a toaster, I'd say it's safer
| to skip the "elbow grease" lesson in this special case.
| samizdis wrote:
| At the risk of sounding like a salesperson, I'd like to
| mention a feature of basic/classic Dualit toasters - namely,
| the optional and elegantly simple sandwich cage. [1] The cage
| is designed to take two slices of bread with a filling (in my
| usage, always heavy on the cheese). You put this into the
| toaster slot, which is vertical, and safely make
| cheese/whatever toasties. So, your 12-year-old had the right
| idea, but not the right toaster.
|
| FWIW, and now going full salesperson, Dualit toasters are
| low-tech and minimalist. The timer is clockwork. There is no
| automatic pop-up function; you can depress a lever to raise
| the toast during cooking to check its colour, if you like.
| All parts are serviceable/replaceable. I've had my bog-
| standard Dualit (plus two cages) for 20+ years, and so far
| I've not had to replace even a heating element; and this with
| usage at least five days a week.
|
| [1] https://www.dualit.com/products/original-sandwich-cage
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Even with the cage I'd be worried that the content could
| still slip into the toaster.
|
| I'll keep using my toaster-oven for that.
| lttlrck wrote:
| The clockwork timer on mine broke, so I bought a
| replacement and repaired it.
|
| I bought it in Europe so it was 220v. When I moved to the
| US I purchased 110v heater elements and swapped them out.
|
| It's metal, held together with screws, and toasts bread.
| It's perfect.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| Generally I'm salty at people going full sales mode. But
| this time? I'm not even mad
|
| Sandwich cages are the kind technological solution people
| in general just have something of a blind spot against.
| Made myself a note if I decide to buy a toaster when I move
| next year
|
| Ah, the wonders of technology and engineering :)
| schroeding wrote:
| > There is no automatic pop-up function
|
| That's a bit _too_ low tech for me, but otherwise looks
| like a solid device :D
| traverseda wrote:
| Presumably it does turn off on it's own.
| samizdis wrote:
| Yes, when the clockwork timer runs down.
| avereveard wrote:
| They sell uncaged vertical toasters?!?!?
| SECProto wrote:
| I would note the parent comment appeared to have been
| talking about an open faced sandwich, i.e. cheese topping
| on a slice of toast.
|
| Even if I'm incorrect and a closed grilled cheese sandwich
| was the culprit, a toaster oven would still be a better
| suggestion in my opinion!
| mmcdermott wrote:
| A toaster oven, or even a conventional oven with a
| broiler setting.
| stormbrew wrote:
| 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.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Dunno man, mine takes less then 5 minutes to get to about
| 150degc. 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 enclosed space, consequently
| bleeding a lot of energy into the room
| SECProto wrote:
| Toaster ovens and toasters are at most 1800W appliances.
| Typical electric oven elements are in the 3000-3500W
| range. If you're broiling, toaster ovens are much more
| efficient.
|
| Ovens I've used take roughly 15minutes to warm to 400F
| (200C), regardless of if they are electric or gas.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| How many times can you run that oven before you spent the
| energy required to produce the toaster oven? I'd bet it's
| in the thousands.
| SECProto wrote:
| If you apply the same anti-consumption calculation to
| everything in life I applaud you wholeheartedly.
|
| That said, you can buy a toaster oven for $30 from
| Walmart, and that cost covers the energy, material,
| transportation, and labour, plus markups at each stage.
| If you assume a $0.10/kWh energy cost, you might have at
| absolute most 100kWh of energy used in manufacture. That
| puts the oven/toasteroven breakeven point from an energy
| perspective at no more than about 60 hours of heating
| element usage.
| stormbrew wrote:
| 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.
| ip26 wrote:
| It's a fun idea, but I must say I have discovered quite by
| chance that an inexpensive toaster oven is the tool for
| this job - as well as countless other jobs.
|
| Not just toasting bruschetta - it's secretly a $60 patio
| oven, opening the door to things like baking fish mid-July
| without heating or smelling up the house.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah I'm pretty confused as to why people are suggesting
| all toasters with super-dupe sandwich cage thingies. Why
| care about the orientation of your food while it is
| toasting?
| drewzero1 wrote:
| It's easier to evenly heat a vertical slice of bread, for
| one. Most times I've used a toaster oven I've ended up
| with one side cooked much more than the other. Plus a
| horizontal toaster oven takes up a lot more
| counter/cabinet space, which is at a premium in a lot of
| kitchens. (I don't have a fancy toaster or fancy sandwich
| accessories, but I do really like the idea of multiple-
| use appliances.)
| conductr wrote:
| This is my take. Mid 40s and I've never owned a toaster
| in my adult life, but the toaster oven gets frequent use.
| However I don't make plain toast ever. I suppose if I
| did, especially in the AM, I'd see the appeal.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I still don't see the appeal, what's the advantage of the
| non-oven toaster? Maybe it is quicker or something? But
| the toaster oven is a timed device anyway, just run it
| while the water is boiling for coffee...
| corrral wrote:
| Toaster's smaller and easier to clean. Quicker to start,
| if only slightly. Probably faster. Wouldn't be surprised
| if they're more power efficient per slice of finished
| toast. Toaster oven, being large and having so much
| functionality overlap with a normal stove (and microwave,
| to some extent), is far less common (at least in the US)
| than the smaller and more focused toaster. Most two-slice
| toasters you can easily stuff in a drawer or cabinet.
| Toaster ovens demand permanent counter space.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Takes up way less space!
| conductr wrote:
| Has way less utility! Jk, this is a valid point, I just
| happen to have plenty of space so this isn't a factor for
| me
| conductr wrote:
| Upright toaster is very quick and low risk of burning
| even when left unattended. I my experience, that timed
| example falls apart unless you're right there to take it
| out of the oven. I don't drink coffee so have no reason
| to hang out in the kitchen. I'd start it then go to my
| room and get dressed and return to my toast on my own
| time. However, my toaster oven behaves like a real oven
| and holds heat even when the elements turn off, I'd have
| to do a lot of experimentation to figure out the right
| time/temp setting. Figuring out the desired setting on a
| upright is incredibly easy. Once set, it's set and
| forget. You just push the button, walk away, return when
| you want to eat your toast.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Never owned a toaster. If I want toast I just do it in a
| pan. It surprises me how many people don't realize you
| can just use a pan.
| bityard wrote:
| I've been looking for a toaster that works as well as the
| ones made 60 years ago. And for once, a marketing page has
| me convinced to pry open my wallet.
|
| But there is no link or button anywhere on the page that
| tells me how to buy one. :(
| samizdis wrote:
| In the UK, you can find Dualit stuff in stores that have
| a kitchen appliance section (John Lewis, say). I've seen
| them in shops in Germany and the Czech Republic, too. Not
| sure where you're based, though. Mind you, there is a
| little shopping trolley icon at the top right corner of
| the page ...
|
| Or the site map has "shop" listed:
|
| https://www.dualit.com/products
|
| Don't know if that's international or just UK. A basic
| search shows Dualit stuff at Target and Home Depot,
| though. Amazon, too.
| bbarnett wrote:
| While a nice looking toaster, and supposedly good, I
| could buy 10 cheap toasters, each lasting up to 10 years,
| for the same price as one of these.
|
| It is at this point I realised my toaster oven is fine,
| for that once a week serving of toast.
|
| Now, if they had a 30 yr parts warranty, or some such, at
| least I'd feel semi-secure..
| selectodude wrote:
| They're engineered for restaurants so they're absolute
| overkill for any home use. Your home toaster isn't going
| to successfully pump out 400 slices of toast per hour.
| bbarnett wrote:
| They're engineered for home use, that's why they are sold
| at home depot, on amazon, and in retail outlets.
|
| Restaurants buy proper commercial gear, from hospitality
| supply depots. You don't buy restaurant ovens, and gear,
| from amazon or home depot. A strong tell is, restaurants
| aren't looking for candy red, enamel coated stuff. They
| want stainless, and their gear is hidden away in the
| kitchen, and they don't want to pay a penny more for
| trend.
|
| Honestly, why would you say that? There is nothing about
| this that is commercial.
|
| A 30 yr parts warranty is what tells people it's
| _actually_ well engineered.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| Maybe not for 400 slices an hour but Dualit toasters are
| stainless and pretty standard issue at cafes and bed and
| breakfasts in the UK.
| bbarnett wrote:
| They may have a commercial line, but that's not what you
| get on Amazon, or Home Depot, with its 15 candy colors
| and consumer facing build.
|
| If cafes are buying a toaster at home depot, they're
| doing it wrong. Most retail equipment even specifies
| warranty is void for commercial use.
| frogpelt wrote:
| Ha. I knew the influencers would eventually make their way
| to Hacker News.
|
| But seriously won't the cheese drip out the bottom?
| mypalmike wrote:
| The cage holds the bread slices together, creating more
| friction for the cheese to counter the gravitational
| force. So somewhat surprisingly, little if any cheese
| drips out.
| dmix wrote:
| How do you deal with the dripping cheese part? I'm guessing
| a tray at the bottom you need to clean?
| lttlrck wrote:
| it is closer to a panini maker that you'd think... lets
| call it a poor mans panini even if it isn't very cheap.
|
| The cage is very stiff and squeezes the slices very
| tightly together. So get the bread thickness and filling
| right, and it doesn't drip much/at all, and the slices
| will stick together. Crusts help. So it's not unlike a
| dedicated panini/sandwich toaster.
|
| It's not perfect, a dedicated device is worth it if
| you're going to use it a lot and/or you have the counter
| space.
| ajdude wrote:
| Removable stainless steel tray at the bottom of the
| toaster. The metal panels that the toaster rests on are
| easily accessible too. It doesn't have a spring-loaded
| "pop", but rather there's a lever on the side of the
| toaster to lift or lower the toast.
| natch wrote:
| It's explained on the website.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| There's no electrocution risk with that?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Yeah. Using literally any other normal method seems much
| safer and cleaner than that idea.
| lttlrck wrote:
| No.
|
| Also it's incredible difficult to touch the elements even
| if you wanted to: there is a mylar sheet covering them
| (and they are behind a cage...).
|
| See:
|
| https://assets.dualit.com/images/landscapehalf/50027-clas
| sic...
| ajdude wrote:
| When I was reading the GP comment, I immediately thought of
| the Dualit toaster. I'm not at all affiliated with them,
| but I own the classic as well as this sandwich cage and I
| cannot recommend it enough. They are expensive, but user-
| serviceable parts means that everything broken can be
| easily replaced from the logic board to the heating
| elements.
|
| I think we should support companies that not only support
| right to repair, but look towards quality and longevity of
| their products. Dualit makes the case. Bonus points that
| their classic series are hand built in-house!
| slowhand09 wrote:
| But DOES IT MAKE FRACTAL PATTERNS ON THE TOAST?!?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| If it doesn't, all it takes is a microwave transformer.
| EASY!
|
| Oh look, my channel now has 200k subs! Cool.
| RektBoy wrote:
| mcphage wrote:
| If you follow the link and go to the bottom, it says
| "Registered in England", so... no.
| samizdis wrote:
| Er, Dualit is British:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualit
| rexreed wrote:
| "Dualit Limited, Registered office County Oak Way,
| Crawley, West Sussex RH11 7ST. Registered in England".
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I want to give a shoutout to a similar but much nerdier
| design, which is no longer sold. Kenmore (rebadged as
| De'Longhi) used to make a single long-slot toaster with an
| adjustable width all the way out to about 2 inches. I have
| one. The heat element isn't amazing, and it, like the
| Dualit, is manual lift with a timer. But critically, you
| can move the toaster elements manually together or away
| from one another with a lever on the top of the toaster. In
| other toasters, the elements are fixed in position
| regardless of the bread width. As a result, this toaster is
| _amazing_ for big thick hand-cut slices of bread. And no
| need for a sandwich cage at all: you can put entire hoagies
| in there.
|
| A picture: https://www.lowes.com/pd/De-Longhi-2-Slice-
| Aluminum-Toaster/...
| drewzero1 wrote:
| This morning I was making toast in my cheapo toaster and
| was reminded of the Dualit a customer brought in last year
| for me to repair. The date code was 1997 and it sounded
| like it was the first heating element replacement it had
| needed in that time. I thought the one side/two side
| heating element switch was particularly clever.
|
| Honestly I was just impressed that the parts were
| available. Most consumer-grade toasters use nearly-
| identical mechanisms, with zero available replacement parts
| (maybe a crumb tray if you're lucky).
| corrral wrote:
| Considering their two-slice toaster I just looked up is
| $300, it _better_ have repair parts available for the
| next, IDK, 50 years at least, not to be a complete rip-
| off. I expect I 'll go through a half-dozen toasters in
| my life, and probably won't spend that much _total_
| (inflation adjusted).
| drewzero1 wrote:
| That was the same conclusion I came to. I replaced my $20
| toaster from 2015 with nearly-identical $30 toaster in
| 2020. I had looked into a lot of options to avoid the
| unified toaster box mechanism, including building my own,
| and eventually decided that the value proposition just
| wasn't there (especially considering how infrequently I
| make toast).
| corrral wrote:
| Right, I'm sure it's worth it for someone who's _really_
| into toast, and I get the whole buy-it-for-life thing,
| but I try to be a little selective about what I go _that_
| hardcore with, and a toaster doesn 't pass that test for
| me. Shit, that's almost a quarter of what I recently paid
| for an entire stove, or about half the price of the
| cheapest stove that store had.
| jandrese wrote:
| Conventional toasters are so cheap it makes no sense to
| try to repair them. Plus they aren't built to be repaired
| at all. When my last one died I tried taking it apart to
| see what went wrong (element burned through as it turned
| out) and see if I could fix it, but the whole mechanism
| was basically as single piece put together with spot
| welds and rivets, and with part markup being at least 2x
| or 3x initial cost there would be no way repairing it
| would make sense. I could gripe about it being cheap junk
| designed to fail, but it lasted over 20 years and browned
| thousands of slices of bread.
|
| If some well built toaster that won't fail costs more
| than 4 times what the cheap toaster does, then it
| probably doesn't make sense to buy it. Especially if you
| can't guarantee that the well built toaster will actually
| last a lifetime.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| If it cost only 4 times as much I'd probably consider it,
| but 10+ is just a really hard sell unfortunately. I had
| to scrap a perfectly good toaster because I couldn't find
| a replacement for a cracked plastic part that is supposed
| to make or break contact in a switch and engage the
| electromagnet. It would still toast fine if you held down
| the lever, and it pained me to toss it, but I couldn't
| source or fabricate a safe replacement part.
|
| I'm sure the manufacturer(s) don't want to worry about
| self-service causing house fires though, and it costs a
| lot to create, maintain, and distribute a stock of
| replacement parts for what ultimately is a disposable
| appliance. I just wish I could find a solid basic
| consumer/prosumer toaster in the sub-$100 range.
| jandrese wrote:
| Replacing tiny broken plastic parts is the main reason I
| now own a 3D printer. Granted, a toaster is one of those
| places where the relatively low melting point of PLA or
| PETG might be an issue, but it is still very useful to be
| able to fabricate replacement parts that are otherwise
| impossible to find.
|
| Even better is how I can redesign the replacement part so
| it doesn't fail in the same way next time.
| imtringued wrote:
| In theory you want anything with a finite lifespan to not
| need any repairs or maintenance during its lifespan and
| only fail once its lifespan has been exceeded.
|
| Repairing isn't supposed to make sense, you get the next,
| better iteration of the product.
|
| In practice, products fail way too early and for easily
| avoidable reasons justifying the need for repairs.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Here is a hack for extremely fast grilled cheese.
|
| Basic idea is to make the components separately:
|
| 1) toast two pieces of bread until they are dry and quite
| brown, this is important (to remove the water ) so that the
| bread does not heat up in the microwave
|
| 2) while it is toasting, cut up cheese for each slice, I use
| quarter inch thick 1" x 2" pieces, usually four per slice
|
| 3) after the bread is toasted, put them on a glass plate and
| butter them, then cover each with the slices of cheese
|
| 4) microwave 30s until the onset of melting
|
| 5) optional to add cold deli meat the sandwich after
| microwaving and combining
|
| 6) cut into fours and serve with optional dipping sauce
|
| The dry toast and the melted cheese have a very good texture
| and taste and it takes about 3 minutes to make.
|
| I make this for children often and add a bunch more cheese
| and meat so that four pieces of toast can be the main part of
| a simple lunch for 8 kids (each cut into quadrants).
| gonzo41 wrote:
| If you lie the toaster on it's side it works.
| OneLeggedCat wrote:
| About ten years ago, I bought one of those small countertop
| toaster ovens that is roughly big enough for four pieces of
| bread to lie flat in it. It became the best $100 I've ever
| spent. We cook everything small enough to fit in it,
| including toast with cheese :) . We've since only used our
| regular full-size oven maybe half as often, because this
| small countertop one is so much faster and more convenient
|
| No need for an actual toaster, although this one takes a
| minute or two longer. As an added bonus, my mother-in-law
| hates waiting that extra minute or two, so that's a big win
| in my book.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| You can buy reusable toaster bags that make this possible.
|
| All sorts of crumbly, melty things can go in a standard
| upright toaster.
| t_mann wrote:
| Kudos for not just throwing away the toaster. Will have
| benefited the learning experience.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| A story from an academic summer camp where I used to work:
|
| In the dining hall one morning, a teacher sees three kids
| putting ice cubes into the toaster. The teacher walks up to
| them. Two of the kids dash away, leaving the third to fend
| for herself.
|
| Teacher: "What are you doing?"
|
| Student: "Putting ice cubes into the toaster."
|
| Teacher: "Why would you do that?"
|
| Student: "To see what would happen."
|
| Teacher: "Okay. Let's think about this. What happens to ice
| when it gets hot?"
|
| Student: "It melts?"
|
| Teacher: "Yes, it melts into water. And what happens when you
| put water into an electronic device like a toaster?"
|
| Student: "...it goes boom?"
|
| Teacher: "So should you put ice into the toaster?"
|
| Student: "No."
|
| Teacher: "Thank you."
|
| This is a camp explicitly for gifted & talented students, by
| the way. They _are_ exceptionally talented in many ways, but
| they 're still 11 years old.
| logifail wrote:
| > This was a camp explicitly for gifted & talented
| students, I might add
|
| Believe me, they're the worst ;)
|
| My son recently got on the wrong train to get home from
| school, it was one that was "fast" that is it doesn't stop
| in the place where we live, his train sailed straight
| through our station and the next several stations, before
| it finally stopped somewhere and he got off.
|
| At this point he (rightly) whipped out his phone and called
| me for help/advice. I checked the train timetables, figured
| out that although I _could_ have gone and picked him up in
| the car, it would actually be quicker - and perhaps a
| learning experience - for him to get the train back.
|
| So, I told him "go to platform X and get the train at HH:MM
| and it will bring you home".
|
| He went to platform X, but unwisely got on the _first_
| train which arrived, which unfortunately was a delayed -
| fast(!) - service. So, he ended up going in the other
| direction on a fast train - and (again) not stopping -
| straight through our station, until his train eventually
| reached somewhere it did stop at.
|
| At this point he phoned me in tears. I got in the car and
| drove there to pick him up.
|
| We filed that under "learning experience". We seem to be
| having plenty of them...
| undersuit wrote:
| When I was 10 or 11 on a camping trip I watched an adult make
| sopaipillas, on a propane camp stove no less. So the morning
| after I get home I get up at 6AM and try to recreate the
| recipe from memory. My mom is a bit a of health nut, so for
| flour I used the whole-wheat we had available and instead of
| a frying oil I used olive oil. I turned on the gas stove and
| smoked the entire 2000sqft two story house out with a grease
| and burning dough fire.
|
| Even if a video I could watch online was available in the
| 1990s, the recipe would still fail no matter how safe the
| instructions were because I misunderstood the base concepts.
| My mom taught me safety in the kitchen afterwards.
| napolux wrote:
| 5 minutes crafts should be illegal
| t_mann wrote:
| Scary. I recently did some research into what's behind the
| 'Jungle Builders' channels (two guys pretending to build
| flashy, but completely dysfunctional, pools somewhere in a
| forest with little more than their hands as tools). Seems to be
| a similar scheme, it doesn't invite viewers to recreate, but
| they leave a lot of litter and moscito-infested concrete pits
| behind. Most of them are actually in the same tiny forest
| somewhere in Malaysia that looks like a v2 of the Banksy theme
| park now.
| mulmen wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| Can I ask what you tried searching? Because "Jungle
| Builders' channels" pulled it up immediately.
| mulmen wrote:
| 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".
| hammock wrote:
| Found a video with the aftermath:
| https://youtu.be/YCyLWhPnq1M
|
| For documentation purposes, I googled "jungle builders
| are a scam," clicked the second result which is a Reddit
| thread and found this in the comments 4-5 parent comments
| down
| t_mann wrote:
| Here's one, although I don't like it because I feel like
| it's overdramatizing a bit. With construction quality this
| low, my hinge is that the jungle will claim back those
| spots fairly quickly, but the (drainless!) water pits will
| remain moscito breeders for a considerable amount of time
| (and wildlife trap hazards for some time).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCyLWhPnq1M
|
| In response to your question: they hold up extremely
| poorly. But ecologically speaking, it's probably no worse
| than the average palm oil farm.
| mulmen wrote:
| Yeah I wondered if this was some kind of "traditional"
| construction with modern style. But water-based masonry
| seems like a suspect choice in a rainy climate.
|
| On the other hand I was wrong once back in the 90s.
|
| Thanks for the link.
| t_mann wrote:
| Fyi, here's a probably legit traditional jungle building
| channel (that clearly inspired the ripoffs, down to the
| no talking, shirtless + shorts):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
| hammock wrote:
| That guy (Primitive Technology) is the original. Then
| someone started a different channel making swimming pools
| and it really caught on
| teruakohatu wrote:
| There is a whole genre of people building "by hand"
| underground pools and other crazy structures in the jungles.
| Aside from being terribly unsafe, if you look closely you can
| often see marks in the dirt from machine tools that they
| forgot to smooth away in the soft clay.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I think those are all knockoffs of the Primitive Technology
| channel.
| fritztastic wrote:
| I thought it was just annoying that they're often on the top
| results of searches and thought of them as just digital
| clutter.
|
| But for people to post outright dangerous and deadly
| instructions is negligent at best and I would say more
| accurately in the realm of manslaughter at least.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Sorry way to many ads on that site. Like every paragraph...
| mrtksn wrote:
| We really need to finish with this content removal business and
| simply hold people accountable for the content.
|
| In other words, YouTube or any "utility level" platform should
| not have the right to remove content by its own and just request
| information to protect itself. For example, if someone is posting
| about something harmful the videos should remain and the person
| who does that should face the consequences.
|
| It's not just that the platforms suck in judging the content, the
| more important aspect is that this content is also part of
| historical record. I would like to be able to watch and examine
| content from criminals, from fraudsters or pranksters.
|
| For example, it's fascinating that Heaven's Gate cult website is
| still alive and kicking[0]. I'm glad that I can take a look at
| the real thing but if their mass su*cide happened today, I'm sure
| that all kind of materials about them would be promptly removed
| and we will be forced to accept only the official narrative(which
| might be or might not be correct on this case but that's not the
| point). None of us would be allowed to read their texts, listen
| to their conversation and judge it by ourselves.
|
| [0] https://www.heavensgate.com
| framapotari wrote:
| > For example, if someone is posting about something harmful
| the videos should remain and the person who does that should
| face the consequences.
|
| Ok, so now a video is up and people are tricked by it and
| injure themselves in the process. Some people die. Is that an
| acceptable cost? Does your solution make any considerations for
| ongoing harm?
| mrtksn wrote:
| Sue the person who uploaded the video, as it happens with all
| the malicious activities with the real world.
|
| Sure, we can have tools to reduce risk - maybe there can be a
| warning under the video that the contents are disputed and
| some people claimed harm. If those people are lying the video
| uploader can sue them.
|
| Just because some people don't know how to behave and have
| delusions that nothing is real on the internet, we can't have
| total speech control in an attempt of "saving the kids".
|
| Just as with the real world, people need to develop the right
| habits to stay safe.
| lancesells wrote:
| > Just as with the real world, people need to develop the
| right habits to stay safe.
|
| Just as with the real world, you don't have a right to a
| broadcasting platform for anything you wish.
| mrtksn wrote:
| You actually have that right in any sane country. The
| limitations are on the frequency you can broadcast or the
| volume if you do your broadcast through sound systems.
|
| Actually, only on extremely crazy dictatorships you will
| have police storming you before you finish your
| broadcast. On most places, you can be sued but the police
| wont try to silence you as if your words are a spell.
| framapotari wrote:
| Where did the police come in? We were talking about
| Youtube selecting what to make available on their
| platform. Is that analogous to the police stifling your
| speech in your view?
| mrtksn wrote:
| Yes, it is in the same effect due to the ubiquity of the
| platform. IMHO, platforms with that significant user base
| should be regulated as utility.
| framapotari wrote:
| You don't want private entities making decisions on what
| content they host on their platforms, but you do want the
| government to make that decision (host everything) and
| force those private entities to abide by that decision
| under threat of penalty? And that is how we avoid
| dictatorships in your view?
| mrtksn wrote:
| The government has a due process, if the government
| doesn't have a fair due process you change them until you
| have a fair due process. You change the governments by
| election and if that's not available by burning down
| their stuff.
|
| Companies don't have a fair due process. Google is
| infamous for not providing a human response for their
| algorithmic censorship. You can Google it.
| lancesells wrote:
| So you think all guidelines should be eliminated?
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9288567?hl=en
| mrtksn wrote:
| Guidelines on the nature of the content? Yes.
|
| Things harmful for the platforms itself? Removing stuff
| like spam is fair IMHO.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Of course you do, as long as it's not illegal.
|
| People forget even TV had public access, which could get
| pretty ridiculous back in the day.
|
| Your argument is old, tired, and nonsensical.
| krapp wrote:
| Public access tv (in the US at least) is actually a
| private platform, you do not have the right to broadcast
| anything you with on it "as long as it's not illegal."
|
| As with newspapers, magazines, radio, social media
| platforms, etc., the owners public access tv stations are
| allowed to exercise editorial discretion with regards to
| what they publish. There was actually a landmark Supreme
| Court case about it:[0]
|
| [0]https://www.commlawblog.com/2019/06/articles/broadcast
| /supre...
| framapotari wrote:
| Where is this right to a broadcasting platform to publish
| anything you wish as long as it is legal enumerated?
| mrtksn wrote:
| Depending on your dictatorship, it will be different
| everywhere.
|
| In free countries you just broadcast. It's like the right
| to eat pancakes, it's not specifically regulated. Of
| course there are rules of what you are allowed to do or
| not, for example you can't broadcast in specific
| frequencies because those are licensed and if you like to
| do that you need to purchase a license. If you broadcast
| using loudspeakers, you will have regulations on the
| loudness of it.
|
| The commercial license might come with its own
| limitations. Depending on your location, you might get
| into trouble if you take advertisements for drugs or
| cigarettes or alcohol. You can lose your license over it
| but your broadcasting equipment wont try stopping you
| from doing it.
| framapotari wrote:
| > In free countries you just broadcast
|
| Sure, and anyone who is banned on YouTube can still "just
| broadcast". Their rights were not harmed in any way.
|
| To borrow your analogy, you may have the right to eat
| pancakes but you don't have the right to eat at IHOP. You
| can be banned from every pancake selling diner in town
| yet you can still eat pancakes. No one has stopped you
| from eating pancakes.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I can't agree with this one. Due to the different nature
| of the mediums(radio waves v.s. internet platform) you
| can't just broadcast because unlike radio waves Youtube
| will refuse to carry your signal. That's why I advocate
| for Youtube be impartial to the content and carry
| whatever the users put in it. If there's a problem with
| the content, let it be solved by the parties impacted.
|
| Again, unlike radio, with internet platforms each
| platform is in its own reality. With radio, when you
| broadcast your signal reaches everyone indiscriminately.
| On the internet you broadcast into platforms as if they
| are different universes with different populations.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Sue the person who uploaded the video, as it happens
| with all the malicious activities with the real world._
|
| A corpse is discovered in a garage with charred stumps
| where the hands should be. Investigators look through that
| person's browser history and find they watched a few
| hundred wood burning videos. What now, hundreds of
| lawsuits? Who would pay for that?
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| > Some people die. Is that an acceptable cost? Does your
| solution make any considerations for ongoing harm?
|
| You talk as if this isn't exactly what happened in the
| current framework of private censorship.
|
| Even if abolishing private censorship would cause the
| scenario you outlined, that wouldn't be worse than the
| current situation and at least you'd solve the problem of
| pointless censorship.
| framapotari wrote:
| > Even if abolishing private censorship would cause the
| scenario you outlined, that wouldn't be worse than the
| current situation
|
| This seems like a statement with nothing behind it but your
| confidence that it is truth. I believe that could be much
| worse than the current situation.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| If the video goes down and fewer people see it, fewer
| people die. How was the censorship pointless? You didn't
| "solve" any problems, you just ignored the actual
| complexity of the real world to uphold your ideals.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| > If the video goes down and fewer people see it, fewer
| people die.
|
| Isn't it the case that the dangerous video was left up
| while the criticism was removed?
|
| > How was the censorship pointless?
|
| I'm talking specifically about private censorship.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Speech is not magic spell. Sure, in Turkey the government
| believes that Netflix makes people gay and they regulate
| Netflix to ungay the Turkish youth but this is just as
| ridiculous as the censorship on other topics on other
| parts of the world.
|
| If someone is dying because of a video, the fix is not in
| removal of the video. Sure, you can put labels agains
| poor judgement like they do on physical products.
| framapotari wrote:
| > If someone is dying because of a video, the fix is not
| in removal of the video
|
| It might not be 'the' fix but it could be 'a' fix. If
| your interest is preventing deaths that is.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Many things can be a fix to many problems. Listening
| devices at homes can be a fix to domestic violence for
| example.
|
| The point is, for "a fix" of an issue we are trading
| things and I don't find it a good trade. Total
| unchallenged censorship is ot a good compromise to "save
| the kids".
| framapotari wrote:
| I don't think a private company choosing what they host
| on their platform is total unchallenged censorship. With
| such a vast gap in understanding of terms I don't think
| discussion will get us anywhere.
| mrtksn wrote:
| You can find a lot of feedback of creators about their
| objections falling on deaf ears but yes, you are right;
| that's the core of the disagreement, let's agree to
| disagree.
| philistine wrote:
| The thing is the whole house of cards was built on pseudonymous
| growth. Most Youtube accounts can be traced back to specific
| people and corporations, sure, but it takes a lot of manual
| effort to figure it out and the success rate is not 100%. And
| what do you do when the person is based in a country with no
| regards for the rule of law, no extradition treaty with the US,
| yet its citizens still have the ability to post videos to
| Youtube?
|
| What you're proposing would not only slow down the growth of
| Youtube, it would contract it. And proposing to Google that
| anything they do should get smaller for the benefit of mankind
| is somehow a cardinal sin against capitalism.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I have this proposition that I wrote about previously. The
| core of the idea is that the platforms can remove your
| content only if you are anonymous and you can re-instantiate
| your content and override moderation by accepting full
| responsibility through revealing your true identity. So if it
| happens that someone post some really nasty material, the
| police knocks on their door and content is removed only
| then(some type of content can be straight out illegal, like
| specific types of porn).
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Here's a better idea: hold the publisher responsible for
| what they publish. Don't force the public to dive down
| rabbit-holes trying to figure out who uploaded the dodgy
| content, find out what jurisdiction they're in, and try to
| find an advocate in that jurisdiction to hold the uploader
| to account.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Sure, the publisher can also be responsible but YouTube
| is not a publisher. They are like electrical company that
| provides you with cables and electricity.
|
| Youtube removing videos is like the electric company
| cutting of your electricity when they believe there's
| something harmful on the TV.
|
| There are plenty of publishers on youtube and as they do
| curate their content, they should definitely be
| responsible. They are already responsible actually.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > They are like electrical company that provides you with
| cables and electricity.
|
| Well, except that they don't provide anything similar to
| cables or electricity; what they distribute is content.
| How's that not a publisher?
| mrtksn wrote:
| > they distribute is content. How's that not a publisher?
|
| Because they are not involved in the publishing? They are
| a platform where the publishers engage in publishing.
| ghostoftiber wrote:
| > simply hold people accountable for the content.
|
| Yes but by what level of accountability? If I make a video
| about changing a clutch, and then some kid drops a gearbox on
| his face and kills himself, who is responsible? Is Demolition
| Ranch responsponsible for mass shootings? Is the History
| channel actually racist because it rebroadcasts Hitler all the
| time?
| mrtksn wrote:
| That's up to the courts to decide. Definitely not Youtube's
| business though.
| ghostoftiber wrote:
| Right. It's kinda hard to get upset about youtubes content
| and then claim it's up to the courts to decide, huh? ;)
| mrtksn wrote:
| What's hard about it?
| yonaguska wrote:
| Even just bringing thumbs down would go a long way. They took a
| very useful metric away from technical how-to videos.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| YouTube didn't introduce content moderation (apart from
| copyright, and flat out illegal material) because daddy
| government told them to.
|
| They introduced moderation because companies threatened to pull
| advertising because they didn't want their brands plastered
| next to awful content.
|
| YouTube totally has the right to leave plenty of dangerous or
| morally repugnant content up. But they don't have the right to
| other companies' advertising money if said companies jump ship.
| hedora wrote:
| I would agree that eliminating content removal would make sense
| if they also eliminated their recommendation system.
|
| From a legal perspective, making them legally liable for any
| content they promote (but not content they merely distribute)
| might fix the problem.
| mberning wrote:
| They can auto generate warning messages on every video even
| tangentially referencing the c-word for 2 years, but they let
| this kind of thing slide for years and years.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Ignoring the politics & posturing, my impression is that the
| number of people dead due to stupidity about COVID-19 is a few
| orders of magnitude larger than the number of people dead due
| to this sort of video.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| I don't think the point was about the relative number of
| dead; I think it the observation that YT clearly has the
| technology to automatically annotate content, but declines to
| use it for things (like dangerous hacks) where it could save
| lives.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Reasonable...but I suspect that YT's "technology to
| automatically annotate..." is actually pretty sucky in the
| real world - high error rates, lots of (paid hourly)
| moderation needed, pushback from Legal on "issues and
| exposure" that it creates, etc. So they're not gonna deploy
| that tech against hazards which don't have a huge body
| count and/or political weight behind 'em.
| hedora wrote:
| Yeah, but they did a terrible job of this.
|
| They still push anti vaxxer conspiracy theory crap, but they
| immediately banned actual tenured scientists with decades of
| experience writing and reviewing papers on pandemic response.
|
| If anything, their treatment of this video is par for the
| course. They're banning the factually correct content, and
| pushing popular misinformation that kills people.
| madengr wrote:
| addicted wrote:
| Wait, why did YT remove Ann's video? She doesn't show how it's
| done. She just shows, through drawings, how dangerous it is.
|
| WTF Yiutube.
| lancesells wrote:
| I'm going to guess the people and companies profiting from
| those videos reported her video.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Because she talks about death, and YouTube can't monetize
| videos about death.
| kzrdude wrote:
| And thus, the video was deemed worthless to the whole system
| (unfortunately).
|
| But that's of course short sighted: even a court could find
| youtube reckless if they selectively remove videos of caution
| while leaving up dangerous videos; if both are left up they
| might get off free.
| gspr wrote:
| Instead they keep the videos she calls out for causing death.
| Since at least they don't talk about death. Jesus christ
| google is a vile company!
| imiric wrote:
| Google takes 45% of YouTube's advertising revenue. Videos
| criticizing their most popular channels directly impact their
| profits. The company doesn't care about protecting content
| consumers, it only cares about their customers (advertisers)
| and maximizing profits. They tolerate content creators since
| they actually get them views, but otherwise they would rather
| run ads 24/7 if people would watch them.
| cwkoss wrote:
| youtube effectively has abandoned moderation policy, and just
| has automated report-driven systems.
|
| I bet the video was removed because fractal woodburners with
| delusions of safety felt angry for being called out, and
| reported it.
| edianorh wrote:
| Playing with microwaves carries many risks. Even without getting
| electricity involved, the magnetron contains beryllium oxide
| which can be fatal to humans if it gets into the lungs. Just to
| disassemble one, you need to know what the magnetron looks like
| and not try to disassemble it.
|
| Like many other appliances, it has capacitors, which may remain
| charged for a long time too. Those are dangerous too.
| ugjka wrote:
| Thank God we didn't have any microwave ovens when I was a kid
| because I liked to disassemble everything
|
| But there was one capacitor from a photo flashlight that was
| close to killing me if I touched the ends, but thankfully it
| discharged on my screwdriver
| edianorh wrote:
| I got zapped by the capacitor of a photo flash twice. I
| studied electronics, I was being carefully, and still I
| messed up. The second time I was being even more careful and
| I thought the capacitor was discharged. I'm not even sure how
| it happened, I was holding the PCB by the edges.
| ugjka wrote:
| Mine was a bigass capacitor from a mountable flash that
| plugged into the mains, that thing definitely kills
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >Just to disassemble one, you need to know what the magnetron
| looks like and not try to disassemble it.
|
| I know what you're going for here, but it's a funny sentence.
| Linda703 wrote:
| richrichardsson wrote:
| I was considering searching for and reporting all "Fractal Wood
| Burning" videos.
|
| But you need to be signed in to flag a video, and there's no way
| I'm polluting my viewing history (and thus what YT thinks I like)
| with such shit.
| mywittyname wrote:
| You can go back and delete the videos from your history and YT
| should treat it as though you never watched it. I make use of
| this on occasion when I click a video I really shouldn't have.
| mixedCase wrote:
| You can delete them from your history, and you can indicate in
| the feed that you don't want those kinds of videos in it
| through the three dot menu
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