• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 17th, 2024

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  • The main problem with ethanol in rubber fuel lines is that ethanol causes hardening and flaking of the rubber. Long before it ever gets bad enough to leak the little flakes of hardened rubber detatch from the inside of the line and travel down to fuel pumps, injectors, and carburators. Where they clog up all the small metered orifices that regulate the amount of fuel the engine is getting. This can lead to the car just not running or running poorly, to the internal components of the engine breaking or seizing, thus trashing the whole engine.


  • I’m a car girl, its mkind of my thing. Octane ratings aretgere to protect your engine, its a rating of how readily the gasoline ignites in the engine. The larger the number the harder to self ignite. Most cars use 85, the only time the higher octane 93 is needed is for cars with turbo or supercharging, or cars with higher compression ratios.

    Just put whatever its rated for in it, going with a higher octane than what your car is rated for doesn’t hurt a thing, but it also won’t make your engine run better or anything.

    As far as ethanol goes, modern cars ate fine with 10-20% ethanol in their gas. It will get worse mileage the higher the percentage of ethanol as it is not as energy dense as gasoline. The E85 stuff has a higher percentage of ethanol (85%) than is allowed in conventional gas and was introduced to try and lower gas prices (it’s actually completely ineffective and ethanol for fuel is more energy intensive than just giving us straight gasoline but they have to prop up the corn industry somehow). Regular cars can’t use E85 unless they are rated for it as the engine has to add more fuel to keep a close to stoichiometric ratio of fuel to air.

    TLDR: Use whatever octane your car asks for, if you put a higher octane in it doesn’t hurt, but it also doesn’t add any benefit.

    When it comes to ethanol regular cars can tolerate up to roughly 20% with only a reduction in fuel mileage as a result. E85 is only for cars rated to use it as they need a sensor to detect ethanol percentage and adjust fuel to air ratios accordingly.





  • I’m 37 and now back in college to finish up my degree. It’s honestly depressing how badly AI usage has affected many of my classmates. I talk a lot with my professors as I’m close in age to many of them and from what I keep hearing over and over is that any online or homework assignments would have you believe that 95% of students have a perfect grasp of the materials. but as soon as they’re in an environment without an internet connection everything falls apart.

    I see it in person in my recitations, my physics class might be the worst. Kids get up to the board to to work a simple linear motion word problem and struggle to even make a list of all the variables. Yesterday I watched my professor try for 5+ min to get 2 different students to simply write the units next to the numbers they filed into an equation, they just could not understand what he was asking of them. Our first exam had over half of the class score below 40%.

    I realize not all of this is attributable to AI use, but the amount of times I’ve heard students say “just ask chatgpt” is absurd. Several times I’ve overheard one of these exchanges and the replying students says something along the lines of they don’t like to use AI or trust AI answers and then they get dogpiled by their peers in return. It’s a serious problem, and one I don’t have any easy answers to.







  • My school requires 2in1 laptops with stylus support (and windows😖) for all engineering students. I picked up a lenovo think book 2in1 to meet the requirements and have been dualbooting manjaro on a seperate ssd as it has 2 m2 ports. I use manjaro because im used arch which I run on my gaming PC. My work laptop has had manjaro using kde plasma for a while now and I generally really like it.

    When I loaded up the lenovo with manjaro/KDE it worked great as a standard laptop but whenever I tried to use the stylus or touch screen things started falling apart. Tracking was OK with the stylus but I couldn’t get pressure or tilt sensing to work and the on screen keyboard was pretty terrible. I also couldn’t get it to work properly with a few programs I need specifically for school. I spent about a week trying to get it all sorted but I was never able to get a configuration that worked consitintly and smoothly. After a fair bit of forum surfing the consensus I was able to glean was that KDE was behind the curve on touch/stylus support but gnome was supposedly better suited to it.

    I’ve now been running GNOME for a couple weeks and the touch/stylus support does work much better but there are still a few hiccups. I had to install a different on screen keyboard, the one gnome comes with worked fine except for the backspace key refused to function which turns out to be a pretty big problem. My biggest complaints though are with how gnome functions in comparison to kde. The file explorer, console, text editors, menu customizations, and layouts are a lot more frustrating and clunky feeling to me. I’ve swapped most of the original stuff with KDE version wherever I could make them work. Overall its not too bad now, just different I guess. Personally I wont be using GNOME in the future if I can avoid it. Hopefully KDE comes up with functional touch/stylus support so I can switch back.