Readit News logoReadit News
jdietrich commented on Ode to the AA Battery   jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
js2 · 11 days ago
Main disadvantage is cost. Looking on Amazon, it's $1.61/ea AA lithium vs $0.62/ea akalaline. That's Energizer vs Energizer. Amazon Basics AA alkaline are $0.32/ea. (Unlike alkaline, knock-off lithium aren't much cheaper than Energizer.)
jdietrich · 10 days ago
If I had a dollar for every device that I've seen ruined by leaking alkaline cells, I could buy a palletload of lithium cells.
jdietrich commented on Ode to the AA Battery   jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
pimeys · 10 days ago
There is one very good reason: the discharge curve. An alcaline battery loses voltage when it discharges, the lithium ones discharge with the max voltage until they suddenly stop working.

This is a reason insulin pumps require specifically high quality alkaline and lithium is considered a risk.

jdietrich · 10 days ago
Lithium primary cells have a shallower discharge curve than alkaline, but not completely flat; measuring state-of-charge is essentially trivial for any competent design engineer. Medtronic specifically recommend FR6 lithium cells in their insulin pumps.

https://data.energizer.com/pdfs/l91.pdf

https://www.medtronicdiabetes.com/sites/default/files/librar...

jdietrich commented on Ode to the AA Battery   jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
BeetleB · 10 days ago
Eneloops were huge for use in DSLRs.

And they are overhyped.

Most of them are about 2000 mAh. Other NiMH batteries can have, say, 2700 mAh. So even though the latter have a higher discharge rate - after 6 months of storage the latter still has more juice.

The benefit with the 2700 mAh, of course, is if you're using when full, you can use it for much longer.

If they cost the same, I could see the hype. But most people are still better off with regular NiMH AA batteries.

jdietrich · 10 days ago
Eneloop Pro cells have a rated capacity of 2500mAh.

I can't think of any good applications for conventional NiMH cells any more - they're dominated by LSD NiMH cells in low-discharge applications, by lithium primary cells in ultra-low-discharge applications and by the various lithium secondary chemistries in high-discharge applications.

jdietrich commented on Eat Real Food   realfood.gov... · Posted by u/atestu
overgard · a month ago
Honestly, you can find studies to prove just about anything when it comes to nutrition. Too much money involved. Sometimes you have to use common sense or try different diets to see how your body reacts. I find "high fiber" and "low protein" to be a suspicious suggestion though. Protein generally has a small insulin response, your body actually needs protein, and if things like the "protein leverage hypothesis" are correct it can also help with satiety. Fiber, on the other hand, is literally food stuff that can't be digested. It can be helpful for your colon bacteria, but that's about it.

Just because an article comes from Harvard doesn't mean it's correct -- Harvard scientists were also behind the original food pyramid, and were likely paid off by the sugar industry.

jdietrich · a month ago
Unless you're doing something blatantly wrong or have a very specific disorder like coeliac, diet just doesn't have very much influence on health. There are a very wide range of diets that are more-or-less equally healthy, within a margin of error. Humans are highly adaptable omnivores that have evolved to survive and thrive on a broader range of foods than pretty much any other species. The data seems so mixed because the effect sizes of reasonable interventions are so small - a tiny signal drowned out by noise.

The entire problem is that most people in high- and middle-income countries are in fact doing something blatantly wrong - they are consistently eating vastly more calories than they use. Some of those people are ignorant of what 2000 to 2500 calories actually looks like, some are deluded, but a very large proportion know damned well that they're eating far too much and do it anyway.

The obesogenic environment that we now live in is partly due to the influence of the processed foods industry, but in large part it's simply a product of abundance. Before the late 20th century, it was simply inconceivable that poor people could afford to become morbidly obese. Agricultural productivity has improved beyond all recognition and the world is flooded with incredibly cheap food of all kinds.

We've spent the last few decades trying to push back against that with all manner of initiatives intended to endgender behavioural change, with very little success. It doesn't really matter what guidance we give people when they have shown a consistent inability or unwillingness to follow it.

If we're actually serious about the effects of diet on public health, I think there are only two credible options - extremely heavy-handed regulation, or the mass prescribing of GLP-1 receptor agonists. All of the other options are just permutations of "let's do more of the thing that hasn't worked".

jdietrich commented on Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert   substack.com/inbox/post/1... · Posted by u/Vincent_Yan404
crazygringo · a month ago
> 404 is a classified code for a nuclear industrial base.

Can you expand? A code under what system? What were some other code numbers and what (unclassified) things did they refer to? Did each code refer to a specific city or specific factory? Or were all cities/factories dedicated to a certain type of industry or military objective classified under the same code? Why did they teach you this code number growing up?

I'm really fascinated by this. Fantastic story overall, can't wait for part 2!

jdietrich · a month ago
Most things in the Chinese military system are numbered rather than named. Military units are numbered twice - a public cover designator and a private true unit designator, originally four and later five digits. Factories got a three digit number - 296 for the small arms factory in Jiangshe, 816 for the uranium enrichment plant in Fuling and so on. Everyone in and around Factory 404 would have known it as such, but the mere existence of Factory 404 was a state secret.

The existence of such a large and conspicuous secret might seem bizarre to the post-cold-war mind, but it was fairly common in the West too. For example, the British Telecom Tower in central London stands at 189 metres tall and had a revolving restaurant that was open to the public, but was also a designated site under the Official Secrets Act.

jdietrich commented on Lessons from the PG&E outage   waymo.com/blog/2025/12/au... · Posted by u/scoofy
adammarples · 2 months ago
Typically people move aside for emergency vehicles
jdietrich · 2 months ago
Ask any EMT or paramedic - an astonishingly large proportion of human drivers panic in the presence of an ambulance and just slam their brakes on.
jdietrich commented on Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]   archive.org/details/insid... · Posted by u/lawlessone
RajT88 · 2 months ago
That's a solution. Another would be to enshrine in law independent watchdog agencies whose goal is to win trophies for rooting out corruption, reducing waste, preventing or breaking up harmful monopolies, etc.
jdietrich · 2 months ago
How valuable are those trophies compared to bribes, or the tacit bribes of cushy "consultancy" roles? How do you stop lobbyists from gutting those regulators - what use is a fiercely independent regulator that has no resources?

Good governance is hard.

jdietrich commented on Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies   ftm.eu/articles/europe-he... · Posted by u/Fnoord
jack_tripper · 2 months ago
It's always companies run by Unit 8200 ex-Israeli spies that are running these telemetry-/ad- surveillance dragnets, and there's never any retaliatory action against them.

Like how about a call to Benny's office saying "hey buddy, reign your dogs in, our citizens are off limits"?

jdietrich · 2 months ago
Unit 8200 hand-picks the best and brightest young Israelis and trains them in computer science. You might as well say "It's always MIT" - of course an elite educational institution produces a lot of successful startups.

If you're looking for a sinister plot, look no further than In-Q-Tel.

jdietrich commented on Formula One Handovers and Handovers From Surgery to Intensive Care (2008) [pdf]   gwern.net/doc/technology/... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
sheepscreek · 2 months ago
Formula One teams are known to throw money (and lots of it) at problems. It works for them because:

  - 2 drivers/cars per team.
  - ~2 hour race on a weekend every ~2 weeks per season.
They don’t need to solve every problem and the solutions just need to work well during the race (at least for the pit crew).

The hospital needs to do this for hundreds of patients every day. They need solutions that can scale (cost less per person). This was about one specific problem (handover) but different patients could bring with them different complications and add new constraints.

Still very cool though. Glad they got some actionable insights.

jdietrich · 2 months ago
It's more to do with the bureaucratic costs of getting a product licensed as a medical device. By the standards of the medical industry, an F1 wheel nut gun or a WEC refuelling rig isn't particularly expensive; the prohibitive part is getting a specialist item approved for medical use. Motorsport can do things that don't scale, because no-one is stopping them from using a one-off prototype made to precisely fit their needs. They (and their suppliers) iterate incredibly rapidly Bringing a new medical device to the market is an immensely expensive multi-year project. Obviously there are benefits to the precautionary principle, but I'm not sure that anyone has quantified the costs.
jdietrich commented on Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices   office365itpros.com/2025/... · Posted by u/taubek
amanzi · 2 months ago
Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too.

The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoint Online, the metadata, permissions, data governance, etc. It's the Teams meetings, voice calls, chats and channels. All the security policies that are implemented with Entra and Defender. All the desktop and mobile management that is done through Intune. And the list just goes on and on.

Microsoft bundles so many things with M365, that when you're already paying for an E5 licence for each user, it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible.

Take a look at the full feature list to get an idea of what's included: https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic...

And of course, the more you consume, the harder it is to get out...

jdietrich · 2 months ago
To reiterate a crucial point in this comment, replacing the Office apps is the least of the issues. Enterpise customers rely on 365 for identity management, endpoint protection, business intelligence and a whole bunch of other stuff that the average user pays no attention to. We aren't talking about replacing an office suite, but an entire model of IT infrastructure management.

u/jdietrich

KarmaCake day32882September 13, 2009View Original