Would be more practical to have a single 50-300W AC-DC 24V PSU per room or group of rooms, then pull relatively short DC cables to each light. A multichannel light controller could also be placed nearby, and then if you need fully-featured brightness and color control, only a small PWM amplifier could be placed at each light if distance from controller to each light is too long to transmit PWM power directly.

Good illustration that a seemingly simple feature could require a ton of functionality under the hood. Would be nice to have this in Python.

What’s 1.44 mm connector in this context? Common sizes for headphones are 2.5, 3.5 and (lately) 4.4 mm

Since you mentioned 4.4mm, thought I would chime in and mention pentaconn (the trade name) which is a TRRRS connection (which does include a ground connection as well as L+/L-/R+/R-. I still do not understand the purpose of the ground connection in these plugs since there's nothing to ground on the other end.

Isn’t it the only common variant of 4.4mm? Since portable balanced audio is audiophile-adjacent, no wonder it includes the common ground of dubious utility.

Don't forget the classic 6.35mm jack!

Polypropylene is great: it revolutionized residential plumbing, at least in countries that adopted it (apparently not the US). With PP tubes you can weld any complex plumbing with like $50 worth of tools and minimum skills. The only drawback is significant thermal expansion, but they’re flexible enough that they won’t break even if you forget to design around that.

Isn’t that cross-linked polyethylene (PEX), not PP?

Not sure what the other comment is referring to, but you’re right that PEX is much more flexible than PP. It’s commonly used in the US for residential plumbing, and is easier and quicker to install than PP, which is a big reason PP hasn’t replaced it (in the US).

Rechecked now, PEX became way more accessible it seems. Rehau-style toolkits used to cost several hundreds.

No, PEX is different. PEX is flexible, sometimes more convenient but requires more specialized and expensive tools to install properly.

You can install pex with just a crimping tool that runs around that price.

I prefer copper and not having micro plastics in my water.

If the water main was installed in recent decades it might well be PVC so having copper instead of polythene in your house won't make a meaningful difference.

I feel like half of junior programmers are susceptible to this.

Unfortunately yes. Some mobile games are 30+ GB (and this is probably the major reason for increasing minimum storage), high-res videos take any amount of space and are slow to sync with cloud, in-app downloaded data caches are routinely 2-5 GB each in addition to apps themselves.

Absolutely. Design parametric families of patterns, 3d-scan the person, let customer adjust with live preview, laser cut, then fully automated or low-skill assembly. Probably not currently economical like many things involving physical world manipulation, but without obvious roadblocks.

Russian infra doesn’t suck that much, I guess it was overbuilt in soviet times. Armenian, on the oner hand… But they’re “societally prepared” in the sense that repairs are quick usually, and there are even some upgrades recently.

I had a Russian friend tell me that the Soviet mindset was to overbuild.

He said they tended to build “two of everything,” which is why there’s so many sets of two.

If one craps out, the second can be used in its place, or scavenged for parts.

Gas-powered cars are indeed much cleaner, they are very popular in Armenia because of favorable pricing compared to petrol. And while air in cities here may not be very clean, it's generally not because of cars: people burn trash in winter and there are a lot of dust in the summer.

Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.

LPG cars are also very popular in Poland, because of fuel prices. Not sure about new cars, but if you buy a used car that hasn't somehow yet been converted to burn LPG, the conversion is pretty much the first thing you do.

Natural gas heating is not the problem in this case, it burns very cleanly with semi-modern heaters. The pollution is from coal, wood, and especially all kinds of trash (plastic, painted cardboard, pieces of various engineering wood products).

I'm the US, one presidential administration spent some effort to also squash natural gas.