Go through it, keep what is truly sir use and definitely try to sell or donate what you can, especially physical media since even without a lot of monetary value those are items that typically aren’t being made any more so are of a finite number. There are those of us that like collecting physical media and have the space to store and enjoy it so helping it get a second life is a better choice than just dumping it in a landfill to rot (almost literally) forever.

Otherwise the key is to relish the nostalgia of going through it but don’t let it color your decisions on what to keep too much. It’s okay to hold on to some things that truly matter to you just for sentimental reasons, but you shouldn’t try to keep it all. My wife and I each have a plastic tote in our basement of keepsakes, we try to limit sentimental things to just that one tote each to help keep it manageable.

I can certainly ask

CIPP was the original plan for the entire run until they got into it. The existing pipe doesn’t have the right fall over the run, being flat in a few places with it seeming as though it rises in at least one spot. They were able to clear the roots from 85% of the line with one area towards the very end giving them the most trouble.

While I have issues with our contractor, the scope of work isn’t really one of them. They are using CIPP for the last few feet to the city main tap, and for the section under the steps to avoid needing to dig that up, as well is along the interior portion before the trap where it is clear 4” cast iron. The only trenchless option we might have in this case is pipe bursting and I’ve not seen anyone in our area that really does that, and it would mean pulling a new 6” pipe which we don’t really. I appreciate the opinion but in this case trenching is really the right option unfortunately for the job being done.

I hadn’t considered this. I imagine soaps and such also don’t help things in a lateral since a lot of the water will have some sort of soap in it (anything other than a toilet flush, and those will be followed by at least a small amount from hand washing).

I do appreciate the viewpoint, and there are areas around us I’d fully consider installing one (both areas with still combined storm/sewer systems and those with challenging topography and less than well maintained systems). Our borough does a great job keeping our system clear and I’ve never talked to anyone around us who has a backup for anything other than a clogged or more commonly collapsed lateral.

It’s a good thing to be thinking of though for others with sewer issues!

Thanks for the idea, our main is about 3’ lower than the first drain so code at least doesn’t stipulate one on our line. We haven’t really had backup issues and this was fully caused by root encroachment (and related issues like seam separation on the terra cotta and loss of proper drainage angle). The line is at least 55 years old so I’m not concerned with backups after we get a clear run going again with a proper functioning house trap.

Thanks! TIL and have a rabbit hole to dive down. This one at least has not pushed out anything native at least since it’s in a yard in a suburb, and the wooded areas around us are chock full of native trees.

It also seems to be at least tolerated by the birds and such around us, we regularly see nests in it every year and the birds are always flitting around it. We offer quality bird feed as well to keep our cardinals and titmouses (titmice?) happy year round. But if it dies and needs replaced we will for sure look at native options.

Thanks, they are not using a trencher but rather an excavator so I’m sure it won’t be clean cuts of the larger roots. I’ll have to ask them to cleanly cut what they can as they work. We don’t have the luxury working any further out though since the lateral is where it is.

Interesting, about 3/4 of the drip area is mulched with very few plants in it and honestly the grass doesn’t do great under the canopy so maybe it won’t need to compete as hard. I’ll have to see if I can get our borough tree guy to take a look at it, otherwise I’ll need to find a tree company near us.

I’ve seen 3x the drip edge but that’s a pretty similar area. This is under the drip edge so not a great spot.

Im just happy we caught the issue before it was really bad. A little backup in the basement let us find a partially collapsed cast iron house trap (which is what was originally dug up, that’s the pile of dirt in the picture) and a lateral that was so full of roots I’m surprised we didn’t have bigger problems. Luckily our HO policy includes service line coverage so at the end of the day if we can keep the tree it’s really not that bad.

Yeah, I’ve had that same thought. About 30 linear feet of 6” pipe chock full of tree roots tells me it’s been feeding on that buffet for a little while. That said we live in an area where trees do really well anyways, there’s another tree about 20 feet away that’s also does fantastic and it’s not even close to anything as great as a sewer pipe so I do have hope that after a year or two it will bounce back, but it looks like we will end up cutting around 1/4 to 1/3 of its roots out. Luckily the house blocks the predominant wind and the hill slopes away from the house so worst case it shouldn’t be a risk to the house.

This is comparing apples and oranges though. Automotive cooling systems are designed for a very different problem set than datacenter cooling systems. The temperature gradients are much larger in ICE systems, they need to be small, light, and portable, and they cool something that generates much more variable heat loads.

A data center creates a consistent heat load, is stationary, with access to a source of water that is functionally limitless to the operators, cools a much smaller gradient and needs to do so in the most economical way possible to be as profitable as it can be to the owners. Evaporative coolers are dead simple, very effective, and scale very easily which is why they are used.

It evaporates, that’s how it cools. The water is sprayed over a heat exchanger and gets turned to essentially steam and then new water is pumped in and thus the water is “gone”. It will fall as rain somewhere but likely not near where it was taken from.

A closed loop system could be used but they are more expensive and require more maintenance so large data centers don’t usually use them unless required to.

It really depends on what you want to accomplish, your priorities, the amount of time and effort you are willing/able to put into it, and your risk appetite (not just privacy but also availability of your mail server).

It is for sure one of the more challenging services to self-host, and IMO doesn’t offer a huge improvement over a hosted solution with your own domain from an actual security and privacy standards point since email is inherently insecure and non-privacy protecting without adding additional not-always-standard layers on top like PGP/GPG, SMIME, one-time passcode escrow systems, etc. that all have their own huge trade offs.

Your self-hosted server will have downtime as well, some planned but also some unplanned. If your server is down, it can’t accept or send mail obviously which can be an issue (many services will try to deliver again after a back off period, but won’t try forever). Enterprises work around this with load balanced servers and running different services on fault tolerant infrastructure. That increases complexity quickly though and isn’t what most self hosters do AFAIK.

I use SimpleLogin with my own domain and have no problems 99% of the time. Every once in a while I’ll find a site that doesn’t like my .net domain, but those typically won’t take anything that isn’t a major provider. I use that as a sign I probably don’t need to use that service.

There is, I think, a few things that contribute here.

1. The US has a very stupid “bigger is better” mentality. So if you go out you expect a large portion because that translates to better (and more value). This is of course not true, but culturally it’s very embedded.
2. almost everyone I know takes home some portion of their meal from a restaurant. So that single portion is really two, or maybe three.
3. IME people don’t usually have giant portions at home, they sometimes do of course, but things tend to be more sane for home cooked meals for your family. They also tend to be a lot more balanced, with more veg and grain.
4. what you see on TV is often sensationalized, and not fully indicative of normal here.

I would hazard to guess they are investigating how the use of AI was missed in their editorial process, how they missed the incorrect quotes, and who violated their journalistic standards by using an AI to directly write article text since it’s a coauthored piece.

In typical Ars fashion, the editorial team appears to be looking into what happened and are being fairly open about at things: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards.1511650/

I will be very disappointed if this was BenJ or Dan [edit: I had messed this up, it wasn’t Dan but Kyle Orland that coauthored it] Kyle using AI to write their article since both have had really good pieces in the past, but it doesn’t sound like this is some Ars wide shift at this point. Like all things, it makes sense that it will take time for them to investigate this, Aurich (the Ars community lead and graphic designer) was clear that with this happening on a Friday afternoon and a US holiday on Monday, it’s likely to be into next week before they have anything they can share.

Yes, hail is from thunderstorms and is generally larger, ice pellets are winter precipitation and almost always smaller. Hail usually lasts only a few minutes, ice pellets can last many hours.

Hail is formed through a completely different process and is a spring/summer precip type associated with thunderstorms. It forms as water gets lifted high into the atmosphere from updrafts in the thunderstorm then fall before getting lifted again. Hail often shows layers (like a jawbreaker) and can grow very large.

In the US, sleet/graupel is essentially just a frozen raindrop and is a winter precip type. Wintry mix is what the US National Weather Service uses for any mix of rain, snow, sleet, graupel, and freezing rain. The WMO and Europe use Ice Pellets for frozen raindrops and Sleet for mixed rain and snow. So both are official terms depending on where you are.