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Medical use of plactic is a minuscule minority of plastic use. The vast majority of disposable, single-use plastic is not actually necessary. I'd be shocked if less than 90% of single-use disposable plastic was from food containers. Hell, I'd be pretty surprised if it were less than 99%.


By "biggest material impact", I didn't mean the sector that uses the most material. I meant it was the sector that would experience the biggest impact in a real material way, which would be hard to mitigate.

Obbiosl computing would be radically altered as well but I'm not actually sure how much that would matter. Other than during the 90s, there just simply isn't much evidence for all this extra computing having a significant effect on growth.


They do these kinds of studies on mice because mice have a high homology with humans, and a huge number of the findings extrapolate to humans.


Yes, and as a model organism they're fantastic. But I feel any and all studies on mice need to have "on mice" always in any published study or news report about that study.

But it's one thing to pump a 100g/100g of micro plastics to bodyweight directly into the brain of a mouse and another to study mice in a mostly natural environment filled with plastic dust in similar proportions to what we find in our human lives..


Reminds me of those "mobile phone radiation is bad for you" studies. I read a few and calculated the energy they exposed those mice with in joules per kg, and it was like putting your head in a microwave oven for a few seconds. No wonder the mice had some issues afterwards...


Exactly, thank you.

I mean, I can understand doing those kinda of experiments in animals since it would be unethical to do them in humans (not going to discuss the implications of doing tests in animals either, let's just say that doing them in animals is less controversial). But as always the title omits this crucial point of information, mostly probably because this generate more clicks for the website, but I hate this trend so much.


Any idea what percentage of mice studies do extrapolate to humans?


That's a great question and thesis statement. I look forward to hearing the results from someone spending 4 years of their lives researching the answer.


Both of those things are straight-up improvements, even if they're not perfect. You can nit-pick every single thing all you want, but better is better.


Changing the container your soda comes in is like sanding off splinters from the sharpened stake you're about to stab into your leg.


It's a lot more complicated than that.

And I will note that I drink a lot of tea and fruit juice, which also come in plastic bottles. Most drinks come in plastic or metal containers these days. Most of the time, I buy mine in plastic containers.

I wish it were different and I've lived without a car for more than a decade in the US. Try advocating for a less car dependent infrastructure in the US. It gets you mostly pissed on.

Individuals have limits on how much they can control given the larger context of the world they live in. Attacking my consumption of cola drinks as the focus willfully ignores my real point that styrofoam food containers are dramatically worse than plastic bottles.


Not complicated. US has normalized sugar addiction and obesity. Rest of the world sees this as fucking bizarre, like pretending that cigarettes are ok as long as you don't have cancer at the moment.


A. I only drink diet coke. It contains no sugar.

B. I have a genetic disorder. Diet coke contains extracts from the coca plant -- thus the name "Coca Cola" -- minus the hallucinogen cocaine. They have medicinal effects on the gut and lungs, both important systems significantly impacted by my genetic disorder.

C. Before someone else jumps up to tell me I'm evil incarnate, diet coke is the only thing I consume that contains sugar substitutes. I generally avoid them as well. And I drink no other cola drinks. Full stop.

I generally don't discuss this on HN. I don't intend to discuss it further in this thread. Note to self: I thought it was just a few of my relatives who were nutters who believe all sodas are the work of the devil and if you have any health issues and ever drink a single drop of cola, your health problems are entirely your fault for drinking colas. But, no, there are more people out there cast from the same mold.

Edit: comment not 100 percent accurate. I also drink ginger ale. Feeling like you need to defend your personal choices at gun point from judgy random internet strangers is not the best means to engage in meaningful discussion.


I'm sorry that I contributed to a judgmental discussion. I was being glib and short-sighted.


> Most drinks come in plastic or metal containers these days.

But do people buy those drinks daily? I drink mostly just tap water - because it is convenient - as it is almost everywhere.


I live in a 100 year old building with lots of plumbing issues. I don't trust my tap water. I limit my consumption of it.

So, yes, I buy such drinks -- and consume them -- daily.

This is possibly a class issue. Lots of people in the world lack reliable access to clean water. There are entire charities devoted to trying to remedy that fact.


How about filter the tap water? much more convenient, economic, and healthy than keep buying drinks.


How about you butt out of my life?

I didn't come here to ask a bunch of random internet strangers to tell me what a stupid fuck up they believe me to be for absolutely no reason and how easily they think they can solve my problems with a snap of their fingers.

I intended to make two points:

1. Given what a shit world we live in, harder plastic bottles are the lesser evil in many cases. They are much less poisonous than styrofoam containers, especially when hot consumables are put in styrofoam containers.

2. Gas fumes are a related threat, so the less exposure you have to gas fumes, the better.


That's a ridiculous analogy. What about suger-free sodas, or sparkling water without even artificial sweeteners? What about people who drink soda, but still don't go over the daily recommended sugar intake, and otherwise have healthy lifestyles?

I'd be willing to make two assumptions:

1. A gaping wound in your leg is probably less healthy than a moderately-high sugar consumption.

2. People who are concerned about nanoplastic intake are probably also concerned about deleterious health effects of things like sugar intake.


I think sparkling water is a great alternative, but I'm skeptical that all the fake sugars will turn out to be much better in the end. We seem to have a habit of replacing known bad things with things that we just haven't found out are bad yet.


Indeed the WHO advised against sweeteners just a couple weeks back: https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...


Specifically for weight control.

If you're already in the middle of the healthy BMI range and not having trouble keeping a healthy weight, I don't think there's been a demonstrated harm.


The recommendation is based on studies that suggest significant (negative) changes in the gut microbiome which would apply to everyone.

It’s worse for people attempting to lose weight because it apparently doesn’t work for that either, and this is the main reason sweeteners are used.


> 1. A gaping wound in your leg is probably less healthy than a moderately-high sugar consumption.

I didn't saw they were equivalent, I just said they're similar. They're in fact two totally different categories of "unhealthy", which is why I used them. Because over a 20-year period, most stab wounds go away completely, while the effects of sugar intake tend to compound.


"dearth" means "lack" or "scarcity". I think it's the opposite of what you meant.


You are correct. Edited and replaced the word with glut. Thank you!


Analgesic isn't a British word, though. It's used plenty in American medicine.


No, Americans only know brand names because #capitalism.


...that's why everyone in the UK has a Hoover. The most common term I've heard for {acetominophen, ibuprofen, etc} in the US is "pain killer".


So aggressive. In Dutch it's a pijnstiller, or "pain silencer".


I don't think that's what the complaint is. The complaint is that "multibyte" is not necessarily UTF-8. You can't just blindly convert to multibyte assuming that it's UTF-8, because it might not be. You can't convert between two encodings by just going through "multibyte", because it might actually not support all characters you might need to support.

So it really is a deficiency in C. It's nearly useless to have a "multibyte" or "wide character" encoding when those can mean anything. Having conversion between UTF-8 and UTF-32 is useful. Having conversion between "implemetation and platform dependent 'multibyte'" and "implementation and platform dependent 'wide character'" strings is nearly useless.


C multibyte, I believe, was designed around ISO2022-style stateful code switching. It predates Unicode.


> You can't just blindly convert to multibyte assuming that it's UTF-8, because it might not be.

I mentioned that. TFA didn't say that specifically.


It sort of did, but in a completely different place past the critique section:

> But, rather than using them and needing to praying to the heaven’s the internal Multibyte C Encoding is UTF-8 (like with the aforementioned wcrtomb -> mbrtoc8/16/32 style of conversions), we’ll just provide a direction conversion routine and cut out the wchar_t encoding/multibyte encoding middle man.

Not sure why it wasn't mentioned up top. When trying to convert between UTF-8 and UTF-16 without doing it myself or pulling in external dependencies, this was the most annoying thing that slapped me in the face. This is the problem that makes reliable charset conversions between specific encodings actually impossible using just the stdlib functions.


Standards-wise the only answer to this is to deprecate all non-UTF-8 locales and leave non-UTF-8 codesets outside the scope of C.

Basically, non-Unicode needs to always be at the edge, while in the middle everything needs to be Unicode.

From an application perspective it's easy: document that it only works in UTF-8 locales. Really, that is my position for my software. Anything else is ETOOHARD.


I just want reliable conversions. In my situation (duct taping a very old service to a newer one), I needed to read structured files with UTF-16 fields, and process them into an eventual UTF-8 file written to a different location. The host this needed to run on did not have any unicode locales installed (and incidentally, I hate changing locales for my software because it's a program-global switch to flip, and most of my program still wants to run in the user's locale).

I found it ridiculous that there was no way to just convert UTF-16 to UTF-8 without either reinventing that wheel, pulling in an external dependency, or changing global state and having the right system locales installed (as well as knowing the name of at least one of those locales, and guessing a language along with it), despite having the latest C and C++ compilers at my disposal.


It's not a link, it's the image name that you'd directly use from docker or podman. And yes, that's the same one.

One of the things I found so confusing about docker at first was how much information you could leave out of your image reference and docker would assume the rest. I'd prefer if it only assumed localhost, and never automatically assumed any remote registry. There's really no reason for docker.io to be special.


Something else that's confusing is why these links don't just redirect to the registry landing page.

A simple redirect from https://docker.io/mailserver/docker-mailserver to https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver/docker-mailserver would make so much sense.


> It took them years to permit uploading of vp9/opus webms

Did they finally do that? I left permanently a couple years ago (after being there regularly since 2006) because the small "these kinds of threads are why I still hang around this place" threads got more and more infrequent and the regular users got more and more annoying and less fun. Most of the site just became a constant pool of angry racism, cynicism, and paranoia. I can handle seeing stupid racism, but the death of fun and the constant angry sarcasm just got old.

Anyway, I was constantly annoyed that I couldn't upload vp9 webms, and that apng was also not supported given how much better than gif it was. Webp would have been decent, too.


> I don't think there's a truly safe programming language.

This is correct, technically, but you can achieve really high assurances of safety. "safe" is not a binary, but a spectrum.

The rest of the comment is patently false. It's actually close to the opposite of reality. The stricter the type system, the smaller the risk of unexpected behavior. Very very smart people who "know how to manage memory" use C and introduce memory errors very often. It's actually only in small, ungeneralizable programs where weaker type systems don't matter.


Not a counterexample of the type system of Rust itself, but this one with LLVM following C and C++ definitions of "side-effects" is interesting: https://counterexamples.org/eventually-nothing.html


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