Why YSK:

Although politicians and journalists often treat it like major platform, or even the "digital town square," X is fairly minor social media platform. The various Meta platforms (including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger) have combined 10 billion monthly active users. X (Twitter) is about 5.5% that size. It trails behind not only the obvious giants like Meta, Google (YouTube) and TikTok (Douyin), but also well behind platforms that are exclusive to one country or region, like WeChat or Weibo, and behind "also-rans" like Snapchat, Reddit, and Pinterest.

X is not a major platform. It has continued to struggle with outages, trolling, user exodus, and now a little more than an Internet ghost town.

I know a lot of people who think that your US mortgage "restarts" if you refinance. That is not true. If you are able to refinance your mortgage with a new rate just ~~.25%~~ a little bit lower than your current rate, the cost of refinancing can pay off within just a year!

A little bit of "Mortgage theory"

Each and every mortgage payment you make is the sum of three components:

1. The interest on your total balance (balance=the amount you owe), which is exactly the interest rate you have (APR) divided by 12 (because the "A" in APR means annual, and you make 12 payments, once per month in a year). This is the what I will call the basic rule of mortgages.
2. A principle payment that is exactly what is necessary to cause your mortgage, with your given the APR, to be totally paid off after the duration of your mortgage.
3. If you have an "escrow account", then there is an addition of property taxes and property insurance which is independent of the above two.

For a normal fixed-rate mortgage, the sum of 1. and 2. above will never change. Gradually, 1. will decrease and 2. will increase.

What happens when you do a refinance

Every time you make a payment, the part of your payment that goes to "principle" changes what you owe, by making it decrease a little bit. As a consequence, your costs go down if you can lower your APR. You can lower your APR by refinancing, and refinancing doesn't change your principle; what you've already paid off is what you've paid off.

When you refinance, you, do effectively "restart your mortgage", which is probably why the myth I'm discussing here is so stubborn! You had a 30 year mortgage, you were paying it off for 10 years, and then you refinance and you have a 30 year mortgage again. That sounds like a bad deal, but here's what you're missing:

1. You can just get a 20 or 15 year mortgage instead of a 30 year mortgage. You could get a 15 year mortgage and maybe have a higher monthly payment, but pay off your mortgage 5 years early and save hundreds of thousands of dollars. Generally, shorter mortgages have a lower interest rate, saving you even more!
2. You can get a new 30 year mortgage at a lower rate, and overpay it, making your monthly cost effectively the same, but you still pay off your mortgage years early! I'm not even sure it's possible to get a mortgage that penalizes paying off a mortgage early.

Sometimes, people say "you pay the interest first". This is simply not true! This is the main crux of this myth. No, you do not pay interest first! You only pay the interest on the existing balance. It just seems that way, because, per my basic rule of mortgages, when you owe more, you are paying more for interest, and as you pay off your mortgage, you owe less!

The catch: refinance fees

It costs money to do a refinance. The bank will charge you "origination fees", they might charge you appraisal fees, in certain consumer-hostile states there might even be a refinance tax, because the banks successfully bribed your state to make those taxes so that you don't refinance.

These fees can be thousands or 10s of thousands of dollars. But they are the only reason that it might take a year or two to "break even" after refinancing. Just subtract those fees from your savings to see the break-even duration. If that duration is less than a couple years, it's probably a good idea to refinance, unless you expect rates to get even lower in that time (they probably won't right now, IMO).

A note on variable rate mortgages

Variable rate mortgages are not necessarily a bad deal and may very well be a good deal. They don't really change the formula above very much other than that the APR can (and will) change. In the interests of simplicity, I disregarded the effects of a variable rate mortgage, other than to say that most of the content of my post probably still applies.

Final notes

Shop Around! Shop around when looking for banks! Even after you have a "preapproval" letter from your bank when you are first house shopping, you can still shop around even though they say you cannot (a contract isn't a contract until money changes hands!).

There was an Ask Lemmy post about descaler and it reminded me of an experience from my own household adventures.

I use both Iron Out and Barkeepers Friend at home to deal with my foundation drains. Both products have different formulas with different mechanisms and they are not compatible. I'm thankful I am so paranoid or else I might not have realized and potentially created a harmful situation in my basement (a particularly bad place for the heavy gas that forms!).

Iron Out

Liquid forms are called Super Iron Out and Super Iron Out Outdoors.

Both have oxalic acid as the active ingredients although the SDS for Super Iron Out says Oxalic acid and the Iron Out Outdoors says Ethanedioic acid, dihydrate.

Both Oxalic acid and Ethanedioic acid, dihydrate are powders, not solutions. On the surface this probably seems extremely autistic of me and it is, but it's also really important.

Let's look at the CAS number given on the SDS. Oxalic Acid is given CAS 144-62-7 Ethanedioic acid, dihydrate is given 6153-56-6. Ethanedioic acid is another name for Oxalic acid and the reason for the different CAS number is the "dihydrate". This distinction only matters in solid form. If it's in a solution it's the same damn thing (except for the fact that it ionizes into two forms and the relative abundance of each depends on pH). Therefore it is needlessly confusing and wrong and I hate that lol. That's not the point of the post but I needed to get that out.

The solid form of Iron Out is a mixture of different compounds, none of which are any powdered version of Oxalic acid.

It contains Sodium hydrosulfite, Sodium metabisulfite, Sodium sulfite, Sodium Carbonate and Citric acid. It's super tempting to break these out into what they do but they can perform multiple roles and that will come up later.

Barkeeper's Friend

Barkeepers Friend also has solid and liquid versions.

The solid version is called Cleaner and Polish or Cookware.

The active ingredients are Oxalic Acid (CAS #144-62-7), a surfactant and an abrasive. The difference in the two formulas are the surfactant and abrasive, but neither of these are involved in why the two formulas are not compatible so I'll gloss over that.

The liquid versions are called Soft or Multipurpose.

They still use oxalic acid as the main ingredient but again different quantities (or no) abrasives and different surfactants.

What's your point?

You should not mix Oxalic acid and sulfites. Sulfides can react with acids (even weak ones) and form hydrogen sulfide gas. I have more experience with SO2 than I want and I can give you my professional option that it fucking sucks.

So if you are not careful and assume Iron Out and Barkeepers friend are interchangable you may have a bad time. Or, if you are using them for different purposes (powder iron out to remove iron deposits and oxalic acid to control biofilm growth) you may also have a bad time.

Don't they do the same thing? Why are they not compatible?

Kinda but not really.

Rust is stupid complicated actually. It's often simplified as Iron(III) Oxide but that's absolutely not the whole story even though it sounds super technical. It's useful because if the three oxidation states of iron this is the one that flakes off most easily.

There are probably multiple reasons but intended use of both products is likely why the formulas are different.

Barkeepers friend is primarily used on metal surfaces which might have corrosion and to remove the resultant rust. The reaction between oxalic acid and rust isn't one step and it isn't simple because both the iron oxide and the oxalic acid exist in different states in solution, largely dependent on pH.

I think the easiest way to explain is to contrast with Muriatic acid (HCl). HCl is a strong acid (It's got an estimated pKa of -5.9) and will brute force the insoluble iron oxide apart and form a soluble Iron chloride. The iron oxide is acting as the base in the acid-base reaction. If the acid then goes on to contact more iron in the metal it will oxidize it so that the formation of oxides will occur more readily. So it can remove rust and encourage new rust. Neat.

Oxalic acid is a weak acid. The two forms have pKa of 1.2 and 4.2. Oxalic acid is not doing an acid-base reaction with the oxides. It reacts with Iron(III) oxides to form a soluble complex. This is called chelation. It's more complicated than that of course but what is important to remember is that it is reductive not oxidative. It's not absolutely safe for stainless steel but it's way less aggressive than Muriatic acid.

Iron Out on the other hand is more focused on removing iron deposits on non metallic surfaces. The combo of sodium hydrosulfite and sodium metabisulfite was patented by Hach as a rust remover from non metallic surfaces. They are stable powders that when made into solution form soluble iron sulfite from iron oxide via reduction.

Citric acid and sodium carbonate also work together. Sodium carbonate raises the pH of the solution so the citrates can still do chelation without the level of attacks on metal metal what would occur at lower pH.

Sodium sulfite is probably there as an oxygen scavenger and corrosion inhibitor so that any oxidized iron that exists does not as easily form an oxide. Again this is likely related to the use of both products as iron out powder isn't always rinsed off right away like barkeepers friend is.

So while Iron Out also considers risk to metallic surfaces, the cleating agents likely selected knowing use on metal is not the main intent. Cost is probably also a factor.

TL;DR:

Maybe just don't mix cleaning chemicals ever. Even if they have the same "purpose" or even the same name they might use different, incompatible active ingredients.

The GFDL is a free documentation license that's designed, among other things, to be easy-to-use alongside the GPL and LGPL software licenses. Whenever you go to submit something on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc., there's a clause stating that you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the GFDL.

The article 'Wikipedia:Copyrights' gets into more of what "most" means here if you genuinely want to reuse its material for your project. Notably, the amount of text that's actually been imported under CC BY-SA 4.0 and thus cannot be licensed under the GFDL is quite miniscule; I don't think I've ever seen this happen before.

(Notably this is not the case for Wikimedia Commons, where each piece of media has its own licensure.)

Why YSK: Probably a lot fewer people know about Wikimedia's usage of the GFDL than they do about Creative Commons (BY-SA 4.0). If you're making a project licensed under the GPL, LGPL, or GFDL, GFDL material will slot in much more elegantly than CC BY-SA 4.0, meaning you can easily reuse material from these major open knowledgebases.

Why YSK

You may already know this, but your friend or family may not.

These things can cause great harm to your bowels, and your body at large

When I was a Seventh-day Adventist, there were a lot fringe people that milked others for money, and that included bowel cleanses.

The types of testimonies I heard was things such as "I never felt so much better" "I feel so good right now after doing this" "I feel like I am not bloated" "I am even pushing out mucous and am detoxifying everything"

First, if you are seeing mucous come out of your bowels, that is a BAD THING, and is something you should be seeing your doctor about. Either the protective mucous is coming out, or you have some pretty bad inflammation that should be checked out sooner than later. Mucous should never becoming out of your butthole. If it is, you need to make sure you tell your medical provider immediately.

Second, our bowels have more than just poo poo that go through them. Of course there is good bacteria, but there is also fluid and electrolytes down there. Having a sudden shift of fluid being taken into your bowels in order to flush those "toxins" out carries the risk of becoming severely dehydrated and losing electrolytes. That is also bad.

Do not pay money for those. I am sure (or hope) I am preaching to the choir, but those bowel cleansers can cause some serious harm.

If you feel you are suffering from something in your bowels, please speak to a qualified healthcare provider like a medical doctor, physician assistant, nurse practitioner, etc who has experience in said field. A GI doctor is more than skilled and knowledgeable enough to get to the root of what may be causing you issues. They have the tools to look straight into your bowels via colonoscopy, EGD, take biopsies, interpret the results, and help you make changes or give meds to help.

After you are seen, ask the doctor if they know of any good registered dieticians, none of that nutritionist bullshit (unless that is the qualified are called in your country), in case you were diagnosed with, say, celiac, IBS, etc.

If you are suffering from bowel issues, the people selling things only want your money. That is especially so if they sell it in their own "clinic." You aren't anything to them.

Perhaps it is the same with a medical doctor, but at least they are actually qualified to do something.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Paywall free link: https://archive.ph/6YIDb

Sellers on Amazon and TikTok Shop have sold jewellery containing illegal amounts of a cancer-causing metal, an investigation by The Sunday Times has found. Items have been sold on the marketplaces containing large amounts of cadmium, a toxic heavy metal that is carcinogenic. The legal limit for this element in the UK is 0.01 per cent in any piece of jewellery. One £2.99 ring bought on Amazon that was advertised as 925 silver contained more than 9,000 times the maximum allowance and was estimated to be made of 92.3 per cent cadmium.

YSK this because the high amount of public debt, which has been getting a lot of attention in the US, is actually by design.

In our double-entry bookkeeping system, money is created via bank lending and government spending, adding to the economy, and is destroyed via loan repayments and taxes, subtracting from the economy.

Central banks create a wealth pump mechanism into assets through money printing, which erodes consumer purchasing power, driven by deficit spending, which creates money for the private sector.

Profits are privatized; losses are socialized.

• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-023-01304-5
• https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy

The reason this is important and timely is because the messaging around these tools implicitly suggests there is an air of authority and integrity it would be impossible for them to have given that no journalists have examined and analyzed the mechanisms of these tools at any stage of their development.

In my opinion, that is a worthy YSK because people don't know that they can view and interact with Bluesky content without giving your data to an American for-profit entity.

In France, there is a powerful left-wing politician named Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

He was senator for decades. He was previously a minister. He has run for President multiple times. People close him describe him as a political beast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_M%C3%A9lenchon

On october 3th 2023, the newspaper Le Monde published an absolutely astonishing investigation into his girlfriend. They reveal that his girlfriend SCREAMS and HUMILIATES ordinary people. And he knows that.

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2023/10/03/pourquoi-la-justice-enquete-sur-la-deputee-lfi-sophia-chikirou_6192142_3224.html

3 days later, on october 6th 2023, Melenchon took a trip to Morocco.

Believing he was far away for any camera, he made a cynical confession to moroccan university students:

"I really don't care what newspapers reveal. The vast majority of voters don't read newspapers. They watch online videos"

"We are now in the great era of social media"

https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/lfi-melenchon-prefere-sa-communication-video-qui-se-compte-en-millions-aux-articles-lus-par-des-milliers-de-personnes-20231005

Elon Musk regularly attacks the New York Times.

On social media, he urges people to not read it.

That's because the New York Times has published incredible stories about him.

Elon Musk knowingly lied about the safety of self-driving vehicles. Multiple people were killed

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/magazine/tesla-autopilot-self-driving-elon-musk.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0FA.6BPE.ictTmt9kuYUM

Musk is sexually harassing SpaceX engineers

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/business/spacex-workers-elon-musk.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0FA.xbgX.h15uViBA8cME

The Musk Foundation is breaking the law:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/elon-musk-foundation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0FA.WyJ4.vfnRZI725oNm

When powerful politicians and businessmen tell you "don't read newspapers", they aren't trying to give you good life advice.

It's a manipulation attempt.

Are you on the list? If so, congrats!

More info: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/45728788

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49778353

Also /c/modabuse. Also /c/yepowertrippinbastards. Also lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, comrade, ACAB, and 552 individual accounts across 67 instances, about half of them on lemmy.world.

None of this is in the source code. It's downloaded at runtime from a file nobody has ever looked at.

If you're just tuning in

Tesseract is a third-party web frontend for Lemmy, maintained by asimons04 and licensed AGPL-3.0. Admins deploy it on their own servers alongside or instead of lemmy-ui, and there are public instances of it people use to browse Lemmy generally. If you've used a Lemmy site that didn't look like stock Lemmy, there's a fair chance it was this.

Last week db0 posted a PSA: Tesseract contains a blacklist of instance domains compiled directly into the application. 32 of them. Admins can't see it, can't configure it, and aren't told it's there. Connect to a listed instance and the app tells you it's "incompatible," which is not true.

I went through the code to see how that was implemented. The hardcoded list turns out to be the small half of the system.

There's a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads. It isn't in the git repository. It's unauthenticated and world-readable, so anyone can pull it. Right now it carries 552 user accounts, 2,275 username patterns, 54 instances, 97 communities, 289 keyword patterns and 351 domains, with every category set to hide matches rather than flag them. Not collapsed behind a click. Simply absent, with no indication anything was removed.

Verify all of it in ten seconds

curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \
  | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.json

That's the live policy, base64-wrapped gzip, 111KB of JSON when it unpacks. There's a stale fallback copy at /data/policy.dat as well.

It filters criticism of moderators

• lemmy.sdf.org/c/modabuse — listed
• lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/yepowertrippinbastards — listed
• lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/YPTBcirclejerk — listed
• community regex power ?tripping?
• keyword censoring me

Call the rest of it whatever you like. This part is not spam defence.

It filters words

The 32 community name patterns include Communis(t|m), Conservativ(e|es|ism), Leftis(t|m), Libertarian(ism)?, ^Green Part(y|ies), Zionis(t|m), (Police|Cops), guillotine and billionaire.

Keywords include comrade, ACAB, neoliberal, proletaria(n|t) and death to.

Filtered communities on instances that aren't blocked: lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, lemmy.today/c/news, lemmy.ca/c/politicalnewscanada, lemmy.ca/c/usa, infosec.pub/c/strategic_unions.

The 552 users aren't bots

67 instances. 272 on lemmy.world alone, 40 on sh.itjust.works, 19 on lemmy.ca, and 28 instances contributing exactly one person each.

355 of the 552 usernames are plain alphabetic, twelve characters or under, median length eight. Only 36 look like spam registrations. A bot list looks like the opposite of that.

Seven of them aren't even Lemmy. There are Mastodon and Friendica accounts in there: people who have never used Lemmy, hidden by a Lemmy frontend, with no possible way of finding out.

I have the list and I'm not posting it. Most of these are ordinary people who got pattern-matched, and 552 names on this comm is a harassment target inside an hour. Run the command above and grep for yourself.

And it lies about it

When the instance block fires you get: "Incompatible Instance. Not Supported. $instance is not compatible with Tesseract."

Nothing is incompatible. It's a policy decision dressed as an API error, and it's what had db0 chasing a version mismatch that never existed.

For the hidden users, communities and keywords, you get no message at all.

Admins can't switch it off

Tesseract has env vars for PUBLIC_DOMAIN_BLACKLIST, PUBLIC_FAKE_NEWS_BLACKLIST and the shortener lists. There is none for either blocklist. enableToxicMode bypasses the other filters and explicitly not this one.

Self-host it and you cannot disable this, nothing in your config admits it exists, and the contents can change without you pulling a commit.

Before someone says it

A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. "It targets the left" doesn't survive the data and I'm not going to pretend it does.

The problem is that spam filtering and political editorial got welded into one undocumented, remotely-updatable blob, shipped hidden, to admins who've never read it and users who don't know it's there. The spam work is what makes the rest unauditable: "it's a spam list" answers every individual question and none of the whole.

And /c/modabuse is not spam.

Asks

1. Publish the runtime policy in the repo, or kill the endpoint.
2. Stop reporting a policy block as a technical incompatibility.
3. Tell users when something's been hidden. One line.
4. Give operators an off switch, like every other blacklist in the codebase has.

It's AGPL-3.0 and db0 already forked it. That's the licence working as designed. But forking isn't disclosure, and the admins who need this are precisely the ones with no reason to go looking.

If you run Tesseract, you are relaying a 111KB moderation policy you have never read, under your instance's name, to users who don't know it exists.

Full contents of every list, unedited, in the comments.

Why YSK: consuming too much sodium can lead to high blood pressure, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke. In my country (USA), the average daily sodium intake is over 3,300mg, exceeding the recommended maximum of 2,300mg. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends an even lower maximum of 2,000mg.

Also: with the rising cost of food, being mindful of additives that increase sell weight is important.

https://ia803206.us.archive.org/26/items/the-dictionary-of-obscure-sorrows/The%20Dictionary%20of%20Obscure%20Sorrows.pdf

Never have I felt so understood. I am so glad/sad I know of this now.

Excerpt:

adomania

n. the sense that the future is arriving ahead of schedule, that all those years with fantastical names like '2013' are bursting from their hypothetical cages into the arena of the present, furiously bucking the grip of your expectations while you lean and slip in your saddle, one hand reaching for reins, the other waving up high like a schoolkid who finally knows the answer to the question

When you share a YouTube video using the share button it adds “si=some_unique_code” to the URL. If you don’t remove that it shows your personal account to anyone who receives it so that they can chat directly with you. For a lot of people this is their real name.

I’ve seen it all over Lemmy so I figured I’d mention it here! You only need the stuff before the question mark in the URL to let others see the video.

This can also be turned off in your YouTube settings under the privacy section. The setting is “channel visibility for shared links”. It will still add the si code for tracking though.

• They have been found to have been altering the contents of the archived articles.
• They have DDoSed a server using our browsers when we visit their site
• Wikipedia has blacklisted it
• It's DNS is banned widely

Guidance published ... asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content;

Recommended alternatives include: Internet Archive Ghostarchive Megalodon

The Wikipedia guidance points out that the Internet Archive and its website, Archive.org, are “uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.” The Internet Archive is a nonprofit based in the US.

ArsTechnica Source

Cromite browser was a privacy and security oriented Android browser.

Their latest update was in 21th of May: v148.0.7778.168.

Their commit history also suggest that the browser is slowly being sunset.

To put it into context, the current version of chrome on Android is 150.0.7871.63, released on 30th of June.

Content Warning: a lot of this stuff is obviously NSFL

Don't go through this footage if you're not fully prepared to see things you may never be able to unsee.

It includes:

• 64,537 videos
• 17,905 photos
• Ability to download individual videos
• Searchable index
• Exhaustive sources list (300+ journalists)
• Geolocation data
• Livemap with minute to minute updates
• Victim list

In a news media environment that doesn't want us to know/remember that a genocide is even happening in the first place, archives like this will preserve the record for future generations and ensure that the victims of this slaughter are not erased from history.

Why do I think You Should Know?

One only need look to the injustices done to the Muslim community of New York City by the NYPD and others for an example of what the consequences of not understanding a diversity of people for what they are.... Any New Yorker worth their salt understands the importance of Muslims to New York City, to act like because some people from a different country who just happened to have the same religion... only vaguely? committed an act of terror would mean that Muslim New Yorkers liked it anymore than any other New Yorkers did? Yet history repeated itself and Mosques were treated as compounds to be monitored like the US did to US Japanese descendant populations in WW2....

What I mean by that point is that I think right now it is important to understand the nuance to groups that people want us to simplify down to a soundbite that serves as a justification.

The Website I linked is a University Of Michigan curated list of resources to learn about Islam (and I mean that in a very basic sense of learn about the history of it) that is mostly focused on the resources the University provides but is nonetheless a really compact extensive list you can quickly use as a starting point if you want to research something.

This is also a nice simple website I found that visualizes populations of Muslims on earth in a nice easy to understand way.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/muslim-population-by-country

Personally growing up in the US I know until pretty late into my life that I simply had no idea there were so many Muslims on Earth. Living through the post 9/11 years I would often hear statements said about Muslims or people who follow Islam from people who didn't really know any Muslims and the day I learned that there were that many Muslims it hit me as really unintuitive.

~2 Billion people is an incredible amount of human beings, there is no way even if you had infinite lifetimes to try that you could meaningfully reduce that many people down to anything other than the same spirit any human being is born with.

I don't mean this post in aggressive way, I just think genuinely more people should know in Christian predominant nations that when somebody starts generalizing about Islam or Muslims the correct response is to call attention to that fundamental logic error. Sure, criticize Islam, analyze it, talk about the politics of it, but be specific and be curious about the actual nuance to the story!

Any time someone says "Muslims always" or "Islam is inherently... ____" return to this basic fact. Not only is that bigotry, the basic reality is that there are so many Muslims on Earth living in so many different places with different cultures that any kind of generalization is at a face level absurd like saying the world is flat.

"Creating the internet's largest dedicated repository of information on anti-consumer practices, one edit at a time."

I think it's important to have one central, accessible place documenting every scandal, controversy, screw-up a company has ever pulled. It allows you to make better choices and to better cut through the PR bullshit of said companies.

However, consumer rights wiki doesn't come up when I search for "[company X] controversies" or similar terms in search engines (based on my limited testing).

That's why I feel it's important for more people to know about this site.

Good introduction video : INTRODUCING THE CONSUMER PROTECTION DATABASE: EXPOSE EXPLOITATION & HOLD COMPANIES ACCOUNTABLE! - YouTube

Absorption coolers use heat to regenerate their refrigerant. Two common types are a water vapour-LiBr chiller, and an ammonia-water chiller (in fact Einstein patented a mini bar chiller design still used today that has no moving parts, using just helium or hydrogen and gas absorption/evaporation to move refrigerating gasses around)

Single effect chillers have a low Coefficient of Performance (CoP) roughly around 0.4-0.6, meaning for every watt of heat you apply to a single effect chillers, you move 0.4-0.6W of heat, but they only need a minimum of 90⁰C in heat to power them.

Double effect chillers can reach 0.9-1.2 CoP.

Flue gasses are typically hotter than 90⁰C, so you'll often see absorbers part of combined heat and power systems. Cooling in the summer, heating in the winter. All using waste heat from power generation.

What I find the most fascinating about them is they work using heat. The only power you need to apply is for a few pumps to move fluids around at low pressures, otherwise the primary refrigeration energy comes from heat regenerating the refrigerant.

I've often wondered what a district cooling system using these would get for efficiency if you colocated it with something energy hungry like a cement kiln or glass kiln.

Video of how a double effect chillers works

District cooling video

Edit: these are used already for district cooling, just usually for a campus like a university or government complex. The big benefit is you can run them on marginal heat sources, even off of low grade geothermal.

You should know this ahead to fully enjoy that beauty of compact, mathematically sound week chart, and perhaps the accompanying momentary illusion that world makes sense again.

The next opportunity to enjoy most compact possible calendar page will be in 2038, so don't miss it!

(Bonus: if you notice that 1st week is week 5 so apparently January 2027 also has 4 weeks--what gives? That's because in ISO week numbering, first three days of January 2027 count as week 53 of 2026. In other words, week 1 of 2027 starts on January 4th.)

If your calendar starts with Sunday, this past February of 2026 was actually compact, and the next one is in 2037.