Interesting Links for 02-10-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Do not charge your phone in the bath.

(tags:phones electricity baths water )

2. Solar leads EU electricity generation as renewables hit 54%

(tags:europe renewables solarpower )

3. A plurality of Brits see Reform, their policies, and their voters as racist

(tags:racism politics UK )

4. Progressive Era America put 200,000 poor kids on trains to send them West. Now we know what affected whether they thrived.

(tags:sociology children family USA )

5. "I built ChatGPT with Minecraft redstone!"

(tags:ai minecraft )

6. Sora 2 and the end of copyright as we know it

(tags:copyright ai )

Comments

[lilysea]

...Do not charge your phone in the bath

I am very surprised that this did not occur to an adult who was, presumably, sober, not drug affected, and not intellectually disabled

Aren't the risks of electricity + water widespread knowledge in those parts of the world that have home electricity?

[andrewducker]

You'd really really think so.

[lilysea]

I can be brainfogged and absent minded as hell

and even so

I'm like

"under what circumstances would I used a plugged in charging mobile phone while in the bath?"

and the only circumstances I can imagine are

"If I was in so much agony from period cramps/other muscle spasms that I had to be in hot water in order to cope/breathe/talk, and I needed to call an ambulance, and my phone was too flat to use without being plugged in"

[rhythmaning]

I think this article should win the poor woman the Darwin award.

[lilysea]

Progressive Era America put 200,000 poor kids on trains to send them West. Now we know what affected whether they thrived.

From 1913 to 1982, Fairbridge Farm School in Australia was home to a total of 3580 children who came to Fairbridge from Britain and other overseas countries under various child migration schemes to learn to be farm labourers (boys) or domestic servants (girls).

Some of the unaccompanied children sent to Australia from overseas were as young as 6 years old.

Some were orphans, some had two living parents who were too poor to feed them, or two living parents who had alcohol issues.

Sadly, because Fairbridge was an institution run mainly by adult men with no emotional ties to the children, and no real third-party outside/independent oversight, there was a horrific level of violent physical punishment; and an even more horrific level of child sexual abuse.

Eventually, the Australian government apologised in parliament and organised financial compensation for the survivors, who are now all aged 60 plus.

[jack]

I keep electricity out of the bathroom but I had no idea a phone charger had enough electricity to be deadly:(

I feel silly, but better to be honest, I suspect many maybe most people were the same.

[slemslempike]

Same here! I could also very much see myself using the phone in the bath as it's waterproof/"safe", then noticing the charge and thinking ah, I'll just charge that then and not making the immediate connection that this makes it unsafe. (Whereas if I had a phone already plugged in I think that would register as unsafe already.)

[simont]

Yes, me too – I would have expected that any kind of low-voltage charger had deadly electricity only at the mains-plug end.

But I'm at no risk in this case, because I keep my phone well away from a full bath, charging or not. I do see why someone might want to play phone games in the bath, but the risk of *kersplosh* "oh, bugger" just seems too close to 100%.

[andrewducker]

My phone is IP67 rated, which means it can be 1m underwater for up to half an hour. So a brief kersplosh in the bath doesn't seem that worrying.

[bens_dad]

I forgot about my phone and took it paddle boarding. Since Ben was with me this also involved swimming and walking chest-deep in the lake.

Even though it was not a waterproof model, everything is still working - except for the mobile phone function - so I now have a pocket sized, wifi-connected, USB powered computer with battery backup.

[andrewducker]

That's basically what Sophia has. (As she has my old phone, to use as a mini-tablet).

I'm glad that at least some functionality survived!

[jack]

A phone that can't take phone calls is the dream :)

[lilysea]

My phone is IP67 rated, which means it can be 1m underwater for up to half an hour

Wow! I had no idea that there were mobile phones that water proof!

I thought all mobile phones were "spill part of your drink on them, buy a new mobile phone" !

[andrewducker]

It's actually pretty common nowadays. What model do you have?

[lilysea]

iphone se 3rd gen, row, 64gb, red

[andrewducker]

1m 30 minutes: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108039

[bens_dad]

I would have expected that any kind of low-voltage charger had deadly electricity only at the mains-plug end.

I was thinking that, but had indeed forgotten that it is the current that kills.
I have a USB-C cable in front of me marked "60w" [presumably meaning 60W]. At 5V that is 12A. Ouch.
(Low-voltage devices are exempt from some safety regs, but only because, in theory, they cannot produce enough current to be dangerous.)

Of course, water may have run along the cable and connected to the mains terminals, taking the phone and charger out of the equation.

The critical point is that there are no sockets in the bathroom for a reason, so don't use an extension cable to plug something in.

It seems razor sockets near baths and showers in the UK must use a transformer to isolate the mains voltage output, so that connecting part of it to earth does not complete a circuit.
---
I'm now worried that Ben could do this at some point in the future. He might have the smarts to use an extension lead, but I fear he may not be taught to keep electricity out of the bathroom.

[andrewducker]

Is it something he could usefully learn from you?

[calimac]

Our bathrooms all have sockets, which I use for things like electric toothbrushes. I charge my phone there also, because it's convenient. But it's by the sink, far away from the bathtub, and it'd be a deuced nuisance to use the phone while it's charged in anyway. If I need to use the phone while it's charging (rare), I unplug it and then plug it back in again.

D'oh

[lsanderson]

I was thinking that too, and it may have been true when they appeared upon the world, but the amps are a lot higher than they ustta be, and there are a lot of cheap, err, inexpensive phone chargers than there ustta be.

[juan_gandhi]

Thank you so much! Especally #4, #5, and #6. (The first three are kind of obvious, judging by the titles)

[jack]

I also realise I don't actually know how the electrical danger works.

This incident was charging cable to ground. Is just touching the end of a charging cable a risk when you're not in the bath?

Is touching a charging cable with both hands a risk?

[andrewducker]

The active parts are all hidden inside the port, so you should be fine, so long as you don't get enough water in there to connect your hands to the current.

(I would hope that most chargers have protection built in too)

[bens_dad]

Wet skin might carry more than a hundred times as much charge as dry skin, so the risk is much greater when wet.

There was a suggestion that she would probably have been OK if she had not touched the shower tap, which suggests that the tap was connected to earth/ground.
Both hands touching the same part of the cable is not dangerous in itself (but might kill you if your feet or body are touching another cable), but if one hand touches live and the other touches neutral or ground, then yes you become part of the circuit and are at risk.

If a cable touches water then that water can become effectively part of the cable. IIRC this would not happen with distilled water but is very likely with sea water. If your tap/bath water contains dissolved salts or other conducting substances, that will make it more like sea water and better at carrying the current.

I suspect that plastic baths are much safer than the enamelled metal baths in use when I was a child.

I have seen several USB cables with what look like woven outer covers; if that is porous the water might have been sucked along it, meaning the the wires might not even have been involved in the circuit.

[jducoeur]

In #6, I feel like the article is glossing past what seems to me the likeliest explanation: Altman is doing what he always does, which is to just ignore the legal risks and figure that it's cheaper to ask forgiveness than permission while he still has all those billions in VC money to play with. That is, he's just ignoring all the risks, because they get in the way of moving FastFastFast.

Basically, I think OpenAI, as a corporation, is playing a high-stakes game of chicken with both law and reality, gambling that they can innovate their way past both before the lawsuits catch up or the bubble bursts.

[andrewducker]

I suspect you're right.