cogman
@cogman@lemmy.world
- Comment on Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division, which fought for a free and open web 1 week ago:
Unfortunately, the web is pretty much captured by google/apple at this point. I don’t think it’ll be long before gecko and spidermonkey die. When that happens, we are looking at a web that is basically over-fitted for webkit and v8. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what lead us to the bad old days of internet explorer (Ironically now just a webkit skin).
- Comment on Meanwhile, in Springfield Ohio 1 month ago:
Agreed, very well done.
- Comment on NATO official: Ukraine has legal right to strike deep into Russia 2 months ago:
In fact this is basically the only way for the war to end. By capturing Russian territory Russia now has a reason to come to negotiations to just call everything off to get their land back.
- Comment on Why is Kamala Harris being held at such a higher standard than Trump this election? 2 months ago:
Corporate media likes elections to be close and exciting because that draws ratings. Hence the reason they put on kid gloves for the idiot fascist.
- Comment on Nvidia reveals that 150 RTX A6000 GPUs power the Las Vegas Sphere 4 months ago:
Why so many? Its resolution is 16000 x 16000 which is a lot but also not that much. Is it doing more than just video output?
- Comment on Real 4 months ago:
There are premium brands that do well, but there are also non premium brands that do pretty well. GE, for example, tends to make fairly reliable product (even today) for roughly the same price point of samsung/lg.
- Comment on Real 4 months ago:
An insulated box with a decent compressor does not cost 10k. Making a compressor that fails after 2 years is actually hard to do, something both LG and Samsung spent time and money to achieve.
Consider, for example, that nearly every car manufactured with an AC. Which is exactly the same tech as a fridge. Yet you rarely end up needing to replace the compressor on your car. You might need to recharge it or clean it, but not replace the compressor. 10k of your car price isn’t the HVAC.
- Comment on Real 4 months ago:
There’s some appliance breakdown vids (idk if Rossman is one of them) but the gist is Samsung and LG like to put cheap plastic parts in high wear locations which inevitably fail.
Fridges are dead simple appliances. A compressor and evaporator coils with a temperature sensor. There’s absolutely no reason they shouldn’t outlast you and everyone you love.
It’s insane these “premium” brands are built to fall like they do.
- Comment on Not happening, dude 6 months ago:
I think we are on the same page. I completely agree that EVs aren’t enough or even the best solution.
- Comment on Not happening, dude 6 months ago:
Where does your power come from?
Right now? Primarily hydro with a strong solar and wind showing. Roughly 10% of my power is from Fossil fuels.
You are just shifting the shit elsewhere
Even with a pure fossil fuel grid, EVs still end up producing less CO2 than ICE vehicles. However, grids aren’t pure fossil fuels which means EVs are far cleaner than Fossil fuel vehicles. Especially in my current circumstance.
Less than 8% of energy consumption in the US comes from renewable energy. Another 8% come from nuclear.
13% while being one of the fastest growing energy production sectors.
www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
That’s petrol / natural gas / coal powering your home, factories, shops, and restaurant
Not mine because I live in the Pacific North West which is the greenest grid in the US.
- Comment on ‘It’s got nasty’: the battle to build the US’s biggest solar power farm 7 months ago:
The main reason to not farm between solar panels is irrigation and harvesting. Modem farms tend to rely on big equipment to accomplish those sorts of tasks.
Now, with giant arrays of power production, you could theoretically make a rail system with an electric motor/s running the farm equipment up and down the rails. That would be custom equipment (Though it could be standardized). The irrigation would still be a challenge. Pivot irrigation works so well because it’s a single tube carrying all the water. That makes for much lower maintenance. I’m not sure how you could get similar maintenance with panels. The naive approach would be tubing carrying water under all the panels. That, however, would frequently clog requiring someone to constantly go around fixing nozzles and plugged pipes.
- Comment on Mexican cartel not only forced vendors to buy chicken at inflated prices, they sold them bad birds 7 months ago:
Corruption is a big reason. Mexican government leaders tough on the cartels tend to end up dead
- Comment on Dynamic pricing is coming to grocery stores 8 months ago:
No such luck in the US. Company stores are barely illegal here.
- Comment on Dynamic pricing is coming to grocery stores 8 months ago:
Best way to stop this is something like the FTC stepping in. Honestly, this is mostly likely illegal in the context of a grocery store.
If I walk up to a shelf, grab an item advertised at $1, then when I get to the checkout stand it’s actually $2, you’ve now mislead me on the price with no ability for me to have verified the price.
Now, without getting the law involved, one thing you can do is simply make it too expensive for these stores to switch prices. Take a picture of the price when you grab an item (annoying I know) and if you get to the exit and the price is higher, reject it and have the grocer take it back.
If you don’t want to do this with everything, primarily target refrigerated foods which they HAVE to throw out if you give it back to them (And they have to take it back).
- Comment on A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us. 8 months ago:
The cost has already been paid. Even small farming communities have rail line access that’s mostly been abandoned because the line owners switched business models.
As for flexibility, again, that’s mostly an issue with how rail line management has evolved. From shorter more frequent trains to ultra long infrequent trains. Mostly to cut the cost of staffing.
The solution is simple, nationalize the rail service. Put it under the USPS and have them figure out scheduling to optimize the speed of goods shipping.
The current state of the rail system is entirely due to the monopolistic nature of ownership. The incentive is to increase prices as much as possible while shipping to the fewest stops possible. Profit motives are in direct conflict with generalized shipping.
The reason trunking works today is the public nature of roads. Well, why shouldn’t rail lines be equally public? We practically gave the property away to the current rail owners with the notion it was for the public good… Well, they’ve failed that.
- Comment on A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us. 8 months ago:
And frankly, I’m really ok with this.
Trains should be the backbone for shipping. They are WAY more fuel efficient, like 3 to 4x more efficient than shipping by truck. Rail requires far less maintenance. And there’s always the option install a 3rd rail and use electricity instead of fossil fuels to ship.
- Comment on A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us. 8 months ago:
The only solution is a bigger truck.
We need to get rid of the commie laws requiring special licensing (CDL, Communist driver’s license) for freedom trucks.
- Comment on I've noticed that people make the 'surface of the sun' temperature comparison a lot 8 months ago:
The sun is based on physics and observing nebula and super novas. We know how much the sun weighs based on it’s gravitational pull. We know what it’s currently burning given the frequency of the light it emits. We know what generation it is based on the elements in the planets. And we know the contents of other stars by the light they emit when they explode and collapse.
We know the layers of the earth because we can bounce sounds off the earth’s core to see how deep it is. We know roughly what it’s made of because we know how much the earth weighs and that the earth has a magnetosphere (you only get that with certain metals).
The methods used are generations of built up knowledge in physics and astrophysics.
You can, of course, just google these questions and get better answers than my summation
- Comment on Why Software Engineers like Woodworking 9 months ago:
Because you think “Oh, I made a mistake, I’ll be sure to fix it later”. You never fix it later. You mostly just add layers of shit on top of it and pray nobody asks you in the future “Hey, WTF were you doing there?”
- Comment on Electric school buses are a breath of fresh air for children | Nearly $1B in federal funding could help clean up the unequal health impacts of diesel pollution. 10 months ago:
AAA says that EV batteries tend to lose power faster in cold weather, getting as little as 50-60% of their advertised range.
Right, and the EVs that lose that much range are the ones with the smallest battery packs. The heating requirement as a percentage of the battery pack goes down as the battery gets larger. It takes roughly the same amount of energy to keep a 40kWh battery warm as it does to keep a 150kWh battery warm.
The same logic doesn’t directly translate for a car as a bus.
- Comment on Electric school buses are a breath of fresh air for children | Nearly $1B in federal funding could help clean up the unequal health impacts of diesel pollution. 10 months ago:
Buses will have fairly large batteries (Bird does 150kWh). The percentage of the battery needed for heat goes down as size goes up because the interior size is relatively negligible in how much added heating capacity is needed to keep the bus warm.
But yes, probably wouldn’t be too crazy to throw on a propane heater in especially cold climates.
- Comment on Electric school buses are a breath of fresh air for children | Nearly $1B in federal funding could help clean up the unequal health impacts of diesel pollution. 10 months ago:
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Electric cars run just fine in icy weather
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Heatpumps, which work a lot better for larger buses than smaller buses.
Bus routes are generally short, fixed, and planned. They are literally the perfect place for an EV.
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- Comment on EV Batteries Are Dangerous to Repair. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway 10 months ago:
The problem with this is that every vehicle would need to be built around the same battery pack dimensions
There’s a lot of ways to tackle this issue. You could have a couple of standards (think AA vs AAA batteries). Or you could make the packs smaller and more modular so different applications can have more or less of them.
have the same amp-hour rating
No, they’d not need that. In fact, I’d say it’s desirable for them to not have that.
same voltage, same cooling system
Same voltage, yes, same cooling system? Not exactly. They’d just need to have cooling system hookups in the same place.
I seriously doubt that would ever happen as nothing like that has ever existed in the 120+ years of automotive history.
Loads of things like that have existed in the automotive industry. In fact, that’s one of the biggest features of the big 3 automotive manufacturers is having standardized parts shared between one another.
- Comment on EV Batteries Are Dangerous to Repair. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway 10 months ago:
Standard and swappable battery packs? Yes. All the skateboard style vehicles or ebikes have battery packs that can be removed and replaced.
Making that automated could be nice but isn’t necessary to get the benefits of a standard. A standard forces pack producers to compete with one another in terms of quality and price. It makes it cheaper to install new batteries. And it makes it possible to upgrade your cars range with newer packs. With an EV, you won’t need to get a new vehicle hardly ever if getting new packs is relatively affordable and easy. Further, the worm packs still have value so swap locations will be incentivized to pay you for the pack they remove.
The notion this needs to be part of a giant battery swapping network to reduce charge times is silly. 10 to 15 minute charge stops are already very short and all you need on most cars for the next leg of a journey. It also introduces a lot of complexity. Like, what if I want or need a 100kWh pack but the standard is 80kWh packs? What about pack wear? Who’s in charge of pulling the degraded packs? And what do we do about someone putting in a pack with fake capabilities? You have a situation where you are cycling parts worth well north of $10k. That’s a mighty tempting target for theft.
A standardized battery is still a really good thing. I just don’t think it needs to be a part of road trips.
- Comment on EV Batteries Are Dangerous to Repair. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway 10 months ago:
Every EV has this already. What they don’t have is a standard. Not shockingly, every EV manufacturer will argue why theirs should be the standard.
- Comment on Tesla Has The Highest Accident Rate Of Any Auto Brand 11 months ago:
- Comment on Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data 11 months ago:
For your car repair example, it would kinda be like someone got that and then started going to every crash up derby they could find.
No, it’s actually more like you bought the car because you know you’re going to rack up a million miles every year. Out of the norm but not an asshole move.
If Google didn’t want to lose here, they could have not had that feature.
200TB is a lot of data and a completely reasonable amount if you are doing a lot of filming. HD film takes up a lot of space, especially if it’s raw.
This sort of usage is so predictable I can’t imagine Google didn’t consider it when pricing things out. Heck, they advertised the unlimited storage space being useful FOR preserving photos and video.
Why give a company that spent 26 billion dollars making their search engine the default everywhere because they don’t want to spend the 1 million dollars it’d require to continue supporting a product they advertised. They could have ended new sign ups and just supported existing customers.
- Comment on Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data 11 months ago:
I’m saying that Google should not be allowed to sell a product with an advertised feature to gain advantage over competitors only to later change their mind and remove that feature when they deem it too costly.
A multibillion dollar advertising company should have to support the products they sell.
If you bought a car and one of the features sold was “free repairs for the life of the vehicle” you’d be rightly upset if a year later the dealer emailed you to say “actually, this was too expensive to support so we are cancelling the free repairs, but you can still pay us to repair your vehicle or we’ll sell you a new one, aren’t we generous!”
- Comment on Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data 11 months ago:
but I’m not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense
He was expecting a company that promised unlimited data to not reneg on their advertised product. Or to simply delete data they promised to store because it’s inconvenient for them.
Yeah, it costs money to store things, something Google’s sales, marketing, and legal teams should have thought about before offering an “unlimited” product.
- Comment on Lower Decks: Can anyone tell me what I'm missing? 11 months ago:
The other treks are more idealized, heroized, professional.
Which is something LD likes to poke fun at.