SomeoneSomewhere

@SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It took 68 years for the world to reach 1 terawatt of solar PV capacity. It took just two years to double it | RenewEconomy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Indeed.

  In addition, there’s a lot of consumption that was non-electric (e.g. transport, heating) that is moving to electric. Most of the increased grid consumption is not new consumption, it’s consumption that was previously direct fossil fuels.

  The exception is basically bitcoin and AI, plus electrification of underdeveloped areas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3001: Temperature Scales⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Converting between Kelvin and Celsius is simple addition; converting between Rankine and Fahrenheit is simple addition. Converting between the two groups requires multiplication, and pre calculator, that’s notably harder.

  Also, all your kJ/kg/°C or BTU/lb/°F tables and factors are identical when you swap to referencing absolute zero. If you change to the other unit system, all that goes out the window.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clevo reseller wants get coreboot ported, ends up throwing a temper tantrum and banning Germany, Texas and AMD over unsatisfactory experience⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel dumber having read that.

  Banning a whole country because you disliked a company?

  Dealing with stuff that’s ‘almost working’ is often harder than starting from scratch; ask any tradesperson.

  They also apparently cannot get their heads around the fact that people might give you a discount if you advertise their brand. Ad-supported pricing has been around for a long time; it’s not some voodoo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3001: Temperature Scales⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The other scores seem to be more about inherent cursedness, not simply ‘there is a far better option’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3001: Temperature Scales⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I am very surprised that Rankine gets such a high cursedness score. Isn’t it just the same as Kelvin but based on Fahrenheit instead of Celsius?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intuit possibly succumbs to the Streisand effect⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Until the day comes that I get a letter in the mail from the government saying, “Here’s how much you paid in taxes, if you’re cool with that then please disregard”, I will not be satisfied.

  NZ does that. More accurately, they email you to tell you that there’s a letter available online - I don’t think they send physical mail by default.

  Then they pay any refund straight into your nominated bank account.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Conker Championships men's winner cleared of cheating | UK News⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  "We are gentlemen at the World Conker Championships and we don’t cheat. I’ve been playing and practising for decades. That’s how I won.

  “I admit I had the steel conker in my pocket, but I didn’t play with it. I show it to people as a joke, but I won’t be bringing it again.”

  Mr Jakins won the men’s competition but lost in the overall final to women’s champion Kelci Banschbach, originally from the United States, who only took up the game last year when she moved to Suffolk.

  Hmm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did my bus driver want me to not pay the fare and instead just "TAKE A SEAT!!!"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If we knew what city/route/service and day, we might be able to get a better idea.

  • Sometimes operators declare a ‘fare holiday’ when everyone rides free, usually as compensation for some major fuckup previously, or for some other PR stunt. Metlink in Wellington doesn’t charge on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, or New Year’s Eve.

  • Operators sometimes half-strike and refuse to collect fares.

  • The specific route, service, or time of day might be free.

  • It’s an express service that you can’t pay cash on (only fare cards) and it’s easier/nicer to tell you to ride for free than to tell you to get the next bus because they don’t take cash.

  • You might be part of some group (youth, students, elderly) that doesn’t have to pay.

  • Something is broken and they can’t collect fares.

  • They don’t want to deal with the big banknote you had.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are good harddrives to use with serves⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

  Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

  Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

  Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Secret calculator hack brings ChatGPT to the TI-84, enabling easy cheating⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t remember if they fully closed the loopholes, but there are inputs that programs cannot catch unless you actually replace the OS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's a pretty solarpunk fact that small, distributed wind turbines use steel more efficiently than big centralised ones⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Livestock aren’t an efficient use of land in the first place, and you can absolutely graze around turbines, at least according to this: www.windenergy.org.nz/…/how-to-host-a-windfarm

  It appears there are even advantages to crop farming under turbines: agupdate.com/…/article_bb057e6c-e58b-5990-b4d5-62…

  Obviously can’t do any aerial crop dusting around turbines.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Square!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t normally need to specify that the sides are parallel if you specify four right angles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Secret calculator hack brings ChatGPT to the TI-84, enabling easy cheating⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Here in NZ they do a factory reset on your calculator at the start of every exam.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[discussion] DC (direct current) power network⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure there are any power grids past the tens-of-megawatt range that aren’t just a 2/3/4 terminal HVDC link.

  Railway DC supplies usually just have fat rectifiers and transformers from the AC mains to supply fault current/clearing and stability.

  Ships are where I would expect to start seeing them arrive, or aircraft.

  Almost all land-based standalone DC networks (again, not few-terminal HVDC links) are heavily battery backed and run at battery voltage - that’s not practical once you leave one property.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where can I access the Fediverse itself?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, it’s been a while since I used ChromeOS. Looks like Flatpak was founded about the time I stopped.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where can I access the Fediverse itself?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, it’s been a while since I stopped using ChromeOS. That’s an improvement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[discussion] DC (direct current) power network⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  PV inverters often have around 1-2% losses. This is not very significant. You also need to convert the voltage anyway because PV output voltage varies with light level.

  Buck/boost converters work by converting the DC current to (messy) AC, then back to DC. If you want an isolating converter (necessary for most applications for safety reasons) that converter needs to handle the full power. If it’s non isolating, then it’s proportional to the voltage step.

  Frequency provides a somewhat convenient method for all parties to know whether the grid is over- or under- supplied on a sub-second basis. Operating solely on voltage is more prone to oscillation and requires compensation for voltage drop, plus the information is typically lost at buck/boost sites. A DC grid would likely require much more robust and faster real-time comms.

  The AC grid relies on significant (>10x overcurrent) short-term (<5s) overload capability. Inrush and motor starting requires small/short overloads (though still significant). Faults are detected and cleared primarily through the excess current drawn. Fuses/breakers in series will all see the same current from the same fault, but we want only the device closest to the fault to operate to minimise disruption. That’s achieved (called discrimination, coordination, or selectivity) by having each device take progressively more time to trip on a fault of a given size, and progressively higher fault current so that the devices upstream still rapidly detect a fault.

  RCDs/GFCIs don’t coordinate well because there isn’t enough room between the smallest fault required to be detected and the maximum disconnection time to fit increasingly less sensitive devices.

  Generators are perfectly able to provide this extra fault current through short term temperature rise and inertia. Inverters cannot provide 5-fold overcurrent without being significantly oversized. We even install synchronous condensers (a generator without any actual energy source) in areas far from actual generators to provide local inertia.

  AC arcs inherently self-extinguish in most cases. DC arcs do not.

  This means that breakers and expulsion type fuses have to be significantly, significantly larger and more expensive. It also means more protection is needed against arcs caused by poor connection, cable clashes, and insulation damage.

  Solid state breakers alleviate this somewhat, but it’s going to take 20+ years to improve cost, size, and power loss to acceptable levels.

  I expect that any ‘next generation’ system is likely to demand a step increase in safety, not merely matching the existing performance. I suspect that’s going to require a 100% coverage fibre comms network parallel to the power conductors, and in accessible areas possibly fully screened cable and isolated supply.

  EVs and PV arrays get away with DC networks because they’re willing to shut down the whole system in the event of a fault. You don’t want a whole neighborhood to go dark because your neighbour’s cat gnawed on a laptop charger.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where can I access the Fediverse itself?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most Fediverse stuff has web front ends so that any modern browser will work.

  My concern would be that Chrome is about to neuter ad blockers, and you can’t use a different browser without replacing the OS.

  Both are also heavily privacy destroying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If "Master/Slave" terminology in computing sounds bad now, why not change it to "Dom/Sub"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The issue is acronyms; there’s millions of products, schematics, datasheets, and manuals that refer to them as MISO and MOSI with no further explanation. Any new standard that doesn’t fit runs into the 15-competing-standards problem, and ought to be followed by an “AKA MISO” every time it’s used.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We found the Missing Performance: Zen 5 Tested with SMT Disabled⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There should be no need for tuning, tweaking, or optimizing on functionality this basic.

  If you ask the processor, it will spit out a graph like this telling you what threads/cores share resources, all the way up to (on large or server platforms) some RAM or PCIe slots being closer to certain groups of cores.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Caption this.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Only 15mL and into a syringe, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to open a textbook⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Apparently still alive at 85: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Goodstein

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CFCs⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Has it occurred to you that sometimes there’s actual evidence backing up the things you ridicule?

  You can go measure the acidity of rain in your back yard if you want.

  The sunlight in NZ is far, far harsher than if you go a few thousand kilometres towards the equator, where it should be hotter. We have some of the world’s highest rates of skin cancer. Are you implying that crisis actors are faking having skin cancer?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Swifts and Mirages can be under 900kg.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The hospital administrators are starting a meeting and "you need to leave"⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What would be different about the family room on the next level down? Presumably that one would be intended for family of patients on the next level down…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Enterprise SAS SSD are just built different... two layers, and takes up all the space it can.⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Secondhand stuff can be really cheap if you know where to look, but the drawbacks are usually power and noise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is wage theft exactly?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It can also include situations where the worker isn’t paid what was agreed.

  For example, if you were going to have a 10% commission but the employer lowers this to 2% or nothing, or where a $30/hour rate magically becomes $15/hour after hiring.

  They might legally be able to cut your pay by giving notice - this will depend on the jurisdiction. In other regimes, they essentially have to go through the full legal process to fire you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UN banned Apollo Fusion's business model of using mercury rocket propellant to launch satellites into space⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s been various desktop-grade plans regarding use of nuclear rockets, both in the atmosphere and not. Never underestimate what engineers can come up with.

  I think what they were trying to argue is that the mercury emitted would be no worse than the mercury already emitted as a byproduct of power plants.

  Most rocket operators/manufacturers run on razor thin margins or at a loss, sustained by state subsidies or wishful venture capitalists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Alaska Air Grounds Boeing 737 Max-9 Fleet After Fuselage Blowout⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It appears that the door design is unchanged from the previous generation.

  The problem is not with any specific part of the design or any model of plane. Grounding the Max again will not help past fixing this specific fault.

  It is the fundamental corporate culture. The same poor QA, both in design and production, affects all current Boeing aircraft.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Raspberry Pi is 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1 was in 1978⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not clear, but I think they were referring to the version 1 Pi - the newer ones are much much much faster.