dgmib
@dgmib@lemmy.world
- Comment on At what age do we switch from measuring a human by length to by height? 8 hours ago:
The same time you stop measuring age in months.
- Comment on Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe 2 days ago:
You seem to be misunderstanding friend.
I’m all for building as much wind, hydro, and solar power as possible. It is the cheapest option.
I’m not arguing against that.
People here seem to think that money spent on nuclear is money NOT spent on Wind/Solar/Hydro/Storage/etc as if there’s a fixed budget for all energy transition projects. That’s not the situation.
Insurance and financial institutions are losing big money on climate change disasters, and they are getting data from their actuaries and climate scientist, saying it’s going to get massively worse. There is rapidly growing interest from “big money” private sector investors, In any technology that might solve the climate crisis.
There’s more money investors wanting invest in wind, solar, or hydroelectric projects, than there are projects to invest it. The limiting factor isn’t money.
Believe me, no one would be happier than me to be proven wrong that we can build enough wind, solar, and hydroelectric to get off a fossil fuels by 2050.
But if you extrapolate the current data and the current trend lines, they don’t come anywhere close.
If we also invest in nuclear, we come closer.
- Comment on Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe 2 days ago:
It’s not a question of viability it a question of time.
Can we replace all fossil fuels with wind and solar power only? Absolutely.
Can we do it by 2050? Not without a miracle.
- Comment on Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe 2 days ago:
From an investor perspective, solar farm projects are a slam dunk once they reach the point of being ready to purchase panels.
There are a lot of things to line up to build a grid-scale solar farm before you get to that point. You need to acquire (the rights to) the land, get permits to connect to the grid, which usually includes construction of the new transmission line to the grid. You need to line up panels from a manufacturer (who in turn has supply chains to manage), and labor to install it. And 100 other things. It typically takes a few years of planning, but get all that in order, but it’s a small percentage of the total expense of the project.
At the point you need to do the larger capital raise needed to buy the panels and hire the labour it’s a slam dunk. The project can be completed typically within 12-24 so there’s a quick process to get to generating revenue for investors, and because solar has gotten so cheap it doesn’t take long to see positive ROI. It’s not like electricity demand is going away either. It’s a very safe bet, once all the pieces are lined up, and not difficult to raise funds once you get to the point of needing the big money.
People on Lemmy/Reddit have this mental model that there’s a fixed budget for investment in the energy transition. If that was the case, then yes it would make sense to go all in on the cheapest technology option.
But that’s how it works. Energy projects are competing with the global market for investment capital and there’s no shortage of wealth wanting to throw money at a solar project because they’re low risk/high ROI.
Nuclear projects are a different story, long timelines from construction to revenue generation and high upfront capital costs make them unfavourable investments, they generally need government support to derisk the investment before investors jump on board. Which the governments are reluctant to do because they lack a mandate to do so from the populace. In part because of this mindset that nuclear investment impedes solar or wind investments.
- Comment on Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe 2 days ago:
Solar has been growing exponentially for the past decade or so, wind has not. Wind has run into supply chain limitations on rare earth metals such as neodymium and isn’t growing exponentially anymore.
It’s doubtful that solar will continue growing exponentially for the next 20 years but even if it does, that only gets us to the point of enough capacity to displace the ~17.9 PWh of electricity generated by fossil fuels in 2023.
To get off of fossil fuels we need to change everything else that’s burning fossil fuels too. That means every vehicle replaced with an EV, every gas furnace replaced with a heat pump. As we do that it’s going to 2-3x electricity demand.
The world burned 140 PWh worth of fossil fuels in 2023, and we only generated 1.6 PWh from solar power. That 1.6 is up from 1.3 PWh in 2022. A lot of that 140 PWh was wasted heat energy so we don’t need to get that high, but we still need to generate something in the area of 60-90 PWh of electricity annually to eliminate fossil fuels.
~4/5th of our energy still comes from fossil fuel, we have a long f’ing way to go. Even with the current exponential growth of solar we don’t get off of fossil fuels within 20 years, and that’s assuming global energy demand doesn’t increase.
Don’t take my word for it. Extrapolate the data yourself. Your rose coloured glasses aren’t helping.
- Comment on Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe 2 days ago:
We can’t manufacture and install enough solar farms and storage to get us off of fossil fuel within 20 years and more importantly available investment capital isn’t the limiting factor.
Investments in nuclear power are not taking money away from investments in solar.
We can do both, and it gets us off fossil fuels sooner.
- Comment on San Francisco to pay $212 million to end reliance on 5.25-inch floppy disks 3 weeks ago:
It’s not quite as crazy as it seems. The older/larger floppy disk formats were more reliable due to their lower track density.
There was more surface area per byte of data. The old floppy disks could be written once and read for years in harsher environments. New floppy disks we more prone to failure after a few years.
- Comment on Microsoft Edge gets "unfair advantage", browser makers claim 1 month ago:
They’re was never any evidence of google’s wrongdoing, the accusation came from former MS edge developers:
developer-tech.com/…/edge-developer-google-youtub…
Officially Google denied it:
theverge.com/…/google-youtube-microsoft-edge-inte…
You may be right, this could have been MS couldn’t make a better browser and pulled the plug, and the devs just blamed google.
- Comment on Microsoft Edge gets "unfair advantage", browser makers claim 1 month ago:
I’m not defending Microsoft… but if we’re going to go after a tech company for leveraging their other assets to give themselves an unfair advantage can we also go after Google?
In the first releases of Edge, Microsoft tried to build a new web browser from scratch to compete with Google Chrome. By google kept changing YouTube’s code so that videos would playback janky on Edge. Microsoft eventually gave up trying to fix for YouTubes ongoing changes and now Edge is based on Chromium (the same open source web browser maintained by Google, that chrome os built on). Google leveraged YouTube to prevent completion from Edge.
And now Google is blocking ad blocking extensions so that users are forced to see more google ads in their browser.
Microsoft’s has leveraged their unfair advantage to get a little over 5% market share.
Google’s leveraged their unfair advantage to get 66% of the market.
Both companies need a hard smack down, but I want to see Google taken down too.
- Comment on Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants 1 month ago:
Just beware, sometimes the AI suggestions are scary good, some times they’re batshit crazy.
Just because AI suggests it, doesn’t mean it’s something you should use or learn from.
- Comment on Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton 1 month ago:
They call it jailbreak because this is an issue of freedom
I support your position and the right to repair, but that’s not the origin of the term jailbreak in the context of computing.
The term jailbreaking predates its modern understanding relating to smartphones, and dates back to the introduction of “protected modes” in early 80s CPU designs such as the intel 80286.
With the introduction of protected mode it became possible for programs to run in isolated memory spaces where they are unable to impact other programs running on the same CPU. These programs were said to be running “in a jail” that limited their access to the rest of the computer. A software exploit that allowed a program running inside the “jail” to gain root access / run code outside of protected mode was a “jailbreak”.
The first “jailbreak” for iOS allowed users to run software applications outside of protected modes and instead run in the kernel.
But as is common for the English language, jailbreak became to be synonymous with freedom from manufacture imposed limits and now has this additional definition.
- Comment on NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules 1 month ago:
This also leads to stupid rules like you can change your password more than once a day, to prevent someone from changing their password 5 times and then changing it back to what it was before.
- Comment on Tripling renewables globally by 2030 is doable, says new IEA report 1 month ago:
In most jurisdictions, tripling renewables doesn’t get us to a place where we’re generating more electricity than we can instantaneously use. The few places where it is possible can usually export excess electricity to neighbouring jurisdictions that still rely heavily on fossil fuels.
We still have a depressingly long way to go before we’re at the point of renewables generating “excess” energy that needs to be stored.
- Comment on Grid-scale batteries: They’re not just lithium 1 month ago:
It is, but lead based chemistries tend to wear out and need replacing a lot sooner than lithium ion.
You’re core idea is correct though, there’s a lot of battery techs that are cheaper / better when size and weight are irrelevant.
- Comment on World now has five times more PV than nuclear power 1 month ago:
Whoever wrote that article is playing fast and loose with the definition of exponential.
Here’s the actual data of global electricity source on a log scale for the past ~15 years
Notice that the line for both wind and solar is inflecting to the right. If it was exponential it would be straight.
The time between each doubling of output is increasing.
It’s close, but not enough to be exponential growth.
- Comment on World now has five times more PV than nuclear power 1 month ago:
It’s not an exponential curve. It’s slower than that.
It’s more than linear; we are adding more capacity each year than the year before. But added capacity per year as a percentage of the previous years total is a decreasing.
If it was exponential the growth would be a straight(ish) line when plotted on a logarithmic scale… it’s not. On a log scale the line inflects.
- Comment on World now has five times more PV than nuclear power 1 month ago:
Such an incredibly misleading article.
1 GW of nuclear capacity generates several times more electricity than 1 GW of PV capacity.
Nuclear power plants run at almost full capacity pretty much 24/7/365. With the occasional shutdown every few years for maintenance and to replace the fuel rods.
PVs only generate electricity during the day, and only hit their maximum capacity under ideal conditions. The average output of PVs is 15-25% of their capacity.
Globally we generate more electricity from nuclear than we do from all PVs together.
At the typical sizes we’re building them you need dozens of PV farms to match the energy output of a single nuclear reactor.
- Comment on Questions about the safety of Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving' system are growing 2 months ago:
Tesla’s biggest issue is Musk.
Tesla held a commanding lead over the other automakers in the self-driving segment a few years ago. Now they’ve all mostly caught up thanks to Musk’s unhinged firings. Tesla lost some of its best talent for no other reason than not wanting to work for an egomaniacal billionaire nut job.
Tesla needs to fire Musk before he runs it into the ground just like he’s done to Twitter.
- Comment on Samsung TVs will get 7 years of updates, starting with 2023 models 2 months ago:
Genuinely curious, what new features did that updated firmware have that were valuable to you?
- Comment on US Government Launches New Attempt to Gather Data on Electricity Usage of Bitcoin Mining 4 months ago:
You’re not wrong.
Wholesale prices do bounce around significantly in a day, occasionally even going negative. And some miners do shutdown for brief periods during high demand due to a high electricity price. Some miners aren’t buying electricity from the grid, and have their own generation sources with different economic inputs. And there’s lots of day to day volatility in mining rates that has nothing to do with economics.
There’s no formula or methodology that could tell you how much energy is being wasted at any given moment. That impossible. There’s no way of knowing how many miners are operating globally at any given point in time. We can’t even reliably tell which country a block was mined in. We can only make reasonable estimates of global averages over the last few weeks.
You can get closer with more detailed modelling, but the equation I gave using global averages for bitcoin and electricity prices in the last few weeks will get you to an accurate estimate.
- Comment on US Government Launches New Attempt to Gather Data on Electricity Usage of Bitcoin Mining 4 months ago:
Yes somewhat… the formula has several factors that are constantly in flux, Bitcoin mining is a random process the value can be off entirely by chance. But it’s designed to self-adjust over the long run towards that formula, individual fluctuations cancel out in the long run.
For electricity price specifically, wholesale prices of electricity tend to be fairly close everywhere bitcoin is mined. Bitcoin mining is more profitable where electricity is the cheapest and is uneconomic in places where the price of electricity is above average. So it only happens where the wholesale price is globally competitive.
- Comment on US Government Launches New Attempt to Gather Data on Electricity Usage of Bitcoin Mining 4 months ago:
The economics of Bitcoin mining at scale force it to find an equilibrium where the cost of mining a Bitcoin is just a bit less than the current market value of a Bitcoin.
Electricity is the only significant variable cost at scale so the amount of electricity needed to mine a bitcoin ends up being a little less than however much a bitcoin can buy.
Thus one can estimate the total amount of electricity very accurately by simply taking the block rate (6/hr) times the block reward (~6.25 BTC) times the current price of a bitcoin divided by the wholesale price of electricity. You’ll get the upper bound for the amount of electricity being consumed.
Which by the way works out to around a TWh costing tens of millions of USD every single day. Which is more electricity than a small country
The only thing that will stop the waste is if the price of bitcoin drops. You can legislate it away, that won’t stop it, it will just move when it’s happening.
- Comment on German Navy to replace aging 8-inch floppy drives with an emulated solution for its anti-submarine frigates 4 months ago:
The old 8” floppy disks were more expensive but known for being incredibly reliable.
The newer 5.25” and 3.5” floppies used cheaper and mass produced coatings on the magnetic surface, plus the smaller and higher density tracks had less surface area per byte and less material to hold the signal.
The net result was the newer floppies often couldn’t be reliably read after a few years of use.
It’s not at all surprising they stuck with the more reliable system for so long.
- Comment on Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose 6 months ago:
You wouldn’t be able to MITM a plaintext connection inside a corporate network with this attack by itself. You could only MITM something that the attacker can access without your VPN.
Any corporate network that has an unsecure, publicly accessible endpoint that prompts for credentials is begging to be hacked with or without this attack.
Now you could spoof an login screen with this attack if you had detailed info on the corporate network you’re targeting. But it would need to be a login page that doesn’t use HTTPS (any corporations, dumb enough to do that this day and age are begging to be hacked), or you’d need the user to ignore the browser warning about it not being secure, which that is possible.
- Comment on Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose 6 months ago:
I can’t see routing traffic to some kind of local presence and then routing back to the target machine to route out through the tunnel adapter without a successful compromise of at least one other vulnerability.
That’s not to say there’s nothing you could do… I could see some kind of social engineering attack maybe… leaked traffic redirects to a local web server that presents a fake authentication screen that phishes credentials , or something like that. I could only see that working in a very targeted situation… would have to be something more than just a some rouge public wi-fi. They’d have to have some prior knowledge of the private network the target was connecting to.
- Comment on Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose 6 months ago:
As I mentioned in my other comment, this wouldn’t let an attacker eavesdrop on traffic on a VPN to a private corporate network by itself. It has to be traffic that is routable without the VPN.
- Comment on Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose 6 months ago:
Not all VPN traffic. Only traffic that would be routable without a VPN.
This works by tricking the computer into routing traffic to the attacker’s gateway instead of the VPN’s gateway. It doesn’t give the attacker access to the VPN gateway.
So traffic intended for a private network that is only accessible via VPN (like if you were connecting to a corporate network for example) wouldn’t be compromised. You simply wouldn’t be able to connect through the attacker’s gateway to the private network, and there wouldn’t be traffic to intercept.
This attack doesn’t break TLS encryption either. Anything you access over https (which is the vast majority of the internet these days) would still be just as encrypted as if you weren’t using a VPN.
For most people, in most scenarios, this amount to a small invasion of privacy. Our hypothetical malicious coffee shop could tell the ip addresses of websites you’re visiting, but probably not what you’re doing on those websites, unless it was an insecure website to begin with. Which is the case with or with VPN.
For some people or some situations that is a MASSIVE concern. People who use VPNs to hide what they’re doing from state level actors come to mind.
But for the average person who’s just using a VPN because they’re privacy conscious, or because they’re location spoofing. This is not going to represent a significant risk.
- Comment on Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose 6 months ago:
So for this attack to work, the attacker needs to be able to run a malicious DHCP server on the target machine’s network.
Meaning they need to have already compromised your local network either physically in person or by compromising a device on that network. If you’ve gotten that far you can already do a lot of damage without this attack.
For the average person this is yet another non-issue. But if you regularly use a VPN over untrusted networks like a hotel or coffee shop wifi then, in theory, an attacker could get your traffic to route outside the VPN tunnel.
- Comment on Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths 6 months ago:
This is the part that bothers me.
l’d defend Tesla when FSD gets into accidents, even fatal ones, IF they showed that FSD caused fewer accidents than the average human driver.
They claim that’s true, but if it is why not release data that proves it?
- Comment on Microsoft's Collapse in the Web Server Space Continued This Month 7 months ago:
Who cares? Because I assure you, Microsoft doesn’t.
20-25% of those webservers are running on Microsoft Azure hardware. Microsoft is the #2 cloud provider and has been slowly but closing their gap behind AWS in recent years. All of that is in large part due to them embracing Linux and open source support on their platform.
Software isn’t the battleground, and hasn’t been for a decade. The people behind Apache and Nginx aren’t making bank on their web server dominance. Microsoft and AWS still rake in money hand over fist regardless of what software runs on their servers.
The author of this article’s apparent attitude that this is some kind of indicator of Microsoft’s market failure is one of the most ridiculous conclusions I’ve heard in a while.