Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on I got a big head start early in life in not giving a shit about what other people thought. 26 minutes ago:
Of all the ways one could possibly guide oneself by the opinions of others, being guided by the opinions of teens is about the dumbest possible one.
- Comment on New Bill to Effectively Kill Anime & Other Piracy in the U.S. Gets Backing by Netflix, Disney & Sony 2 hours ago:
Yeah, GoGo need to improve their Linux support since at the moment they seem to just “go along with it” without putting any effort into it
That said, with stuff like Lutris (can only speak of that since I never used Heroic) which can use GoG’s API to access your account and download games and has GoG-specific install scripts, it’s also a reasonably seamless experience to game in Linux from GoG and none of it is tied to a proprietary vendor solution like Steam + Proton, so it’s a lot more flexible and friendly for those who want to do their own tweaking - for example all my games in Lutris run sandboxed using firejail for extra security and blocking network access, but I can’t do that for Steam.
GoG is pretty much a totally open solution (you need not use their API and can just download an offline installer and install it however you see fit) whilst Steam is tracking and controlling your installs and in some cases game playing, so that means gaming with Steam is much more tightly coupled to both their code and their servers and thus Steam is always going to be more ill-fitted to the traditional hacker ethos in Linux that GoG.
Finally, keep in mind that Steam’s enhanced Linux support is just a natural consequence of their strategy of trying to protect themselves from any Microsoft funny business with Windows by creating their own Windows-independent ecosystem, with Linux being a natural shortcut to do so cheaply.
- Comment on New Bill to Effectively Kill Anime & Other Piracy in the U.S. Gets Backing by Netflix, Disney & Sony 1 day ago:
Funilly enough as somebody who has been using the Internet since being a working class teen in a poor European nation in the early 90s and thus knowing all about pirating, GoG is what made me stop pirating games (and even after they came up with GoG Galaxy I still kept downloading offline installers, plus my purchases in Steam have always been pretty limited in comparison to those in GoG exactly because in Steam my access to install a game can be removed at any time) whilst things like Netflix never stopped my pirating of Movies and TV-Series exactly because it was a streaming service which I would have to pay forever to maintain access to the Films and Series I liked rather than a Film and Series store were I could buy to keep (and, adding to this, during the peak period of VHS tapes and DVDs I actually did buy a lot of physical media).
Anecdotal, I know, but it’s funny that my behaviour over the years almost perfect matches what you describe.
- Comment on Bro... 2 days ago:
Now you went and made it a British meme, complete with a weird accent.
- Comment on (:3) 2 days ago:
It’s basically indentured servitude - in that poverty is what now turns people into de facto slaves rather than race - in pretty much the same way as the English “ended slavery” but not really back in the 18th century.
The thing is, unlike in the US the Brits got rid of indentured servitude more than a century ago, plus in the US poverty and race are tightly couple for afro-Americans because the ultra-Capitalist system in American transformed ex-slavery and the subsequent tail of racist discrimination into poverty and made poverty a dynastic characteristic (in that even after active Racism was weakened, being born poor means a huge probability of being foverver poor so the victimization of Historical Racism was propagated down the generations) so present day indentured servitude in American disproportionately hits the descendants of the slaves whilst indentured servitude in Britain mainly hit the majority ethnic groups in those isles (though I do believe that for example the Irish were much more likely to be victims of it than the English).
- Comment on No Frills PCB Brings USB-C Power To The Breadboard 4 weeks ago:
TL;DR - It’s a nice and pretty run of the mill breadboard power adaptor which happens to support USB-C connectors, but the article and its title insanely oversell the thing.
This is not exact as amazing an achievement as the headline implies since the necessary stuff to talk the to the USB PD host upstream is already integrated so you just need to a chip that does it (and even without it, you’ll get 150mA @ 5V by default out of the USB 3 host upstream and up to 900mA with some pretty basic USB negotiation in a protocol that dates from USB 1.0 and for which there have long been integrated solutions for both the device and the host sides).
Further, the converting of those 5V to 3.3V just requires a buck converter or even just a voltage regulator (though this latter option is less efficient), for which there are already lots integrated solutions available for peanuts and where the entire circuit block needed to support them is detailed in the datasheet for that converter.
Looking at the circuit diagram for this (linked to from the article), they’re not even doing the USB PD negotiation or any kind of USB 1.0 negotiation, so this thing will be limited to 150mA for a USB 3 host or whatever current your traditional USB power source can supply (as those power sources really just do power supply of whatever amperage they support over a cable which happen to have USB connectors, rather than including a genuine implementation of an USB host with current limiting depending on negotiation with the USB device, so such power sources don’t require the device to do any USB negotiation to increase the current limit above 150mA).
This is really “yet another run of the mill USB power breadboard adaptor” only the USB plug is USB-C rather than mini-USB or micro-USB (so, a different plug plus a handfull of minor components as per the standard of the circuitry to properly support it), so pretty much the same as the cheap chinese ones you can get from Aliexpress, though this one uses a Buck Converter rather than the $0.1 Voltage Regulator in most of the chinese boards, and actually does proper filtering of power supply noise and proper protection against over current, so it is a quality design for such things, though it’s not really a major advancemnt.
What would really be nice would be something that does talk USB-PD to the upstream host AND can convert down from the 20V at which it supplies peak power, so that you can take advantage of the juicy, juicy (oh so juicy!) capability of USB-PD to supply power (up to 100W right now, which will be up to 250W with USB 4), though if you’re pulling 100W (which at 5V means 20A, which is a stupidly high current that will melt most components in a typical digital circuit) from you breadboard power adaptor, then I’m pretty sure magic smoke is being released from at least one of the components on that breadboard and, by the way, you’re probably damaging the power rail of that breadboard (aah, the sweet smell of burnt plastic when you turn the power on for your half-arsed experimental circuit!!!)
- Comment on Renewables supply 71% of Portugal’s electricity in 2024, led by solar 4 weeks ago:
Actually technology such as solar concentrators using molten salt is perfectly capable of supplying power at night.
In addition to that Portugal has also invested a lot in Wind generation (which, for all my criticism of my own country, was actually a wise bet) which doesn’t suffer from the problem of not producing at night or when there is heavy cloud cover.
Further, power consumption at night is mostly residential since industry seldom operates at those hours, and if electricity prices for business customers are made to float with availability, in a solar-heavy production environment big industrial consumers would be fitting their consumption to the period when solar is up.
Also, consider that even when the days are shorter in Portugal, they’re still longer than most of Europe because of how far South the country is compare to most of the rest - even at the peak of Winter days are at worst about 9h long.
As for that problem in drier years you pointed out, it’s even more of a problem with the hydro-heavy generation that the country has at the moment, so having more solar would make it less of a problem: yeah, drier years would affect the ability to store excess power produced by solar in dams but, guess what, solar would still be producing fine during the day even in the worst drought whilst hydro would not, same as it happened 2 years ago when the share of renewables was down to less than 50% exactly because a longuish period of drought forced most hydro-generation to stop.
Solar is hardly a silver bullet, but for a country like Portugal which has excellent conditions for it, solar should be a far larger slice of the generation makeup than it is, especially considering that the single biggest source of renewable energy - hydro - is the one which will be worst hit with the effects of Global Warming.
But yeah, your point is valid that renewables, at least in Portugal, won’t work by themselves unless there is some deeper interconnection with the rest of Europe and even Northern Africa to balance production across a wider area (when wind is not blowing somewhere, it still blows somewhere else, and the same applies to cloudy weather vs sunny weather), some kind of energy market which incentivizes heavy consumers to consumer the most when solar is at its peak and for investors to actually invest in energy storage to make money from “arbitraging the sunlight” (i.e. store cheap electricity during the day to sell it for more at night) or to use the kind of solar technology that also works during the night (i.e. molten salt solar concentrators). I say “at least in Portugal” because the whole problem with Global Warming and hydro-generation is going to be very nasty in Portugal (according to Global Warming Models which predict most of the country will basically turn into a desert) but some other places in Europe are going to be a lot more rainy and hence can reliably get their renewables from hydro.
That said, I am almost 100% certain that the politicians in Portugal will not make the right choices and instead will make the choices that maximize short-term profitability for the largest energy company in the country, because that’s mainly what they’ve been doing in the last couple of decades.
- Comment on Renewables supply 71% of Portugal’s electricity in 2024, led by solar 4 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t put any bets down on which one is winning the “most crooked shitshow” competition…
- Comment on Renewables supply 71% of Portugal’s electricity in 2024, led by solar 4 weeks ago:
Solar has only started growing very recently as the government has focused on large projects and made sure home generation for feed-in is nonviable.
This choice has, “of course”, no relation to how massive projects means lots of money greasing palms whilst home generation does not.
- Comment on Renewables supply 71% of Portugal’s electricity in 2024, led by solar 4 weeks ago:
Portugal has a huge installed base of hydro-generation, some of which is capable of being used to store excess energy (by pumping it up to the upper basin of the dam for later use in generation).
The mix of lots of hours of sunlight, the country being not so hot that solar panels suffer from lower efficiency due to heat and hydro-generation which can be used for storing excess power produced for use later, makes the country pretty much optimal for solar generation.
No, the reason for the crap legislation can probably be found in the deep incestuous relationship between the two main political parties and the largest power generation company of the country alongside Portugal being one of the most corrupt countries in the EU.
- Comment on Renewables supply 71% of Portugal’s electricity in 2024, led by solar 4 weeks ago:
Most of which is hydro-generation, and most of that is the product of an installed base or projects started way back in Fascist days (so, half a century ago). By the way, this is way is why the year before this value was much lower - below 50% - since there was a drought in the country (which, by the way, is something Global Warming models predict will become a far more common occurrence) so hydro-generation produced way less.
Meanwhile solar generation, which should be very widespread in the country containing the capital of Europe with the most hours of sunlight per year (and yet not as hot as North Africa, hence solar panels here do do not suffer as much from heat related lowering of efficiency) has barely started going and home solar generation is pretty limited due to - as somebody else already pointed out - really bad legislation (which, knowing my country as I due, I have little doubt it’s the product of Corruption in favour of well connected companies such as the largest energy provider in the country - which, “curiously”, employs lots of politicians from the two main parties).
As usual, my country is a shit show which only succeeds at something by sheer absolute luck, because it sure as hell isn’t due to it being properly managed or having clean competent politicians.
- Comment on Renewables supply 71% of Portugal’s electricity in 2024, led by solar 4 weeks ago:
Portugal is so sunny that Lisbon is literally the city of Europe with the most hours of sunlight per year.
- Comment on I believe him on a factual level, but not on an emotional level. 4 weeks ago:
The best possible proof that Belgium is not just a place set up by The Netherlands and France as a network of gas stations to travel between those countries is that the roads in Belgium are visibly worse than in The Netherlands or France (really: you can tell exactly were the border is when driving into and out of Belgium by the change in the condition of the road).
The problem for the Belgium friend is that he’s not keen on admitting that if Belgium wasn’t a real nation but rather a Franco-Dutch partnership, it would be better run.
- Comment on I knew it. Vaccines got him. 5 weeks ago:
In a wall near were I live somebody in the time of peak Covid vaccination tagged a slogan (in a language other than English) that roughly went like “50% or the prickled will die” - so prickled here meaning those who got the Covid vaccine - which might sound like a smart anti-vaxxer slogan until one thinks about how it implies that 50% of those who get the vaccine will never die, or in other words that the Covid vaccine actually gives eternal life to half the takers.
- Comment on Do You Need A VPN? 5 weeks ago:
I literally have two machines running on always on VPNs, one my personal PC and another a home server were a torrent service is running, and have no such problems.
I think maybe the mistake you made was spending most of the time with it OFF and then turning it ON once in a while, whilst mine just goes ON as soon as I boot my machine and stays on.
Granted, I’m not using it for getting around geo-locked websites, I’m using it for having a bit more privacy and for safety when sailing the high seas so once in a while I have the opposite problem (that I’m blocked from accessing sites in my own country because the connections appear to be coming from a different country).