MangoCats
@MangoCats@feddit.it
- Comment on SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink 1 week ago:
I believe Florida’s recent build-out of utility scale natural gas plants is driven, in part, by their ability to ramp up and down virtually instantly.
However, the linked story is about a residential neighborhood where lots of homeowners installed individual natural gas powered generators for their homes. Then, when the public grid failed in a hurricane, they all switched on their “whole home, natural gas powered” generators at once for the first time and the natural gas supply to the neighborhood was nowhere near up to the task of delivering all that fuel at that rate.
- Comment on SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink 2 weeks ago:
Read this quick before the people selling generators get it buried: wtsp.com/…/67-144d70da-bb27-496c-8928-ab7e61a53b0…
The gas company finally figured out how to deflect their responsibility in the matter: they say that the generator owners “didn’t register” their generators, but… now that it has been a year, has the gas company done anything to improve service capacity?
Anyway: the tie-in with Starlink is, anything like this works great until everybody tries to use it all at once at high capacity. When all 53,000 residents of Grand Island Nebraska decide to stream different high definition videos all at once? A good fiber system can handle that, Starlink? I’m curious…
- Comment on SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink 2 weeks ago:
Time Warner and Comcast need to have all that grant money clawed back. They contracted with the taxpayers to deliver a service and they didn’t even make a good faith effort to start.
- Comment on SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink 2 weeks ago:
Seriously, this is in the “well, we know you want all the free money you can get, but: no. Now go do your thing on your own dime.”
Fiber in the ground is infrastructure like paved roads. Satellites? One counter-orbiting frag bomb can take out a satellite constellation in less than a day.
- Comment on ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity 2 weeks ago:
Me, personally, we have trees and shade. So many subdivisions don’t, and they have dark colored roofs, and then homeowners do bone-headed things like adding “sun rooms” - lots of those in Houston.
We get upset when our electric bill passes $300 for the month, but our neighbors with the 3500 sq ft? They never see it under $400.
- Comment on ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity 2 weeks ago:
The average (US suburban 2200sq ft) home’s A/C does consume 4kW while it is cycled on, and in the hotter than normal months of summer it can run continuous duty cycle for hours on end.
- Comment on ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity 2 weeks ago:
Arguably, a great deal more than the energy you lose from opening the door to your house in the summer, once while the A/C is running.
- Comment on ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity 2 weeks ago:
Depends on your electric rates, of course. The gotcha in this statement is “per thousand requests” which cranks up the power usage from 40 watt-hours to 40 kilowatt hours. Say you’ve got “affordable” electricity at 12.5 cents per kilowatt hour: 40 * .125 = 5.
- Comment on ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity 2 weeks ago:
This figure is already not bad. 40 watt hours = 0.04kWh - you know kWh? That unit on your electric bill that is around $0.18 per kWh (and data centers tend to be in lower cost electric areas, closer to $0.11/kWh.) Still, 40Wh would register on your home electric bill at $0.0072, less than a penny. For comparison, an average suburban 4 ton AC unit draws 4kW per hour - that 40Wh request? 1/100th of an hour of AC for your home, about 36 seconds of air conditioning. I don’t know that this article is making anybody “look bad” in terms of power used.
- Comment on ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity 2 weeks ago:
FFS, I have been using Claude to code, not only do you have to tell Claude to fix compilation errors, you have to point out when Claude says “it’s fixed” - “no, it’s not, the function you said you added is STILL missing.”
- Comment on ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity 2 weeks ago:
Which is why they’re giving everybody free access, for now.
- Comment on ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity 2 weeks ago:
I was just thinking, in more affordable electric regions of the US that’s about $5 worth of electricity. You’d tip a concierge $5 for most answers you get from Chat GPT (if they could provide them…) and the concierge is likely going to use that $5 to buy a gallon and a half of gasoline, which generates a whole lot more CO2 than the nuclear / hydro / solar mixed electrical generation, in reasonably priced electric regions of the US…
- Comment on This Tiny Radio Lets Me Send Texts Without Wi-Fi or Cell Service 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, whenever I tell the kids “WiFi is down” what that really means is “Comcast has killed our link, again.”
- Comment on This Tiny Radio Lets Me Send Texts Without Wi-Fi or Cell Service 5 weeks ago:
Low power requirements, battery + solar power source… this isn’t science fiction anymore.
- Comment on This Tiny Radio Lets Me Send Texts Without Wi-Fi or Cell Service 5 weeks ago:
WiFi goes down and people sometimes NEED to communicate instead of streaming Netflix.
This is just an alternate channel, if Eheran doesn’t have the imagination to understand how low bandwidth can still be extremely valuable, as compared to, say, screaming at the top of your lungs to attempt to be heard 5 miles away, then… I’m not really interested in what they think.
- Comment on This Tiny Radio Lets Me Send Texts Without Wi-Fi or Cell Service 5 weeks ago:
If I wanted to transmit, for example, temperature and humidity from a sensor once every 5 minutes, would the network be willing to carry my signals?
- Comment on Doge reportedly using AI tool to create ‘delete list’ of federal regulations 5 weeks ago:
The Netherlands are 20 years ahead of the US in this respect: en.wikipedia.org/…/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand…
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 5 weeks ago:
to the point where non-programmers can solve their problems
I had a period of about 10 years where I bounced from company to company fixing non-programmers’ code so that it could actually be used in commercial products that brought in revenue.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 5 weeks ago:
legit concern I hear is its environmental impact.
Commuting my fat ass to a climate controlled office, out to lunch, back home, parking spaces, highway lane miles, fuel, periodic vehicle replacements… that all has environmental impacts too, if I can do my job in half the time, that’s a big win for the environment.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 5 weeks ago:
I have been doing this stuff for over 40 years, the tools get faster and the ecosystems get more complex.
What would be really nice is a return to simplicity, using the fast tools to make simple stuff fast-squared, but nobody seems to want that.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 5 weeks ago:
If you ask something longer than 20 lines, there’s a very high probability that it won’t work on the 15th round of corrections.
Try Claude by Anthropic. I noticed Copilot and Google getting hung up much faster than Claude.
Also, I find that if you encourage a good architecture, like a formalized system of variables with Atomic / Mutexed access and getter/setter functions, that seems to give a project more legs than letting the AI work out fiddly access protection schemes one by one.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 5 weeks ago:
I got one up around 500 lines before it started falling apart when trying to add new features. That was a mix of Rust and HTML, total source file size was around 14kB, with what I might call a “normal amount” of comments in the code.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 5 weeks ago:
Once my business is in a more profitable place I’ll bring someone on to fix up the code
AKA: technical debt. I actually approve of this approach when you’re testing the market and don’t have any paying customers. Where it gets ugly is when customers start placing trust in your product, trust that might be costly if your code fails, and management doesn’t budget the resources to actually fix up the code. I was very glad to leave the place that was doing this…
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 5 weeks ago:
The problem is when people assume you can actually build an entire software/service architecture of any complexity just through vibe coding.
Welcome to CEO handling 101. It’s an art, a very soft skill, and not for the faint of heart. I worked for a mid sized (50 employee) company once where I’d “speak truth to power” in our weekly meeting, get shot down rather enthusiastically by the CEO during the meeting, then after I and the rest of R&D left his office, he’d go out to production and have them start implementing all the concepts of my pitch - as his own ideas, naturally.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 5 weeks ago:
That’s a great tip: having it review the security of code that an earlier context generated.
I plan on having it write unit tests, or at least try to…
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 5 weeks ago:
You need to be able to read it to understand that it’s going a little off the rails.
At least 2/3 of the time I spend with AI coding is getting it to compile without errors - that’s more than a little off the rails, but it’s also much more helpful when you finally do get to a working example that you can look at, instead of beating your own head against the Stack Exchange archives hoping for inspiration, let it try for you.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 5 weeks ago:
AI coding is actually a very powerful tool, almost like a light saber. Do you notice how many amputations and artificial limbs there are in that galaxy far far away?
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 5 weeks ago:
Because: for $20 per month to the AI company, you can output poor code much much faster.
- Comment on Switzerland plans surveillance worse than US 1 month ago:
For a more extreme example, look to the Principality of Monaco. Being so much smaller, it can be much more extreme.
- Comment on Microsoft suddenly kills its movies and TV store on Xbox and Windows 1 month ago:
PS3 was a 1080p capable device connected to our (new in 2007) 1080p living room TV, the only 1080p device for almost a year. It played BluRay discs - they had the opportunity to cooperate with Netflix and other content providers like the Smart TVs that followed, but they didn’t. When they rug-pulled the “otherOS” feature that I was using to stream live (still) photos from WebCams in the Caribbean, that earned a NetTop PC a place in the living room, and from there PC based content sourcing became the norm in our house. To this day, we have no “Smart” TVs. Our BluRay players are not internet connected (and they play 99% DVDs, less than 1% BluRay content…)
Consumer behavior gets ingrained, hard to change when they’re happy where they are.