boonhet

It starts sounding better when you go further north. I’m not that far north, but further north than pretty much anyone in North America as far as percentage of population is concerned. Edmonton, Canada’s northernmost city with a proper population count is still multiple degrees south of me because Europe’s climate is different and we can live further north than NA folks without our winters getting quite as bad in terms of temperature and snow. Anchorage is about a comparable latitude. But there’s an entire country (two if you count Iceland, which I forgot about) that’s located north of me and three that have more than half their landmass to the north of me (two of which also have most of their population north of me - Russia’s population centers are fairly southish). So they have it even worse than I do.

A small 3kW nominal, 5kW max wind turbine is on sale for ~1300 EUR plus VAT so around 1600 EUR. That should get you like 700-800 watts an hour, right? A 7 kWh battery starter kit that should also last you through the night at a similar drain rate for most of the year (just not in the winter when night is 18 hours and the rest of the time is barely sunny either and you need electricity the most because heat pump which is also the time of the year where electricity costs money) is about 4k (VAT included). At this level, the batteries and solar might still sound good, because wind turbines are annoying and big and not that efficient at home usage scale.

Now the other problem is that the panels that would take a day to fill that battery pack in a day in the summer would take nearly a month to fill it in the winter. It’s not JUST fewer hours of sunlight, the sun angle itself is super low. So you’re going to need a fuckton of panels.

In the end, if you want to stay on your own power reliably (e.g because you have a heat pump for heating and you live in an area where a power outage could be several days) and you get short winter days with barely any sunlight like I do, that turbine starts sounding pretty darn good, it’ll be an order of magnitude cheaper, though you should still have SOME battery. It’s just that if I wanted to power my house all on my own produced electricity, and heat my home with a heat pump (ideally geothermal because less energy), with only solar + battery, at ~2 kW of power into the geothermal pump, an 18 hour night is 36 kWh of battery required. There’s like an hour or two of actually useful sunlight a day and a few hours of “the sun technically exists”. Then up to 18 hours of darkness. If I add a wind turbine to my hypothetical solar + battery array, the battery capacity doesn’t need to be nearly as big.

This is only really required, though, if you want to be entirely self-sufficient. If you live in a town where you can rely on the grid being functional 99.9% of the time and are OK with using something dirtier than coal for your main electricity source at night, you’ll be fine with much less and the wind turbine sounds useless again. It’s only in my “oh I’ll go all green and all self-sufficient” fantasies where it’s useful.

The below text I marked as a spoiler so it can be ignored because it’s my ADHD ramblings on what I envision as a future utopia if there was tech and funding for this. It would reduce the need for wind turbines even on grid scale and everyone could have green energy without having their own production unless they need it for reliability.

Basically there is almost nowhere that wind wins over solar. At least at consumer scale.

Anything between late october and early march?

I can’t be arsed to find it again, but there’s a company that does solar installs in my country and they have production statistics from some of their installations on their website. I checked out a couple and May or June tended to be about 30x higher than December. I think May was actually the peak production month which in hindsight makes sense because in June the midday sun is really high in the sky and the morning and evening are somewhat more north than you’d normally get so they don’t give you much extra.

December, meanwhile, gets about an hour of useful sunlight a week.

The problem is that, legally speaking, the lower receiver is the gun. So you can buy all the other parts online with no background check etc.

Makes you wonder if there’s a more sensible way to classify things legally… Probably not.

And then you have the updates! That’s fun! They sell ERPs as SaaS, but it doesn’t work like any other SaaS. The major updates break tons of shit because your own customizations will be based on upstream fields and methods that no longer exist. Not as bad as migrating to another ERP entirely, but not exactly cheap. At work, we keep support for our custom modules for longer than the ERP company itself supports those old versions so our customers get an extra year or 2 out of it. It’s a pretty big deal for them and of course great for us, helps retention because they’d have to spend more for less if they go to the competitors (on even the same ERP that is - going to another ERP wouldn’t just be a migration cost, the annual cost itself would go up too).

Even Microsoft knows Windows is dead. That’s part of the reason for the push for office365 over locally installed applications. It’s not dead as in everyone will stop using it next year, but it’s dead as in it might only have 10 years left as THE dominant desktop OS, maybe more, maybe less.

What they’re really ingrained in business with is their ERP bullshit. Migrating a bunch of users from Windows to Linux is cheap and easy compared to migrating all your data AND users from Dynamics to SAP or Odoo or something. It’s such a headache, you basically never do it in-house, you contract that out to a company that specializes in the ERP you’re moving to. Because it’s not just data you’re migrating, it’s business processes too. Bunch of custom modules usually need to be created, yay!

Yes, but then you hold all the liability for your shit going missing. The entire point of using a managed service like github or gitlab is that you have someone to sue.

I mean, didn’t Gitlab also say they were going all-in on AI?

There’s no major forge you can use for proprietary projects that isn’t shitty.

Doesn’t matter, still driving up prices of old Toyota trucks and when you can say “hey look they last forever and don’t depreciate much”, it’s easier to sell new trucks, even if they’re mechanically very different.

Working as a game dev is just uh… dumb.

Triple A at least guarantees your paycheck until you’re laid off and then you get a severance. Which can happen at any moment. Also you have to do crunch.

Indie games don’t even guarantee you a stable paycheck. It’s sorta contingent on how well the game does. Unless it’s an established indie company in which case it’ll be triple A soon.

Nobody should be a game dev as their day job unless they’re a millionaire already. Otherwise, it works best as a side project to do while working as a dev in literally any other industry that requires devs.

I mean I can’t see what the comment was and I’m assuming it must’ve been downright hateful, but that person almost certainly has learned a foreign language just to communicate with the world and in fact had to learn another foreign language in school because their name is Estonian for “gypsy” and learning two foreign languages (usually English and Russian, sometimes German or something else for the second foreign language) is required. Likely they speak 2.5 languages as is common here (my German is so bad I count it as half a language - native speakers speak too fast for me, but I can kinda get my point across if needed), but could be more.

Just pointing out that even when trying to be accepting of others, subtle anglo-defaultism can show up in your comment, not that I necessarily agree with whatever the comment was.

Why if I already need to know Docker for work, but not the others

I’ve used Kunernetes but not Ansible lol

Yes, that was my point, you (generally) link statically in Rust because that resolves dependency issues between the different applications you need to run. Cost is a slightly bigger, bloatier binary, but generally it’s a very good tradeoff because a slightly bigger binary isn’t an inconvenience these days.

Docker achieves the same for everything, including dynamically linked projects that default to using shared libraries which can have dependency nightmares, other binaries that are being called, etc. It doesn’t virtualize an entire OS unless you’re using it on MacOS or Windows, so the performance overhead is not as big as people seem to think (disk space overhead, though… can get slightly bigger). It’s also great for dev environments because you can have different devs using whatever the fuck they prefer as their main OS and Docker will make everyone’s environment the same.

I generally wouldn’t put a Rust/Cargo project in docker by default since it’s pretty rare to run into external dependency issues with those, but might still do it for the tooling (docker compose, mainly).

True, Docker does it better because any executables also have redundant copies. Running two different node applications on bare metal, they can still disagree about the node version, etc.

The actual old-school bloat-free way to do it is shared libraries of course. And that shit sucks.

Main benefit of Docker for home is Docker compose IMO. Makes it so easy to reuse your configuration

Actually docker is excellent for building from source. Some projects only come with instructions for building in Docker because it’s easier to make sure you have tested versions of tools.

Both your examples actually include their own bloat to accomplish the same thing that Docker would. They both bundle the libraries they depend on as part of the build

This seems to be an ad for a windows based product. I agree with your points though.