HaraldvonBlauzahn
@HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
- Comment on Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030 1 week ago:
Rust has traits and reference counting which map nicely to COM objects.
By the way, the Linux Kernel is OOP. That’s a good choice for things like queues, file systems, and device drivers.
- Comment on There’s so much stolen data in the world, South Korea will require face scans to buy a SIM 1 week ago:
Remember biometric information is like an account name, not like a password. You can change and reset your password, but not your fingerprints.
- Comment on Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030 1 week ago:
“Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases,” he added. “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’”
That’s insane. Even a good engineer will frequently need years to fully understand one million lines of code - even if the code is organized very, very well.
To compare, one million lines of program code might have around 200000 important symbols whose meaning and complex connections one has to learn and memorize. That’s far more than the average vocabulary one will learn in five years when learning a foreign language to a high skill level. Doing it in a month would be like learning to read and write fine Japanese or Arab literature in a month when you have never spoken a word in that language before.
- Comment on Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices 1 week ago:
I am. I have 16 GB on my 15 year old eight-core PC, run virtual machines, and need barely half the RAM. My laptop is a Thinkpad T490 and is totally fine. My Linux phone runs fine with 5 GB right now.
- Comment on Grid-Scale Bubble Batteries Will Soon Be Everywhere 1 week ago:
People will also need to stay back 70 meters.
Huge amounts of carbon dioxide can be far more dangerous. The Lake Nyos disaster has killed over 1700 people.
- Comment on Grid-Scale Bubble Batteries Will Soon Be Everywhere 1 week ago:
And wave power, which can complement wind and solar power.
Look up [the Pelamis wave power plant[(m.youtube.com/watch?v=l3-SXFtPYe0&pp=ygU1cGVsYW1p…). Bought by E.ON , a fossil company. Then, E.ON killed the project.
Now, the Chinese have copied it and are building it. What a grim joke.
- Comment on Grid-Scale Bubble Batteries Will Soon Be Everywhere 1 week ago:
They don’t want working energy storage. That’s why there are so many fairy dust projects like nuclear fusion.
And on the other hand, there are well-proven established techniques like heat pumps, OV panels, Lithium batteries, and saisonal heat storage. Which should be built and used at a large scale because they work - but aren’t.
- Comment on Grid-Scale Bubble Batteries Will Soon Be Everywhere 1 week ago:
even the waste heat from the compression could be used to achieve more compression
No. Waste heat can by definition not be converted to mechanical work.
Otherwise, one could build a perpetuum mobile: Convert heat to mechanical work, use that work to generate heat, convert it to work again, and so on. You’d have a machine that generates energy out of nothing, and that’s not possible because of the law of energy conservation.
- Comment on Grid-Scale Bubble Batteries Will Soon Be Everywhere 1 week ago:
Compressing gas generates heat, and a significant part of that heat will be lost. Heat dissipation is itreversible, and this lowers efficiency a lot.
BTW the same reason why in industry, pneumatic drives are universally replaced by electric motors: Their efficiency is too low.
- Comment on Notepad++ updater installed malware 3 weeks ago:
I would doubt that the average self-updating Windows program has better security.
- Comment on Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup's robots could 'fracture a human skull' 5 weeks ago:
Related: Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks saw this coming: arstechnica.com/…/why-irobots-founder-wont-go-wit…
I think this is a well-written and important article.
One more aspect: The article lines out that todays control algirithms for robots are not inherently stable and can’t guarantee safety.
I have seen some code that runs in some if such humanoid robots and would like to add the following warning: the control code for robots is typically written by researchers, not safety experts. While there might be some brilliant programmers among them, such code will be, in most of the cases, a hot mess which cannot guarantee any safety. It will certainly not meet requirements which are commonly mandated for things like complex medical devices, automobiles, or other dangerous work equipment - but due to the much larger complexity and dangerous mechanical forces in such robots, the requirements should be higher than in automobiles.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 5 weeks ago:
Well, what the world really needs are laptops with built-in HVAC support!
- Comment on Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup's robots could 'fracture a human skull' 5 weeks ago:
Would you go near an uncontrollable maniac swinging a ten-pound sledgehammer, or stand two meters below a larger-than life bronce sculpture of Neptun with a harpoon, weighting 150 kilograms, which is not fixed, unstable and could at any moment fall upon you?
No? Then you should not go near such a robot.
- Comment on The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing" 1 month ago:
Yeah, but is it useful to rob the Mona Lisa?
- Comment on 1 month ago:
They survived the K-T extiction event ir K-Pg event which killed perhaps 75% of species in earth 66 milliin years ago.
While we are already causing an extinction event which will probably far worse, by causing temperatures to rise to a level higher than in hundreds of millions of years. And I am not so sure that we survive that in the long run. Humans are incredibly adaptable, that’s right. But our food sources are not, and the great mayority of them (except perhaps algae and mushrooms) are far younger in an evolutionary sense, so it is unlikely they can adapt.
- Comment on The Authoritarian Stack 1 month ago:
Yeah Brexit was a test run. Great Summary by Carole Cadwalladr “The great British Brexit Robbery” (published by the Guardian, de-published following pressure by Google, I guess, but can be found on the net).
I was completely spooked by the fact that these Brexiteers were using language in a Nazi-like way.
- Comment on Big Nuclear’s Big Mistake - Linear No-Threshold 2 months ago:
That is at least very disputable.
Look up “epigenetic effects of ionizing radiation” on scholar.google.com (that is a google service for searching academic papers).
There are also effects for which the current theories have no good explanation. For example, in Germany, several careful studies found that near nuclear plants, there is a larger risk for childs to develop leukemia. Similar results have emerged in other places of the world.
- Comment on Demolition of the cooling towers of the Grundremmingen nuclear power plant, Bavaria / Germany 2 months ago:
There are two problems with that.
One is that nuclear plants are, among other stuff, massive heat engines. Because all the steel, tubes and whatever expands when it is heated up, switching it on and off stresses the material. This can be improved on by design but such design has extra costs and has its limits.
The second is that when you turn down your plant to half the output, you spend essentially the same money to get half the result. Which means you have just doubled the cost per kilowatt hour. And this with the background that nuclear is not any more cost-competitive to begin with.
In the result, a fleet of wind power plants plus battery or hydro storage is cheaper than such a nuclear plant.
- Comment on An in-space construction firm says it can help build massive data centers in orbit 2 months ago:
What should that babble even mean?
In a data center, you have 4 main problems:
- Get an massive amount of comuters there, and maintain them to keep working
- Get information there and the results back
- Get a constant and massive flow of electrical power there
- Get an equally massive amount of heat away from it.
Being in orbit helps with exactly none of that. For example, the heat: In orbit, there is no air or water which would work as a cooling medium, but just a vacuum which cools almost nothing. It is like a vacuum flask. Get your smart phone when running hot in such a vacuum flask and tell me how it worked…
So what is the purpose of all that bullshit??
- Comment on Demolition of the cooling towers of the Grundremmingen nuclear power plant, Bavaria / Germany 2 months ago:
Coal is in decline as well, and interestingly, abandoning nuclear has only accelerated that. With coal from the Rurgebiet being historically the primary energy source, Germany has still a lot of coal, so there is more way to go.
The thing is that technically and economically, nuclear competes with wind power, because wind generates all day and especially also in winter. New nuclear is completely uneconomical and coal is becoming uneconomical - new coal plants already are, that’s why their numbers are world-wide in free fall.
Gas competes with the combination of solar and large battery storage. So, it will have a few years more.
Retrofitting that old nuclear plants to operate safely would have cost a lot of money which in turn would mean less money for new wind power and solar, and also less money for modernizing grids which is a very important point.
- Comment on Demolition of the cooling towers of the Grundremmingen nuclear power plant, Bavaria / Germany 2 months ago:
Isn’t that a nice logo
I think it is as solarpunk as it gets 😀
- Comment on Demolition of the cooling towers of the Grundremmingen nuclear power plant, Bavaria / Germany 2 months ago:
Well, as I explained in my post comment, this is one step taken after literally decades of discussion. These things are moving with a loooot of inertia.
Also, like in many other places, the conservative and rightwing parties are blocking the transition where they can, because of fossil lobbying, or fossil corruption, if you want so.
On a larger scale, this is a struggle between two parties, “old power” and “new power”. New power, or green power, will eventually win, but there is likely going to be a long interim period where things are not that tidy.
If you like an entertaining read, I can recommend “Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson. (And don’t be disheartened by the first chapter, which is very dark. Things get brighter later on.)
- Demolition of the cooling towers of the Grundremmingen nuclear power plant, Bavaria / Germanym.youtube.com ↗Submitted 2 months ago to energy@slrpnk.net | 9 comments
- Akkudoktor Energy Management / Optimization System: Optimized Control of Home Energy Systemsakkudoktor-eos.readthedocs.io ↗Submitted 2 months ago to energy@slrpnk.net | 0 comments
- Submitted 2 months ago to energy@slrpnk.net | 0 comments
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on one bright second 2 months ago:
Good to know that. I am sometimes just thinking that we lived in a bright second. And are now staring into darkness.
- Comment on Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it 2 months ago:
Yikes.
I am already uncomfortable when my mom talks with her phone to search Google. But hey, she is 83 years old and her health is declining. Maybe she does not need so much privacy any more.
But here is a sad story: I have two friends, a couple. Both are automation engineers. They could not have kids, which was their dream. So instead, they built their dream house. A beautiful house. And, if course, with a lot of automation. Shutters which open in the morning and close when it is stormy. A shower which plays the right morning radio program. Extra settings for when parents-in-law visit.
But what makes me uncomfortable is voice control by speech recognition. All that cortana/siri stuff. For everything, even switching in the light. I don’t like that when I visit people. For me, it is like somebody is always listening, even to stuff that is meant only for my friends ears.
I have bot told them, but I don’t like that house.
- Comment on Is the AI Conveyor Belt of Capital About to Stop? 2 months ago:
The company’s development and expansion of its services will rely in no small part on massive data center projects, which will require the same amount of energy to operate as New York City and San Diego combined—energy that currently isn’t even available.
In that case, there is a little but fundamental problem. It is based on basic physics: You can fake securities or earnings, or you can print money. But you can’t fake energy because that violates the laws of physics.
- Comment on Is the AI Conveyor Belt of Capital About to Stop? 2 months ago:
On the other side of the deal, OpenAI will have to pay about $60 billion per year to fit the bill for the agreement. It currently generates about $10 billion in revenue, which, statistically speaking, is less than $60 billion.
ok.
