HaraldvonBlauzahn
@HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
- 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 week ago:
Yeah, but is it useful to rob the Mona Lisa?
- Comment on 1 week 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 2 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago to energy@slrpnk.net | 9 comments
- Akkudoktor Energy Management / Optimization System: Optimized Control of Home Energy Systemsakkudoktor-eos.readthedocs.io ↗Submitted 4 weeks ago to energy@slrpnk.net | 0 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to energy@slrpnk.net | 0 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on one bright second 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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? 5 weeks 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? 5 weeks 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.
- Comment on ICE just bought new tool to monitor hundreds of millions of smartphones. Experts say it’s dangerous 5 weeks ago:
Alternative ODes surely do have better privacy than Android, but that’s probably not sufficient. On Smartphones, there runs not a single CPU like on a laptop, but more like 5 computers and only one of them is controlled by the OS. For example, there is a baseband processor and a radio modem. And the SIM card is a computer. And part of these can be controlled remotely (have you ever wondered how your phone automatically re-programs it parameters when you change providers?).
And then there are gaps in authentication in the radio prozocol: Your phone / SIM card authenticates against a radio tower so that the right phone user pays the bill. But the phone has no way to detect a rogue mobile tower…
- Comment on The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe 5 weeks ago:
It seems to be just accepted that everyone is going to jump to another company every couple years (usually due to companies not giving adequate raises).
Well. I did the last jump because the quality was so bad.
