Badabinski

Yeah, the lifespan and ability to leave a flywheel “discharged” makes me wish I could have one for my homelab (as unrealistic as that might be). I have a solar generator as a battery backup, but it’s not a true UPS with a fast transfer switch (I needed at least 3kWh of capacity for long power outages, my max draw is like 600 watts before I finish load shedding). Most of my servers can tolerate the brief voltage sag, but my R640 chokes and dies. My battery is hooked up to one of my PDUs, and I’d love to have a flywheel hooked up to the other PDU. The battery would be fully transitioned by the time the flywheel was discharged.

On the point of safety, I have a question. I feel like it’s probably easier to prove that a flywheel system is deenergized, but there is the very slight risk of confinement loss. With a chemistry like Lithium Iron Phosphate that can’t sustain a flame and doesn’t produce flammable gasses, do you feel that batteries might begin to approach the safety of flywheels? It sounds like you have actual experience with flywheel systems, so I’m quite curious.

EDIT: holy shit, someone is actually selling a 300 KVA flywheel system on eBay for $30,000. I wonder who the hell would buy something like that used.

EDIT: I said “very slight risk” of confinement loss, and I should probably correct myself. The risk is ridiculously, stupidly small for a system like I linked above. Maybe the bigger systems that get buried and have concrete poured on them are riskier, but I don’t know if people even do that anymore for datacenters.

Full disclosure, I haven’t watched the video, I’m just going off of the other comments. Mechanical energy storage is definitely already a thing. Flywheels are the past, present, and future of energy storage in certain niches. My dad was a PM for IBM for many years and told me all about installing them while building out datacenters in the 90s. They’re great for powering large loads while a generator spins up. They’re, uh, not really that great for multi-day storage. You’re going to lose energy no matter what. Magnetic bearings won’t help this, they still have something analogous to friction.

Anything other than batteries or pumped hydro is probably a fool’s errand when it comes to grid-level storage. You’re not going to make a crane big enough to compete with millions of gallons of water pumped up a hill. You’re not going to be able to make a flywheel spin fast enough to compete with millions of gallons of water pumped up a hill. Do not try to compete with the water using your giant spinning death wheel or big dumb crane. Batteries get a pass because they’re dense as fuck and very simple to deploy.

Brainrot.

touch foo; tar cvf foo.tar foo

My fucking autocorrect decided that cvf should have been xvf. I caught it before I hit enter to close out the code block, but wtf? When did my keyboard develop opinions on command args‽

Yeah, every now and then I take a step back and say “what the fuck did they build?” when dealing with some of the GNU tools. Twenty minutes later I’ll start complaining about how the BSD version of something from coreutils lacks a GNU argument that would make my life about 83% easier.

It’s like a sick sort of Stockholm Syndrome. I do genuinely like GNU coreutils, but there’s some baffling shit present.

The issue is that browsers don’t release much memory back to the system when it’s needed. I wish they’d work more like the Linux kernel’s VFS caching later, but they don’t (and might not be able to. For example, I do don’t think the Linux kernel has good APIs for such a use case).

The issue is that browsers don’t release much memory back to the system when it’s needed. I wish they’d work more like the Linux kernel’s VFS caching later, but they don’t (and might not be able to. For example, I do don’t think the Linux kernel has good APIs for such a use case).

The problem is that the extra RAM used by a browser is held on an exclusive basis and so is not nicely reclaimable by the kernel. I love that Linux caches the shit out of files in RAM, it’s great. It’s also great that it can release that memory when I launch a chundering dumpster fire application that eats all of my RAM. If a browser had been holding that memory, then the godawful Linux OOM killer would have launched, halted all threads on the system, walked the entire process tree, and SIGKILLed something (probably not a browser tab) before letting everyone else resume.

With the way memory is currently managed, a bloated browser is a liability. Cached state needs to be stored in something like a mmaped file so that the kernel can flush pages out of memory if someone else comes along with a malloc. Alternatively, there needs to be communication between a browser and a userspace OOM daemon. If the system started hitting a soft limit, then the browser could start unloading background shit more aggressively.

Free memory is wasted memory, but so is memory that can’t be used for anything else when it’s needed.

Hey there! I want to preface this by saying a couple of things. The first thing is that I don’t really have a horse in this race. What people run in their homelabs is their business, and I appreciate seeing diverse setups. The second thing is that we had a cordial conversation before about nuclear fusion. I’ve seen you around a lot, and I have a pretty high opinion of you. I’ve felt that if we interacted again, it’d be a mutually positive experience.

After reading this thread, I feel surprised and concerned. The tone of conversations in this thread seems different from what I’ve seen in the past when seeing the rainbow Starfleet badge. I hope I’m coming across genuinely when I ask—is everything okay? I’m not asking out of some oblique motivation to dismiss your point of view, but because I feel like there’s more anger and frustration in some responses than is (in my opinion, and only my opinion) warranted by the situation. Like, for example, have there been bitter arguments about this topic in the past? Is this topic similar to other ones that are frustrating/upsetting? Has today just been a really shitty day? The last one is pretty common for me, and I find that it can make me react with more anger and force than I would have otherwise intended. It doesn’t change my opinions or values, it just affects the way I express myself. I personally do not like to express anger on the internet (unless I feel that my anger is truly warranted), and I sometimes wish someone would stop and ask me “is everything okay?” in those moments. Being able to think about and express feelings about the thing that’s aggravating me is such a relief, and it helps me step back into myself. I’ve seen enough of your posts that I’m going to presume to extend that to you.

I want to reiterate that my intention here is not to dismiss or reduce your points, nor is it to change your mind. I’m not trying to tone police, because the tone people use on the internet is their own damn business. I’m totally accepting of a “please go away,” if all of this is off base or unwanted in any way. I’ve just grown fond of seeing your comments, and this thread seems like an outlier. If that’s intentional, then I apologize for my presumption.

I should try this on my XL. I have big dumb 0.6 nozzles right now so it’d look like garbo, but I could print it in PLA with PETG supports. Being able to have almost no space between the support and primary material would probably make many alternative orientations possible.

For those who don’t know (including me):

Shotcut is a free, open source, cross-platform video editor.

I could see the NT kernel being okay in isolation, but the rest of Windows coming along for the ride puts the kibosh on that idea.

I’ll throw in “folks” as another gender neutral option. I say “you folks” all the time, especially in professional contexts. I’m not from the South, but I have family there so y’all is a part of my vocabulary. I use it in more informal situations pretty commonly.

Android similarly makes it easy. If I just press and hold on ?, I get options for ¿ and ‽. Seems like mobile devices have worked out more convenient UIs for this type of thing.

I always have a terminal open in the workspace on my other monitor so it’s just <super-j> interr <tab> <return> <super-;> <c-v>

wait, that makes me sound like an absolute fucking nutcase lol. I typed that first sentence completely unironically and only realized how absurd it was afterwards. It’s faster than the whole “type the Unicode point value” thing, but I should probably start using compose key instead.

I fukken love me an interrobang. I have a shell alias on my computers that copies one of those bad boys into my clipboard so I can more easily display my shocked puzzlement. It’s very useful when dealing with msft products, especially Azure.

Yep, or when you’re doing EMDR and you open your eyes and your therapist is crying. That’s how you know you’ve hit the good shit 👉😎👉

Thankfully, that only happened once. It honestly made me feel better, it was incredibly validating.

Just wanna give a big ol’ +1 to The Body Keeps The Score. My partner read it and it was a game changer for her.

Man, that’s cool! Concrete is a heck of a lot cheaper than epoxy granite resin and is perfectly suitable for a low-precision tool like this lathe.

I do hope that he finds a way to shield those bearings. You really don’t want metal chips or sawdust making its way in there. Any damage they sustain will cause runout, which will lead to increased chatter and parts that are out of spec. Plus, a matching pair of tapered roller bearings can be quite expensive!

EDIT: to be clear, I mean no disrespect when I say low-precision. Not every lathe needs to have slides and handwheels. I have a little Sherline lathe that I’ve used like this in the past (using gravers, not tools in a tool holder). It’s great to quickly turn something or to put nice decorative details on a part. Precision is possible with a lathe like this, but it requires fairly strenuous effort.

I could not have imagined a more fitting name if I had been writing this whole episode as a work or fiction. The world can be so fucking delightful at small scales sometimes.