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abhibeckert

@ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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509
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption

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  • you can’t ignore basic laws of the universe that oil is a finite resource

    TLDR - oil might be a finite resource but gasoline is not oil and it can be renewable. But it's also a rapidly shrinking market.

    The stuff can literally be grown on trees. It's cheaper to pump it out of the ground, but it's actually not much cheaper. Fuel from plants, which we farm in bulk for human consumption, can absolutely be used to create gasoline. It's also net-zero — because the plant takes carbon out of the atmosphere to create the oil and then it's simply returned to the atmosphere when your burn it.

    Most gasoline in the USA contains at least 10% biofuel, and some is up to 85%. The latter requires an engine tuned to run on it, however it's possible (and is an area of active research) if you're willing to spend a bit more money to manufacture 100% pure biofuel that can run on unmodified engines. Porsche in particular has started selling a biofuel that is specifically designed to run on classic cars that were manufactured decades ago. They plan to produce something like a million gallons a month of the stuff, and it will work in basically any car. And if you have a classic car (designed for gasoline that contained lead) then it will work better than the fossil fuel you can buy at a gas station

    The thing is though, battery powered vehicles are way cheaper than doing any of that. And if you really need a fuel based approach (e.g. batteries are just too heavy for large aircraft), then Hydrogen is a better option than any biofuel.

    So - while gasoline can technically be environmentally friendly and is a usable source of energy for the foreseeable future, in reality it's destined to follow horse drawn carriages and steam engines, a technology some people only use for their own personally enjoyment or to preserve our history.

  • Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose

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  • Everything-but-Windows?

    No. Any device that implements a certain DHCP feature is vulnerable. Linux doesn't support it, because most Linux systems don't even use DHCP at all let alone this edge case feature. And Android doesn't support it because it inherited the Linux network stack.

    I would bet some Linux systems are vulnerable, just not with the standard network packages installed. If you're issued a Linux laptop for work, wouldn't be surprised if it has a package that enables this feature. It essentially gives sysadmins more control over how packets are routed for every computer on the LAN.

  • Gen Z mostly doesn't care if influencers are actual humans, new study shows

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  • When I think of “influencer” this is the image in my mind.

    ... OK. But that's not what the term "Influencer" actually means. The actual definition is basically just "anyone with a lot of followers".

    And there are plenty of people with a lot of followers who produce great content. For example this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU

  • Gen Z mostly doesn't care if influencers are actual humans, new study shows

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  • How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money

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  • How would that ruin it?

  • The Verge shows how Google search is useless

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  • Nilay Patel - the editor in chief is anti-AI especially when it comes to article content. He doesn't allow anyone at the company to use generated content except when they are writing an article about AI and even then only to demonstrate a point - e.g. "here's a comparison of two LLMs with the same prompt". It was also his decision to stop AI's from crawling any content on their website.

    He used AI to pad the article because that's what real spam articles do. It had nothing to do with acceptance.

  • The Verge shows how Google search is useless

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  • they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early

    My Brother is newer than yours (the cheapest one I could get that prints on both sides of the paper), and has a setting to toggle how it behaves when toner is low.

    The default is to pause printing until you replace the toner - honestly that's not entirely wrong. Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.

    The alternative mode is to just show a "low toner" warning badge whenever you print a document. That's what I use, but I also check if it printed properly before closing the document which a lot of people don't do. It looks like this:

    As far as I know it's just a simple counter - how many pages have you printed since it was replaced. Obviously that's never going to be particularly accurate.

  • The Verge shows how Google search is useless

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  • That seems like a bug assuming you have your region selected/enabled? I'd report it to DDG.

  • The Verge shows how Google search is useless

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  • What do you mean by "local"? If you mean finding somewhere to go for lunch or the opening hours of a store, I recommend using the maps app on your phone (I prefer Apple Maps over Google, because it uses Yelp and TripAdvisor for reviews which are accurate than Google reviews... if I had an Android phone I'd probably install Yelp/TripAdvisor).

  • Google Kneecaps Loads Of Very Big Websites After SEO Change

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  • I can usually find what I need on google pretty damn quick

    It depends what you're searching for. Some things are very hard to find that used to be easy.

    The solution I'd like to see is for Google to stop being anticompetitive. For example it just leaked that they pay half of their company wide profits to Apple in order to stop Apple from using (or creating) another search engine.

    Stop spending tens of billions of dollars per year trying to keep competition away, and instead invest all of that money into making Google Search a better product.

  • Google Kneecaps Loads Of Very Big Websites After SEO Change

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  • Because they are making so that we get less results that are just cheating the system to show up at the top?

    No, because they are failing to hide low quality search results. Something the would invest more money in if an alternative search engine existed.

    There are so many websites now that just shouldn't exist at all. And they wouldn't exist if Google didn't send tons of traffic their way.

  • No, you don't need a 'very bespoke AOSP' to turn your phone into a Rabbit R1 — here's proof

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  • ChatGPT 4 is a great assistant, I find it indispensable... I use it on my phone and computer but would like it in a dedicated device.

    Privacy? Yeah it's not great, but that's mitigated by OpenAI focusing the product hard on areas that don't really need privacy.

    I do think these tools can be private - but to get there we need more RAM on our computers and phones, and it needs to be expensive high bandwidth RAM, which costs a fortune right now. A lot of research is being done to reduce memory requirements and more manufacturing capacity for memory is being ramped up.

  • No, you don't need a 'very bespoke AOSP' to turn your phone into a Rabbit R1 — here's proof

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  • Hopes were set unreasonably high because the hardware designer has a great reputation. And the hardware seems well made (for the price) and certainly tries out some interesting new ideas. I love how the camera is physically blocked while not in use for example.

    The software team has let this product down. Not surprising, but dissapointing.

  • Why data centers want to have their own nuclear reactors

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  • That eVinci reactor is tiny at only 5MW. You'd need something like a thousand of them to run a single AI data center. It's also horrifically expensive at over $100 million (each! multiply that by a thousand!) and it can only produce that amount of power for eight years, then I'm not sure what you do. Buy a thousand more of them?

    For comparison, some wind turbines provide more than twice as much power from just a single turbine. And they cost single digit millions to setup. They're not as reliable and they're also bigger than a micro nuclear reactor. But none of that really matters for a data center, which can draw power from the grid if it needs to.

    The only really promising small reactor I've heard of is the NuScale one - but it may have been vapourware. Republicans made a big splash during the 2016 election campaign and committed to paying 1/12th of the cost of a reactor as part of their clean energy "commitment". There was no price tag, just 1/12th.

    A couple years later, after they'd won the election, they quietly abandoned that plan and agreed to pay $1.3 billion which they claimed would be 1/4th of the budget. The subtext was the earlier election promise was before a budget had been figured out yet. But going from 1/12th to 1/4th is a pretty big jump.

    And then a few years after that... when the company told the government $1.3 billion would not be enough money for the project to be financially viable... and that in order to sell electricity at all they needed the government to subsidise every single watt of power produced by the plant for the entire period that it operated... because it was going to run at a loss... that's when the government pulled all funding (except what had already been spent, which was a lot of money) and the whole project collapsed.

    I tried to find references for all of that, but the website for the project is now a "domain for sale" page. All that's left is a few vague news articles which have conflicting information. But I've been following this for decades and the project you linked to was one of the ones that made it crystal clear to me that nuclear doesn't have a future unless something really big changes.

    Who knows, perhaps if the government had been really committed to NuScale, they might've pushed through the pain and helped it succeed int order to become cheaper later. But the government wasn't willing to take that risk and apparently nobody else was either.

  • Why data centers want to have their own nuclear reactors

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  • need to be somewhat close to important population areas

    They really don't. I live in regional Australia - the nearest data center is 1300 miles away. It's perfectly fine. I work in tech and we had a small data center (50 servers) in our office with a data center grade fibre link - got rid of it because it was a waste of money. Even comparing 1300 miles of latency to 20 feet of latency wasn't worth it.

    To be clear, having 0.1ms of latency was noticeable for some things. But nothing that really matters. And certainly not AI where you're often waiting 5 seconds or even a full minute.

  • The retro Nokia phone everyone owned 25 years ago will get a reboot soon – and yes, it has Snake

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  • The S30 OS, before Nokia collapses, was much better.

    Yeah no - you're miss-remembering it. For example you had to delete SMS messages otherwise your mailbox would fill up.

    It could only fit 10 messages before it'd run out of space, and once full no messages would be received at all.

    Also, the battery life was ten days in standby if you didn't use the phone which was nice but as soon as you started using it... then it only lasted 3 hours. I used to carry two spare batteries in my bag... don't miss those days at all.

  • Why data centers want to have their own nuclear reactors

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  • Yeah I call bullshit on that. I get why they're investing money in it, but this is a moonshot and I'm sure they don't expect it to succeed.

    These data centers can be built almost anywhere in the world. And there are places with very predictable weather patterns making solar/wind/hydro/etc extremely cheap compared to nuclear.

    Nuclear power is so expensive, that it makes far more sense to build an entire solar farm and an entire wind farm, both capable of providing enough power to run the data center on their own in overcast conditions or moderate wind.

    If you pick a good location, that's lkely to work out to running off your own power 95% of the time and selling power to the grid something like 75% of the time. The 5% when you can't run off your own power... no wind at night is rare in a good location and almost unheard of in thick cloud cover, well you'd just draw power from the grid. Power produced by other data centers that are producing excess solar or wind power right now.

    In the extremely rare disruption where power wouldn't be available even from the grid... then you just shift your workload to another continent for an hour or so. Hardly anyone would notice an extra tenth of a second of latency.

    Maybe I'm wrong and nuclear power will be 10x cheaper one day. But so far it's heading the other direction, about 10x more expensive than it was just a decade ago, thanks to incidents like Fukushima and that tiny radioactive capsule lost in Western Australia proving current nuclear safety standards, even in some of the safest countries in the world, are just not good enough. Forcing the industry to take additional measures (additional costs) going forward.

  • Will self driving trucks hit the roads with nobody on board or will they keep a human supervisor?

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  • the google cars few years ago had the boot occupied by big computers

    But those were prototypes. These days you can get an NVIDIA H100 - several inches long, a few inches wide, one inch thick. It has 80GB of memory running at 3.5TB/s and 26 teraflops of compute (for comparison, Tesla autopilot runs on a 2 teraflop GPU).

    The H100 is designed to be run in clusters, with eight GPUs on a single server, but I don't think you'd need that much compute. You'd have two or maybe three servers, with one GPU each, and they'd be doing the same workload (for redundancy).

    They're not cheap... you couldn't afford to put one in a Tesla that only drives 1 or 2 hours a day. But a car/truck that drives 20 hours a day? Yeah that's affordable.

  • Will self driving trucks hit the roads with nobody on board or will they keep a human supervisor?

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  • inspect the inside and outside of the truck before and after each trip.

    This could easily be a full time job for a team of people who working an ordinary 9-5 job inspecting one truck after another all day, basically the way taxis and other car fleets are maintained.

    I'd argue that's an improvement over driving a truck. Truck mechanics are paid slightly better than truck drivers, and they work far better hours.

    Many of them can fix blown tire or a failed spark plug

    Trucks have 18 wheels. A tire doesn't have to be fixed immediately. And I can't remember the last time I encountered a failed spark plug... but even if it were to happen one cylinder being out of action will just reduce your horsepower by 12%. You'd fix it after delivering the cargo.

    But again, roadside mechanics are a thing. And they're paid even better than workshop mechanics.

    deter theft and vandalism by often sleeping in the truck

    Human truck drivers are only allowed to drive 60 hours a week. Which means for at least 108 hours a week, the truck is parked somewhere. A self driving truck would have no such limit, and would almost always park at a safe location.

  • Will self driving trucks hit the roads with nobody on board or will they keep a human supervisor?

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  • This tech advances very slowly.

    Historically, anything that reduces cost of transporting goods has advanced extremely quickly. The best comparison, I think, is the shipping container.

    It took about ten years for shipping containers to go from an invention nobody had heard of to one that was being used in every major seaport in the world and about another ten years for virtually all shipping used that method.

    The New York docks for example, dramatically increased activity (as in, handled several times more cargo per day) while also reducing the workforce by two thirds. I think self driving trucks will do the same thing - companies/cities/highways that adopt AI will grow rapidly and any company/city/highway that doesn't support self driving trucks will suddenly stop being used almost entirely.

    Shipping containers were not a simple transition. New ships and new docks had to be built to take advantage of it. A lot of new trucks and trains were also built. Just 20 years to replace nearly all the infrastructure in one of the biggest and most important industries in the world.