frezik

frezik , vor 6 Stunden

I've been hoping that we can sneak more and more things into userspace on Linux. Then, one day, Linus will wake up and discover he's accidentally made a microkernel.

frezik , vor 4 Tagen

Conservatives consume tons of porn. They just feel guilt about it afterwards.

frezik , vor 11 Tagen

Except we have better options than we did 10 years ago.

I'd be all for nuclear if we rolled back the clock to 2010 or so. As it stands, solar/wind/storage/hvdc lines can do the job. The situation moved and my opinion moved.

frezik , vor 11 Tagen

But the technology to rely entirely on renewables isn't really there either.

Yes, it is.

https://books.google.com/books/about/No_Miracles_Needed.html?id=aVKmEAAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description

This is a book by a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering that goes into the details. We don't need nuclear. All the tech is there.

frezik , vor 11 Tagen

No, you just pay out the nose up front.

If I had money to invest in the energy sector, I don't know why I should pick nuclear. It's going to double its budget and take 10 years before I see a dime of return. Possibly none if it can't secure funding for the budget overrun, as all my initial investment will be spent.

A solar or wind farm will take 6-12 months and likely come in at or close to its budget. Why the hell would I choose nuclear?

frezik , vor 11 Tagen

If you're going to do that, then also consider the co2 output of all the concrete needed for nuclear power plants.

frezik , vor 11 Tagen

... it's currently not possible to store the renewables anywhere

Every time someone argues this, it's immediately obvious they haven't actually paid attention how the storage market has been progressing.

Next, you'll probably talk about problems with lithium, as if it's the only storage technology.

frezik , vor 11 Tagen

Then we just move the problem. Why should we do something that's going to take longer and use more labor? Especially skilled labor.

Money is an imperfect proxy for the underlying resources in many ways, but it about lines up in this case. To force the issue, there would have to be a compelling reason beyond straight money.

That reason ain't getting to 100% clean energy in a short time. There is another: building plants to use up existing waste rather than burying it.

frezik , vor 10 Tagen

Nuclear is nothing bog standard. If it was, it wouldn't take 10 years. Almost every plant is a boutique job that requires lots of specialists. The Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design was meant to get around this. It didn't.

The experts can stay where they are: maintaining existing nuclear power.

Renewables don't take much skilled labor at all. It's putting solar panels on racks in a field, or hoisting wind blades up a tower (crane operation is a specialty, but not on the level of nuclear engineering).

frezik , vor 10 Tagen

And 5 years is what nuclear projects have promised at the start over the years. Everyone involved knows this is a gross lie.

frezik , vor 10 Tagen

China built a few Ap1000 designs. The Sanmen station started in 2009 with completion expected in 2014 (2015 for the second unit). It went into 2019. The second, Haiyang, went about the same.

This is pretty similar to what happened in the US with Volgte.

frezik , vor 23 Tagen

Unlike purchasing things for imaginary gods, carbon credits could work in theory. At least well enough to be part of the solution. That is, if they were properly regulated around strategies that actually absorb carbon and everyone is forced to be honest and transparent.

Which none of them do, of course.

frezik , vor 23 Tagen

Datacenters moved to using evaporative cooling to save power. Which it does, but at the cost of water usage.

Using salt water, or anything significantly contaminated like grey water, would mean sediment gets left behind that has to be cleaned up at greater cost. So yes, they generally do compete with drinking water sources.

There's no way nuclear gets built out in less than 10 years.

frezik , vor 23 Tagen

They primarily use evaporative cooling. Way less energy use, but no, it doesn't get returned.

frezik , vor 26 Tagen

It's looking like a dead end. The content that can be fed into the big LLMs has already been done. New stuff is a combination of actual humans and stuff generated by LLMs. It then runs into an ouroboros problem where it just eats its own input.

frezik , vor 26 Tagen

See Sun Microsystems after the .com bubble burst. They produced a lot of the servers that .com companies were using at the time. Shriveled up after and were eventually absorbed by Oracle.

Why did Oracle survive the same time? Because they latched onto a traditional Fortune 500 market and never let go down to this day.

frezik , vor 26 Tagen

You can buy them new for somewhat reasonable prices. What people should really look at is used 1080ti's on ebay. They're going for less than $150 and still play plenty of games perfectly fine. It's the budget gaming deal of the century.

frezik , vor 26 Tagen

Eh, they'll have plenty of demand for their nodes regardless. Non-AI CPUs and GPUs are still going to want them.

frezik , vor 26 Tagen

Yeah, if anything, Apple is behind the curve. Nvidia/AMD/Intel have gone full cocaine nose dive into AI already.

frezik , vor 26 Tagen

Lot of those games are also hot garbage. Baldur's Gate 3 may be the only standout title of late where you don't have to qualify what you like about it.

I think the recent layoffs in the industry also portend things hitting a wall; games aren't going to push limits as much as they used to. Combine that with the Steam Deck-likes becoming popular. Those could easily become the new baseline standard performance that games will target. If so, a 1080ti could be a very good card for a long time to come.

frezik , vor 25 Tagen

So here's two links about Alan Wake 2.

First, on a 1080ti: https://youtu.be/IShSQQxjoNk?si=E2NRiIxz54VAHStn

And then on a Rog Aly (which I picked because it's a little more powerful than the current Steam Deck, and runs native Windows): https://youtu.be/hMV4b605c2o?si=1ijy_RDUMKwXKQQH

The Rog seems to be doing a little better, but not by much. They're both hitting sub 30fps at 720p.

My point is that if that kind of handheld hardware becomes typical, combined with the economic problems of continuing to make highly detailed games, then Alan Wake 2 is going to be an abberation. The industry could easily pull back on that, and I welcome it. The push for higher and higher detail has not resulted in good games.

frezik , vor einem Monat

It's a bit more complicated than that. Governments still spy on an IPv4 address, but because that address is shared, it's spying on everyone behind it. At least with IPv6, it'd be targeted.

frezik , vor einem Monat

What is actually happening is that governments still spy, but it's on everyone behind that address.

People really need to stop pretending IPv4's flaws are good things.

frezik , vor einem Monat

I tried an IPv6 AWS Lightsail instance recently. It had a private IPv4 address, but it's not behind NAT and won't route outside the network.

Which would be fine if all the software packages you need can access things over IPv6 on their servers. One that doesn't is WordPress, because of course it doesn't. That means no plugins or updates except by manual downloads.

But hey, who would ever want to run WordPress on a cheap Lightsail instance?

frezik , vor 29 Tagen

Sure, that's what you have to do. You shouldn't have to at this point.

frezik , vor einem Monat

According to a company trying to sell its Agile replacement.

frezik , vor einem Monat

You reinvented zip and didn't even know it.

frezik , vor einem Monat

Zip makes different tradeoffs. Its compression is basically the same as gz, but you wouldn't know it from the file sizes.

Tar archives everything together, then compresses. The advantage is that there are more patterns available across all the files, so it can be compressed a lot more.

Zip compresses individual files, then archives. The individual files aren't going to be compressed as much because they aren't handling patterns between files. The advantages are that an error early in the file won't propagate to all the other files after it, and you can read a file in the middle without decompressing everything before it.

frezik , vor einem Monat

See my reply here: https://midwest.social/comment/10257041

The two aren't really equivalent. They make different tradeoffs. The scheme of "compress individual files, then archive" from GP is what zip does. Tar does "archive first, then compress the whole thing".

frezik , vor einem Monat

It's just a different layer of compression. Better than gzip generally, but the tradeoffs are exactly the same.

frezik , vor einem Monat

Yes, I'm aware of how this works.

The important point is that zip and compressed tarballs have overlapping but not identical purposes.

frezik , vor einem Monat

KiCAD has also improved greatly over the last few years. It still has an opinion on how the work flow should be, but that work flow moves pretty well. It's gotten easier to find pre-made footprints, too.

If only library management didn't suck.

frezik , vor einem Monat

The music of Holst's "The Planets", if we want to complete our list of things Star Wars superficially plagiarized.

frezik , vor 2 Monaten

Let me guess, hardened steel? Because that's how you keep your bike from getting stolen in New York. Kryptonite calls it the "fahgettaboudit" lock for a reason.

frezik , vor 2 Monaten

It's been two years away for the last 30 years.

frezik , vor 5 Monaten

Early Access is a problem when big publishers try to do it. It makes sense that indies do it so they have cash flow at all. Big outlets have funding on hand, but are trying to leverage it, anyway.