Patch

Patch , 4 months ago to Technology in Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai

Biogasoline is a thing, although I'm not aware of anyone really pushing it as viable fuel above biodiesel, ethanol, and bioLPG.

Patch , 4 months ago to Technology in Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai

Currently literally 99% of the world supply of hydrogen is fossil fuels. Yes, in the "future centuries" sense of the long term things might be different, but in the "we need to stop climate change in the next decade or so" sense it's a non-starter. If you banned companies from making hydrogen from fossil fuels, the world simply wouldn't have enough hydrogen.

It's basically not possible to make electrolysis more efficient; the energy requirements are simple physics. The only way that technology can make green hydrogen cheaper is to reduce the capital cost of building an electrolysis plant, and to make enough surplus electricity that the cost to ring it comes down. Although as the latter also makes recharging a BEV cheaper too, that doesn't necessarily get hydrogen anywhere closer to being competitive.

Patch , 4 months ago to Technology in Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai

We had one in my town until it closed down 3 years ago. Now the nearest one to me is a 90 mile round trip away.

Hydrogen definitely feels like a fad which has had its moment.

Patch , 4 months ago to Technology in A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO

Having data means nothing if you can't monetize it.

As you say, AI can already access it all completely for free with nothing more complicated than a web crawler. Long term, charging AI firms for access is not a viable strategy unless the law changes.

And they've been trying for years to monetize visitors through advertising and other schemes, and so far come up consistently short.

Patch , 4 months ago to Technology in Microsoft wants to update your Windows 11 PC without forcing you to reboot

Ubuntu has live patching free for personal use built right in. It's not exactly a niche thing.

(I don't bother on most machines because I reboot my laptops every day anyway, but you know; nice for servers and whatnot).

Patch , 4 months ago to Technology in Signal and Threema want nothing to do with WhatsApp

It might be OK for you to be "disconnected", but some of us have got stuff to do.

Patch , 4 months ago to Technology in Signal and Threema want nothing to do with WhatsApp

I have both WhatsApp and Signal installed.

In the 3 years or so since I installed Signal, I haven't had a single conversation on it. Only a handful of people from my Contact book are showing as Signal users, and none of them people I speak to regularly.

I live in anticipation of someone deciding to message me on there, but I'm not exactly optimistic at this point.

Patch , 4 months ago to Technology in Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here.

The trick isn't making hydrogen, it's capturing it, refining it (so that it isn't mixed with a tonne of air), and compressing it into a pressurised storage tank for later use.

Patch , 4 months ago to Technology in Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here.

Solar costs whatever it costs to buy, install and maintain a solar PV farm, which is not nothing.

If you're going to build a solar PV farm, you're obviously going to want to sell the power you generate in whatever way is most profitable.

At the moment, it's still magnitudes more profitable to sell solar back to the grid than it is to feed it into an inefficient hydrolysis plant, create a load of hydrogen and oxygen, and then move it by leaky tanker somewhere to sell it.

Patch , 4 months ago to Technology in Microsoft revives aggressive Windows 11 upgrade campaign with intrusive popups for Windows 10 users

The pain of this. I have two separate Windows work laptops (one for my employer, one for the firm we work with; data separation fun). The number of times I've booted up the second laptop ready to dive into a meeting or to quickly grab a reference only to be confronted with 15 minutes of that.

Between pestering me to check for updates, pestering me to restart to complete updates, hanging on shutdown to carry out updates, and hanging on startup to finish updates, I feel like I spend an unfeasible amount of time and brainspace thinking about system updates. Why? I've got actual work to do too!

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Boffins find AI models tend to escalate conflicts to all-out nuclear war

Now I'm as sceptical of handing over the keys to AI as the next man, but it does have to be said that all of these are LLMs- chatbots, basically. Is there any suggestion from any even remotely sane person to give LLMs free reign over military strategy or international diplomacy? If and when AI does start featuring in military matters, it's more likely to be at the individual "device" level (controlling weapons or vehicles), and it's not going to be LLM technology doing that.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Google Chrome Warning Issued For All Windows Users

What I really want to know is why and how it went away.

The move was in place because of the fear that IE was becoming a monopoly. Now Edge is very very far from the most popular browser, and Google Chrome is looking like the overwhelmingly dominant player, there's no reason to make MS prompt people to download rival products anymore.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in How can open source hardware be a movement if the raw materials still have to be mined and factory produced?

This is essentially a novel version of the "free as in freedom" versus "free as in beer" distinction. In this case not exactly about the cash value per se, but about the physical aspects and systemic realities behind the having of a thing.

An open hardware design means nothing more and nothing less than freedom to access, share, use and modify the designs. It is about ownership and reuse of the intellectual property.

Open hardware doesn't change the fact that most hardware will still be manufactured by the same large corporations. It says nothing about the technical feasibility of amateur fabrication. It has nothing to do with the environmental impacts of a technology or the production thereof. It isn't fundamentally a socialist paradigm.

For an open hardware spec like RISC-V, the reality of it is that the freedom afforded by the open designs is a freedom of large corporations to enter market with a competitive product without being squeezed out by a handful of established monopolistic giants. This is a positive thing, but it's a positive thing with distinct limits that fall very short of any ideas of utopia.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading “10G Network” claims

It doesn't really mean anything anymore. The transistors are not 5nm either. It's just marketing.

Quoth Wikipedia:

The term "5 nm" has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors being 5 nanometers in size. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a "5 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 51 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 30 nanometers". However, in real world commercial practice, "5 nm" is used primarily as a marketing term by individual microchip manufacturers to refer to a new, improved generation of silicon semiconductor chips in terms of increased transistor density (i.e. a higher degree of miniaturization), increased speed and reduced power consumption compared to the previous 7 nm process.

Patch , 5 months ago to Technology in It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription

No shit that it's easy to live with marginally slower (but still really pretty fast) shipping and access to a second-tier streaming service.

It's pretty much the definition of a luxury purchase.