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frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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Passkeys might really kill passwords (www.theverge.com)

Passkeys: how do they work? No, like, seriously. It’s clear that the industry is increasingly betting on passkeys as a replacement for passwords, a way to use the internet that is both more secure and more user-friendly. But for all that upside, it’s not always clear how we, the normal human users, are supposed to use...

frezik ,

Biometrics can be fine when they are layered on top of other authentication methods.

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    frezik ,

    She is especially in the news right now not because of anything she personally did, but because of who she's dating. The girlfriends of head quarterbacks are usually sidenotes to a football game, even in cases where they're famous in their own right (Danica Patrick and Aaron Rodgers comes to mind). Swift isn't even dating a quarterback, though.

    The focus is unusual, and it's pretty obviously conservatives making her a target.

    frezik ,

    Doorbell cameras are tricky there. They're designed for the lowest common denominator and expect you to use the existing wiring for power, but nothing else. No PoE connections for that.

    My other cameras are PoE, though. Madness not to.

    frezik ,

    As opposed to all the people starving now under capitalism.

    frezik ,

    Eh, sitting through Packers games during the McCarthy years, I wouldn't assume that.

    frezik ,

    Depends on the culture of the space. For cis white males, no problem. Anyone outside that description, though, you might have to hunt to find one that's welcoming.

    The makerspace I helped get off the ground is far from perfect, but we try. It was started in the first place because the existing makerspace in town was very much not welcoming to people outside of cis white males. Around 25% of our membership identifies as not male (which is really high for a makerspace, but we can do better). A super majority of the current board is also non-male identifying.

    Even there, we're still pretty white.

    frezik ,

    Carter has become something of a sacred cow among progressives. His post-presidency had shown him to be a wonderful human being, but there's lots to criticize about his time in office.

    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. (insideevs.com)

    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 oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here. All seven of its California stations...

    frezik ,

    What, you don't see how great it is to have two separate sets of infrastructure with little overlap in order to have a less efficient solution pushed by the oil industry?

    frezik ,

    Hydrogen is better for cars VS batteries in every meaningful way in 2024.

    Lol, no.

    severely underdeveloped technology of batteries we have today.

    Lol, no.

    frezik ,

    Not really. Since grid storage doesn't have the same weight limits as EVs, there are a hundred different viable technologies. Everything from flow batteries, to flywheels, to pumping water uphill. Hydrogen fits in there, but it's not likely to be widespread.

    frezik ,

    Hydrogen production can’t be done in your backyard

    I can put two electrodes in salt water and run it off an old power brick and generate hydrogen. It's not efficient, industrial hydrogen isn't primarily made that way (it mainly comes from oil instead), and hydrogen has a list of other problems, but it can be done.

    frezik ,

    Because you can put that electricity directly into the grid rather than wasting it making hydrogen.

    frezik ,

    You know that 75% loss of energy the GP mentioned above? That's for hydrogen fuel cells, not hydrogen ICE. It's even worse for ICE. Why the hell would we do that rather than putting that solar directly on the grid?

    frezik ,

    We don’t have and likely won’t have batteries that could replace it for decades.

    Wrong. There are tons of options for grid storage batteries that are gearing up for mass production right now.

    frezik ,

    Yeah. There was a time, 10 or 20 years ago, where I would have said we should invest into all possible solutions, including batteries and hydrogen. It would have been nice to have it all be funded 10 times more than they were, but they were funded.

    And then batteries won. The pseudo-reasonable argument "we should fund every possible avenue" no longer applies. We did that, and now is the time to go all in on the winner.

    frezik ,

    None of that is magic, or even especially expensive. You can do it with stuff available off the shelf to a hobbyist. It'd be a silly way to run cars, but you can do it.

    frezik ,

    Algae is, at best, around 10% efficient at converting light into energy. You can use solar power to produce hydrogen at better efficiency than that, but even that's pretty poor. The best is to just use that electricity as it is, and second best is to put it in a battery.

    frezik ,

    I'd just as soon see the majority of long haul trucking be replaced by electrified rail.

    Likewise with a big chunk of the airline industry.

    frezik ,

    We did explore both options over the last 30 years or so. Batteries won for cars. Holding out otherwise at this point is silly.

    Hydrogen might be what ends up powering long haul trucking, but I'd prefer that be replaced by electrified rail, anyway.

    frezik ,

    Green hydrogen--where it's produced entirely using renewable resources--currently costs at least twice as much as producing it from hydrocarbons. Depending on the details, it can be seven times as much. Pink hydrogen--water electrolysis powered by nuclear--is barely much better.

    The vast majority of production comes from hydrocarbons. Most of it currently goes to the agricultural industry for making nitrate fertilizer.

    This is entirely the petrochemical industry trying to open up a new market before it loses its current biggest one.

    frezik , (edited )

    I recently did the math on this in another thread comparing BEVs to ICE on range. It details the absolute worst case for driving range that I could find with zero gas or charging infrastructure in between. The BEV can actually do it better (in that it gets you closer to the goal under the most stressed conditions) with no further advancements in battery tech.

    With only one charging point halfway on this trip, many BEVs would make it fine. Two charging points at a third of the distance each would open up the list very nicely. It looks like there are already high voltage lines near this very route (guessing a little from a map of Canadian lines), so the infrastructure is already most of the way there.

    Speaking more generally, outside of this worst case scenario, all we need is more charging infrastructure. A 250-400mi EV would otherwise work fine for the majority of people with little to no new battery tech required. We should take advancements we can get, anyway, but it's not a hard requirement anymore for the average driver.

    Original post of mine copied below:

    Let’s take the absolute worst case I could find for North America: in Quebec between Matagami and Radisson there is a 620km (390mi) distance between gas stations. This exceeds the range of many ICE cars, but let’s continue. It gets real cold up there, and there’s a few days out of the year where it’s well below 0F. To account for the cold, let’s increase that distance by 40% to get to about 550mi.

    There is one EV on the market right now with a 516mi range, the Lucid Air. So it can’t quite make it under the absolute worst case conditions that, even up there, will only happen for portions of the year. Many ICE cars would also fail to make it.

    This problem is completely overblown. The 1,994 combined population of those two Canadian towns will have to wait. Literally everyone else in North America will be fine if we just get our charging infrastructure better.

    Oh, and ICE cars lose gas mileage in cold weather as well. 15% lower at only 20F. So ICE cars that could barely make that trip under warmer conditions probably couldn’t under the extreme cold of this exceptional situation.

    frezik ,

    Who’s “we” here?

    Public funding for research; in other words, all of us.

    A bunch of companies connected to the oil industry want hydrogen to happen, because the oil industry knows they're the only economical source of hydrogen. Even among them, Toyota is about the only one who was willing to do the full nose dive into the tech, and it's biting them in the ass.

    frezik ,

    You can use electricity on the grid to charge a car. Not sure if you were aware of that. It's going to be a whole lot more efficient at it than hydrogen.

    frezik ,

    So hydrogen just appears somewhere? There's no other infrastructure involved?

    frezik ,

    Forgive me but which of these major manufacturers rely on publicly funded research when designing new vehicles?

    Public funding tends to go on at universities. Major manufactureres then buy the patents and take the credit.

    frezik ,

    The materials to make batteries aren’t readily available in the quantities needed to add grid scale storage

    Let me stop you right there. The batteries for grid scale are not going to be lithium, which I'm guessing is what you're thinking.

    Like with most energy tech, we should be investing in it all so we have a diverse mix of solutions.

    We did. Batteries won and hydrogen lost. Now is the time to deploy what we have.

    frezik ,

    Flow batteries currently don't have the kwh per kg to be competitive in EVs, but they're great for grid storage. There are some lab advancements improving that of late, but as with all battery tech lab advancements, you shouldn't rely on any one of them working out to mass production.

    frezik ,

    And hydrogen won't get you there. It's much easier to build a substation than the new infrastructure for hydrogen.

    frezik ,

    What hydrogen in the atmosphere?

    frezik ,

    Maybe, but pirate radio in the US is somewhat limited. It was popular in the UK because of how tightly controlled the airwaves are controlled there for the BBC, and you move just outside territorial waters and still broadcast to a good chunk of the country.

    An AM radio tower in the US, though? Can't discount it completely, but doesn't seem likely. Every broadcast gives away your location--it's like lighting a match in a dark cave--and AM transmits pretty far even on small amounts of power. There are ham radio operators who track down things like that just for fun.

    frezik ,

    Why would we do that? I want to be able to sit in a car for 10 hours, pee in a bottle, and eat sandwiches I prepared ahead of time. This is an excellent way to spend most of a waking day. Who wants to do something as silly as getting out to stretch?

    frezik ,

    Good thing we make decisions based on something that happens for a few days out of the entire year.

    frezik ,

    When you work out how to do this in practice, it doesn't actually matter. You really should be stopping for ~20 minutes every few hours, anyway. Put in better charging infrastructure and there isn't much point to vehicles over 400 miles of range. Even 250mi is probably enough. Use further advancements to reduce weight, not push range further.

    And before someone shows up who thinks nobody else has heard that batteries have shorter range in cold weather, yes, I'm accounting for that.

    frezik , (edited )

    Let's take the absolute worst case I could find for North America: in Quebec between Matagami and Radisson there is a 620km (390mi) distance between gas stations. This exceeds the range of many ICE cars, but let's continue. It gets real cold up there, and there's a few days out of the year where it's well below 0F. To account for the cold, let's increase that distance by 40% to get to about 550mi.

    There is one EV on the market right now with a 516mi range, the Lucid Air. So it can't quite make it under the absolute worst case conditions that, even up there, will only happen for portions of the year. Many ICE cars would also fail to make it.

    This problem is completely overblown. The 1,994 combined population of those two Canadian towns will have to wait. Literally everyone else in North America will be fine if we just get our charging infrastructure better.

    Oh, and ICE cars lose gas mileage in cold weather as well. 15% lower at only 20F. So ICE cars that could barely make that trip under warmer conditions probably couldn't under the extreme cold of this exceptional situation.

    frezik ,

    See the math here: https://midwest.social/comment/6976296

    You have to look for incredibly specific situations in North America for current EVs to not be able to make a stretch of road. So much so that many ICE cars would fail at it. We do need better charging infrastructure. Better batteries are desirable for many other reasons, but not required.

    frezik ,

    The towing range of an F150 Lightning is actually twice as far as its ICE cousin.

    We're also not fully utilizing the possibilities of trailers yet. They can bring extra battery. We just need the hookups to make it happen. The aerodynamic cost is already paid by having a trailer, and extra weight is less meaningful for highway travel.

    frezik ,

    To be a dick, have you actually measured distances between gas stations in rural America and thought about how this would work if we replaced them with chargers?

    frezik ,

    Great, that will help you drive right past the point.

    frezik ,

    I was buying in a way that couldn't be simply taken away.

    Do you have a favorite leather polish to lick up?

    frezik ,

    You can get time of use billing at home with many power companies. Only makes sense if you have solar panels or storage batteries or some such.

    frezik ,

    But there's so few uses of actually buying things with crypto. People don't use it as a medium of exchange outside of illicit goods and money laundering. We're more than a decade into this and using crypto to buy a pizza is still a novelty.

    A major proof of this is that FTX collapsed and took a chunk of the crypto market out with it. The market at large shrugged this off. If it were actually linked in to the broader economy, then it would have had similar ripple effects to a major US bank failing.

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    frezik ,

    It's been explained endlessly. Doesn't work.

    frezik ,

    Salaries of officers of non-profits are public information. See page 8.

    She was taking $5.6M from "related organizations" (not quite sure what that would be), but not much from the Mozilla Foundation itself. The rest of the board is taking $115k-$340k directly from the Foundation.

    frezik ,

    You have the timeline on those two events backwards.

    frezik ,

    The consequences don't need to be that severe. They do need to go all the way to the top. Applying the maximum penalty is how conservative jurisprudence works, and it's unnecessary.

    frezik ,

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoxhaism

    Hoxhaism (/ˈhɒdʒə.ɪzəm/ HOJ-ə-iz-əm) is a variant of anti-revisionist Marxism–Leninism that developed in the late 1970s due to a split in the anti-revisionist movement, appearing after the ideological dispute between the Chinese Communist Party and the Party of Labour of Albania in 1978.

    Yeah, I'm just going with "made up". The alternative is navigating three levels deep of leftist infighting.

    Across America, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they're being built (www.usatoday.com)

    Across America, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they're being built::The clock is ticking toward a deadline to meet renewable-energy standards. But USA TODAY's analysis finds local governments banning wind turbines, solar plants.

    frezik ,

    considering wind energy is very unreliable, only working when it’s windy.

    Saying "no" isn't the solution to this. Solar and wind work together to cover each other's flaws. The wind is often blowing when the sun isn't shining, and vis-à-vis.

    At the next level, you can use historical weather data to calculate how much things will be in a lull where neither are producing. That gives you an idea of how much storage you need to cover it. The details depend on the region, but this is often much, much less than detractors are letting on.

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