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frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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frezik ,

Won't work in spaces where people are around all day, like offices, but it doesn't matter. The eye and skin dangers are already addressed for the most part. The major remaing question is ozone and the VOCs it combines with.

frezik ,

Just yesterday, I was defending Lemmy users by saying that they actually do read the article, but here we are.

frezik ,

Read the article. These problems are addressed.

frezik ,

This thread might be the worst example of "I didn't read the article, but I'll comment anyway" that I've seen.

frezik ,

OnlyFans tried a while back. There was probably some internal political maneuvering going on with that one.

frezik ,

Honestly, it's questionable how much this helps over typical motorcycle safety gear in the first place.

frezik ,

Not just the legal team. Every time there's new legislation like this, a new set of contractors pop up offering to walk your company through what it needs to do to be compliant. Nobody is quite sure what the limits are--and nobody will for several years until court precedents work out the issues--so those contractors are going to tell you to assume the worst case interpretation.

PCI Compliance (technically a contractual obligation rather than legal), Sarbanes-Oxley, and GDPR were good things, but all of them spawned a sub-industry of grifters.

Electric school buses are a breath of fresh air for children | Nearly $1B in federal funding could help clean up the unequal health impacts of diesel pollution. (grist.org)

Electric school buses are a breath of fresh air for children | Nearly $1B in federal funding could help clean up the unequal health impacts of diesel pollution.::Nearly $1B in federal funding will help decarbonize transportation and clean up some of the unequal health impacts of diesel pollution

frezik , (edited )

Almost like we're still putting money into research to solve all those problems. Much of what you cite is overblown, and what remains valid isn't going to stay that way.

Edit: also, school buses need to support a lot of routes that are off the main roads. Tram or trolley systems are not feasible.

frezik ,

https://stnonline.com/partner-updates/6-myths-about-electric-school-buses-debunked/

"...according to a 2013 SAE study, the average school bus route is less than 32 miles, with over 99% of routes being under 78 miles. "

Busses exist with a 155 mile range. This is a non issue.

frezik ,

Adam Something videos are great, but his opinion shouldn't be taken uncritically. Doubly so in a North American context, which has very different economic issues with mass transit adoption compared to his EU roots. He often rails against politicians who are trying to take some of America's bad ideas and implement them in Europe. In NA, we have to deal with the fact that this shit is already here. Note how YouTubers who do have an NA background, like Not Just Bikes or City Nerd, are more cyncial about trams and trollys while still supporting the general idea.

In any case, trollys and trams aren't going to work for school buses. They need to serve every nook and cranny of a city. That's why they're separate from other public transportation in the first place. Short of having wires literally everywhere, it's not feasible.

frezik ,

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/60068.pdf

"Similarly to route duration,
doubling the route distance to reflect daily operating
distances, it is found that on average school buses travel
73.46 miles, with a 99.7% cutoff on driving distance of
154.46 miles."

That's double distance to cover both before and after school; they have a pause in the middle of the day to charge up again. There are battery buses on the market right now that do 155 miles, which is double all but 0.3% of routes out there. It also takes about an order of magnitude more power to run a motor for an EV than it does to run the heaters. If you get stuck in the snow in an EV at 50% charge, you can likely make it there through the night with the heater running.

The cold is a complete non-issue for this use case.

frezik ,

Not all lithium chemistries have fire issues, and lithium isn't the only chemistry on the horizon. Oceanic lithium sources are basically indefinite--there's more than we would have a use for. There are also alternative extraction methods that open up more economical sources ("mineral reserve" means the economically exractable sources, not the complete total amount).

Recycling products like this will work when there's scale to justify it, which there will be in about a decade. In fact, we don't necessarily need to fully recycle it. Cells that are no longer useful for cars can still be useful for general storage, so we'd reuse rather than recycle.

Hydrogen is a dead end. Inefficient and would require a totally separate and unnecessary set of infrastructure from battery charging. Why pay for two sets when one will do?

If you're using an argument against EVs that's repeated on the right, it's almost always bullshit. If it's an argument unique to the left, such as how cars have created terrible cities and EVs don't fix that, it's on much better ground. That's not relevant to busses, however.

frezik ,

A survival crafting game where the tech tree goes backwards. You start in a prepper hole with working water filtration, food sources, etc, and everything is nice. Then something breaks and maybe you fix it. Something else breaks and maybe you fix that. Three things break at once, and at least one of them is going to stay broken. Have to do something more primative and time consuming.

Eventually, enough things break that it's no longer sustainable and you die. Game ranks you based on how long you last.

frezik ,

Haven't played it, but I believe Mini Motorways is something like that.

frezik ,

Awesome! Look forward to seeing the results.

Just for the record (because this can be an issue), I freely give this idea away with no expectation of compensation.

frezik ,

LMGTFYWNMGSN

Let Me Google That For You, Wait, Never Mind, Google Sucks Now

frezik ,

The trouble with that is that videos are much harder to reference than text. If someone slaps a [citation needed] on a claim I'm making, I may have to track down the video, find the right time stamp, and link that. And then they will probably say that YouTube isn't a valid source, even if it comes from a relatively reputable creator (I've had people say this for a Tom Scott video where he was interviewing a subject matter expert in the topic).

This is all so much easier with blogs. Even if people should be a little more skeptical of blogs, at least a blog can link its own sources more easily than YouTube to get to something more reputable.

frezik ,

Just to add to that, on my main job as a web developer, we had contracted to an SEO company some years ago, and they were constantly in communication with Google. One of our web sites had done something Google didn't like in the past, and Google flagged that and it was killing its position in the search rankings. Google themselves won't tell you much more than that, but the SEO group was able to figure out what it was and get Google to give us a clean pass.

Used to be that way. Just from personal observation, I concur with the poster above that this relationship has broken down and it's worse for everyone.

frezik ,

Per your edit, there might be a blind spot in the study. Consider when you've searched for a recipe, and the top result you find always starts with "My cousins showed up one day and I had to scramble to make something . . . ". A big story you don't care about before you can get to what you want. That's happening because Google is giving those kind of recipe posts a higher rank. Ironically, adding this human story to the post is there for the sake of robots, not people.

I wouldn't classify posts like that as spam, exactly. I still find the recipe I want. But they do make the experience worse.

frezik ,

I've seen just the opposite. The top comment points out all sorts of problems with the article beyond just the headline.

Take this one on using nitrogen asphyxiation for the death penalty: https://midwest.social/post/7581080

I'm personally against the death penalty, but this article was garbage with garbage arguments. The top comments highlight why. Not only did people read the article, but they were also clear headed enough to point out all its flaws even when they are broadly on the same side as the authors.

frezik ,

I'm pretty sure I could train an AI to make racist jokes at a board meeting. That's halfway there already.

frezik ,

Corporations don't have to be about making tons of money. They can be about organizing people to accomplish things that they couldn't individually. You then make money just to give those people a living wage and keeping the lights on.

This doesn't even need to have a legal framework. Just a couple of people who agree to take up certain tasks is a company.

frezik ,

A co-op is another form of corporation. Dense, multi-family structures should be done that way.

What we don't want is for housing to be a speculative investment. Remove the profit motive of holding a house that's empty and reselling.

frezik ,

The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:

Housing as an investment.

My city has a rental vacancy rate of <4%, and a homeowner vacancy rate of <1%. Flippers leave a house empty while under the process of flipping it, and that's not what the numbers show. Landlords do increase the cost compared to ownership (they have to cover all normal costs of ownership, plus have profit for themselves), but they don't reduce the number of shelters being occupied. Not when vacancy rates are this low.

In other words, my particular city may have costs driven up by flippers and landlords, but the number of dwelling units would be short even without them. Getting rid of them would be an insufficient solution, even if there are some benefits on costs. It does not address the problem that we need more dwelling units.

frezik ,

Why? A co-op can own an apartment with occupants as co-owners. There's no need for rent.

frezik ,

I ask again: why? What does renting accomplish that a co-op couldn't? Other than making a landlord rich.

frezik ,

I wish PoE would get more love. Networking and power in one package. Voltage is high enough that you can run it around your house without too much power loss, but not so high that you are supposed to have a licensed electrician do it. The equipment for it is getting cheaper. It's easily powerful enough to run smart LED lights without wireless network nonsense. Plus, you can give your PoE switch its own dedicated UPS, and now your lights are all on battery backup.

It was born for a corporate IT environment for running VoIP phones and security cameras, and mostly ignored for residential customers. Good news is that used 48 port switches with full PoE are cheap on eBay.

frezik ,

I use one of those hubs and it's enough to charge my laptop.

Simple answer is that higher voltage is easier to deal with than higher current. USB originally ran it 5V, which would take 12A of current to provide 60W. The wire would be 14AWG, which is 1.63mm thick. Conversely, if you increase the voltage to 20V (as USB-PD can do), you now only need 3A, and the wire can be much thinner/cheaper.

The wire doesn't care about voltage for the most part. The insulation around it needs to be thick enough to keep it from shorting to other wires and stuff around it, but it doesn't take much insulation to be rated for 300V; way more than we need here.

frezik , (edited )

The problem is that nothing wants the same DC voltage. It wants 3.3V, or 5V, or 12V, or 48V, or 18.7V, or whatever. You end up with layers of conversion and save nothing in the end.

Let's say you start with solar photovoltaic panels, a DC source. It feeds into a DC-DC inverter that puts out a steady 48V. Existing DC-AC microinverters can get 95% efficiency, and DC-DC conversion can be around the same.

In an AC system, we convert to DC at point of use (be it through a wall wort, a floor wort, a USB power port integrated into traditional AC plugs, or something else). This conversion can likewise be around 95% efficient.

In a DC system, we still have to do a DC-DC conversion to get the voltage you actually want at point of use. This is around 95% efficient, as well.

In the end, we stack the same number of conversions at around 95% efficiency no matter if we run AC or DC. Except that assumes we're coming from a DC source in the first place, like solar photovoltaic. If we come from an AC source, like wind or hydro or pretty much anything besides a solar panel, then we only have transformer losses of converting the higher line AC voltage to what your house uses. Those aren't 95% efficient; they're closer to 98% efficient, so we're better off.

Not only that, but we would still prefer AC for basically anything with a high draw motor, like air con or refrigerators. Now we're doing DC-AC conversion, and that's closer to 85% efficient. These are some of the highest draw items in a house--and they're going to be used more as heat pumps for HVAC, water heaters, and clothes dryers become more common--so that drop in efficiency hits that much harder.

So DC home power sounds like a good idea until you break down how conversion efficiency hits things in practice. If we're just going to get to the same place, why bother ripping out our current system?

That said, I would like to see PoE get used for residential more. There's lots of devices that can run off 48V and can also use networking (like smart LED lights). Why not put it over the same plug and skip having to put those devices on a wireless network? Also, you don't need a licensed electrician to run it. You can't be an idiot about how to run and terminate it, but you don't need a license. This would likely be alongside our existing AC wiring, though.

frezik ,

PoE would be that standard, since it's 48V already and can run all over the house. However, we don't actually save anything in terms of efficiency by having everything be DC.

frezik ,

That would only allow PoE+, which limits devices to 25.5W. Speed would be limited to 100Mbps. Still enough for lights, though.

frezik ,

If we're talking about hiring someone to run AC wires, then the cost of extra equipment can be offset by the labor costs.

(I have definitely hired a master electrician for every outlet added to my house. Definitely.)

frezik ,

It's running parallel to AC wiring. It's usually not a big deal in practice, except for higher draw cable.

frezik ,

Why would 100VDC help over AC? You lose very little by rectifying AC.

And again, these aren't the high draw items in the house. Stuff with motors are, like air con and refrigerators. Those are better left on AC. Why bother when the gains are small?

Amazon has been listing products with the title, 'I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy' (www.businessinsider.com)

Amazon has been listing products with the title, 'I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy'::Products have appeared on the platform with odd titles that are seemingly related to OpenAI's usage policy.

frezik ,

Amazon is a marketplace, anyone can create a store and put up items. It’s not really Amazon’s fault that people have BS listings. It’s not reasonable to human-vet every listing. Maybe they could have a better reporting system; idk.

I'll push back on this part. They can vet just fine by raising the barrier to entry a bit. They'd have fewer products. There'd be three USB cable vendors instead of 500. That would be OK.

Leaning into Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap") can be OK in some circumstances. Leave all the gates wide open and let anyone in. Steam is a good example; I find most of my games by word of mouth, and if some shithole asset flipper wants to toss their game up there, I will probably never see it until Steph Sterling points it out.

I don't think that can work for Amazon. It's too much and fraud is rampant.

frezik ,

And then there's a hundred other factors. How many charge cycles does it get? Cold weather performance? Can it be mass produced? Does it improve safety over current cells?

It might be useful for what it leads to. Batteries get better because we explore ten different options and then one of them works out. People have gotten less excited over individual discoveries like this for mostly fair reasons. But then there's another layer of understanding beyond that where you see it as one path of many.

frezik ,

Is there a web site out there that can help me determine what kind of cancer that video gave me?

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