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frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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frezik ,

I feel dirty saying it, but Walmart store brand Oreos are really good.

frezik ,

America. Doing the right thing after exhausting all the alternatives.

frezik ,

Or just, like, fucking not.

frezik ,

It's a no brainier, until you deal with standardizing the battery and attachment mechanisms across many manufacturers. Then figuring out the machines necessary to automate the process of removing the battery and swapping in a new one. Then dealing with people who abuse their battery and bringing them to EOL early. Then deploying all of that nationwide.

Oh, and it limits where you can place the battery. You can't integrate it into the frame, which has some big advantages in reducing weight.

Conversely, charging stations are relatively easy. You need to standardize the plug, which ain't nothing, but it's far easier than an entire battery release mechanism. The charge stations themselves aren't much more than a transformer, some high voltage electronics, and some controls. Again, not nothing, but way easier than an automated garage for battery replacement.

Charge stations were always going to be able to race way ahead in deployment timelines, and we still don't have enough of them. If we had focused on battery swap stations, we'd be even further behind.

frezik ,

These joke Calvinball Magic sets are getting out of hand.

frezik ,

Fine, we'll make it three, but only if you promise not to play blue.

frezik ,

They couldn't have been that isolated when they were directly buying and copying western designs. The first version of Tetris was programmed on what is more or less the Soviet clone of the DEC PDP-11.

frezik ,

. . . anything and everything to do with space.

No. Just no. Soviets had their successes, but they were bad at building fundamental tech. Their space program was callous towards both human and animal life. They were focused on being the first at everything, and tended to run with the solution they could implement immediately. It wasn't built in a way where successes could be leveraged for more successes. Nor did it build fundamental tech in ways that could be used in the economy at large.

Ironically, capitalism was able use space technology to improve the lives of the working class better than a supposedly communist system did.

frezik ,

Russian programmers are pretty good; don't underestimate them. A lot of them are focused on malware, mind you.

I don't expect Russia will make a console on par with a PS5, but they might make one closer to the hardware of a SNES Classic mini-console.

frezik ,

They didn't just buy them (although there was some of that). They cloned them outright. They had the manufacturing capability to make them on their own, but lacked the knowledge of how to build it themselves.

frezik ,

Cloning stuff is good. Not being capable of designing and building your own is bad. It means you can never improve on what already exists.

It wasn't for lack of engineers. The Buran rocket's first and only flight took off and landed on 100% automation. That's not easy. But didn't build things in ways that could benefit people in a more widespread way.

frezik ,

Yeah, they were so bad at it that they ended up in space first. Just absolutely terrible.

And rushed it so bad they didn't have fundamental tech that was applicable to a wider economy.

Their space program was callous towards both human and animal life.

Show us your proof, PragerU fan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika#Ethics_of_animal_testing

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

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage

The Soviet rocket program failed a lot, but they covered it up at the time. It's largely come out in the time since then, and it was horrific. If NASA lost an astronaut, everything shuts down and they figure out what happens. When a test site in Russia blowed up and kills over 50 people, including the head of the development program, that's just Tuesday.

capitalism was able use space technology to improve the lives of the working class capitalist parasites better than a supposedly communist system did.

FTFY.

Nah, I like my version better. The proof is the machine you're using to type this.

Also, I'm a socialist. I just don't think the USSR was very good system. There's both positive and negative things to learn from it, but the most important is "let's not do that again".

frezik ,

especially since it didn’t abuse colonialism and imperialism to do so

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH

deep breath

HAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH

frezik , (edited )

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH

deep breath

HAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH

Edit: just for future reference (because people who argue this shit aren't worth giving the benefit of a serious debate), I don't doubt one bit that the US benefits greatly from barbaric imperialist polices around the world both then and now. I take great issue with the idea that the USSR somehow got to space without its own barbaric imperialist policies. Just ask Poland, Finland, or Ukraine. Or any of the numerous peoples who had been forced to live under the previous Czarist regime, and whom the Bolsheviks did fuck all to help. Or Hungry or Czech, which played host to the incidents that invented the term "Tankie". Marxist–Leninism is a shitty drug.

frezik ,

It's interesting, but the electronics are more complicated. There's a reason that everything standardized on base 2, including in Russia after the 1950s.

frezik ,

Unironically this. It was a great movie moment, but the domino effects throughout the franchise didn't make for good storytelling.

frezik ,

Almost all the discourse around episodes 7 and 8 when they were new was "Ray is a woke Mary Sue character", and later "Rose and Finn were just diversity inclusions". Complete with death threats sent to the actors.

Rose and Finn's episode 8 scenes could have cut entirely and you'd immediately have a better movie. That wasn't because they were diversity inclusions, but because it was terrible writing.

frezik ,

Elon provides invaluable support to the company and deserves to be compensated for . . . hahaha, no I can't write that with a straight face.

frezik ,

It was 5 years ago. Other companies are catching up.

One place they aren't catching up is non-SUV EVs. There are a few, but if you want an EV that isn't an SUV with over 250mi range, and cross Tesla off the list, your options become real thin.

frezik ,

But a lot of those sedans have range around 120mi, like the Mini EV or BMW i3. Many of the one's that remain are luxury brands with luxury prices, like the BMW i7 or Porsche Taycan.

frezik ,

Compared to Porsche, or BMWs over an i3 size? No.

frezik ,

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 ,

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 ,

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

frezik ,

Even if you could get a new one, I don't think they'd meet US safety standards. Not even close.

Mind you, the US has to have stringent safety standards because we have gigantic vehicles in the first place.

frezik ,

We should take a step back: why do we need all those safety standards in the first place? The reason is that we have such gigantic vehicles in the first place, and smaller ones simply cannot be safe on the same road. Level that all down and suddenly Kei cars are as safe as they need to be.

frezik ,

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 ,

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 ,

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 PC gaming deal of the century.

frezik ,

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

frezik ,

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

frezik ,

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 ,

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 ,

Nah, you're giving GP too much credit. He's the American right-libertarian variety.

frezik ,

But sensing a tiny amount of blood will send them into a murder frenzy, so the sharks have that going for them.

frezik ,

The problem with LEDs isn't the bit that emits lights. It's the power supply, specifically the electrolytic capacitors. Good designs either use higher quality caps, or use designs that avoid electrolytic caps altogether. Either one takes a bit more money, but the market is always in a race to the bottom.

Long term, I think we should be avoiding traditional light fixtures entirely. It's better to have a lot of little lights spread over an area rather than a few point sources in the room. That gives us the opportunity to separate the power supply from the lights entirely, like LED strips do.

frezik ,

Which was also true of ICE cars. The Model T Ford had a major design flaw: everyone could work on it easily, parts were plentiful, and there was no reason to buy a replacement once you had it. In fact, there's enough of them still running, with an associated parts market, that you could still daily one if you wanted to.

frezik ,

If they're easy enough to work on, and the parts market is maintained, yes.

Nothing lasts forever without something going wrong, but we can make it easier to fix. It's a little more true of EVs, because they're mechanically simpler than ICE cars. You added an electric motor (which lasts forever if designed well), batteries (life dependent on the chemistry involved), and some electronics to drive that (caps in there go bad, much of the rest will last forever if not abused). You took away an ICE, an intake system, an exhaust system, perhaps some forced induction, a coolant system (which you might have on EVs, but not to the same level), an ignition system, a shitload of sensors (O2 sensors having particularly short life, relatively speaking), and a fuel pump.

If designed to be worked on, the EV is far, far easier.

frezik ,

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 ,

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 ,

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 ,

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

frezik ,

That is a horribly naive underselling of what's involved in storing nuclear waste. How do you transport it? What do you do in the event of an accident during transport? Where is it stored now? Is it somewhere we can get good transport in? How do you mark something "do not enter" for tens of thousands of years? Think of what languages existed during the Roman Empire, and then realize that we'll have to store it for orders of magnitude longer than that.

Logistics, logistics, logistics. They are not easy for even the simplest projects.

We do have the recycling technology. It's not a far off thing; been developed for decades. If there's a good reason for a nuclear renaissance, it's in using the waste we already have, and recycling it down to something that's only dangerous for centuries, not millennia.

frezik ,

especially when the nuclear lobby say things like ‘they’re safe as long as they’re run properly and no one cuts corners, but please don’t regulated them properly or they won’t be cost effective’

This this this, so much this. Yes, they can be safe. That safety comes with heavy regulation. That makes them incredibly expensive, and once you get there, it's just not worthwhile anymore.

frezik ,

We've basically solved the storage issues through about eighty different methods that have various applicability in different situations. They just need to be scaled up at this point.

It's actually better. No traditional power plant can match demand exactly, and large amounts of power are wasted as a result. A wind+solar+storage solution can match demand very close. This means we don't need to replace every GWh of coal and gas with a GWh of renewable. The lack of wasted power takes off a pretty big chunk.

frezik ,

Me too. Fuck the Greens. Joke political party in so many ways. Even if I lived under a system where First Past the Post voting wasn't the norm, I'd be looking for parties other than the Greens.

frezik ,

Realistically it’s the only viable long-term option

No, it isn't. Solar+wind+storage will do fine.

Fusion power would be nice but doesn’t exist yet at least not outside of a lab and I don’t think even in the lab particularly efficient.

And the fact that you word things this way makes it pretty clear to me you have no idea what you're talking about and haven't actually researched anything about it.

frezik ,

I brush it off because nuclear has exactly the same problem. Worse, actually. We know what happens when you build solar, wind, and storage: on average, things get built on time and in budget. We also know what happens when we build nuclear: it doubles its schedule and budget and makes companies go bankrupt. One is way easier to scale up than the other.

If all the paperwork was done and signed off today, there wouldn't be a single GW of new nuclear produced in the US before 2030. Even optimistic schedules are running up against that limit.

React to demand in minutes? Cute. Because most energy storage works by being pulled by demand directly rather than reacting to it, things change almost instantly.

This is critical because it means we don't have to replace a GW of fossil fuel generation with a GW of renewables. The difference between demand and supply all but disappears. You don't have that for nuclear, though, because it doesn't react that way. In fact, it's preferred if they only provide baseload that never changes.

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