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frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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frezik ,

They work fine, just not at full capacity. Financing and payback calculations tend to assume they'll be replaced after 30 years, but that's just guesses made by accountants, not reality.

frezik ,

The one's made now have plenty of longevity. They don't base the replacement time on when they actually go bad, and as long as they're not abused or get hit by bowling ball-sized hail or something, they'll keep producing some kind of power for a long time. It's just that for the space they take up, it may be worthwhile to replace them.

Same with EV batteries. They might have limited range after 10 years, but they could still be useful for things like home backup power without having to do a whole recycling job.

frezik ,

According to a company trying to sell its Agile replacement.

frezik ,

Trees are great for other reasons, but they grow far too slow to capture significant carbon. The fastest natural carbon sinks are algae.

frezik ,

You reinvented zip and didn't even know it.

frezik ,

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 ,

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 ,

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

frezik ,

Yes, I'm aware of how this works.

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

frezik ,

Pushing the limits of technology also hasn't been a healthy thing to do all the time. If the cost of these big, expansive, detailed games is swaths of mandatory overtime for the developers only to be laid off when the project is done, it is not worth it.

frezik ,

Last year's Nvidia keynote at Computex had Jensen trying to get the audience to have an awkward, AI-generated sing along. The market thought this was great and sent the market cap over $1T.

For this year's keynote, Jensen wandered the stage like he was looking for his cat while rambling about language models. The market thinks this is great and sent the market cap over $3T.

For the second biggest company on Earth, he is a shockingly bad speaker, and completely ill prepared. For some reason, the market loves this guy.

frezik ,

That's the thing: no new products were announced.

frezik ,

See also: Sun Microsystems, who made tons of servers that drove the dotcom boom. They didn't fare so well afterword.

This is a "grab the pile of cash and be happy" situation.

frezik ,

They didn't though. Blackwell was announced before this, and there isn't any real specifics besides showing some prototypes. There's some software stuff about improving Pandas and pregenerated LLMs. That's about it.

frezik ,

Microsoft made a big mistake with Windows 10: it basically works fine.

frezik ,

Yes, and you leave it on all day at full blast. And you have a dedicated building where there's thousands of them doing the same.

frezik ,

We need to deploy solar and wind at a breakneck pace to replace the fossil fuel usage we already have. Why compound that with a whole new source?

frezik ,

Code is rarely the biggest thing in these programs. You want textures that don't look stretched and pixelated at 4K? That's going to cost you.

Look in any game directory. There's probably a one big file--sometimes a few big ones--in there that you can rename to .zip and unpack it as one. It will dump all the textures/sound effects/etc. in the game, but have zero code. It will be something like 70-90% of the game's entire space.

frezik , (edited )

Are you willing to give up 1080p screens and 16-bit/44.1kHz sampled music? Or how about languages that can't be represented in ASCII, much less Latin-1? Because handling those take up way more space than code.

frezik ,

And there's almost always a reason. Code size tends to be modest compared to supporting data around it.

frezik ,

It's almost always compressed in some way. Still takes up a lot of space. You can fit a lot of compiled code in the space of a 1 minute, 128kbps mp3.

frezik ,

If you're old enough, then the first word processing program you ever used was probably on a screen 640x480 pixels or smaller, didn't support internationalization, couldn't provide true WYSIWYG to match output between the screen and a printer, and couldn't render fonts with anti-aliasing. Which of these features would you like to drop to reduce the size?

Everyone loves "tight" programs until they realize what they have to give up to make it work.

frezik , (edited )

I have. Still small compared to the images and such that are used in a user facing application.

Edit: just to bring in real numbers, I have an old TypeScript project that results in a 109M node_modules dir. Which I agree is absurd. I also have an old anime video, 21 minutes long, at only 560x432 resolution, 24fps, which takes 171M. And that's my point: even in really bad cases, code size tends to be swamped out by everything else in user-facing applications. If there's any kind of images, music, or video, the code size will be a small part of the complete picture.

frezik ,

Does Windows booting take up that much space because of code, or because of data that code is loading?

frezik ,

Even Nvidia's gains are based on selling that hardware to outlets buying GPUs in shipping container quantities to run huge LLMs. If those companies dry up, so will Nvidia's market position. At the other side of things, their traditional market is gaming, but that industry is contracting and may not be making games that push hardware limits the way it used to. Their best long term bet might be a rumored Steam Deck/Switch like handheld (one of their own making; they do supply the chips for the Switch and upcoming Switch 2), but that's not going to justify a $3T market cap.

frezik ,

Obi-wan declaring himself a Sith was the weirdest part of the prequels.

frezik , (edited )

Base load is not necessary. It was made because you could build certain types of plants really cheap if they're run all the time at the same level. They aren't a requirement, but rather an economic convenience in an old way of doing things.

Renewables with storage are able to match demand more closely than traditional plants ever could. This results in less wasted power. That means we don't have to replace every GWh of traditional generation with a GWh of renewable.

Hydro and geothermal have both had some interesting breakthroughs the last few years. Small scale hydro can get useful amounts of power from smaller rivers than was feasible in the past. There are places to put them we didn't have before.

There's also high voltage DC lines. The longest deployed one is currently in Brazil, and is about 1500 miles. An equivalent run in the US would mean wind farms in Kansas could power New York, or solar in Arizona could power Chicago. When you can transmit that far, then the wind is always blowing somewhere, and it's sunny somewhere for the entire day, as well.

Nuclear lost its window of opportunity. It may already be cost competitive with putting solar panels in space.

Edit: fixing autocorrect's bad corrections

frezik ,

It's limited in the geography where it could be useful, such as near techtonic plate boundaries. Iceland gets about a quarter of its electricity that way. Some advancements in drilling techniques have made it more viable in more locations.

https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2023/05/is-geothermal-energy-making-a-comeback

frezik , (edited )

When these artificial caps are removed and the plant is allowed to operate as intended and no kneecapped to allow coal and oil plants to operate at their peak effeciency rates, nuclear drops below .10USD.

Wholesale or retail cost? Either way, that's not especially cheap compared to renewables.

Nuclear may be cost competitive with putting solar panels in space at this point. Granted, that's back of the envelope costs for a hypothetical space based solar system compared to nuclear plants that already exist. But the fact that they're close is not a good sign for nuclear.

Plants will take 10 years to build, at least. If every permit was signed today, there wouldn't be a single GW of this new nuclear going on the grid until 2034. We're aiming for major reduction in CO2 by 2030. Oh, and the huge amount of concrete needed would create a massive spike in CO2 by itself. Timeline issues alone kill nuclear before it starts.

Edit: fixing autocorrect's corrections

frezik ,

Scrapping the NuScale project had nothing to do with lawsuits. Governments pulled their financial support because projected costs were exceeding what was contractually promised, mostly due to pandemic-related supply chain and inflation issues.

This is typical of nuclear. The industry wants to believe its problem is regulation. It's not, at least not if you want to have better safety guarantees than the Soviet Union did. Its problem is that to be safe, nuclear is expensive, and there doesn't appear to be a way out of that.

frezik ,

That's what the industry wants to believe. Except that US regulators have shown a willingness to sign off on new nuclear power plants as long as you do all the paperwork right and show that you're not some moron who will dump a pile of plutonium in the desert and run water over it to make steam.

Nuclear takes 5 years to build according to initial plans. That's a joke, and everyone knows it. It's going to take 10 years, and the budget will double over initial estimate, as well. That means it will take 10 years before you see a dime back on your investment, and it could all be for nothing if the funding shortfall can't be made up. Some of this is regulations--you know, the kind that keeps another Chernobyl from happening--but a lot of it has been the fact that every plant takes boutique engineering and specialized labor.

The Westinghouse AP1000 design (what they used in Vogtle) was supposed to fix that boutique engineering. It did not. SMRs are also supposed to fix that boutique engineering, but their projects are also failing.

Meanwhile, you could invest your money into a solar or wind farm. It'll start generating power in 6-12 months and start putting money back in your pocket. Nothing about the construction is particularly boutique; it's almost all mass produced stuff. You don't need specialists to put them together, either. There is a track record of solar and wind farms meeting construction deadlines and budget forecasts. Given all that, who the hell would invest money into nuclear?

frezik , (edited )

Yeah, those old fabs are still useful. Here's what Microchip Technology Inc runs:

https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/00004075.pdf

See page 6.Their fab in Lawrence, MA only goes down to 1000nm. Their other locations go down to 250 or 110nm. IIRC, some of that is the auto industry refusing to port things off of old chips, but the point is that you can do a lot of useful stuff with horribly outdated fabs.

frezik ,

They have high power and low power cores. Borrowed the idea from "BIG.little" design from ARM.

frezik ,

Old Man Murray's former crate rule is now broken.

frezik ,

They had an article about rating games based on how soon you see the first crate. Developers at the time used to always fill space with crates.

Doom failed because there were barrels in the opening scene, and barrels are just round crates.

The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates (www.theguardian.com)

Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually....

frezik , (edited )

Thing is, I could maybe be convinced that a sufficiently advanced AI would run society in a more egalitarian and equitable way than any existing government. It's not going to come from techbros, though. They will 100% make an AI that favors techbros.

Edit: almost forgot this part. Frank Herbert built a world ruled by a highly stratified feudal empire. The end result of that no thinking machine rule isn't that good, either. He also based it on a lot of 1960s/70s ideas about drugs expanding the human mind that are just bullshit. Great novel, but its ideas shouldn't be taken at face value.

frezik ,

Check my edit in the post above, made over an hour before you posted this.

frezik ,

Because I'm not lying, you're incapable of looking past the surface of Sam Altman's obviously self serving comments.

frezik ,

Unfortunately for you, we can actually see edit and post times on comments:

https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/67a4cd22-4a0f-4cdb-ba6c-732e57f4cf77.png

My comment, last edited May 30, 12:29:07 GMT-5.

https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/a1d21b38-ddec-4fb2-9c91-b5d80abaafff.png

Your comment, posted May 30, 1:55:04 GMT-5.

So it wasn't an hour before. It was closer to 1.5 hours. You got me.

This isn't just about internet points. You're defending a shithead on the basis of "he didn't say exactly those words", as if context does not exist.

frezik ,

Why do you keep embarrassing yourself?

frezik ,

I agree, and I think there's some reliability arguments for certain services, too.

I've been using self-hosted Bitwarden. That's something I really want to be reliable anywhere I happen to be. I don't want to rely on my home Internet connection always being up and dyn DNS always matching. An AWS instance or something like that which can handle Bitwarden would be around $20/month (it's kinda heavy on RAM). Bitwarden's own hosting is only $3.33/month for a family plan.

Yes, Bitwarden can work with its local cache only, but I don't like not being able to sync everything. It's potentially too important to leave to a residential-level Internet connection.

frezik ,

IIRC, it's nearly impossible to self-host email anymore, unless you have a long established domain already. Gmail will tend to mark you as spam if you're sending from a new domain. Since they dominate email, you're stuck with their rules. The only way to get on the good boy list is to host on Google Workspace or another established service like Protonmail.

That's on top of the fact that correctly configuring an email server has always been a PITA. More so if you want to avoid being a spam gateway.

We need something better than email.

frezik ,

I'm hoping my makerspace will be able to do something like that in the future. We'd need funding for a much bigger internet connection, at least three full time systems people paid market wages and benefits (three because they deserve to go on vacation while we maintain a reasonable level of reliability), and also space for a couple of server racks. Equipment itself is pretty cheap--tons of used servers on eBay are out there--but monthly costs are not.

It's a lot, but I think we could pull it off a few years from now if we can find the right funding sources. Hopefully can be self-funding in the long run with reasonable monthly fees.

frezik ,

Not really, I just have trust issues with my ISP, and I'm willing to spend three bucks a month to work around them.

frezik ,

Setting up a web of trust could cut out almost all spam. Of course, getting most people to manage their trust in a network is difficult, to say the least. The only other solution has been walled gardens like Facebook or Discord, and I don't have to tell anyone around here about the problems with those.

frezik ,

Yeah, that's kinda what my GP post was getting at. But it's all managed by corporations, not individuals.

frezik ,

5-8% per year is a doubling every 9-15 years. This is not a small change. That means we've doubled at least once since the first Tesla Roadster.

frezik ,

They have doubled in capacity: https://rockymntstage.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/slide-2-battery-charts.png

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