2·
7 days agoDiscord and Whatsapp
I’d love to use Signal, but virtually noone in my sphere uses it.
Humanius
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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 24th, 2023
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But someone still needs to pay for that storage investment (as well as for maintaining the grid), and if noone (or nearly noone) is paying for their power then there is no money to invest in these things
Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn’t sustainable in the long term.
As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don’t need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:
- During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
- During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.
Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.
Where in Europe is this? Europe isn’t a monolith, after all.
Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the “salderingsregeling” which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:
- The money to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere, and if a lot of people have a bill of zero euros or a negative amount, that system kind of breaks down.
- The grid has a maximum capacity (especially in residential neighbourhoods) so you cannot pump an infinite amount of power back into the grid. If many houses in a neighbourhood have solar the grid simply cannot cope.
You are correct, but that coking process doesn’t have to be done with fossil fuels. Hydrogen (like you mentioned) is an alternative and you can create hydrogen using water and electricity.
In the NL we have a pretty polluting steel mill that is currently still coal fired. They are working on a transition plan where they adapt it to be gas fired instead, with the ability down the line to make it hydrogen fired when hydrogen production capacity is up to speed.
https://www.ad.nl/economie/tata-steel-stopt-met-kolen-binnen-tien-jaar-over-op-waterstof~a801e791/
(Translated headline: “Tata Steel stops with coal: Transition to hydrogen within ten years”)
That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)
While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword “AI” in their marketing speech.
I don’t consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.
Sadly it’s tricky to separate the two.
Say if hypothethically we have a data center that is not connected to the grid, and is entirely running on solar power and battery storage.
If the grid still generates (part of) its electricity need using fossil fuels, those same solar panels and batteries could instead have been used to (further) decarbonize the grid.While using solar power is good, increasing the overall unnecessary electricity consumption is still not great.
6·6 months agoBe sure to make regular backups of your data.
… and using RAID is not a backup.
If consuming media with integer scaling is the main concern, then 120Hz would be better than 144Hz, because it can be divided by 5 to make 24Hz (for movies) and divided by 2 or 4 to make 30/60Hz (for TV shows).
144Hz only cleanly divides into 24Hz by dividing it by 6. In order to get to 60Hz you need to divide by 2.4, which is not an integer.
And with either refresh rate 25/50Hz PAL content is still not dividable by a nice round integer value
Short answer: It’s because of binary.
Computers are very good at calculating with powers of two, and because of that a lot of computer concepts use powers of two to make calculations easier.1024 = 27
6·9 months agoGreat that it seems to work for you, but I’ve been experiencing this bug for months now if not longer.
I made the changes OP suggested, and now it seems to work correctly.
The problem is not that it gives a download prompt, but rather that it tosses the PDF file into your downloads folder unrequested.
It opens the PDF in the internal PDF viewer as well, but that is not the thing people are having issues with.
I don’t know whether they fixed it since, but last I checked that option was broken.
No matter what you select, half the time it still downloads the PDF to your drive.
I can mostly find myself agreeing (or at least not having big issues with) with all of the points, except for that one.
Let’s just hope they mean requiring a best effort, rather than outright preventing it in the first place.
Since the article doesn’t actually say what the rules and regulations are, here is a link:
Por que no los dos?
How would one realistically go about testing their backup? Do you need a bunch of empty drives?
7·1 year agoFor now I’m holding myself over with Jerboa
That hasn’t stopped me from using other Google services like Gmail, Docs, or Drive either.
If I ever decide I want to opt out of Google’s ecosystem I’ll just serve them a GDPR data deletion request.
That’s what I did when I deleted my Twitter account as well.
People who have a more in-the-middle opinion generally don’t talk about AI a lot. People with the most extreme opinions on something tend to be the most vocal about them.
Personally I think it’s a neat technology, and there probably exist use-cases where it will work decently well. I don’t think it’ll be able to do everything and anything that the AI companies are promising right now, but there are certainly some tasks where an AI tool could help increase efficiency.
There are also issues with the way the companies behind the Large Language Models are sourcing their training data, but that is not an inherent issue of the technology. It’s more an issue with incorrectly licensing the material.
I’m just curious to see where it all goes.