An initially-stupid-sounding idea I heard a while back was running power cables through the ocean floors between America and the rest of the world. It's apparently feasible and the big benefit of it is that at the grid peak hour when the sun is not shining in Europe, they can get cheap solar from America and vice versa
Yeah, ultra high voltage DC power lines have something like 3.5% loss per 1000km. American sun belt to European sun belt is at least 6000km, so you just gotta eat the 20% loss. Same ballpark as pumped hydro storage.
6000km sounds like a lot, but the Chinese have built a 3000km UHVDC line delivering 12 GW, and putting down submarine communications cables this long is complete routine today. Would be interesting how much aluminium/lead/copper such a project would take. EDIT: found a supplier that specifies a 1GW cable at 7000 tons per spool. A spool is 130km of cable, so that's 350 000 tons of cable per GW for the transatlantic link. So just the raw aluminium is around a billion dollars per GW.
Anyway, first we have to properly connect those two sun belts to the rest of their own continental masses with UHVDC, then we have a lot of political problems to solve, and then we can check battery prices...
the Nato-L project [1] trying to get this done between Europe and North-America. 2 of the founders are the guys behind the (very interesting) redefining-energy podcast [2].
There is an infamous "Dropbox comment" on HN that reads the same way as this comment. No idea is new, and novelty is almost never the point. I had seen people do similar things in the past but never approached it myself. Here is someone that has done the thinking for me and put it out there for free. I appreciate that.
Yeah, but the OP is more like the "all you have to do is rsync and cron job". It's an article about the relatively complex step by step process that people do to implement a functionality. It may be the inspiration for an analogous dropbox, but definitely not the dropbox article or post. A product that you could grab from the app store that does all of this out of the box would be the analogue to dropbox.
That said, this would be interesting to someone who didn't know these tools could be stitched together in this way. I think that's a big part of why it's on the home page.
Y'all I'm as shocked as you are it's on the home page!
I'm new to hacking (come from an electrical/nuclear engineering background but never did much with software). For reference, just learned what postgres was 2 months ago.
Took a lot of tinkering to figure out but that's more a skill rather than complexity issue. Working from a laptop is certainly better, but was able to get good amount done (like building v1 of a backend and setting up a cloudflare tunnel for a PC) on a long bus ride where I would've gotten side eyes for using a laptop.
I'm no doctor but I'll bet "Doom Coding" is still not healthy but it's better than doom scrolling on X.
Thank you for the comments! I've been learning from these threads (Like tmux or dropbox article lore)
I was not expecting that the prices are going down. Makes sense as the hardware gets older but I always assumed the prices must be inflated given how much competition there is to make new datacenters
Yes i was surprised too. I think it's mostly newer models pushing older ones down. I think there's also a lot of competitive pressure in this market. And the GPU shortage is not really a thing anymore.
The problem is that most of the AI labs are popping up in TX that has a uniquely isolated electrical grid. Recall how the Texas cold snap a few years ago took down the grid for days. Turns out if you make a grid based on short term profit motifs, it's not going to be flexible enough to take new demand.
It's not the grid's technological limitation. We could have lived in a world with a more connected grid, more nibble utility commissions, and a lot less methane/carbon emissions as a result of it
When they launched Sora, one of the first things people did was rendering a person holding a cardboard with a message on it. It started by asking for features and eventually turned into people responding to each other.
One conversation I remember was complaining about people who constantly want AI pictures of anime feet.
This is also true for KDE e.V., where we've evolved from a roughly 50:50 split between corporate and individual donations to now about 75% of the donations (which have overall increased multi-fold) coming from individuals, many of whom are on recurring plans.
This is my cue to come and say that if you want to purify your home air, please look at the science first. Do NOT just go buy a HEPA. Chances are you'll waste your money and get little clean air.
Look for MERV and CADR ratings for filters. Then spend an afternoon building yourself a CR box with a box fan, or a narrower one with some computer fans. It'll work better than most commercial purifiers.
Buying a multistage HEPA purifier is perfectly fine, but first one must get and use an independent air quality meter to measure air quality. This will help one understand which purifiers are helping and which aren't, also how much they're helping. It usually takes several purifiers, including at the source of air entry, to effectively lower the PM levels to very low numbers. Also, the filters must be replaced routinely.
Yep, MERV13 or MERV14 is more than enough if all you're worried about is dust, pollen and smoke.
Because it's not as fine of a filter, far less air pressure is required to filter the air. This results in much, much quieter purifiers.
The endgame of this sort of goal is PC case fans. They've been optimized for decades now to squeeze every last bit of airflow for less and less noise, and they last for a couple decades or more.
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