Syonyk

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361.
by Syonyk 3y ago
Yup. I very nearly changed banks over this particular quirk of "Anything below the maximum rating is a failure that must be addressed." I'm one of those people who likes going into the bank lobby often enough to get cash (tho
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by Syonyk 3y ago
"Rooting for"? Odd sentiment, for sure. Something like "Go Team Star Trek! Humans through the universe!" regardless of the chances of it actually happening? I think the chances of doing much useful in terms of "lo
363.
by Syonyk 3y ago
The "cheap energy" metrics tend to look at the cost per kWh delivered when the intermittent generators are producing. I've seen the estimates on the cost of "solar/wind plus storage," and I remain somewhat pes
364.
by Syonyk 3y ago
Well, I'm a bit limited on thermal mass out here in my office - and quite honestly, I'd have built things somewhat differently were I to do it again. I didn't know nearly what I did now, seven years ago when I built it. I&#
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by Syonyk 3y ago
Human invention isn't, but energy certainly is, and the correlation between "economic growth" and "energy use per capita" is very, very strong. At least some of the "degrowth" has been a result of "f
366.
by Syonyk 3y ago
If you want to phrase it that way, sure. I won't argue. It gets at the core of it well enough. Though I'd rephrase the second part as "Building a robust lifestyle against a wide range of possible disruptions." Ecolog
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by Syonyk 3y ago
> We love our apps and mobile phones. We collectively spend a lot of time staring at them, for sure. That the best paid minds of our time have set themselves to finding ways to "improve engagement" endlessly in various ways
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by Syonyk 3y ago
Do you believe that exponential growth can continue forever on a finite {planet, solar system, galaxy, universe}? If not, then we will eventually have to deal with the problem. We can do it now, or later. Personally, I think "sooner&
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by Syonyk 3y ago
I can hope for a mass change (reduction) in energy use, consumption, etc, driven by consumers - though I don't believe it's likely to happen until the issue is forced by something like "unavailability of resources compared to
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by Syonyk 3y ago
That's rather wrong, though it's a common enough bit of nonsense slung at the degrowth movement. In any reasonably modern use of the word, "growth" is defined as "exponential growth" - percent year over year gr
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by Syonyk 3y ago
California is also facing a net reduction in population in the past few years (around half a million total - that counts births, deaths, people moving in, people moving out - the state's absolute population has gone down the past two y
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by Syonyk 3y ago
A reasonable question, and one not terribly often asked, is "What is the point of the economy, growth, etc?" Is it to serve human health, happiness, prosperity... or is it to just grow for the sake of "numbers go up"? I
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by Syonyk 3y ago
I think it more reflects a very, very different view of what the web should be. I went out of the way to purge any actual Javascript requirements from my personal blog, because I want it usable without JS. About all you get is local sear
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by Syonyk 3y ago
And what are most of those websites and web apps used for? To try, very hard, to keep the user on the site as long as possible, to shove as many ads as possible in front of their face. Consider the opportunity costs imposed on everyone else
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by Syonyk 3y ago
> ...where everyone always wants to lambast the newest tech... Yeah. Because there are a lot of people who've lived through 3 or 4 decades now of the hype cycle and want to see "less tech" in everyone's lives, ha
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by Syonyk 3y ago
Advertising is as old as humans, certainly. But there's also a general difference, as I see it, between "the same for everyone" sort of broad advertising (billboards and the like), vs the "customized for each person, to
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by Syonyk 3y ago
The hubris in tech comes in a variety of forms, but you've definitely hit on one of them. It meshes well with the view of humans you see from the self driving companies - "Humans process the world with a couple crappy cameras and
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by Syonyk 3y ago
I think it's an open question as to if we can turn our current tech into something human-centric and not violently human-toxic at some level or another. And I'll argue that it's really not. And that, yes, we should "g
379.
by Syonyk 3y ago
Postman is well, well worth a read. His observations on TV, before the internet was ever really more than a curiosity, can be just as easily applied to what the internet tried to do. The problem is that we're not, collectively, any go
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by Syonyk 3y ago
No real surprise. A good number of people who have grown up with the promise of the tech are pretty well disgusted by what it's turned out to deliver, which is mostly "A handful of multibillionaires treating the rest of us as set
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by Syonyk 3y ago
Similar to the benefits I've found of actually committing to a blog for the past... 8 years. Wow. The major benefits I've found: - I can "flush from active storage" anything I've written as a blog post. I know mys
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by Syonyk 3y ago
20-30 60-100W equivalent LED bulbs in outdoor fixtures around their house. At 10W per LED, that's 200-300W they run most of the night. I can read by their lights at night from a quarter mile away. I've tried. It's entirel
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by Syonyk 3y ago
Tesla has two solar products. Don't confuse them. The first is the "solar roof" sort of thing that... we'll see how maintainable it is, but you get to write a properly large check for it, and most of the people I know w
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by Syonyk 3y ago
Who said every parking space? I didn't. Even at the coastal FAANG offices, EVs are still the minority. And not everyone will be charging every day. It's still fine to have a lot of non-charging spots - some people have short c
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by Syonyk 3y ago
Yup. This is one of the reasons I've argued in favor of "slow, at work charging" as the default for EVs. If you put in a bunch of 240V/16A chargers (3.8kW), as people show up in the 8-9 timeframe, they start charging, a
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by Syonyk 3y ago
> ... but utility scale solar probably means repurposing farmland... Great. Let's start by repurposing the land that grows the corn we turn into ethanol at somewhere around or below unity EROEI, as a political handout to the midw
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by Syonyk 3y ago
I've no idea why you're being downvoted, because it is a very real issue. You don't have to burn down many warehouses with solar before insurance companies start to have a lot of hard questions and rate increases. In tens
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by Syonyk 3y ago
The short answer is "No, but it sounds obvious if you don't know much about it." Similar to Solar Roadways - the less you know about solar or roads, the better the idea sounds. The half mile gouge down a road near me from a
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by Syonyk 3y ago
> Has anyone done more detailed numbers on costing of roof mounted installation vs just putting utility scale solar on the ground? You're far cheaper on the ground, for a variety of reasons (at least in most areas). A good ground
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by Syonyk 4y ago
Probably. And working as designed. I know plenty of people, some I'm related to, who are full in on what amounts to "Well, they know everything anyway, why shouldn't I use the most convenient payment option?"

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