dale_glass

137 ms·

1891.
by dale_glass 6y ago
Linus Tech Tips looked at a fuel cell USB supply a few years ago. It sucked horribly, and barely produced any power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-yLqwGS2dA Besides that, we can have 10 hours from a battery quite easily
1892.
by dale_glass 6y ago
It could get very messy. Think of it: 1. Something asks for memory from the kernel. 2. Kernel doesn't have enough free memory, goes to offload something old to swap. 3. Swap file is too small, needs to be extended. This calls the &quot
1893.
by dale_glass 6y ago
I don't mean it quite like that. Think for instance of a song that got stuck in your head. It probably hits some parts of it just right. What if we could fine tune that? What if we take a brain simulator, a synthesizer, and write a GA
1894.
by dale_glass 6y ago
The brain is pretty much guaranteed to be inefficient. It needs living tissue for one, and we can completely dispense with anything that's not actually involved in computation. Just like we can make a walking robot without being the le
1895.
by dale_glass 6y ago
The way I understand the story is that you have a scan of the relevant physical structure of the brain, plus the knowledge of how to simulate every component precisely enough. You may not know how different parts interact with each other, b
1896.
by dale_glass 6y ago
It's interesting, but strikes me as very unrealistic. I don't think it'd go that way. In fact, it'd be far more horrifying. We wouldn't bother trying to convince an image of a brain into cooperation, because we simp
1897.
by dale_glass 6y ago
I don't think you quite understand it. Yes, BTC is proof of work. Yes, complexity increases to control the rate. But that's it. Complexity has nothing to do with scaling. BTC doesn't scale. It's fixed at 1 block per 10 m
1898.
by dale_glass 6y ago
Doubtful it will doom it. Bitcoin and similar crypto scale difficulty based on the amount of power spent. So if a bunch of miners drop off due to electricity prices or such concerns, the network will simply readjust and keep on going. BTC h
1899.
by dale_glass 6y ago
Fun fact: The penguin used to have a contender: https://xenia-linux-site.glitch.me/ I got an avatar made in the style (male though).
1900.
by dale_glass 6y ago
That's an interesting counter-argument but I don't think it works very well. In fact that's pretty much how I expect things with nuclear to go. Where you have strong central government control -- there you can have comprehens
1901.
by dale_glass 6y ago
I think you're still missing what I'm saying. Yes, running a grid 100% on renewables is probably extremely difficult. Yes, nuclear may be the optimal way forward today. But I still think the most likely outcome is the renewable gr
1902.
by dale_glass 6y ago
That map isn't particularly meaningful. Sure, stuff is being built technically. But as far as I know, the main places where it's being done for real are China and India. The UK for instance has one powerplant actually in construct
1903.
by dale_glass 6y ago
"Last time I checked France was a democratic nation. So was Belgium. Both of those have achieve majority nuclear power generation, and France over 70%." That was the past. The dynamics have changed, and renewables are much more co
1904.
by dale_glass 6y ago
The issue as I see it is that pretty much nobody is looking at decarbonizing a grid, money be damned. Unless your power production is run by the government, generation is done by companies looking to make a profit. Solar and wind companies
1905.
by dale_glass 6y ago
Nuclear's cost is almost entirely in the infrastructure, and it's paid over a very long time period. The business plan for nuclear is to spend a decade or two paying back your loans, after which you make big $$$ because the plant
1906.
by dale_glass 6y ago
Why bother? What reason is there to believe a generator with blades attached to it is going to lose to a generator with a containment building and reactor attached to it?
1907.
by dale_glass 6y ago
I don't see how nuclear can win over the long term. Solar and wind are simple and very amenable to mass production. Many parts of them are usable for other purposes -- we need generators for things other than windmills, inverters for t
1908.
by dale_glass 6y ago
"What's different in 2021 that will make it succeed now when it failed in 2014? If anything, there's less interest now, as there are viable alternatives and increased investment in tools that work with standard C." You m
1909.
by dale_glass 6y ago
"Since you're a careful programmer, you are therefore smart and you never call a null function pointer." I don't think that's remotely justifiable to assume in modern times. There's 150K lines of C code in the
1910.
by dale_glass 6y ago
Right, and that's one of the things that makes C a bad language for security sensitive issues -- not just that it'll let you use memory after free(), but also that compilers have a liking for doing creative interpretations.
1911.
by dale_glass 6y ago
It makes no difference to initialize the pointer to nullptr, actually. Also, neither GCC, nor Clang produce a single warning with -Wall here. Ideally, I think, the pointer should be null and one would get some sort of error to the effect &#
1912.
by dale_glass 6y ago
I think something that is often missing in such posts is the appalling attitude towards undefined behavior in C compilers. Yes, okay. You've been careful. You've checked you're not accidentally overflowing a buffer, traced th
1913.
by dale_glass 6y ago
What kind of GUI app has a performance problem with the message bus? We're in the age of 4K, 60 FPS rendering. If any GUI application has a message bus that's strained enough to impact performance, then either the application isn&