mapt

59 ms·

841.
by mapt 2y ago
Deep cycle lead acid powered vehicles have some significant costs in usability and maintenance, and in a world where the oil price can just jump by a factor of ten as it did in the OPEC crisis, we might have paid them if we weren't ins
842.
by mapt 2y ago
Are you at all familiar with "Telegram Dude"? A fugitive of the Russian Government, an expat whose Facebook-like social network VKontakte was seized by the Russian Government, before he fled Russia and started an encrypted messag
843.
by mapt 2y ago
Apparently, Signal is already used heavily by the US military, and Telegram by the Russian & Ukrainian military. As we create, so we destroy for tactical reasons. Telegram's founder was just arrested for "failure to moderate&
844.
by mapt 2y ago
DIY doesn't come with those asterisks, and DIY with only-thermal power use & energy storage is on the simple side of things. "Help me heat in the winter" is basically the simplest use-case, because you can accomplish it
845.
by mapt 2y ago
A good number of the roofs already are. While more expensive than working in a field, it's way cheaper/safer than working on a tiny residential roof. Parking lots are tougher, but I saw the first one this year.
846.
by mapt 2y ago
> You can now break even on electricity costs for a residential pitched-roof installation in under 5 years. This is without any subsidies, without selling anything back to the grid. This is arguably a false economy. ~75% of costs for the
847.
by mapt 2y ago
This has been the case for years now for pitched residential roofs - they stopped being competitive a long time ago. Thankfully, the impetus for residential roof solar was always more ideological than practical. There's plenty, PLENTY
848.
by mapt 2y ago
Unfortunately in 2024 with extremely inexpensive solar cells, I don't see much future for this technology. Even fixed latitude tilt angles are coming into question given the modest cost increases that they create versus a flat or a ve
849.
by mapt 2y ago
Notably, the possibilities are quasi-finite because of the solar neutrino noise floor. When we reach that, we stop needing to scale to 10x larger detectors for a 90% reduction in reaction cross section, and they start to need to be 100x la
850.
by mapt 2y ago
Building a big camera and an integral field spectrophotometer and a single-objct coronograph+spectrometer so that you have three instruments to hang off of a telescope does not reduce your costs. Building ten big identical cameras, does red
851.
by mapt 2y ago
A lot of these estimates seem to be using a projected present price - this is what it costs for the hardware if you build it now - rather than what it would cost if you delay 15 years to slow-roll the program and keep a portion of an academ
852.
by mapt 2y ago
To participate in an American healthcare treatment you need to interact with a private for-profit company which will shut down if it doesn't on average attain significant profitability; Let's say 30% goes to shareholders, taxes, r
853.
by mapt 2y ago
A small fraction of the time, private equity is brought in to make an ailing, breakeven business profitable. Much more often, it's to bite off limbs until it dies, feasting on cashflow and assets. And then the third portion of the time
854.
by mapt 2y ago
I know a number of nursing homes had >50% mortality from COVID, as there was not even a real attempt at isolation. While visiting hours may have been restricted, we pretended that nurses and staff (already scarce) were simply unable to
855.
by mapt 2y ago
Solar sails are at this time quite useless for most purposes, and always will be if we can't build, fold, and deploy working sails of micrometer thickness, and/or build gigawatt-scale laser launch projectors. Using ion thrusters i
856.
by mapt 2y ago
Dramatically increasing the amount of scientific research grant funding nationwide would be a natural response to this part of the demographic transition and to the idea of promoting college education, but instead we have an academic pyrami
857.
by mapt 2y ago
I lost a lot of respect for science when my advisor explained that it didn't matter that the cutting edge work I wanted to extend was being done by Some Guy On A Forum, I wasn't allowed to to cite them, and a pity too, because it
858.
by mapt 2y ago
The new method this past year that appears to be highly beneficial is to use various compass orientations of _vertically_ mounted panels. The solar cells got so cheap that every penny we spend on mounting hardware and rigid paneling now st
859.
by mapt 2y ago
Smell is one thing that you can't fix with body cameras even in theory.
860.
by mapt 2y ago
Can an LLM provide the sort of psychological buffer that McKinsey Junior Analysts (some random person picked up off the street in a college town and handed a clipboard, a frequent flier card, and a six figure salary) provide to senior manag
861.
by mapt 2y ago
We were supposed to have an aggressive internal affairs department, federal investigations, and federal prosecutors to address the possibility of local/state police corruption, since the prospect of that corruption was raised in the 19
862.
by mapt 2y ago
The officer "smelling alcohol on your breath" is infamously applied to any situation where the officer lacks probable cause. It cannot be verified in a criminal case or in litigation, the officer is simply presumed to be telling
863.
by mapt 2y ago
The man who learned basically everything about the technology industry that they didn't want us to know yet in bars outside of tech conventions, and then shared it with us in the very best traditions of tabloid media (which has mostly
864.
by mapt 2y ago
I mean... they had it. For ten or fifteen years. In CS, at least. That mostly ended when they became a VC financing & monetization endpoint rather than a novel research platform, and renamed themselves 'Alphabet', cut R&
865.
by mapt 2y ago
This is not an effort or desire-mediated performance, it is a focus-mediated performance. Some people find that cognitively more difficult than others. If you are the type of person to intensively multitask, to occupy your short-term memor
866.
by mapt 2y ago
That's not a statement of fact, it's a tautology. You are responding to an interesting statement that unpacks to "Economically high-performing musicians are more a product of industry effort than an indicator of technical ski
867.
by mapt 2y ago
> And I want to have access to those large club houses that have full gyms and swimming pools and cozy libraries and all kinds of activity rooms, instead of those smallish ones in SF (probably because I'm not wealthy enough, but tha
868.
by mapt 2y ago
There is a shift underway from ubiquitous tilling to lower and no till options. Tilling solves certain problems in a field - for a while - but causes others, and is relatively expensive. Buried lines do not coexist with tilling. We are co
869.
by mapt 2y ago
For non precision watering, we have existing options. For other things - There are probably opportunities in adapting the existing center pivot systems with their pivots and tracks and wheels, with heavier truss segments that support roboti
870.
by mapt 2y ago
Probably? But spraying water on leaves is not only the way water naturally gets to plants, it's often the only practical way to water crops at scale. Center-pivot irrigation has dramatically increased the amount of and reliability of

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