petertodd

7 ms·

31.
by petertodd 1y ago
HAAS CNC mills are famous for using electric stove elements for the spindle brake resistor: https://www.reddit.com/r/CNC/comments/1es1d01/someone_didnt_... I'm not sure that this really is a complet
32.
by petertodd 1y ago
That's not as ridiculous as it sounds! As you know, negative electricity prices mean that someone is willing to pay you to dispose of electricity they need to generate for some reason. For example, a conventional steam-turbine-based el
33.
by petertodd 1y ago
> Generators are not in sync with the grid though. And that's the hardest part. I know. What's interesting re: Ukraine is because there are so many generators there are more options to getting power sufficiently restored for no
34.
by petertodd 1y ago
The tills have keys to manually open them, and you can just record transactions on pen-and-paper if needed and enter them later. I've seen plenty of businesses do exactly that during power outages. Not as fast. But totally doable.
35.
by petertodd 1y ago
Ukraine is interesting in this context because there are so many generators. In the richer parts of Odesa I've even found it hard sometimes to tell whether or not the grid power is on as literally every single building had sufficient
36.
by petertodd 1y ago
> And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this? In Spain it's now illegal to pay with cash for transactions over 1000EUR. Absurd. In Norway they recently made it mandatory in most circumstances to accept cash for transact
37.
by petertodd 1y ago
Also, the data center is probably in a city, surrounded by infrastructure that could be used if necessary. An oil rig is in the middle of an ocean, and has to rely on itself.
38.
by petertodd 1y ago
That would be charging up the spring to throw the breaker. High voltage breakers need to switch on (or off) very quickly, to avoid damage from arcing. It's common for them to have some kind of spring or gas piston arrangement that you
39.
by petertodd 1y ago
The point isn't to make a system that is easy. The point is to make a system that is guaranteed to work in any remotely realistic circumstance. In a real black start, the guys might very well grab a portable generator and just use that
40.
by petertodd 1y ago
Bitcoin mining is doing exactly in some cases. E.g. there's a fair number of small, remote, hydroelectric plants whose construction and/or renovation were financed by Bitcoin mining, with the amount of mining declining over time a
41.
by petertodd 1y ago
Yes, to comply with paranoid hydrogen safety regulations cheaply. Also, note how the nitrogen is also being used to purge the entire line. Not just keep condensation away. With more engineering work an intrinsically safe PTC heater could be
42.
by petertodd 1y ago
That's just a minor problem, not a fatal flaw. Obviously you can fix that with a small heater for negligible energy cost.
43.
by petertodd 2y ago
> Most militarily-significant targets are themselves non-military. Indeed. Large scale war is extremely expensive. Russia's government is spending about 40% of total tax revenue on invading Ukraine. So anything it can do to harm the
44.
by petertodd 2y ago
An example from a few days ago is how Lithuania's government believes that the Russian military intelligence was behind an arson attack on an Ikea: https://www.euronews.com/2025/03/17/lithuania-says-russi
45.
by petertodd 2y ago
Git-annex is another good option: https://git-annex.branchable.com/ I've been using it for many years now for data repos like photos. IIUC one advantage it has over LFS is its model makes it easier to store data in man
46.
by petertodd 2y ago
I wonder if they're using the same die for one or more microprocessor products that are RISC-V-only or ARM-only? They could be binning dies that fail testing on one or the other cores that way. Such a product might be getting sold unde
47.
by petertodd 2y ago
> But first, ask yourself why you are designing a binary format, unless maybe it's a new media container. Binary formats are ideal for critical applications where you want to either 1) parse the file correctly, 2) fail to parse the
48.
by petertodd 2y ago
That's a good idea for filesystems. But OpenTimestamps Proofs aren't really "written to". They're created, and then later validated. Also, being cryptographic proofs, my philosophy is the validator should almost alw
49.
by petertodd 2y ago
Well, like I said, I wanted a 32-byte magic so it'd look nice in hex-dumps. So I had plenty of room. OTS proof files typically contain lots of 32-byte hash digests. So "wasting" 32 bytes on magic bytes isn't a big deal.
50.
by petertodd 2y ago
That's basically how I designed the magic bytes for the OpenTimestamps proof files: $ hexdump -C foo.ots 00000000 00 4f 70 65 6e 54 69 6d 65 73 74 61 6d 70 73 00 |.OpenTimestamps.| 00000010 00 50 72 6f 6f 66 00 bf 8
51.
by petertodd 2y ago
> I saw maybe four or five Bitcoin ATMs in El Salvador, including two Athena Bitcoin machines. I didn’t see anyone using them. I've visited El Salvador quite a few times and traveled a decent % of the country, including non-touristy
52.
by petertodd 2y ago
> with some core devs like Peter Todd talking about tail emission, but that would break the 21 million cap. Bitcoin is screwed. Tail emission, economically speaking, means that the ~0.5%/year or whatever coins that get lost each yea
53.
by petertodd 2y ago
A problem with this article is it could easily give people the incorrect impression that there isn't significant mineral wealth in Ukraine (and occupied Ukraine). There certainly is, potentially trillions of dollars worth: https:&#x2F
54.
by petertodd 2y ago
> I can't buy overnight bunk tickets on Ukrainian trains anymore because I need to authenticate, and the only authentication methods require either Ukrainian citizenship or residency cards. In fairness, that specific case is probabl
55.
by petertodd 2y ago
> but they would refuse if the robots were to be used to kill a human being, regardless of their political views. Guarantee you that most of them would quickly drop that unwritten oath if it was their country getting invaded. I've v
56.
by petertodd 2y ago
In the VHS and DVD days it was common for people to have large video collections that cost them thousands of dollars to obtain; as I said, I personally have probably spent a few thousand on music in my lifetime. Artists - and even movie stu
57.
by petertodd 2y ago
If I could actually buy movies and TV shows for download I would; I buy all my music as sites like bleep.com allow you to easily buy mp3s, probably thousands of dollars over the years. I've tried buying shows a handful of times before.
58.
by petertodd 2y ago
> We're going to add TLSNotary support for real cryptographic signing, see my comments below :) Last I checked TLSNotary requires a trusted third party. I would strongly suggest timestamping TLSNotary evidence, to be able to prove
59.
by petertodd 2y ago
> OpenTimestamps alone can not currently prove anything because TLS session keys are symmetric. Timestamps can prove that the data existed prior to there being a known reason to modify it. While that's not as good as direct signing,
60.
by petertodd 2y ago
You really should add timestamping to ArchiveBox. The easiest way to do that would be via my OpenTimestamps protocol, https://opentimestamps.org It's open source and free to use, and uses Bitcoin for the actual timestamps.

More ›