tlb

49 ms·

721.
by tlb 4y ago
For home use, the Tesla Powerwall is popular. https://www.tesla.com/powerwall . It gets expensive if you want to ride out several cloudy days in a row. It's inefficient to have off-grid battery systems for every home. I
722.
by tlb 4y ago
IBM Selectrics had a symbol ball [𝛼] you could swap for the standard one. It only takes a few seconds to change balls, though when I've seen people doing it they would normally type all the prose on a page, then go back and type all th
723.
by tlb 4y ago
Concurrent writers isn't a thing people directly need. What they need is high write throughput. One way to improve write throughput is with concurrency, but the other way is by just being fast. Making the database fast has the advantag
724.
by tlb 4y ago
For most of those products, a commodity server is more reliable than the software itself. A straightforward hourly backup with manual recovery is adequate for most orgs.
725.
by tlb 4y ago
You should try building it. There’s a big market if you can make it reliable. Keep in mind there are other hot chips besides the CPU. Memory, network interfaces, and power supplies all need cooling too. Most systems are hybrid: water for th
726.
by tlb 4y ago
Whatever you’re heating up has to be a little cooler than the coolest chips in your system, because heat only transfers that way. Semiconductor lifetime goes down with temperature, roughly doubling failure rate for every 10C increase. So if
727.
by tlb 4y ago
String problems are rare, though may come up more in search engine companies. But manipulating sequences comes up a lot in many contexts. Usually it's sequences of more complex things: instructions, packets, files, polygons. It's
728.
by tlb 4y ago
It can be a lot. Speculation requires executing operations before you're sure they'll be needed, which can double or triple power draw in order to increase instruction-level parallelism. And all the machinery needed to enable spec
729.
by tlb 4y ago
Similarly, I wish that on x86, REP STOSB was the fastest way to copy memory. Because it only takes a few bytes in the icache. But fast memcpys end up being hundreds of bytes, to work with larger words while handling start and end alignment.
730.
by tlb 4y ago
There are domains where I feel I can judge an argument solely on its content. Predicting the economy isn't one of them. While I can discard some bogus arguments, there are plenty of coherent and self-consistent arguments pointing in di
731.
by tlb 4y ago
Back in the day, yes. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-05/page/n69/m...
732.
by tlb 4y ago
Maybe, but Barron's also has plenty of day-trader hype. How do you separate the good long-term predictions in Barron's from the bad ones? Read someone else. (You can optimize the process by skipping Barron's entirely.)
733.
by tlb 4y ago
Here it’s entirely about the source. Fred Wilson is an unusually smart and honest investor, and has experienced more market corrections than I have. So I weight his opinion higher than mine. I also weight his opinion higher than my favorite
734.
by tlb 4y ago
It's possible the economics have changed since the 50s. The non-proliferation argument certainly has: in the US in the 50s, making plutonium was considered a useful feature of power reactors.
735.
by tlb 4y ago
It's the one everyone preferred, but not many could afford.
736.
by tlb 4y ago
I prefer markdown. I edit .md files in VSCode, while `jekyll serve` provides a web preview. VSCode has its own markdown preview, but I often have embedded images, videos, and LaTeX, so I use Jekyll's preview which shows exactly what re
737.
by tlb 4y ago
One problem it solves is making reactors that can't produce material for nuclear weapons. That's pretty important if we want to deploy reactors outside the few countries that already have them.
738.
by tlb 4y ago
Website seems down: the domain doesn't resolve.
739.
by tlb 4y ago
The point is that Twitter charges their advertisers, their source of revenue, according to ad impressions served to "monetizable" users. They don't necessarily know at the time of serving the ad whether they're monetizab
740.
by tlb 4y ago
Young me would have been surprised to learn that in the 2020s, computers were designed for non-programmers except for a few specialized ones.
741.
by tlb 4y ago
It's an excellent time to negotiate to get your options re-priced if they're below water. When the market goes back up, you'll be ahead.
742.
by tlb 4y ago
For sure, holding tether (or any stablecoin) without investing it is pointless. It can't go up, but might go down. The only reason to hold it (longer than to do a transaction) is if you're making a return.
743.
by tlb 4y ago
The same line of reasoning says that we should build conventional light- or heavy-water reactors. The risk is minimal. And they're (a) tested and (b) much cheaper than PACER.
744.
by tlb 4y ago
It lacks the key advantage of fusion reactors over fission: not contaminating its working fluid with radioactive isotopes. For something like PACER, you have to extract the heat by running the hot fluoride through heat exchangers to run ste
745.
by tlb 4y ago
You can make 30% interest on deposits. It's better than picking up pennies in front of the proverbial steamroller. More like quarters.
746.
by tlb 4y ago
You have to predict what those well-capitalized parties will do during a market panic. Decision making seems to change quickly when half the money has just disappeared, to focus on salvaging as much as possible.
747.
by tlb 4y ago
Ah, the efficient market hypothesis applied to the most inefficient sector of the economy: health. What could go wrong?
748.
by tlb 4y ago
Not excusing the extortion here, but if you run a high-profit gray-area business, it can be a good idea to butter up the local cops. There are many ways to do so legally, from equipment donations to contributing to the sheriff’s reelection
749.
by tlb 4y ago
One obstacle is that we've all been trained that domain-specific search engines suck. Like Wikipedia search gives bad results unless you know the exact name of the article, so I just use DDG adding the word wikipedia. Another obstacle
750.
by tlb 4y ago
Chip interconnect is much slower than that over long distances. In addition to the LC delay you mention, the RC delay is substantial and increases as the square of distance so it dominates for long wires. The distance-squared effect is miti

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