Posts by cyberdemon 3488 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
Err, that needs more explanation. Why would you be ejected for trying to buy a Helicoil thread repair kit?
The mechanical engineers where I used to work, wouldn't even put a screw in -without- a helicoil. They generally worked with aluminum, and a helicoil is a lot stronger than a plain Aluminium tapped hole.
I read that as "we'll start making some small batch prototypes at EV size in 2 years and flog them to some mugs early-adopters, then make the decision by 2029 as to whether this is really feasible/scalable"
I note their latest published prototype (2020) was a 0.6Ah pouch cell, i.e. the size of a disposable vape battery.
Clearly they reckon they can scale it up, but at what cost/sustainability remains to be seen.
Yes indeed. Soot and road dirt can be surprisingly conductive when you get to kilovolts..
Never mind "please put your car into car wash mode before washing", we'll also have "please wash your car and wait for it to dry before charging", "no charging in the rain" etc
Well...
An e-scooter obviously couldn't carry a 1-tonne battery. There comes a point where simply increasing the size and weight of the battery does not improve range. See: the Tesla Semi, which at maximum range configuration can only carry a half payload.
The maximum range of any electric vehicle is indeed tied to the energy density of the battery technology, because it has to lug the battery around, and it doesn't get any lighter as it discharges.
> what's the highest voltage an EV can charge at?
Usually, the battery voltage. 400V DC chargers for a 400V pack, still would mean sending ~1kA up the charging cable. Would need an interesting new connector.
They -could- put HV power converters inside the car to step down voltage from 2kV or so into the battery. The problem with that is the next "standard" voltage from 415V AC is 11kV AC, so they'd still need HV power electronics outside the car.
It would be nice to have a 2kV AC standard.. Low enough to accommodate on a PCB, high enough to efficiently deliver a megawatt of power.
But all this is moot if you can't get the megawatts to the charging station in the first place..
I've been using Debian for 20 years. For gaming: apt install steam. Select the setting to run all non-native games in Proton, find that 90% of them run flawlessly, successfully refund any that don't.
Even "windows-only" VR games work fine in Proton. Usually the only barrier is 3rd party DRM / evil anti-cheat rootkits, which I wouldn't want on any platform
Yes, you can get game controllers for Windows and Linux. I have a steam controller, but don't use it much. I prefer a keyboard and mouse personally
I note that Elexon (data viewable on gridwatch.co.uk) have recently updated their data reporting to display the "negative" side of pumped hydro. It uses about 1GW all night to produce 2GW over a few hours in the evening.
Previously it showed as zero while "charging", but was presumably included in the demand figure.
It would be nice if they could also pull out batteries and Diesel from the "Other" category
When they say "UPS" I don't think they mean the sort that you could wedge into the bottom of a 19" rack..
e.g. The Microsoft datacentre in Dublin, had 150MW of Diesel generators -in addition to- 170MW of open-cycle gas turbine. They probably had the standard rackmount battery UPSes too, but they only need to run long enough to spin up the gennies.
I think the idea is that the limiting factor is the grid substation, and so having both gas turbines and Diesel means that if the grid supply gets really expensive, then they can make a few quid extra by running both Diesel and OCGT so they can continue to run their operations while simultaneously exporting power to the grid. The substation is always at max capacity, either importing or exporting power.
There was much hype about "second-life batteries" a few years ago, then there were a lot of fires, so much so that the National Energy Administration of China banned the practice.
https://www.bestmag.co.uk/china-verge-banning-large-scale-esss-using-second-life-lithium-ion-batteries/
"There is no second-life for EV batteries" because if you continue to use them after some cells in the pack are dead, then it can be very dangerous.
Cells/"supercells"/modules connected in series all take the same current. So if one supercell is "dead" (usually defined as having less than 50% design capacity) then the whole pack is "dead".
(a "supercell" is a bunch of cells connected in parallel, usually by fusible links. They form essentially one big cell, the capacity of which goes down as the cells degrade and/or the links fuse if a cell "fails short")
Right.. As much as I detest TikTok, I think the Law of Unintended Consequences may apply here..
In 2026, everyone around the world will ONLY be able to use their respective state-controlled social media.
But it won't be for long.. In 2028, there will be no social media and nobody to use it, we'll all be tiny piles of ash.
They have been in development since the 90s. There's a good reason that they have never made it to market: They don't work. Batteries need electrolytes and intercalation materials. The electrolyte needs to be a powerful solvent for good ion mobility (ie low resistance, fast charging) and the ions need a structure to fill on the other side (intercalation) otherwise they plate unevenly and form dendrites
There have been various failed attempts to bring them to market, most notably sakti3, which was a Theranos-like fake unicorn, bought by Dyson and ultimately led to the daft prat losing billions
The few I have seen either have extremely low capacity (coin cell size), low cycle life, or extremely low power density, especially for charging.
As for structural batteries: great for an F1 racing car, but not so great for maintainability (good luck replacing one) or crash safety
Debian has had named releases since forever (all named after Toy Story characters). I don't know if they were the first to do so, but Ubuntu, ROS and now Fedora have since adopted the practice.
It is annoying, i have to look up which name is which quite often too.
But at least with Debian, Sid is always Sid. It has always worked pretty well for me.
I blame bloody Lithium Batteries!
This sort of thing wasn't so easy when the perps had to bring a long extension lead and find somewhere to plug it in.
Quite serious, i've seen scrotes nicking bikes in broad daylight with battery powered angle grinders..
Genuine question, how do VM hypervisors allocate, schedule and prioritise GPU resources? Since a 750MW bitbarn sounds like it will involve a lot of "AI" crap ..
At best, I suppose when the wind stops blowing, your GPU app could be unloaded and replaced by someone else's GPU app, but if someone else was offering to pay more than you, then the GPU would already be running their app and not yours, regardless of the power source. The bit barn won't want to have idle silicon -ever-, since it is so expensive.
I think what is coming is "limit pricing" whereby your smart meter switches you off when the price goes above what you have set as your limit..
People tend to forget that ALL smart meters have a remotely operable contactor that can be used to disconnect you for a variety of reasons.. E.g. you have been switched to prepayment mode (with no need for a warrant), or there is a load-shedding event i.e. if the grid frequency (nationally) or voltage (locally) are too low due to excess demand / shortage of supply, and you are deemed to be an "optional" customer, or there has been a cyberattack and Putin switched you off..
I'll stick to my old fashioned electromechanical meter, thanks
And it's not as if there haven't been improvements in the efficiency of manual reading..
The customer (or the meter reader if an attendance is deemed necessary) simply snaps a picture of the meter and uploads it to be processed automatically.
A very simple Computer Vision problem solved decades ago, is one of the few sorts of things which modern "AI" is pretty good at.
Hmm I wonder why it is so difficult, for us in the West to get hold of these modules, assembled in er, China, from components made in Taiwan, eh?
Embargo or no embargo, China holds all the cards.. Even without Taiwan, China is in a much better position to fabricate this sort of thing than the US/Europe (never mind miserable old Blighty with its new-found Sovereignty)
.. I'll be in my bunker
With the main "American" EV manufacturer, Tesla, facing "disastrous" sales and decimating its workforce is the world finally waking up to the issue of EVs being unsustainable hype?
In the UK, for even half of vehicles to be electrified, even if we had the generation and transmission capacity, we would need to dig up every street and lay new underground cables- at a time when we don't have enough civil engineering workers to maintain leaking gas pipes, water pipes and sewers ...
I applaud them for trying, but..
Here, Adobe, buy my huge library of labeled clips that definitely are my own copyright and definitely weren't generated by your competitors' products using plagiarized material
Also, they would have to pay an unfathomable fortune to get anywhere even approaching on a log-scale the amount of data that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, TikTok et al have already stolen been granted an unconditional license to use by their data-cows platform-users
Maybe this is being built on top of a foundation model from someone else, which would make more sense, but would not quite be the same moral high-ground PR position that they are hoping for
I'm sure there are various big cheeses at POL who would argue that they couldn't POSSIBLY use an off-the-shelf EPOS system, and the idea of trusting SPMs to run it themselves would make them choke on their Chivas Regal.
No no no, it has to be a big centralised bespoke system, ideally one where we can fiddle the books remotely and fit people up for Fraud if we don't like them but can't fire them..
With a bit of luck though, some of those Cheeses will be rooted out by the Inquiry and sent to jail. One can only hope.
s/customers/shareholders/ ?
But seriously, does Mr Jassy know what Generative AI even is or does? The only use for it on Amazon's platform is by fake Chinese sellers to make up nonsense names and bullshit products with fake reviews.. If he really thinks that is going to make anyone's life easier, then I don't know what he is smoking, but i'll pass on it, thanks.
Maybe by "customers" he doesn't actually mean people who BUY from the platform (for those are simply mugs..) but, he means the ones who advertise and sell from it?
I suspect that one reason why this might make "business sense" is because of the wonky Biomass carbon-accounting rules that mean tree-burners (and food-burners) can attribute their emissions to the country(/state?) who supplied the fuel.. So there may also be an incentive there to use imported oil instead of producing it locally..
Yay, because it's green.
Not that i'm a fan of Diesel-powered datacentres, but what is the efficiency of shoving veg oil into a diesel genset compared with solar + electrochemical storage?
The most efficient crops are (IIRC) 2%-5% efficient at creating fuel, and then you have to burn it in a Diesel engine that is itself 20-30% efficient, so overall solar efficiency in the 1% range, and it is taking away land from food crops, using up nutrients in said land (or requiring energy-intensive and polluting fertiliser). And there is a risk that someone will start using imported Palm Oil if they can't grow enough rapeseed.
Put them next to nuke plants? Great. But Biomass/Biofuels are and always have been a load of greenwash.
Is that I am told the UK's electricity demand has apparently dropped significantly in recent years.
But with the advent of EVs, Heat Pumps, Electric Arc Furnaces, increased train electrification, increasing population and now AI bit-barns, I would have expected it to have grown significantly.
So, what is going on? It can't just be lightbulbs.. I suppose a lot of heavy industry has closed down, people with electric heating have moved to gas, and maybe we are drinking less tea? And the transition to EVs HPs and EAFs hasn't really kicked in yet.
Given that this is only 10-20% of what even a low-end laptop GPU can do, and as JessicaRabbit mentions, uses the system RAM via DMA and so chokes out any other memory-intensive tasks, so it's not terribly impressive.
I'm sure it will be used by the likes of Dell and Lenovo to flog "AI PCs" though.
On the upside, at least system RAM is usually upgradeable to well beyond the 16GB provided by high-end laptop and midrange desktop GPUs though, so it may cope with larger models than could run on your GPU, even if it is slower
It's 2024, who the hell is still using Batch files?
On the occasions when I am forced to use Windows, the first thing I do is install a proper shell, be it Cygwin or MinGW, WSL or a VM
It's time that CMD.exe and Command.COM are retired for good, along with the rest of MS-DOS that still persists in Windows, shirley
