Kirby64

There's numerous sodium ion batteries in 21700 packages you can buy online. They have specs and ratings, although they seem conservative generally.

Key difference between them and LFP/Li-Ion is the charge/discharge curves and termination voltage are radically different.

Powerline struggles to reach gigabit and has all sorts of interference issues, and MoCA is expensive and also not full duplex. Bandwidth goes down as you attach it to more nodes.

GP is referring to sodium ion batteries. They’re even cheaper materials wise (no lithium) and have even more favorable outcomes for freezing conditions.

Worse energy density and similar or potentially worse number of cycles, but that’s being worked on.

Video streaming platforms are not generally running on a pay-per-view monetization model. A few offer this, but the vast majority of them are offering it at $15-20/months for unlimited streaming. 4K video uses quite a bit of bandwidth. Low end is something like 15Mbps. That’s ~7GB/hour. Or, $0.385/hour at these proposed rates. Doesn’t take long to start approaching the cost of the streaming services charge.

IoT devices typically run on MCUs and they have WiFi connections, often. The price of MCUs with WiFi has gone down dramatically. Often $5 or less for a MCU capable of WiFi and usually Bluetooth. Think, ESP32-S3 and such.

Regardless of the "everything on one screen" concerns, the one thing that Tesla indisputably does well is their infotainment screen is snappy. It's so incredible to me that cars produced this year still have choppy, laggy, or high latency displays. Even if the actual system is useful/thoughtful/well laid out, it makes the usability experience feel absolutely terrible. You don't want to use it if every tap/click/selection has a 1 second delay...

> If you're buying a Subaru, you're buying it because you value safety and reliability of the car

If I want that, why wouldn’t I buy Toyota/Honda?

Why? Flying business everywhere is substantially more expensive than a one time cost of $6k for a laptop. A single business ticket anywhere overseas matches or exceeds that in most cases.

They also make Liquid Metal themselves. Pretty sure that’s a substantial part of their business actually…

Because, frankly, older hardware is just much simpler and also has much more widely available information about it. It’s just easier. Not that you can’t try, but it’s going to be harder.

No, I’m in the US. What you’re describing does not exist in that capacity in the US. No multi outlet branch circuit exists that is backed by a 40A breaker. At most you’re going to see 20 amps for a regular outlet.

Either way, your scenario of a multi outlet branch circuit on a 20A outlet would also not be correct. Let’s just make it simple: 20 amps of solar gen and 20 amps of power gen, connected as follows:

Panel -> Breaker -> Solar outlet -> hairdryer outlet

The current would flow from the solar outlet to the hairdryer outlet fully, and the measured current through the breaker would be 0. All wires would be at 20 amps and therefore safe. (Lets ignore that 20 amp wire is only rated for that temporarily… continuous draw would be 16a…) No violation of any current limits and no danger.

Now, you could go crazy and connect 30 amps of solar and 30 amps of hairdryers and that would be dangerous, but we’re rapidly getting into the realm of incredulity. As soon as you removed the load/hairdryers you would pop the breaker.

> Imagine someone buys 5 panels that can each supply 5amps. They plug them into outlets on a 40 amp circuit. They then proceed to run their toaster, microwave, vacuum, and hair dryer. They can draw 65 amps through the wires before the circuit breaker trips. (40 from mains, 25 from the panels)

Circuit breakers trip bidirectionally, so the circuit breaker itself would protect if too much current is drawn through to the mains panel.

How, precisely, would you get 65A through the wiring on this 40A circuit, if I drew 40A of consumption and had 25A of supply?

The 25A cancels out the 40A, so the upstream feed would only see 15A total. You do get 65A of total current drawn through the breaker panel, which is a concern, but the supply wiring would not see 65A. Subpanels (which, this would be a subpanel if it only had 40A capacity) are typically going to be just fine.

> When we had our solar installed, we had to make sure we had a newer power meter that could handle power both ways, so it probably is a problem for some situations, but the power flow for a single solar panel into a plug isn't enough to trip this, or maybe newer power meters are better?

This has very little to do with the power meter itself, and more that the power company wants to be able to monitor if the meter is 'running backwards' (i.e., if power is flowing out rather than into the meter). Older meters could only run in one direction.

> Clearly some people think of it differently if they're plugging generators into wall sockets to power the whole house, dumb as that may be.

There's frankly nothing wrong with this if you do it properly. The 'proper' way would be to have a generator input socket near the main breaker panel, and the main breaker is interlocked with the generator input (i.e., only one can be on at a time). You absolutely can just plug a regular generator into a wall, assuming you aren't overloading the wiring or breakers... the safety issue is overblown. The reason why it's 'super dangerous and bad stuff will happen' is because people are stupid and forget to turn off the main breaker. Which, admittedly, is a reasonable concern because... people do forget.

> It's partly because a 20% raise isn't a 20% raise. Even at the most modest tax bracket (above poverty) that will be reduced down to 17%. So outpacing groceries by 2% doesn't really feel good at all.

20% is 20%. Unless you're moving from one tax bracket to another on a particularly steep threshold, a 20% raise is going to actually translate to close to 20% extra take home, especially at the income levels for someone making $3k/mo take home.

A $1200 GPU you already own, typically, is how this is being seen. Maybe you already have a gaming PC, so this is 0 extra cost to you. All it takes is the power to run the GPU which would be minimal extra vs. the $20/mo cost.

> A US employer also generally provides health insurance and retirement, of which they pay a large piece.

Health insurance yes, retirement… no, not really. They may offer a 401k plan and some might even offer a match, but most companies offer at most a 4% salary match (dollar for dollar, or sometimes 50c per dollar).

So, it’s a vehicle to invest retirement funds with some tax advantages, but it’s not really “providing” it like you would subsidized healthcare.

> (Well, OK, the base may be - where the connection is. Will need to test out).

Usually that's the hottest part. And it's also the area most likely to be damaged by the excess heat: the power electronics

> Ah, that explains your stance. I definitely don't want fans that have them enclosed. Something like this is fine:

That example would be considered to be considered an enclosed luminary, actually. The bulbs are facing downward and the backside is enclosed by the glass/plastic globes which trap heat. You'll get more airflow than the fully enclosed ones... but it's still much worse than an open air bulb (or, bulbs where the bulbs face upward), and the place where you screw the bulb into the socket is going to be the hottest point since convection causes the heat to travel upwards.

Also, generally, the more modern designs have an enclosure because it spreads light out with the diffusion of the globe. You can use ring LEDs or other various patterns more easily that way.

> you're telling me I can find a replacement for the LED base?

Depending on which one you mean in the article… the super gaudy ones with extremely custom light fixtures would be hard. The basic led based that have crazy fan blades? Yeah, no problem.

Here’s an example (there’s a million like this in a variety of sizes, lumens, and color temps, just the first example I found on Amazon): https://a.co/d/0aP9nKdJ

> LED bulbs shouldn't cook. I'm not talking incandescent, but LED bulbs. I use them all the time. They last a decent amount of time.

But they do. They’re obviously not as much heat as incandescent lights, but if you’ve ever felt an LED bulb after it’s run for awhile, they’re typically too hot to touch. And fan enclosures are very harsh environments: no airflow and fully enclosed typically.

I’m not making the argument for total amortized cost. I’m just talking about per energy unit cost, specifically in terms of CO2 or emissions.

If the evaluation is total lifetime cost to you, using the equipment you currently have almost always wins out. Same with purchasing more efficient hvac and such: the cheapest/lowest efficiency hvac is almost always the most cost effective. That tide could turn with sharp increases in NG or electric prices… but it hasn’t historically been true for many years.

I’m not sure that’s easily quantifiable. Yes, thermal efficiency of modern NG furnaces can be ~95% or whatever… but you can also run multi stage heat capturing NG power plants that have very high overall efficiency too. Not 95, but at 60-70%, it’d be a potential wash in terms of emissions if leaks are ~10% (especially considering how much worse unburnt NG is as a leak vs when it’s burnt).

Also, if you’re in the electric ecosystem, swapping to heat pump systems will obviously be lower overall power in basically every scenario, and it gives an easy transition path unlike NG.

The POE hats for something like a pi convert the high voltage (~48v) down to 5V, so efficiency is going to be generally middling if you don’t spend a lot on the components. I imagine they’re running 80% efficiency or so, which would be an easy 3W of dissipation at peak or so.

> You're not wrong - but what do I do when the light is not bright enough (hint - almost all of them are not bright enough for my needs)?

Replace the entire LED base with a brighter one if you need more lumens. If you do the same with a standard e26 or candelabra bulb setup, you’ll have the exact same issue with bulb longevity. Brighter bulbs stuffed into the tiny enclosures will absolutely cook.

> Worse than natural gas or heating oil, and much worse than a heat pump.

Worse than a heat pump, yes, but very arguable whether NG is more efficient. Arguably, NG powering central electric power generation and then used for resistive would be overall more efficient. Central NG will be more efficient and also there’s substantially less opportunity for NG leakage if piping was reduced.

NG is definitely cheaper (at least in the US), but that’s not really related to efficiency or emissions cost.

5g/day is the upper limit for known positive benefits specifically around muscle strength and recovery. Theres some studies seeming to show 10g+ is useful for additional cognitive benefits.

I’m not aware of any limit that results in toxicity.

> I honestly cannot detect https://frame-studio-motion.openai.chatgpt.site and it is giving me depression. The website is basic, but it doesn't feel slop. And I guess that is something.

Are we looking at the same website? My eyes immediately go to the font and typeface styling and it registers immediately as AI generated. There’s a very distinct “AI” website aura that Claude and ChatGPT make that requires you to change a ton of the styling to make go away.

Depends on what you want to do. ESP32-S3 devices are ridiculously cheap and come in a myriad of form factors. If you want a RP2040 form factor, they're like $5 each. They've got Bluetooth and WiFi built in, plus plenty of GPIOs.

If you need compute with a bit more horsepower, the myriad of NUCs or thin PCs exist. If you need both in a single board, then the myriad of other SBCs that aren't Raspberry Pi's...

Why? If anything we should stop making tax a separate item everywhere else (like most of Europe does, for instance).

Is there any indication the gas tax is being blamed on oil companies? It’s literally a fixed cost per gallon… so all the extra cost literally is from oil companies. There’s even some places trying to suspend or cut the gas tax temporarily to artificially suppress the cost at the pump.

It kind of has, although I would argue that Siri is more successful than Cortana.

If I recall correctly, the thing that made Cortana particularly frustrating and worthless is that it did all searches using Bing, and opened any websites using Edge, regardless of your default settings. You got forced to use all the Microsoft version of every tool, even if you didn't want to.

> The complaint here, is that Chinese manufacturers, who are mostly in a death battle against each other and not profitable are even cheaper than Tesla and Toyota. In the long run, I suspect that picture will simply not be sustainable for those companies.

Citation needed. Yes, the many Chinese manufacturers are fighting each other... but I see no reason why they can't maintain prices. And I doubt they're all unprofitable, especially the big ones like BYD.

The low quality of the voice assistant meant they doomed the Cortana name. It got associated with garbage voice assistance, so they had to rebrand.

If there had been consumer good will for voice assistant performance before poisoning the name, it might have survived... but when you first product in that realm is garbage and it lingers for a long time, you're dooming the name.

Also, synergy with Halo is meaningless to Microsoft. Most folks do not care or even know about Halo.