hedora

When, not if, unless we somehow manage to replace most governments, world wide in the next 2-3 years (we're definitely committing to the high-emissions roadmaps that show > 70% chance of terminal collapse by 2100):

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse...

I'm hard on laptops, but my desktop is running an i7-2600 from 2011:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/52213/i...

No complaints. It was the peak of Intel consumer products in my opinion. I might upgrade it to 32GiB while I still can. (DDR3 is cheap.)

I have a pile of newer dead Intel machines (laptops and desktops). I don't have anything nice to say about them.

They were more secure though.

Also, does all this remote management whatever stuff cost more or less than slightly better insulation, or an upgraded compressor?

Almost everything you described is either better set at factory (or at coolant recharge - like compressor pressure, etc), or tunable on the antique mercury switch thermostat we had growing up.

The only remaining thing is the defrost cycle stuff, and even that can be 90% of the way to optimal just by having a clock that knows when peak power is. The classic thermostat we replaced the mercury switch had that. I imagine they're like $10 retail, $1 for the microcontroller.

Assuming the extra complexity does actually save another $500/store/year, how much of that $500 is eaten by maintenance contracts, software patches, wifi debugging, etc, etc? Also, what happens if the internet goes down?

I'm not convinced it makes any sense for these things to be online.

Not sure what they run on in 2026, but next year, 800V DC, 1MW per rack:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec...

When this all unwinds, I suspect that deal will have Trump's fingerprints all over it. There will also be sort of graft that screws over taxpayers, and somehow the money will never be returned.

The real shame with all of this is that when (not if) the AI bubble pops, it's going to be like the 1990's, when there was a huge supply of unix workstations, etc.

The difference is that none of this Nvidia gear can run on normal 120V (or even 240V) circuits, so it'll end up going to the landfill or just being powered down in place.

The BMW i4 is probably what you're looking for.

I think it's a huge regression vs. the goofy looking i3 (which is carbon fiber, has a working jog wheel, etc). The i4 is basically exactly a modern BMW sedan, but an EV. I think they moved to a platform that lets them just switch between ICE, hybrid and EV. You can even set the safety tone to make it sound like a BMW with tuned exhaust pipes.

It's almost like the republicans would be better off if they paid attention to their constitutional duties instead of just burning things down.

This will clearly hurt them in statewide elections, but I wonder how it plays out in local rural elections. I can imagine the rejected ballots leaning more blue than average in heavily red areas.

I can also imagine the opposite: Older folks have less mobility on average, and are probably more likely to mail the ballots in. The Propublica article doesn't say anything about this, but I imagine some election officials track it.

Their ID requirements in Ohio blew back a similar way a few years ago. They made it extremely hard to vote without a driver's license, thinking it'd hit college kids, but it mostly hit retirees that no longer drive.

Does anyone pay retail API pricing to Anthropic at scale? The last time I checked, I was burning > "$10K" per week with my $200/month subscription.

I know there's a point where companies get big enough, and Anthropic forces them over to the API, but presumably such companies negotiate heavy discounts instead of eating the 200x overnight price hike.

We were using ZFS in prod a few years ago, and there was a one-line patch to fix data loss issues.

It took Ubuntu something like 6 months to “backport” it. I’m not at all surprised they are taking forever to patch a severity 11 wormable exploit.

Mildly disappointed, but not surprised. Anyway, the ZFS thing (and, before that, widespread systemd-related breakage of an old LTS) are why I don’t trust them in prod anymore.

Good for them!

There are a dozen TVs at any decent big box store that meet those specs, and roughly zero monitors, even if you look online.

Seriously: Name one counterexample.

There are also older devices (for Priuses) that just tap into the high-voltage terminals of the battery pack.

They'd have to beat used car battery pricing and I suspect used car batteries are going to be worth ~ $0 until recycling becomes better.

Apparently, it's almost impossible for wrecker yards to get rid of EV car batteries, even if the battery pack is still fine (but the car was totaled).

I know someone that did this with an old Prius. No software hacking required. Just leave the ignition on, and wire into the high-voltage system (not at the same time, of course!). The engine auto-starts when the battery gets too low.

The more interesting approach is to do it with a used EV. You can get a 100-133 kWh car used for $20-30K. The last time I checked, that was below the price of a house backup battery with a quarter the capacity.

Even if you aggressively used the vehicle for this, you're talking about wearing out a ~ $5-10K battery over many years. For reference, a generator that can do this costs $10K, and would be burning way more than that in propane before the car battery wore out.

I don't think either of those are real concerns. The free supercharging did not overlap with homes that could be charged by cars.

Also, safe islanding devices have been very standard for at least 5-10 years. Policy 1: House watches incoming voltage, and turns off the breaker if the grid is down. House electricity + solar stay on; line to power company stays at 0V. Policy 2: Panels see that the house voltage is low, so they turn themselves off.

Policy 1 requires an electrician, but mostly just for permitting. I'd guess a good fraction of the people reading this could safely do it themselves after reading a manual. Policy 2 does not require an electrician or understanding electricity at all. It's how DIY balcony solar usually works.

The F-150 can do this, but by charging the batteries you don't have.

It could also probably run the house off the 240V outlet in the bed, but only if you knife switched the solar + grid off and just ran the house off the truck.

When the sun came out, you could knife-switch the house back, and charge the truck.

Alternatively, you could rip out your solar and put in the one brand that Ford works with (SunRun, I think), and then the truck would be able to bi-directional charge with the house batteries using the solar, or something like that.

(Yes, this is all dumb, especially since there are standards that should allow a dongle to be made to make this work transparently, and to just automatically do the right thing".)

I think the standard is called "V2H". It's unobtanium from what I can tell.

If you have a Ford EV and a SunRun house, then it supposedly has worked for a few years now. (But that's just vehicle to home charging, not the "V2H" standard.)

V2H can charge home battery systems, but V2L "cannot". There's obviously a market for "plug the 240V outlet on my EV into my house battery. Use the car to charge the house battery while the house is running off the house battery".

Someone will make it work.

You're definitely right on the tinfoil hat angle. Vehicle to home is inevitable, but the rollout is intentionally slow / designed to fail, so the utilities can keep milking folks and justify their natural gas peaker plant investments. Also, once it works, vehicle to home will immediately tank the grid-storage and home-storage battery industry.

Some company is going to create a gray-market "high voltage -> top N home battery systems" dongle that you can just wire into the battery pack on your car. That company will make a fortune (but only if they're able to dodge liability).

I've heard of people doing similar with old prius beaters. You wire the 500V (or whatever) DC battery into an inverter, and then plug your fridge, etc into it. Leave the car ignition on, and it runs the gas engine for a few minutes an hour indefinitely because it sees the drain and thinks you are driving it.

Most modern EV's support this sort of thing officially, but they're hardwired to one brand of house battery. So, when you buy a new car, I guess they think you will throw out your house solar panels and backup battery. If you want two cars, then I guess you get a divorce?

I'm in the Bay Area. There's a serious shortage of general practitioners because the patient:doctor ratio is so high. Even if their absolute pay is high, the amount they are paid to see me is minuscule. They can make more and have many fewer patients / appointments per day if they switch to a specialty.

On the other hand, specialists are more profitable for the "non-profit" healthcare networks we have around here, so they're easy to get appointments with.

Some do this (Samsung), but the more common tactic is to throw constant nags up if the telemetry is not being sent to the manufacturer.

I did my research and bought one that does not do this (2025 TCL), but, if it turned out that it did, I'd have shamelessly returned it. I'd also have issued a chargeback if the store gave me any crap.

Even with all that, if you install firmware updates over the network, then disconnect WiFi, the TV becomes unusable until you factory reset it. (I did this because its EDID is corrupted, and I have to override it with a linux cmdline. The update did not help.)

Show me an example of this monitor. Table stakes to compete with a midrange TV:

- >= 85"

- VESA mount

- 4K @ 120Hz (or better)

- < $2K

- "infinite" contrast ratio

Our TV remote can actually control our Apple TV. It's definitely good enough, and through some witchcraft, it works when the TV is not connected to WiFi.

Remember this when you vote. A progressive swing is coming, and if we will ever regain privacy rights, it'll be when the next swing hits.

Our Samsung fridge will mesh network with any Samsung TV specifically to exfiltrate marketing info, at least according to the manual. (The fridge even has marketing surveillance cameras in it).

I assume at some point, appliance manufacturers will start "partnering" with things that actually need WiFi for exfiltration purposes. Phones would be a good place to start.

That way, we'd need to either Faraday cage our friends' phones, not invite them over, or send marketing pervs video feed of our moldy pickles.

The one we have is even worse. It won't really work well outside of things like airplay or chromecast, and those require wifi. It was extremely cheap though.

(It has an HDMI port, but it's clearly a second class citizen in the menus, etc. Default to HDMI on power up is intentionally broken. It's also intentionally designed to turn into a brick if we ever lose the remote. At boot, it puts a screen up saying to press a button on the remote if you want it to display anything else, and that screen never times out. If you plug in an HDMI input, it says "HDMI input detected; press OK.". There's no "OK" button on the projector itself. You have to press the OK button on the remote.)

You have to be careful with this path. Some manufacturers embed LED's into the bezel and blink them at you (part of the IR sensor for the remote, to prevent you from taping over with electrical tape) if they do not have network.

Others just overlay banners on top of the video.

Caveat emptor.