leoedin

It's not really useless though. Yes, in some dimensions it is terrible compared to GUI parametric CAD. But in other dimensions it is far more powerful and lets you build really complex stuff quickly and easily.

Having worked in the industry for a bit, the reason people talk about "MW of batteries" is because they're usually designed to deliver the capacity for a fixed number of hours. Earlier batteries would do 1 hour (so a battery would typically be 1MW/1MWh) and newer sites coming online are usually 2 hours (so 1MW/2MWh). As battery deployment grows the money is increasingly just in energy arbitrage, so there's a lot of pressure for longer duration storage. If you see a headline MW figure it's a safe bet that it's between 1-2x that in MWh.

Honestly, having an experience of something as a kid gives you absolutely no insight into what it's like to be a parent. Not to mention that every child is drastically different and will react very differently to the same situation.

I thought the millenial journey of discovering their parents sucked through therapy was almost a trope at this point. Certainly the previous generations had more kids, and probably spent less time actively parenting them.

Yeah, give me the iPhone's hardware running Android please. I switched to iPhone because my Android phones kept dying due to hardware issues. Android has a far better keyboard and notification system. Give me it any day.

There's a video on YouTube which shows a world champion shotgun shooter try to shoot down drones before they get to him. His success rate - knowing the drones are coming, ready to go with a loaded shotgun and with elite skill - is really bad. It really opens your eyes to just how scary drones on the battlefield are. You need to hit every single one of them to survive. They just need one to get through to kill you.

Bigger drones would be slower and easier to spot, but even then - if you're not ready and waiting it'll be gone before you have time to react. The only consistent solution for anti-drone warfare is automated. Or nets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mORdXxZ2uKU

A really neat concept. It uses a special hinge design, a magnetic encoder and torque modulation to control the lift of the rotor as it spins. Completely negates the need for a conventional helicopter's swash plate.

The single motor does have the pretty major downside that it spins the moment it's in the air. I suspect a 2 motor drone with a tail motor would be a lot more practical. But I really like how mechanically simple the rotor hinge design is - it pushes all the complexity into the control algorithm.

It seems kind of strange that the entire meat industry exists and is tolerated, yet a few horses in Central Park are making people so angry. Surely these horses have far better lives than the cows did that everyone's tucking into over lunch?

Does anyone do this without the vendor lock-in? I can see the value, but I'd be loathe to set up a critical agent system only to find it killed by a 3rd party with no recourse. Is there a self-hosted option?

> does it _actually_ matter what the code looks like for a desktop app that’s useful to a small handful of people

Not really. But equally, I imagine most people have a similar experience of software development to me - complex, messy and confusing code also often has poor performance and a high rate of bugs.

This is so cool. I've got a couple of iPod Classics in a drawer - alas it doesn't seem to work for them (presumably the colour display adds complexity?). I was wondering if this was possible last time I fished out my iPod - mostly the extra complexity of modern music streaming isn't needed, but bluetooth headphones and casting are great.

It’s just very clearly not “just” $90 a month.

First you need to hire somebody who wants to do it. That costs more than $90 a month. Then they need to install whatever equipment is required to bridge the fridge controller to tailscale. Then finally you have a $90 a month cost.

I agree that corporate probably has the budget to do it properly. But the idea that the costs are just the monthly cost is Tailscale is laughable.

It's true. A person is ginger, but nobody ever says things are ginger coloured. Ginger isn't even really one colour - it's a spectrum of orange-containing hair colours.

I was confused because I thought I'd seen this before. It looks like this project was named fastpotify until 3 weeks ago, when it was renamed. It would be nice if they acknowledged that somewhere!

It's a great idea anyway, when I tried it a few weeks ago it wasn't all working but with the speed of vibe maybe it is now.

> I think where intuition fails a lot of us (myself included) is that in the software world if you have the code/documentation for something then building it is trivial. But in the hardware world, even if you have all the instructions and knowledge, actually applying that know how to create a working project is still very far away, through certainly nowhere near as far away as if you have started from scratch.

It's certainly true that you can build software if you have the code (well, mostly true. Modern frameworks suffer from quite severe bitrot). But I'm not sure that you can extend it.

Large software projects rely on people understanding them. If everyone who worked on the project is gone, it's very hard for someone to regain the architectural understanding required to extend or refactor things. Without any overlap, there's nobody to answer questions. As long as there's been a continuously overlapping stream of developers, that knowledge is more or less retained - but if all the developers leave, and someone picks up the project again later it's almost impossible for them to make meaningful improvements.

AI probably changes this completely.

This is basically how the rest of the world feels with US tech giants.

It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.

I think it's been a long time since any motor racing was just about engineering the best possible car. The problem is that engineering got too good - the best possible car we could make would simply be far too fast to be safe. So F1 (and all motor racing) are always playing the rules to try and keep an even field (otherwise the best funded teams would be leagues ahead) and to stop the engineers from killing the drivers.

There's no way western militaries would just add troops to the front. If we're fighting a war with Russia - regardless of where it is - it would be no holds barred. And just adding more troops to the front is not the way an advanced tech-heavy loss-averse western military would do it.

The only way western troops are deployed en-mass inside Ukraine is as a peace guarantee with some level of Russian agreement. The moment there's footage of British/French/German troops getting hunted down by drones, the public will be crying for direct strikes into Russia and it'll be WW3.

The maps the operators use in the UK still look like digital versions of these control panels. Sometimes they're visible on screens in stations.

In fact, there's a live online version: https://www.opentraintimes.com/maps/signalling/tl-lbg-1

Yeah, I assumed 50% to account for various losses and other less efficient generators. I don't know what the actual number is - probably in the 40-50% range.

Interestingly thanks to renewables the "carbon intensity" of a kWh of electricity is already better than a kWh of fossil fuels in some countries. A kWh of petrol releases about 250g of CO2, and quite a few countries (predominantly developed ones) have lower carbon intensities per kWh of electricity. Considering round trip efficiencies the carbon released by an electric car in those countries is easily 1/3 to 1/4 of the carbon released by a petrol car.

In the USA it's not as good, but electric cars are still releasing about half the carbon.

It just seems like everyone is re-inventing the tech of the 50s and 60s, but at a fraction of the cost by using a completely different set of parts, supply chains and cost structures. And massive eventual volumes.

My guess is the Ukrainians will put a rocket on their interceptor drones, and develop some sort of radar or heat seeking guidance system. Perhaps we'll end up with an interesting hybrid interceptor missile that uses electric propulsion for part of the journey?

The book says 50km/30 miles per day in a petrol car is 40kWh. For a Tesla that would be 7.5kWh of electricity. It also assumes 12 km/litre - which in UK terms is 33 mpg. A Tesla has regenerative braking, so it would be better to compare the fuel efficiency to an aerodynamic hybrid. A Toyota Prius gets 61 mpg (UK) - which would mean 21.6 kWh per day.

So really the comparison is 7.5kWh of electricity compared to 21.6kWh of petrol. The Prius gets 34% of the miles compared to the Tesla for a given energy input. In the olden days when renewables didn't do much, the chemical energy input for 7.5kW of electricity was probably 15 kWh. So the electric car is a little bit more efficient (taking advantage of the efficiency of large power plants).

These days, thanks to renewables the fossil fuel input into the electricity is lower.

See also - mega rail projects that start from nothing (cough HS2).

Politicians think doing engineering projects is like buying something off the shelf. Every engineer will tell you the only way to do stuff is iteration - starting small, learning from your mistakes and growing things. If you start a megaproject without a team of people experienced in doing more or less the same thing recently, it will cost vast amounts. Particularly if you push too fast and commit large amounts of money before you've had a few iteration cycles.

Are the models "doing the calculation" or are they calling a calculator tool? There's a lot of talk about how models can do maths now, but I'm struggling to understand if that just means they just need to recognise that it's a maths problem and pass it to a tool, or if they're truly doing the numerical manipulation themselves.

I was thinking that one of the great ironies of artificial intelligence is that it will make good teaching even more labour intensive. Those kids that can afford the one to one tuition required to push past our natural inclination to be lazy will learn things, while everyone else will succumb to outsourcing all their thinking.

There’s no way I’d have learnt everything I know now about software in today’s environment. So much of software development - debugging techniques, architectural decisions, structuring data etc is learned through trial and error. As the models get better is becoming easier and easier to just not look too closely at their output. I suspect it’s human nature.

I don’t enjoy clothes shopping, because I hate trawling through stuff and spending hours not finding anything. I’d love to have a personal shopper who could judge my style, my size and my needs to curate a list of things to buy.

Right now AI can probably do the buying part, but seems to be absolutely no where near the curation part. Maybe that’s a good thing for humans, so I’m not too fussed.

ARM is a fragmented mess compared to x86. Switching to ARM (right now at least) means losing the ease of x86 booting. In the x86 world, trying another Linux distro is as simple as downloading it and putting it on a USB stick. You can be 95% certain it will work. In the ARM world, nothing is standardised, nothing will ever work first time.

There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.

I've been working on embedded systems using iMX8s, and it's equally awful. You have to maintain your own fork of UBoot. You have to spend hours tweaking device trees. The "NXP" kernel is out of date and never updated, the mainline kernel is missing loads of drivers.

Meanwhile in x86 land you can just download a distro and boot it. Secure boot works out of the box. It's night and day.

Suddenly the ban on computer networks in Battlestar Galactica doesn't seem so far fetched! We're not that far off having enough distributed compute for LLM viruses to install corrupted LLMs everywhere and then start attacking everything within reach.

What an empty article. Testing an OTA update can survive a power interruption during the downloading is such a basic test. It doesn't need an article that long. I guess AI wrote it from a few sentence prompt?

They didn't do any interesting tests. What about brownouts, voltage ripples, timing the reset signal to see if there's any critical moments in the update process, corrupted update files, high EMC environment etc etc. That would be interesting.

I think the article is an advert for a testing platform that enables automating this sort of test. But weirdly they don't show how their platform does the automating, so it just looks like they're really pleased with themselves for doing really basic engineering.