radialstub

My gotcha point was that they are slow. It would kinda suck to have the weather turn on you and then have to wait hours for the house to heat up, compared to a resistance heater that can instantly provide heat. The resistance heater can also be placed close by, compared to the heatpump that will attempt to heat up the entire room or house.

You are not accounting where the energy came from.

Google:

> Fossil fuels generate about 60% of U.S. utility-scale electricity

If we are being generous, these power plants are around 50-60% efficient. Motor vehicle engines are around 35-45% efficient.

If you actually go do the math and account for all the losses during each step of conversion and transmission, I think you would find that they are much closer to each-other than you think.

You have to compare energy usage all the way back to the source, otherwise you are throwing vital information.

> EVs are 4 - 5X efficient

Not even close

> Heatpumps are 4 - 5X efficient

Compared to heating elements, possible, but that's cause heatpumps do not create heat, but move heat. They come with the disadvantage of being really slow, and would increase baseline load during nighttime.

> Induction stoves are 4 - 5X efficient (vs gas stoves)

Nope

> Centralized power generation with fossil fuels loses ~75% (67% wasted up front, remaining in transmission and distribution).

How are you planning on powering all your electric appliances? And before you say solar, you are aware that the sun only shines during daytime, while peak energy usage happens in the morning and late afternoon. It would also mean that car chargers would have to be installed at workplaces for EV's to take advantage of cheap daytime energy. Good luck convincing your employer to eat that cost.

> There are many many other losses and costs: defense budget to protect oil infra

Your fighter jets are not going to be powered by batteries any time soon.

> fossil fuel subsidies

The government also taxes fuels, I am too lazy to calculate if they are net taxed, or net subsidized (excluding externalities, of course).

> ethanol subsidies, trillions of gallons of water,

Sure, ethanol sucks.

> externalized health costs (10M deaths from air pollution/year -- nytimes)

Energy ain't free, you know. Without an abundance of renewable sources available like Norway or Iceland, there is going to be a cost payed to maintain the lifestyles people have gotten used to. Solar is only a partial solution. I cannot see how grid scale chemical batteries are as clean as people make them out to be.

They should be underpaid (I think they should be paid even less), since they earn money from the government and don't facilitate any trade or provide value to end-users. A lot of them think their job is to weed students out instead of educating them. If you read through published research you can see how they stroke their own egos for their useless discoveries. There is zero market feedback for their work so the entire system becomes a circle jerk and full of suck ups.

The people building houses, ensure sanitation systems work, plan logistics to get food to supermarkets etc. should earn triple the amount academics earn.

Academia is just a bunch of egotistical people forcing kids to work on their particular hobbies and if the kids don't enjoy it, the professors have the potential to signal a bad reputation to employers. The system is kind of disgusting. Students should be given much more free reign in what they study.

I earn $22000 per year working as an electrical engineer in control systems. Americans don't know how good they have it.

They did not buy this award, this is just the work of a politician creating ties with powerful people.

In South Africa, the gangs infiltrated the government. This isn't just paranoia or extremist political ideology, this was recently exposed in the Madlanga Commission.

> To combat corruption these countries need to educate their population of its effects plus hefty penalties, including capital punishment, to get it under control. The higher up the tree the more severe the punishment should be. Politicians and senior civil servants should always be put to death since their corruption has the greatest impact.

Giving the government the power to exert these punishments will only give the corrupt officials the power to legally do this to their enemies.

There is no hope for these countries.

This is the government's problem. I tend to be on the side of less government, but it is so obvious that payment facilitation should be a service provided by the government. The government is just allowing corporations to collect rents, because they are lazy and incompetent.

The current tax system is fundamentally flawed, and this will achieve nothing.

The system is rigged against people who provide labour, when these people are the ones keeping the system going. Why can companies deduct taxes from operating expenses and investments, yet individuals are taxed on revenue? This means companies can build wealth much easier than individuals. Why is housing, food, education and savings not considered operating expenses?

Yes but that's because of the scaling laws for transistors. ML models seem to get better the bigger they are. If you want to compress the world's information, you need to look at all the information in the world.

- an archive link to bypass paywalls

Not all heroes wear capes

Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of erlang: "Dave loves Elixir, I think it's pretty cool, I think we're going to have fun together."

battery energy storage system

Application of the Method of Moments to solve full wave formulation of Maxwell's equations. To derive the EFIE using maxwell's equations is a massive pain. With geometric algebra, all you need is ∇F = J and the MoM becomes a mechanical process.

Commission your own solar and battery system. There is no reason to be a renter anymore. Stop giving other people power over you.

Search hybrid inverter and rack mount batteries.

True, however apple makes the overwhelming majority of the profit in the smartphone market.

The memory makers will not expand demand drastically. It is in the nature of their business to keep the market under-supplied, otherwise the following oversupply will kill them. Instead, supply is just rerouted from less profitable segments such as mobile and personal computing.

> Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the companies focused on price performance will end up with more economic resources, and get to turn the upgrade crank more often and for longer.

The iphone is the best selling computing device in history and is among the most expensive in its category.

Photonics used in AI is different to what you would expect. I can't see photonics replace the transistor and VLSI stack of computers. For networking however, high bandwidth photonics is well on its way to replace copper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS8r7UcexJU

> Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care.

How though. Roads are a public good and fixing them should come from the governments pocket. How can you say the problem is private industry, when the government is doing such a good job collecting our tax money. You should be asking where is that money going. And then you will see its because of mismanagement by the government. Trillions in debt, for what?

Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's better to vote for people who vibe with you, than people who can provide essential services.

No, burning models into hardware won't make them faster or reduce the cost. It will cost way more for similar performance as what you would get with a gpu. I am not telling you why, you can go figure that out on your own.

> The fact that these high prices are caused by an actual lack of resources and that the higher prices are driving a reallocation of resources to those who need them most (ie. most willing to pay for them) is not on the radar for many

Careful using words like "need". The resources are allocated to the economically most efficient sectors. Since if you are economically efficient, your profits are higher and can afford to pay more than others.

> I think he's trying to make a point about technology enhancing the capabilities of people who are in any conflict with conventionally powerful forces

Which is absurd, since all the technology he used was manufactured by the conventionally powerful forces and they can decide to not sell you their stuff.

These small proxy wars are irrelevant. Scrappy drones are only used because that is all these small countries can produce. For superpowers, the goal isn't to stockpile mediocre equipment; it is to develop intellectual capabilities. During wartime, manufacturing can then be rapidly ramped up. You cannot invent and develop advanced tech overnight, but you can rapidly scale production.

Also fighter jets are capable of doing so much more than fpv drones, its actually funny that people think drones are the future.

In China, engineers hold the most power, yet the country prospers. I don't think the problem is giving engineers power, rather a cultural thing. In china there is a general feeling of contributing towards the society, in the US everyone is trying to screw over each-other, for political or monetary reasons.

The software is the hard part. Western software still outclasses what the chinese produce by a good amount.