BrightCandle

So many of the GPUs have been crippled for the purposes of gaming and there is zero incentive for Nvidia to produce drivers for those cards to do anything else. Alas they will just end up in landfill.

That is a breach of GDPR, default has to be opt out. We don’t need new laws we just need the existing one enforced.

I recently bought a BE200 for upgrading a very old laptop that came with N wifi with a 4500U CPU. That is pretty old these days! After a driver install both the wifi adapter and bluetooth work as expected. I don’t know if I get wifi 7 speeds and throughput yet as this got upgraded before the network and router did but I think it was worth sharing that it does work on old laptops.

For many people they actually represent a better experience. If you mostly use the car below the range of the battery in your local area and can charge at home then you mostly eliminate the need to travel to fill up stations. Its kind of nice to not have to put petrol into the vehicle every week and have to deal with it being near empty and being forced to refill. It just gets charged cheaply overnight on greener power.

The modern EVs get a lot of range in a 15-30 minute charge too. The reality is a 250 mile EV requires one stop to drive for 8-10 hours. Most people aren’t going to do that without a break in the middle. Even if you were going to go non-stop compared to an ICE its only another 30 minutes of journey time extra and it will cost you less to do it. So long as there are enough charge points, and these days their typically are in a lot of countries, then its not really a massive problem.

In many ways they are more convenient on most peoples average usage and the range anxiety goes away when you realise what we are really talking about in terms of long journeys and how long charging in practice will add.

GDP is doing just fine, its just that there is a class warfare where wages are being suppressed significantly by corporations with State help and so most people are getting poorer as the wealthiest get richer faster than ever before.

As far as I am concerned Copilot is a giant theft of open source code and breaches the license. I expect in the future a lot of repositories will be used to poison these AI agents just as is happening with images. The agents will get better but the quality of what they produce will also be poisoned and get worse precisely due to the theft.

The EU law explicitly says no consent by default and users have to opt in. All of these cookie banners are breaking the law, the law doesn’t need to change it just needs enforcing and these banners will disappear. We already have a do not track header and that could be complied with but it’s enforcement that is the problem.

I tend to go off the https://grid.iamkate.com/ website which is a good day by day look at power generation and summarises the year. Renewables have so far surpassed fossil fuels 10.7GW compared to 10.3GW with other sources taking 5.9GW of which biomass is 1.52GW. I don’t personally think biomass is renewable because its burning old forests and at a rate far faster than the wood is replanted and we know that old forests store much more CO2 than new ones. With hydro and Nuclear its a pretty close run thing if we consider them green renewables are the majority of power production.

Still a way to go, obviously more capacity is required and more storage and this will inevitably lead to excess power in the summer which is how renewables will work and hopefully we will find a good use for free power capturing CO2. A lot of projects are held up by the grid in the UK, more than enough to complete this transition, companies want to install the production its just the grid holding everything up with plans out to 2035.

I can see in the future a standard for DC power with a completely different power socket that saves up the round trip of DC to AC then back into DC for all our electronics. There are fairly substantial benefits to be had but as I think it through the usable DC is 3 to 12V and appreciable load will mean those cables will push a lot of amps. Not sure the economics will work out without it being high voltage and that fits nothing DC today. If it’s high voltage then everything needs a converter again.

Setting a DC standard today will be a world wide nightmare, we need it but it’s got to be dumb for longevities sake. It’s far off I think.

Its not directly in the article but the primary reason Solar is its a lot cheaper than electricity production from fuel, something like 1/4 - 1/10 the price depending on where in the world you are. An energy company is basically foolish to invest in oil based electricity production when Solar is so competitive and cheap and easy to maintain. Wind is a little cheaper where there is good airflow but the maintenance cost is higher especially for offshore. Both however are so much cheaper than Nuclear and especially than oil/drilling fuels that its hard to see much real investment in those older technologies.

There has been a lot of recent complaints around the UK’s granting of further drilling rights in the North sea for Oil. I think the companies taking those up haven’t yet come to terms with the fact there is a good chance those ventures drive their companies to bankruptcy because they wont be competitive as EVs and Solar/Wind take over due to cost savings.

A change in thinking about energy needs to happen to truly understand why Wind and Solar and a bit of storage is enough. You have to accept that at times there will be overproduction of power because storing it to hit exact use capacity isn’t cost effective. Some storage makes sense, but its much cheaper to have more capacity.

What I think will happen in the future once we reach the point this is how most energy comes is more people will be on Octopus like smart energy schemes where you might get paid for using electricity and there will be companies that use this to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We are approaching a world of energy excess but only at certain times and there are opportunities to use that energy for the right reasons to reverse the damage we have done with CO2 emissions.

The UK tops out at about 35-45 GW daily so this is really a substantial amount of power with a lot more planned in the near future. Solar is also taking off, around 200k home solar installations every year at the moment and a lot of new commercial solar farms are being installed. Its a good 1/4 the price of gas, this is mostly economics driving the change rather than any real policy from government.

The removal of h264 isn’t going to go down well for people who use them for under TV boxes. Will be better off with the Pi4 or another device.

In the era when everyone seem to be taking out expensive contracts for new phones every year I have had just 4 smart phones in the past 20 ish years. They all reach the stage where they are just too slow for modern apps but I think we might finally be in the stage where compute power progress has slowed that the current phone might get an open source Lineage et el on it for a decent period of time with multiple battery swaps.

I was using the beta before this and its nice to have it inbuilt but its not quite as good as the beta was. The main drawback with the new approach is that you can’t force the translation if it thinks the page is in English. I use self hosted RSS and I have Translated subsections on that and unfortunately I can’t get the new translator to do the job where the beta would.

Not really, they are using public money to pass it into private hands. Its capitol but not in the way capitalism describes it because its not coming from wealth to invest in new ventures its being extracted and pocketed.

Right now he is probably right. The current grid storage solutions are usually Lion or LiPho and neither is really cheap enough and the entire power system will scew towards enormous overproduction with less storage as a result. But there are plenty of grid size storage solutions being developed that have the $ per KWH that will make it more viable.

One possibility is that we use all that excess power for carbon capture or hydrogen production so that we can burn CO2 producing fuels or hydrogen when the sun and wind aren’t blowing for days at a time. It’s all viable the pieces exist it’s about building them more than anything.

Given the amount of airports Pilots go through daily they must be some of the most Covid infected people on the planet. I bet they suffer a lot more Long Covid complications than most people.

Given they couldn’t even reign Linus in on the appology video and he is still playing the real victim they simply don’t have the power to. The new CEO can’t possibly be happy with what Linus said there but Linus is the boss and he certainly doesn’t listen to anyone else trying to make him see sense. If Luke can’t reach him, and he hasn’t managed to at any point over the years, then the rest don’t have a chance.

This is and has always been a culture that Linus has created and is continuing to reinforce.

That was their early model. They took money for a product and produced a positive video on it. That was the channel its how it got started and grew. They always used weasel words (still do) like a company “hooked them up” which meant they received a free product and payment to produce this video. They were actually caught properly on this on a series of AMD sponsored videos which were so incredibly positive and glossing over the issues and AMD explained the videos had been paid for. It turned out that was how the channel worked, they got paid for positive reviews.

Nowadays sponsorship is better declared (because the ASA required that of them) but conflicts of interests aren’t. There is also the appearance of a lot of fraud too where free products are being placed into their homes. The Intel extreme series is a prime example of something that looks super dodgy and maybe a tax dodge. Right now its hard to prove something criminal is happening, based on their history however its not unreasonable to suspect it is.