this is just wages paid in crypto but adapted to new era in a way that doesn’t make sense

it’s not regulation, it’s a metric that looks nice to investors. but also lower energy use means lower cost

the thing you’re missing is scale. what you’re describing is overgrown car radiator type scheme, and it works up to some couple MW if need be. when you have access to sea, or large river, you can just use that water as a coolant and dissipate some couple GW this way. this is the reason why so many nuclear powerplants are on seashore. because sea is generally very big [citation needed] temperature increase is slight and mostly harmless in usual cases

inland, in absence of large river, the other way to provide cooling is by evaporation of water. one form is to take that oversized car radiator and spray water on it, water evaporates taking away some heat. this arrangement allows for no-added-water operation in low load conditions. in principle this means that lowest possible temperature is not air temperature, but instead it’s wet bulb temperature, which is always lower, and difference is greatest when air humidity is low. in practice this doesn’t allow to reach this lower temperature, but the other approach does. for bigger scale still, instead of using heat exchanger, water is dripped in a tower of some shape and air is moved in some way against it. small part of water evaporates, and the rest, now cooled down, is collected at the bottom. this is how these large cooling towers near coal or nuclear powerplants work, but so do smaller towers that rely on fans instead of chimney effect. extra water is always needed, and temperature closer to wet bulb temperature is achieved in all load conditions. rarely used alternative is to make an artificial lake, and allow for evaporation from water surface

notice that if water is evaporated, it’ll leave whatever is dissolved in evaporator part, which means it has to demineralized at all times. in practice it means that some part of evaporated water is treated continuously by reverse osmosis, and the less saline input water is, the easier and more energy efficient it is to do it

the thing with heat exchangers is, without water evaporation, that they have some constant thermal resistance. if you want to dissipate more heat, you need more of heat exchanger, or alternatively have to allow for higher temperature. the former means more metal needed, the latter means limits to other parts of coolant loop, or using heat pump to cool down silicon, while increasing temperature of coolant. both of these mean extra capex and/or energy use, but evaporating water is cheap, so it’s done instead. it doesn’t help that one of dc ratings is ratio of how much energy gets into dc to how much energy powers actual silicon. evaporating water does not add to energy use, so designs chasing this rating are likely to use that solution

all profit is based on deception - lao zidong

as a side effect, it’s a phenomenal accountability sink. people almost forget that usaf can make entirely human-made fuckups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiriyah_shelter_bombing

i had no idea that you can buy anti-ship missiles in any corner store. not sure how do you make sense of how both of these militias mentioned decided to do nothing after the guy signing their checks and sent them weapons was killed

i don’t give a shit about sam harris. if iranians were broadly fine with theocracy, there wouldn’t be 30k+ dead protesters last month, or major protests every year for a decade. like every other country on earth, you can expect that iran secularizes, except that apostasy or conversion is capital offense, or any significant dissent for that matter, so any survey unaffected by self-censorship would be hard to conduct

there is some reason to think this way. also keep in mind that a segment of that anti-americanism was funded by sales of iranian oil. not all of course, but houthis wouldn’t be a thing without it, or large parts of hezbollah, for example. of course what people want and how it shakes down after the bombs drop is different thing entirely, i guess we’ll see, eventually (i assume that decision to strike was already made)

ai is crypto 2 episode 373275

a hellish vision has been revealed to me

https://mander.xyz/post/47729411

potentially a common one, but we’ll only know after password leak from somewhere

it’s crazy how people memoryholed that (and japan doing the same, and a handful of other countries). or how until 2022 war norway wasn’t really thought of as petrostate by people who didn’t pay attention. or how ten years ago, if you said that putin bombed apartments to wage war on chechenya to win elections all to pardon yeltsin, people would think that you’re a crackpot

no there’s also racist twitter

i’ve collided with an article* https://harshanu.space/en/tech/ccc-vs-gcc/

you might be wondering why it doesn’t highlight that it fails to compile linux kernel, or why it states that using pieces of gcc where vibecc fails is “fair”, or why it neglects to say that failing linker means it’s not useful in any way, or why just relying on “no errors” isn’t enough when it’s already known that vibecc will happily eat invalid c. it’s explained by:

Disclaimer

Part of this work was assisted by AI. The Python scripts used to generate benchmark results and graphs were written with AI assistance. The benchmark design, test execution, analysis and writing were done by a human with AI helping where needed.

even with all this slant, by their own vibecoded benchmark, vibecc is still complete dogshit with sqlite compiled with it being slower up to 150000x times in some cases

yawn, i diagnose that LWer with weeb. this is something happening across entire industrialized world, causes being high performance mechanization of agriculture, old people being stubborn in regards to moving, lack of specialized work in countryside and couple of other factors. germany has patched their hospice staff shortage (not sure how effectively) with migrants, but japanese are way too racist for that. same thing happens in moldova, but you never hear sob stories about retired moldovans because they’re broke and nobody cares, while moldovan govt can’t really do much about it (because broke) to degree that it has not just economic and demographic, but even strategic effects. whole lotta drs strangelove in there

should have glued it in place smh

also ignoring that natanz was actually effectively airgapped, and was knowingly infected by another country’s contractor’s usb stick, working on behalf of dutch intelligence service

Because now you have to establish a complex supply chain and potentially large worker base in a place that’s potentially quite inconvenient for both, instead of a much simpler supply chain and smaller workforce.

i’m not sure why you think that it is the case. if you want to make aluminum, you just need a ship to come in and pile up alumina, then take up piled up aluminum. the process is decently automated these days and you avoid making hydrogen. if you want to make ammonia, then all you need is hydrogen that you use as soon as it’s made and nitrogen which is separated from air on demand. nitrogen fertilizers account for something like 2% of global primary energy use so it’s probably decently scalable. then you can ship out liquid pressurized ammonia, or convert it to ammonium nitrate which again you can pile up*. however with methanol you run into a Problem, because you need carbon dioxide, which means that you have to ship it from somewhere or capture in a massive installation. this immediately makes logistics of this entire enterprise harder. if you want to convert methanol to hydrocarbons then it takes some extra energy for little benefit (2x energy density) and some losses. to some degree, maybe it will make sense, but maybe it’ll be easier to just build up renewables where people already live

in that scenario biofuels get to serve much smaller segment than today in the first place so maybe it’s less of a problem. there are also things like biogas

I strongly feel that hydrogen is even more of a dead-end technology than these e-fuels. It is a right pain to store and transport and has rubbish energy density. There’s no future in the hydrogen economy. I’d bet we’re more likely to jump to artificial photosynthesis and fancy fuel cells than we are to see any substantial hydrogen infrastructure.

and you base that on what exactly other than vibes? there are applications where you need hydrogen directly as a reagent like ammonia synthesis, and these are probably most adaptable to this approach. methane is also proper PITA in terms of storage, yet we store it anyway because it’s cheap as a fuel. if hydrogen is cheaper than that, then it will be used where applicable. it’s easier to transport coal than electricity but not lignite; i don’t know how it will play out with hydrogen, but either way you can imagine a situation where hydrogen is generated onsite, or within pipeline distance, and used immediately or maybe with some storage worth hours to days. this fits iron smelting (DRI) nicely, today the fuel used for it is methane because it’s cheapest (process common in India). if hydrogen is cheaper than that, it will be used instead. other than that, applications where high heat is needed and where no electric heating can be used would be another use of hydrogen, like glassmaking and metal objects manufacture. hydrogen might be not disastrously bad option as fuel for transportation, because every step in manufacturing other fuels introduces losses; there are other tradeoffs

what do you want to fuel these fuel cells with? hydrogen is simplest option and most efficient (60% roundtrip efficiency or so). artificial photosynthesis is not a thing currently and strictly worse than combination of any energy source + conventional electrolyzer, because you have to combine not within single device but within single material something that will work as both. this also is only applicable to solar, not to wind or nuclear. some of these direct light to hydrogen schemes also only use UV only, and hydrogen is mixed with oxygen which is suboptimal, not to mention that main output of that work seems to be grant applications, while both electrolyzers and solar panels or wind turbines are available today, in bulk, straight from factory, and even more efficiently in decarbonization terms, these can replace coal-based electricity generation

regardless, main value of electrofuels today is in propaganda

* regular process starting from gas has carbon dioxide as a byproduct, so urea is another option, but with hydrogen it would have to be provided. it’s more expensive even today. maybe liquefied gas carrier could provide carbon dioxide and load ammonia on return leg, with some other dry cargo ship picking up that urea at some other time