bobdvb

45% and rising.

What it means is that they only pay for generation that's renewable and the energy company assures them by contract that they'll only be paying for renewables.

The rest of us, who might be on green tariffs usually get a commitment that on average almost all our energy comes from renewables. When supply is short then I'm the one who's paying for gas generation rather than the company who has committed to greenwashing. But that also drives investment in renewable generation, in the UK renewables have gone from 2% of power generation in 1991 to around 50% now.

It comes in about 0.2-0.3 people per MW, but as the size rises the number of people per MW reduces.

So, a 100MW DC will have about 20-30 people and a 1GW campus will be 200-300 people.

Those numbers can be boosted if the site has a significant non-operational support staff such as security and cleaning. But a significant part of security us heavily automated, to the point where when Meta had a major network failure they couldn't get on-call support staff into the facilities to fix the issue because the security doors were linked to the main network.

Corn ethanol is a weird carbon subsidy that shouldn't exist.

It's a weird carbon offset for the fuel industry that isn't effective and it diverts huge amounts of farm land away from food crop usage. It ties farms to industry rather than supplying food, binding their profitability to the price of oil far more and that only exists because the US Gov mandates the ethanol blend.

It's supposed to be because it's renewable/sustainable using a biological product, but the industry is heavily dependent on synthetic fertilisers which come from refineries.

There are a great many reasons to get rid of the ethanol mix. Lower food costs being the biggest. Now that EVs are practical the need for trying to whitewash combustion fuel is overbaked.

Water companies in the UK lose about 2,954 million litres of water each year to leaks.

That's 1,200 olympic sized swimming pools of treated drinking water lost in leakages per year.

Yup, I have a pair of CRS504, so I can learn MLAG and my three node cluster doesn't really tickle the sides of that.

On their video Patrick points out that this is now lower than $1 per Gbps, cheaper than any of the cheapest AliExpress switches.

There was a black and white fantasy TV show called "Adam Adamant Lives!" from the 60s. The BBC always wanted to re-release it but the original contracts for the show were written when no one ever considered re-runs and physical releases. The BBC didn't have rights from the original actors for anything other than the original broadcast. And one of the actors who appeared in a few episodes didn't want it to be shown again, even if they were paid, the BBC didn't want to release a box-set without all the episodes. Eventually they just waited until that actor died and they were then able to release it.

I'm lead to believe that in music there are some similar contractual issues. The rights for some artists were for radio, and physical media, but no one considered streaming or downloads because those things didn't exist. So they have to go back and tidy up the contracts to cover their asses. And it doesn't just have to be the headliner on the recording, you may need to get every performer/contributor.

What's interesting about the rise of the mega weight models is that if you look at the smaller models of the same family you see some significant improvements over time. So there's possibly some trickle down, at least some learning from techniques that is improving things across all model classes.

The other interesting one is how some of the Chinese open weights models have changed licenses that prevent some commercial exploitation of them. That's not closing their doors, but it's some steps towards ensuring their business model is protected.

That's my home lab, it's ugly and I am starting to use MTP breakouts instead because those DACs get in the way so much.

And an extra £40~ per server is irrelevant if we're worried about an outage on £500k-£1.5m of gear and the services they provide.

Some network guys I know prefer fibre even within the rack, just because they don't want the weight and the obstructions in the rack. Apparently more than once the weight of the DACs and the bulk of the cable bundle has caused a problem with NICs.

Personally that surprised me, but I can see where they're coming from.

Film is a chemical medium for storage of images.

Video is an electronic process for capturing images and displaying them.

Before digital video there was analogue video, and analogue video was perfectly possible without digital sampling, or computers. Heck, video pre-dates silicon chips and used to be done with CRTs and valves.

As a broadcast technology architect I agree with you a whole lot on the broader technology statements.

But as a former lecturer, I also think the promise of interactivity is dependent less on the tools than on the people. Authoring interactive learning materials is difficult and while that interactivity is engaging, it's not necessarily great at getting a density of information out there.

The Socratic method is great, but that level of interactivity presumes in advance that you know what questions the student will be asking, otherwise it's just a dumb gate. Branching stories for interactivity are highly labour intensive. I suppose if you use AI you could generate a massive number of videos to cover branching learning, but that's going to still be an intensive operation, especially if you're supervising that.

It's definitely competing in rural areas, but Starlink does suffer from physical limitations on the number of terminals per geographic area.

This is a long standing problem with cellular in urban areas. For example at Clapham Junction train station in London, which is not a terminus but a through station with 17 platforms and around 2000 trains passing each day, the local cell towers struggle to keep up with demand because so many devices pass in and out of the station every few minutes.

For Starlink D2D they can definitely gap fill for rural areas, but people are mistaken if they think Starlink can compete with the majority of the users (who aren't rural). Less than 10% of rural folk in the USA have unreliable signal. That's still an interesting market, because that's somewhere in the region of 3-6mil people. But I want to temper the hype because people seem to think LEO satellite can take over everything, when the reality is that terrestrial connectivity is always going to be better for the majority because of physics.