kldg

I was a bit shocked by headline, given how poorly ARM and x86 compares to RISC-V in speed, cost, and efficiency ... in the MCU space where I near-exclusively live and where RISC-V has near-exclusively lived up until quite recently. RISC-V has been great for RTOS systems and Espressif in particular has pushed MCUs up to a new level where it's become viable to run a designed-from-scratch web server (you better believe we're using vector graphics) on a $5 board that sits on your thumb, but using RISC-V in SBCs and beyond as the primary CPU is a very different ballgame.

I'm kind of curious how you.... I guess, interpret the responses to when you send someone AI-assisted content. I previously thought "I don't care if it's AI or not; quality is quality", but I'm increasingly taking the position that I do care, and intentionally have started ignoring comments and especially product reviews where you get the formatted 2-4 sentence paragraphs with formal tone and rule-following. It's come to the point where as long as you don't write as poorly as Epstein, I want the errors. Actually, I'm getting so weird and romantic about it, that I think I'd argue having errors and unusual style shows an openness and vulnerability that's now a necessary gate price; like journalists have so many tools available to them, but they still make typos, factual errors in articles they have no business writing about, and fail to quote people properly -- that's great, I think.

it all takes years. it takes years for permitting to open up the power plant to run the chips. at the scale the Big 3/4 (google, amazon, microsoft, and meta-ish) are going, we don't actually have the capacity to BUILD the capacity, despite a forecast of just 1% national electricity consumption growth this year, partly because we were expecting electricity demand to slow down and for an orderly shutdown of our fossil fuel plants. we couldn't even fill >100GW of gas/coal turbine orders over the next 5 years if we had to, and we might have to, because some of our grids (notably PJM's) are forecast to be under their safety margin of over-production in the following years.

meanwhile, regional grid operators are faced with Big Tech driving tens of % of total power into private contracts where there's only one customer; they are making the decisions normally reserved for nation-states, right? reopening Three Mile Island sounded like a pipe dream a few years ago. I hear They have something like 50 more experimental, small-scale NPPs they want to fire up across the country in the next few years, too (but despite sounding like a big boon for energy, they're ~meaningless short-term in the face of how much demand we're looking at). -so this power (uh, literally) gets wrested away from the grid authorities and from what was largely the domain of government, to now be managed by techbros and a select few partners who will be reliant on their money; I'm sure that will work out fine.

anyway, part of the reason it does make some sense in the US for the government to push for more coal/LNG turbines, is because they're already there and we need them now; the permitting to un-mothball, prevent mothballing, or expand facilities, is far less arduous than what a company'd have to go through for a new facility (tho again, we don't have capacity to build all the turbines we require inside 5 years anyway). I'm not saying it's a good idea to start sending up more GHGs, but it's maybe better than pricing out electricity for residences and "real" industry. hey, who knows? maybe they'll simply build natural gas pipelines that don't leak this time.

-oh, and then there's the problem with these new datacenters disrupting the traditional power demand curve, because they don't really do as much peak draw anymore; their peak draw is approaching base load, as LLM batching (when a company has a bunch of stuff they want processed and can wait a day for it to run in "off-hours") is sold, and if unsold, that time can be used as training time; so the modern datacenter is a 24/7/365 organ; the heart, powering our society, Moltbook. the importance of this is it makes solar less financially attractive, because now we need to be able to bank more energy since more demand's shifting to overnight. we might also want to consider just getting the moon really, really hot? then we can get a truly substantial haul of lunar light for our panels. you know, we decided against nuking hurricanes again recently; maybe we could build some new ones and nuke the moon, a lot.

The LLM is probably also not going to launch into a rant about how they incorporate religious and racial beliefs into their life when asked about current heads of state. You ask the LLM about a solar configuration, and I think it must be exceptionally rare to have it instead tell you about its feelings on politics.

We had a big winter storm a few weeks ago, right when I received a large solar panel to review. I sent my grandpa a picture of the solar panel on its ground mount, covered in snow, noting I just got it today and it wasn't working well (he's very MAGA-y, so I figured the joke would land well). I received a straight-faced reply on how PV panels work, noting they require direct sunlight and that direct sunlight through heavy snow doesn't count; they don't tell you this when they sell these things, he says. I decided to chalk this up to being out-deadpanned and did not reply "thanks, ChatGPT."

I clicked expecting to see someone with a huge, very long hose extension and was disappointed.

yeah, I can say that except for elder areas (not necessarily dedicated facilities, but there are things like "RV parks" which cater mostly to older folks but also families; they usually have 10mph speed limits), I've never seen someone driving a golf cart around town while I've lived in MI, OH, or PA.

I do see people driving horse-drawn carriages, ATVs (probably illegally), snowmobiles (legally in some parts of MI during Winter or condition-dependent), and riding mowers (probably illegally) in and around towns, though. Very rarely, I see someone driving an e-bike; this rareness is mostly because they aren't allowed on the sidewalks here and there's no bike lane, so you need to drive and signal like a car, which is pretty awkward given how many e-bikes don't even come with real brake lights (though many falsely advertise red rear running lights as a brake light, which'd be illegal to drive unless you hand-signal whenever you brake).

While I'm sympathetic to this argument, I should point out patent time to expiration for medicine in the US is pretty inoffensive (relative to how bad it could be, like software patents), and we already have plenty of drugs for excreting excess. We get a big basket of drugs into public domain each year, and government would be wise to publicly celebrate this, I think; would help with the general sense of impending doom citizens feel.

Semaglutide molecule patent will expire in 2031 here (many caveats to this). For the most part, you can get any pill ~15+ years old for ~nothing without insurance, but associated devices like auto-injectors can extend this due to goofy rules; I expect execs thoughtfully considered medical patent law when deciding to initially trial and release GLP-1s as an injection.

it depends a lot on the application, I think, though certainly you can point to cloud services like Cloudflare or whatever Burger King was using to track how many times a clerk said "You Rule" (while capturing all customer audio data, which was then stolen by low-effort attackers) as high-risk; just because you don't feel the safety risks of outsourcing data to a black box on the cloud doesn't mean they don't exist, it just means you get to neglect them. when I headed IT at an SMB, I was given a lot of leeway, and our department had its own budget, so cutting out SaaS was a high priority so we could do more. if I were heading today with LLMs' present competency, I would have replaced much more, up to and including Salesforce which was draining the heck out of our budget despite us not doing anything technically interesting with it.

$40/head/year (including employees no longer with company) for a call metrics suite is low-stakes and relatively easy to replace what we want out of it, and this is an example of something we did replace with a $0 solution with my own abysmal-at-the-time coding skills. ~nobody's about to replace Microsoft suite, though (a couple replacements before me, they earnestly tried; there were still some laptops with OpenOffice on it; I admire them, but I'm not dealing with our sales team trying to figure out what an ODF is).

I love this "petty kingdom" budget model, by the way, as someone whose work personality could be described as "cheap analyst." I'm paying $40/month per head for Software X in your department, and I have an inferior replacement for $0/month/head which meets specs and which you can't quantify productivity loss for (essentially, it just looks ugly and feels bad). I can therefor cut that out of my budget entirely while meeting my obligations, and if *you* really want the decadent solution, *your* department can bear that cost. Either way, I get plenty more money to basically not have to be a dick (like charging careless employees for broken/stolen equipment, or getting an above-expectations solution for ADA employees); and sometimes, maybe some antennas show up on the roof which would be difficult to justify cost for if asked, but I'm way under-budget so nobody would.

not to say this "should" be the solution, but does Proton not offer easy email filtering & automation (e.g. skip inbox, delete)?

I ask because I haven't yet bothered to implement it on a from-scratch email server I stood up a couple weeks ago (just kidding; I wanted to brag about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC test passes from Gmail with both inbound and outbound encryption). I can say from this experimentation and using Google's Postmaster tool, though, that emails being reported as spam by users is *very* serious; Google's threshold is 0.3%; if just 0.3% of users report your email as spam, it's considered a policy violation and your emails are likely to go to spam or have delivery refused outright. idk what Proton's policies are. (edit: by extension, this means enforcing authorization of users is very serious; if someone abuses the service as an open relay, your whole domain is toast)

looks like you've made considerable changes since comments; all prices I checked were accurate (while nothing I checked on diskprices was). this looks genuinely helpful as this is something I look into myself by manually looking around, and is clean/easy-to-use; bookmarked it. only thing I might like on top of this is to be able to filter by if renewed or not, though they seem to often have it in the product title.

Strongly agree with this. I actually kind of wish I could go back to SMB IT (well, I mean I can, but I'm ~retired) with the knowledge I now have; I would've done things very differently/better. If it's small enough, you'll find yourself taking on all sorts of interesting facilities work; it can be pretty fun not knowing what the work day will be like. Some days I would paint, other days I'd be cursing at Active Directory, other days I would be working on the security system, other days I would be running new cables, and sometimes I'd just sit around and play video games. I left IT to do on-call overnight/weekend work in B2B tech support with the same company, where my role upgraded to sleeping through my shift.

interesting. I assume the things I host at home (which is everything) will be recoverable by family at time of my death if they're so interested. I left some instructions in will, but not for things I ought to, on reconsider, like "what" the thermostat is and how to access it beyond the web interface...

-but I do not plan for longer-term than that; I assume if kid cares, she'll bother repackaging it. I am curious about some of the non-book solutions. I think you might be able to rig up a solar solution, burying a box underground with an SBC/mini-PC with SATA or NVMe connectors; the SSD should be fully read from at least once a year. The solar should be degraded-but-fine after 50 years (excluding animal damage, which I find is pretty substantial if you keep them close to the ground... will want redundancy), but the battery will not be, but I haven't been around for long enough to really have a "feel" for how long LiFePO4/other cells will last... I wouldn't be surprised if they could go >20 years with very shallow discharge cycles in a degraded state (perfectly usable for having an SBC read drives once a year), but I'd be very surprised if you could get a standard cell to 50 years.

I tried getting a tape drive a few years ago. I bought a used one off Amazon, but HPE refused to give me the software for it; I wound up refunding it rather grumpily. It'd be pretty surprising if the tape drive lasted for 100 years (edit: interfaceable probably the bigger issue), but under careful conditions with ~no use, the tape cartridge itself should last 30-50 years (with no guarantees; you'll want redundancy on different batches/brands).

I would also add software solutions like PaperBack to the pile of paper storage ideas. Essentially, you create a giant compressed QR code printed to a sheet of paper, and this is like going from storing audio as uncompressed audio on CDs/DVDs to mp3 (DVD-MP3 was underrated!); instead of storing 500 words, you can store an entire book. There's not terrible complexity here, so it should be trivial to reverse-engineer, especially if you include a couple page of notes on how the algorithm works. -or heck, in 100 years, maybe a 50-year-old LLM can simply look at it and read it like you wrote words.

also essentially how many large news organizations have pivoted. $520/year for WSJ, $400/year for Bloomberg (excluding terminal-only news and other extras, of course), $390/year for NYT, $120/year for WaPo (with exclusions). For only $2,500 or so a year, you can have a balanced stream of news and journalism. -But not your household; you need to pay extra for family plans.

(or you can do what most people do)