In that context, running those apps in the background all day and all night was fine, and if they ever noticeably interfered with performance while I was using the machine, pausing them for a bit was easy to do.
I haven't had a desktop computer in at least 14 years. When I'm not using my laptop, I close it and it goes to sleep. Running CPU-intensive apps on my laptop spools the fans up to their loudest, and makes the bottom of its chassis uncomfortably warm. The CPU cores will sometimes hit thermal throttling too. I just don't want to deal with that sort of thing all day.
Then again, I do have a couple Raspberry Pis, an old Mac Mini (running Linux), and a CM4-based NAS in various places in the house running 24/7. I could probably run an @gome-type app on one or more of those. But for whatever reason, doing so just never really occurred to me.
15 years is insane though... I only recently started with an i9 and 3080Ti on medium/highest priority
That would be the ideal device for me when I'm on the go, that I can still use to watch Youtube videos in the bathroom. I do not need a full laptop when I work at home with a $5,000 desktop PC, nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered.
It is really sad to have the tech to do something, but it doesn't exist because the bean counters said no.
Meanwhile, the expensive laptops with actual desktop-class components have unacceptably shitty peripherals, so you can't even pay more money for what you want; it simply doesn't exist.
This is what upsets me the most about laptops.
You can find all sorts of beautiful 4K ultrabooks with the perfect keyboard and trackpad layout, and great webcams too—if you don't mind putting up with a Celeron and 4GB of RAM... If you want a really modern and powerful CPU with lots of RAM, you'll be looking at the likes of Clevo and AORUS and etc. that put desktop-class parts in a thick chassis, but... that bodes terribly for the peripherals they end up using.
Some of the Clevo machines have individual gimmicks like 300Hz displays, but none of them seem to have all of "high DPI, good keyboard layout, good port arrangement, high performance". And this is true for basically all laptop vendors.
OEMs think good peripherals always equate to "thin and light" which results in bad performance, either through bad parts or bad thermals. Maybe Frore Systems' new cooling solution will help slightly with ultrabook thermals, but until that happens, laptops are just suck.
You may notice that this only matters because I even care. You may also notice that this is exactly what building a desktop is for. I am building a desktop, but I also have to build a laptop from scratch for the desktop so I can operate it from bed. Which would have been avoidable if I could've found a laptop in the first place.
The point anyway isn't to say that there aren't any good laptops out there, but rather that if you want high performance (e.g. you are bothered by slowness), you can only get it as a package deal with the rest of the laptop... obviously. But the package deals all suck. The laptop market is so annoying sometimes.
Big reason why I dislike the market so much: the existence of that machine with only a single flaw that nonetheless ruins the value of the entire product. There's nothing else like it. It seems to be the absolute best machine the market has to offer... and it just barely misses. :(
However, the screen resolution seems to be the only problem with it, so anyone who doesn't require specifically 4K (most people) would probably find it worth considering.
[0]: https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-x16-2022-seri...
Once the patents on Apple's trackpad expire, then we'll see.
But having a good trackpad doesn't make up for other blunders like an annoying keyboard layout, a low-DPI screen, or etc., and you bet nobody who makes the thick and heavy high-performance machines is going to care about a good trackpad anyway.
You don't really see OEMs that put top-of-the-line hardware inside a thick and sturdy chassis, and then... add a nice 4K screen and a numpad-less keyboard and put the charging/USB ports on the left instead of the back.
The list of possible blunders is so long that you'd be hard-pressed to find a machine that hasn't been subject to most of them. That's just not how laptops work. Laptops are a package deal, all or nothing. You can't ensure every requirement individually like you can with a desktop.
And the reason I don't like the market is because nobody makes a really good one.
Put it behind a VPN, use wake-on-lan and boom, iPad is essentially a fully blown computer.
What is the point of having half a TB of storage, however many gigs of RAM, lidar, radar, sonar, and the best processor architecture money can buy to render a glorified, interactive video?
I would like to be able to write code without having to pay the price of internet latency. I don't need a $1000 tablet to render RDP.
It's the engineers that actually create the cool things.
I didn't claim that it was sufficient, but it is necessary.
> It's the engineers that actually create the cool things.
Of course. With other people's money (typically).
Sorry for the snark. I'm just bitter because Apple is about to ruin Dropbox because they don't allow KEXTs any more.
https://tidbits.com/2023/03/10/apples-file-provider-forces-m...
For me just getting a decent low-latency mouse (e.g., wired g203) and correctly configuring 100hz+ monitors has vastly improved my experience on my M1 Air and the shitty Thinkpad I use for work -- to the point where I haven't used my desktop in a long time.
The 300W power brick provides enough juice to feed both the CPU and GPU, and the laptop variant of the 3070 ti isn't too much slower than the desktop version in practical terms (I don't feel that 30% less performance). I've never tried it on battery or on the 135W USB-C power limit, but reviews report getting sufficient performance.
I don't have room for a desktop, so it's nice to not feel like I'm compromising on power with something that fits. The memory and SSDs are user accessible, too.
What Dr. Lisa Su giveth, Satya taketh away I suppose.
Having said that, optimizing for perf is rarely worth it because people don't usually care, and when it is - you can often make the biggest difference by figuring out why some step requires O(n^3) instead of O(n) like it should and fixing that, rather than rewriting the entire stack to get some 10-20% improvement...
I bet all the upset over bitcoin power usage, is a tiny thing, compared to (for example) the whole node ecosystem.
Even something such as gmail is massively overengineered. Heck, there are very few improvements over the interface a decade ago, yet I bet it used 5% of the power it does now.
Yet think of how much gmail is used.
And it's not just raw compute. 3d on a page for no reason, massive js binaries for no reason eg ram + bandwidth.
A modern phone could last weeks as a browsing device, if looking at static html.
But all of this means more development skill, less use of fluff and junk, care for size of page loads, and on and on.
Put another way, people concerned about power usage, should realise that using node, means burning more coal/NG. Literally.
Because that's where the excess power comes from.
> A modern phone could last weeks as a browsing device, if looking at static html
That's what I do. Weeks is a bit of a stretch. Maybe one of screen time is limited. That said, discord (the website) drains my laptop battery almost as fast as gaming does. They do spawn a separate WebGL context for each animated emoticon. Crazy, crazy thing
> Put another way, people concerned about power usage, should realise that using node, means burning more coal/NG. Literally.
Sure. At the same time, though, a single car trip to the movies burns orders of magnitude more energy than all your gadgets running JS for an year.
these systems are so abominable, and people have just gotten used to it, hell, many users never even tried anything else, but saying 10-20% is just ridiculous
Here’s the prices for the United States - https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Even these data are noticeably low for my area where we had a _massive_ rate hike in January that results in total prices for electricity (generation + delivery) without an alternative supplier being up around $0.48/kWh.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-bills-supp...
My Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, which isn't a top-of-the-line system at this point, but is still a 16 core beast-ish machine, sucks down (much) less than 400W
That's before you add on a GPU. My 3080 uses 350w under load.
OTOH a Pi 4B with 2 7200RPM HDDs uses about 25W and another with an SSD uses about 7W.
They're obviously extreme examples, but on the flip side, I've got an M1 Macbook Pro which lasts an entire day on a single charge of battery including running docker, slack, and some "mild" compiling (not large C++ projects). I'm not sure how to measure the energy consumption of it on battery, but suffice to say it's "very low".
I think back in those days the price was around 10c
I know this is euro cents but the dollar exchange rate is not too big to make a huge difference.
We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.
It´s easy to look at any situation and say ¨If only they´d _just_ XXX¨. It´s never that simple.
Even if you deeply believe your solution is flawless and people ¨just¨ need to be convinced, the very fact that the situation is happening at all is an indication it will be a long and dire fight...
> essentially limitless
oh well
So yes, there is 1 pretty great solution to the energy problem and yes it has existed since the 50's..
Their average prices are only a little below the EU average.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
How does that have anything to do with the discussion about energy conversion types methods and their pros / cons?
https://www.ouest-france.fr/environnement/nucleaire/sondage-... ]
You can then think what you want of the French people and why they could be dead wrong for not thinking like you, but it's another debate: they'll still want to get out of it if given the time/choice.
I'm not going to get into a debate over the safety of nuclear over other generation options, but is it conceivable that, if the modern regulatory environment were in place when those three plants were built and operated, they never would have suffered major incidents?
But I think molten salt thorium plants can offer superior safety
You're correct that nobody builds rbmk reactors any more, but others of the design continued to operate safely for many years.
[1]https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
There may well be tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. No, we can't state that these deaths absolutely occurred/will occur -- they are spread throughout large populations, mixed into the vast number of naturally occurring cancers -- but technology regulation is not like criminal prosecution where things must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Technologies are not innocent until proven guilty.
That depends entirely on the technology, and who is paying who. Fossil fuels have been proven guilty of numerous sins time and again and are still relentlessly defended as innocent. Leaded fuel in particular enjoyed an undeserved benefit of the doubt. Food additives are another category of chemical with very permissive regulation, provided they don't cause lab rats to immediately keel over.
Technology regulation is unprincipled at best and outright corrupt at worst, and even with the most pessimistic estimates nuclear power has the best safety record per watt of any power generation technology (and it's not close).
Fossil fuels being bad is an argument for getting off fossil fuels, not an argument for nuclear in particular.
"2 workers died in the blast.
28 workers and firemen died in the weeks that followed from acute radiation syndrome (ARS).
19 ARS survivors had died later, by 2006; most from causes not related to radiation, but it’s not possible to rule all of them out (especially five that were cancer-related).
15 people died from thyroid cancer due to milk contamination. These deaths were among children who were exposed to 131I from milk and food in the days after the disaster. This could increase to between 96 and 384 deaths, however, this figure is highly uncertain.
There is currently no evidence of adverse health impacts in the general population across affected countries, or wider Europe."What you are doing here is demanding that the cancers actually be demonstrated, requiring that radiation be treated as innocuous until it can be conclusively shown it isn't. This is the mindset behind those ranting against the linear no threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis.
But regulation doesn't work this way. Nuclear isn't something that must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
...
>And I live in California,
This made me laugh out loud. (Worked with utilities all my life, including in CA.)
While other countries have stable and reliable power in the face of hurricanes and ice storms, our power is routinely knocked out by cars, trees, and basically any act of nature.
I love how expensive everything is for how behind we are from the entire rest of the world. Too bad the expenses keep me trapped and poor, unable to do anything about it—even just move to any other country.
• Long-term debt used to buy off the slave owners in 1837 and not getting fully paid down until 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837
• Napoleonic war debt was also still being serviced until 2015: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...
(PG&E is basically nationalized already, they don't make their own decisions here.)
Solar and wind are extremely expensive when all costs are taken into account. One study found that the "true cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh": [pdf]https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...
Mind you, this could change if we get an economical way to generate hydrocarbon fuels from renewable electricity, so I'm certainly not pessimistic about solar/wind's long term prospects.
Wind and solar were 30% of Great Britain's electricity last year. The National Grid is a private company, so their costs are clear, 3% of the average bill.
That's a bit of an odd one, as the amount of electricity you consume has little direct effect on maintenance costs. Now, it might be in some sense "fair" to charge heavier consumers more, and there's a second order effect whereby if total demand exceeds some threshold, the grid must be upgraded to cope, but if that "delivery fee" scales with your consumption then you're definitely looking at some "creative" accounting.
Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials.
Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades. While that is not a concern in our lifetimes, some progress on thorium plants and so forth must be made for nuclear to be a long term solution.
Nothing is zero carbon either. Batteries have a very long supply chain that involves a lot of carbon heavy steps, and their disposal also creates pollution. The same goes for solar panels, but people conveniently choose to ignore that.
> we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades
We dont need uranium to run on nuclear power. There are several alternatives already.
There are vast quantities of uranium in ocean water in concentrations that while low, still allow it to be extracted. More importantly, breeder reactors can harvest 100X more energy from uranium than currently deployed reactor types, and in the process eliminate all of the long-lasting nuclear waste, i.e. those with a half life of millions/billions of years.
With known supplies of uranium and thorium on Earth, nuclear fission can provide 100% of humanity's current energy needs for something like 2 billion years. For reference, the sun's rising luminosity is expected to boil Earth's oceans away in 900 million years. We could 1000X current energy consumption with nuclear, and have enough fuel on Earth for over a million years. Long before the fuel runs out, we will be able to exploit resources beyond Earth.
Fast reactors also present the possibility of prompt fast criticality (that is, an actual nuclear explosion) in a serious accident if enough of the core melts and moves around.
In any case, costs can be brought down significantly with 1. more reasonable regulations and 2. economies of scale, which just requires building more plants.
So if - due to massive expansion of nuclear power - we get to the point that uranium supplies are dwindling and causing the price of uranium ore to rise, we may still see breeder reactors with lower construction and operating costs than current generation reactors.
I suspect modularity in reactors, that enables a genuine global market to emerge in reactor manufacturing, would be instrumental in bringing down reactor construction costs.
>>Fast reactors also present the possibility of prompt fast criticality
I'm quite the layman in this subject, but my understanding is that there are fourth generation fast reactor models, with passive safety features, that effectively eliminate that possibility.
For regulations: how does one identify "reasonable" regulations? How is this to be determined? The usual way this is done in other industries is by allowing accidents to happen, then add regulations that would have prevented them. I doubt that would be acceptable for nuclear: unlike (say) aviation accidents, the cost of an individual accident can be extremely large.
As for economies of scale, the evidence for that in nuclear is slight. Maybe S. Korea? But elsewhere costs seem to have increased with experience rather than decreasing. Nuclear involves large units that take a long time to build; there's not much room for anyone to gain much experience over their career. If anything, experience decay (as organizations and individuals age) seems to overwhelm experience growth.
> fast reactors
Fast reactors inherently have this problem, since a fast chain reaction occurs without a moderator. In a LWR, concentration of the fuel in an accident reduces reactivity, as the moderator is reduced. In a fast chain reaction, concentration of the fuel will increase reactivity. Putatively safe 4th generation reactors merely assert that such rearrangement cannot happen. If the analysis that led to that conclusion is found to be in error then anyone who has built such a reactor will be in deep trouble. Perhaps molten salt fast reactors will have sufficiently credible analysis, but those have their own issues (such as need for large amounts of isotopically separated chlorine in molten chloride reactors and exposure of the walls of the reactor to unshielded/unmoderated fast neutrons.)
Nuclear should either be operated all the time, or it shouldn't be used at all.
However it's no deficiency of planning.
It's down to public opinion and misguided regulation.
Not sure if that would fly.
No heroics from any project manager would eg let 1980s Ford stop selling internal combustion engines and go all-in-one electric cars. So any deadlines would be missed.
Zwentendorf was such a disaster.
My wholly intuition-based guess would be that the net effect of these higher construction/safety standards is massively more lives lost.
But if that is the case, it's worth remembering that the lives lost from higher construction standards are a result of second order effects and populist government-interventionist political ideologies are generally quite poor at factoring in second order effects, as we saw with COVID lockdown policies, which resulted in far more lives lost from the second order effects of the lockdowns than lives saved from the lockdowns mitigating the spread of COVID.
Specific construction expertise for nuclear very likely has degraded (the US can no longer forge the large reactor vessels for PWRs, for example.)
Nuclear is going to be further negatively affected if there's a transition away from fossil fuels, since the industrial infrastructure for making steam turbines will no longer have as much support. Bespoke turbines from smaller makers will be more expensive.
Nuclear plant construction has the potential to become much less labor intensive if it moves to smaller, standardized nuclear reactors that can be manufactured in factories, using mass-production techniques.
>>Nuclear is going to be further negatively affected if there's a transition away from fossil fuels, since the industrial infrastructure for making steam turbines will no longer have as much support.
True. However this is a surmountable problem. It's just a matter of using subsidies to achieve economies of scale in nuclear plant construction.
The problem with the subsidy argument is there's no good experience to show that subsidies would do more here than just burn money. Nuclear has not had good experience effects. This is in sharp contrast to renewables and storage.
Nuclear is weighed down by the boat anchor of its historically poor performance.
They still charge us for the electricity PLUS extra charges for a fund to eventually decommission the nuclear plant. It’s so expensive.
I measured the consumption at some point and it is a steady 60W.
I expected more, this setup has a marginal consumption compared to other appliances - and it gives me happiness.
Without doing advanced research, I would guess that a lot of consumption i fixed and hardly compressible (fridge, dishwasher, water boiler, induction plate, typical lights) - at least I hope so.
The definition of a Datacenter includes that it's complex, which your given example just isn't
This may have been funny for people who know me and my 30n years of work with real datacenters.
This is also an example of how badly written words on internet convey emotions (especially humour)
Hasn’t changed that much. Here we are in 2023 where most of this distributed power goes to cracking sha 256 hashes. Just for speculation and profit instead of leaderboards.
Cracking hashes would imply that they're taking pre-existing hashes and reversing them to find the input.
So why'd you bring it up?
Cracking sha256 hashes implies trying to reverse a specific hash. There are literally thousands (millions?) of potential inputs that hash to a valid bitcoin mining block output. It's basically a race to find the first one matching the rules of the current block difficulty. The goal isn't to produce any one specific input/hash pair.
Hash collision should always be about finding matching content for a hash.
Be a bitch to search. But damn would we know the topography of the function space.
...I'll see myself out.
This myth was always intriguing to me. Where does it come from?
It's not a number of 0s (which would imply difficulty could only be doubled or halved), it's just finding a hash that is less than the target.
Cryptocurrency feels like the exact opposite of the old internet to me - it feels like a bunch of anonymous bros looking for the next sucker to scam out of money and get rich quick.
I still think it's a dumb idea, but I've learnt not to underestimate human stupidity.
The whole crazy investment thing came much later and basically destroyed any hope of using BTC on a daily basis.
Point is a lot of things are stupid and turn out to work really well. USD is backed by a computer at the Federal Reserve. Sounds pretty stupid but it works.
I could have been rich ... but how should I have known.
>USD is backed by a computer at the Federal Reserve. Sounds pretty stupid but it works.
Pretty much why I think it's stupid as an investment, it's no better than the USD if SHTF. You can't hold it like gold or silver.
Btw, not very many people are putting their money into gold and silver. Returns on that have been lackluster for decades. If BTC truly became "digital gold," I wouldn't be very interested.
Steam and pretty much every other regular retailer dropped Bitcoin support five years ago. The state of Bitcoin feels even more hopeless today than it did back then. It is impressive how you can run a trillion dollar pyramid scheme on just digital nothingness, but I always hoped for cryptocurrency to eventually turn into a real digital cash. Bypassing the fees and incompatibles between regular payment schemes. But none of that has happened. Bitcoin is still slow and expensive and there is hardly anything you can buy with it anyway. Worse yet, most Bitcoin still gets stored in "banks" instead of being self hosted, so it failed on the whole P2P cash thing as well.
It's impressive tech, but for all the wrong reasons.
Biggest problem after that will be user experience, but I am currently in the Ledger Connect (now Ledger extension) Testflight beta and it makes using dApps on iOS with a hardware wallet a really good experience. No cables, no app switching, no weird abstraction barrier. The new Stax also seems like a well thought out wallet that was created with a focus on UX. Only thing I don't yet see is a good NFC integration for existing payment terminals.
I still think the industry is really early. Layer 3 is now a topic for privacy preserving user interactions which is super interesting. It doesn't then stop at being your own bank, but with it you will be able to really control your own identity without anyone standing in the way. For needing less trust sharing your data and being self sovereign. Using the chains just as a highly accessible, authorized data store.
The Ethereum research community is still doing very neat cutting-edge things, but they’re a younger generation and didn’t claim to believe in the same principles (only to later disappoint us all.)
If you are talking about pre-web, I'd say crypto had that era too, up until around 2012 when bitcoin really took off.
I would love to work on doing something like that.
Furthermore, how would upgrades work? When new techniques are discovered, it would be hard to upgrade it. We see these challenges already when it comes to major changes in cryptocurrency networks.
Somehow, the AI believes that Alan Shepard was the first person on space.
Doing this session reminded me A LOT of Asimov's short stories in "I Robot". I feel that the future AI "debugging" session will be like that. It's been a while since I read the book, so I'll have to re-read it again.
Classic SETI@home's website[1] is a blast to browse.
Just use another machine for stuff like this? Spare computers are cheap nowadays.
but we spend a lot of time here talking about the lack of openness in AI, and some justified fear of the companies that own it smothering many other sectors the way search and cloud computer got smothered and centralized. a chatGPT@home large scale group effort would be sort of cool to participate in... but then I think, so many opportunities for mal-actor exploitation
Hoping you guys come back again.
Best.