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countvonbalzac

241 karma · joined November 17, 2021

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countvonbalzac··on California has so much solar power that increasingly it goes to waste
We just need much cheaper catalysts to enable these sorts of industries that could be a very efficient use of ultra cheap excess electricity. Right now catalysts to create hydrocarbon fuels from the atmosphere are so expensive that it isn't worth it to build them, only to run them the ~20% of the time when electricity is so abundant that it can't be stored.
countvonbalzac··on Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days
You should add the ability to change the public holidays. My company doesn't give veteran's day
countvonbalzac··on Traveling with Apple Vision Pro
There's a reason people watch movies on planes - it's to distract you from the uncomfortable environment you're in. VR is more immersive than a 2D screen so it's more distracting.
countvonbalzac··on Google Funding Construction of Seven U.S. Nuclear Reactors
That's per year right?
countvonbalzac··on Can solar costs keep shrinking?
Same - take lightbulbs for example. Thanks to LEDs, the amount of energy you need to generate X amount of light has reduced considerably, but we still have as much if not more lighting than ever. And it's not like our GDP is suffering due to a lack of sufficient lighting, at a certain point there's no gain to productivity gained from having another lightbulb. Same thing can be said about cars, CPUs etc.
countvonbalzac··on Ozempic's biggest side effect: Turning Denmark into a 'pharmastate'?
where do you get it filled in 3 month increments?
countvonbalzac··on Big tech wants to make AI cost nothing
You misspelled screenshots in the title of your website.
countvonbalzac··on Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
Is folding at home still relevant after alpha fold?
countvonbalzac··on How innovative is China in nuclear power?
The median age in China is higher than in the US.
countvonbalzac··on Apple surpasses Microsoft as most valuable company
In theory none? Stock buybacks increase the stock price but reduce the number of shares. So the market cap should stay more or less the same.
countvonbalzac··on Implementing the Goodfellow GANs paper
Are GANs useful for synthetic data generation for transformer based models?
countvonbalzac··on Wegovy and Ozempic (semaglutide) associated with reduction in alcohol addiction
Interestingly there are extremely profitable industries on either side of this fight
countvonbalzac··on Google Cloud error erases $135B pension fund
Why would anyone use Google cloud? No one ever got fired for using ~IBM~ AWS
countvonbalzac··on DuckDB Doesn't Need Data to Be a Database
Does DuckDB cache the S3 downloads? Otherwise it could get pretty expensive, no?
countvonbalzac··on Simple Speech-to-Text on the '10 Cents' CH32V003 Microcontroller
What's the minimum spec chip you will need to run the smallest whisper model (looks like that's 39M parameters)?
countvonbalzac··on AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them
Aren't there some cheap ways to muffle sound?

Wood floors, rugs, curtains, artwork, acoustic panels, etc.

countvonbalzac··on Priced out of home ownership
Tokyo does have much lower housing costs than New York because they build enough housing :)

Rent prices are 72.9% lower in Tokyo compared to New York [1].

[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

countvonbalzac··on A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle
Lol the "pivot to biotech" links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos
countvonbalzac··on TSMC says can make next generation chips without ASML's new machine
"High NA tools are expected to cost more than 350 million euros ($378 million) each, from 200 million euros from ASML's regular EUV machines."

The grammar in this article is strangely bad for Reuters

countvonbalzac··on How much is enough to FIRE in San Francisco?
Prop 13 means that property tax increases are capped at 2% or inflation, whichever is lower.
countvonbalzac··on Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces to counter Starlink
The issue is Starlink is run by a political actor. Elon was using his Starlink leverage to try to affect US foreign policy.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-sha...

countvonbalzac··on Tiny in size, a Cupertino home is selling for big bucks: $1.7M
This is what happens when you outlaw building new homes, and especially when you outlaw building apartments.
countvonbalzac··on What Happens When Hyperscalers and Clouds Buy Most Servers and Storage?
I wonder if that's less efficient though because now every employee has to manage a server, rather than having a small dedicated team that can manage hundreds or thousands of servers.
countvonbalzac··on Robotic arms that assemble panels on solar farms
I guess theoretically humans do more complex work? Rather than screwing in a solar panel, humans supervise the robots that screw in the solar panels. Then in theory we'll have the same number of humans employed in the solar industry but 10x the solar installed per year. When spreadsheets came along we didn't have less accounting work, we had infinitely more. That being said I am very skeptical that AI will be the same, or that our society is in any way prepared for a rapid transition away from human labor.
countvonbalzac··on Mario meets Pareto
What I wish this article had was a simulation that generated the best kart for each variety of stats. The article doesn't really address that different karts suit different driving styles, so as a Mario Kart lover I was hoping there would be a list of the best karts for each of a variety of different driving styles.

But this isn't _really_ about Mario Kart I suppose...

countvonbalzac··on Google's Green Light project retimes traffic lights for 30% fewer stops
what are you supposed to do at an orange light?
countvonbalzac··on San Francisco Died, Again
Or in 2020:

https://nypost.com/2020/08/17/nyc-is-dead-forever-heres-why-...

countvonbalzac··on You can deactivate anyone's WhatsApp account by simply sending an email
If someone doesn't control your phone number they can't reactivate.
countvonbalzac··on Real-Time Air Quality Index Visual Map
The air quality in several cities in the US dropped noticeably after the fireworks. Similar to the air quality after the wildfires.
countvonbalzac··on Larry Ellison: Oracle Database 1,000x Faster Than AWS Aurora
He is in fact the CTO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison

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