17,556 karma · joined March 31, 2014
Correct. In principle if you have enough current available you can charge several thousand 18650 cells in the same time it takes to charge one. But you also need low-loss switching to reconfigure all the batteries to be parallel and monitor them all for rate of charge, voltage, and temperature. The electronics needed are buildable but not trivial.
The cognitive dissonance is staggering.
Author is on the right track but it's much more actively evil than this. The real algorithm is "what if we just show people the results we want to show them, because showing them those things makes us more money*?
* Except for services like Spotify, which shows you the songs that cost them the least.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/07/trump-grand-juries-...
Fine. Except now after one second, the whole page changes and then there's only one book on the page and it has nothing to do with the book I actually searched for.
So obviously they know about the book I want because they just showed it to me but then they make it disappear in favor of one I don't want but which I presume is one the publisher paid them to show me.
My workaround is to search on Amazon in a private tab so they don't know who I am. In that case the book I want shows up and I can click on it and get its URL and then paste it into the original Amazon window where I'm already logged in, and I can order it. Except I don't, because I'm so disgusted by this I go directly to the publisher's website and order it there.
This is ridiculous.
Amazon is throwing money on the floor with this behavior and they're probably just begging for a restraint of trade class-action lawsuit.
It's also free for private repos, and I have both. Codeberg doesn't like private repos, so unfortunately I cannot just move everything to Codeberg. I'll probably set up a Forgejo VPS somewhere.
I suspect not. Even though ebikes are common now, I often hear this comment. Ebikes assist your pedaling; they don't pedal for you. (Well some can pedal for you but you learn quickly that if you let the motor do all the work you'll run the battery down and then you will have to do all the work pedaling a 65-lb bicycle home.)
Lots of people seem to think if a motor is present, then the motor is doing all the work. Ebikes are not motorcycles. What the motor actually does is make the hills less steep and less long. It's a lowpass filter for terrain.
5 years ago I would have agreed with this but now I'm not so sure. We live in an era where you can tell a robot "Here's some C code. Design a 64-bit ISA, write the Verilog to implement it in an FPGA, write a C compiler for it, and use it to compile the C code I showed you earlier."
And now your ISA and your compiler are part of your moat. I can just see the VCs salivating.
There's no such thing as "CL's standard library." I presume you mean the functions built into Common Lisp which provide basic functionality, but nobody uses "bare" Common Lisp any more than anybody uses bare C. The Quicklisp libraries for CL (among others) provide the modern utilities you seem to think CL lacks.
Once you've toiled on the learning curve of Lisp long enough to really grok it you might begin to think you've discovered the foundational bedrock of the universe. From that perspective it's kind of hard not to be a little condescending toward fans of other languages.
It doesn't help that younger programmers today who complain about "too many parentheses" are largely unaware that Lisp was the original language of AI because the guy who invented AI also invented Lisp to help him do AI. I for one am just a tiny bit chuffed about that because I'm certain that more and better progress on LLMs (and beyond) would have happened had Lisp been used instead of Python as the primary vehicle for AI exploration.
So yeah, I damn well consider myself elite and I won't apologize for it.
We wouldn't want to pollute the moon.
If we needed to resume live testing we could just do it underground the way we used to.
The politics of launching a live nuke on a rocket -- even though it's theoretically pointed at the moon -- would be nearly impossible to navigate.
Even if you could solve the political problems, the risk analysis prior to launch would stop the project cold. By which I mean "How much of the state of Florida becomes uninhabitable for the next 10,000 years if the rocket blows up on the launch pad?" Talk about a NIMBY problem.
Sure enough. I learned a lot of history from this wonderful piece. And I still have the Leroy device I used in the 70s.
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/
The mystery is why Google doesn't just route such requests to the known algorithm. It would be a lot cheaper for them and it wouldn't risk reputational damage.
They're pretty but definitely a "look, don't eat" plant.
This requires an enormous amount of computer power, and it's the reason why the US DOE labs have for the last few decades had several of the top supercomputers in the world on http://top500.org.
Pretty much every app I can think of building for my family could just be a website iff local browser-resident persistent data was a thing. (And in some cases I wouldn't even need that if they were going to be always-online.)