jakedata

WHAT DRIVING TO THE STORE WOULD BE LIKE IF OPERATING SYSTEMS RAN YOUR CAR

From http://ibgwww.colorado.edu/~lessem/psyc5112/usail/library/hu...

Taligent/Pink: You walk to the store with Ricardo Montalban, who tells you how wonderful it will be when he can fly you to the store in his Learjet.

Of course operating systems DO run our cars now. I would add

Modern cars: You pay your monthly subscription that allows you to unlock your car after it won't let you in. After entering your destination in the nav system you must sit through five minutes of store-related advertising on your dashboard before you can leave because you can't afford to upgrade to the ad-free tier. You are escorted to the store by a fleet of surveillance drones, several of which follow you around and scan everything you look at. Halfway home the car stops and makes you watch another five minutes of advertising about products related to your purchases.

No grid to tie into, so no need for that level of interoperability. I'm more likely to centralize my battery storage and solar collection once I understand the tax credit ramifications of a non grid-tied system.

Sodium batteries aren't exactly commodified yet, LFE is readily available and not terribly expensive.

For the most part I don't actually need batteries that work in the freezing cold, so much as survive it unmaintained for months at a time. I had solar panel damage last winter that allowed one battery to discharge enough to freeze. That is fatal to a standard flooded lead-acid battery.

If my test battery survives this winter then I will consider using the same type to replace lead-acid ones as they age out.

I am watching performance of the new LFP battery. Weight is not an issue in a stationary installation like mine, longevity and ruggedness are everything. The space is unheated throughout the winter and cold has done terrible things to previous batteries.

So far the one LFP battery I have deployed has been operating properly but there were some initial compatibility issues - my solar regulator did not interact well with the BMS despite alleged compatibility. That cost me several hundred dollars in downstream equipment damage due to voltage surge.

I am watching the new solid-state lithium batteries with great interest.

I have been building, rebuilding, optimizing several small-scale solar installations off-grid for nearly 30 years. These systems need to "just work" for guests and family, not be so finicky and fragile that people are afraid to use them.

The number one innovation that has made off-grid life more than just tolerable is low-voltage LED lighting. It's wonderful to be able to work in a well-lit space without worrying so much about battery life. All lighting is on mechanical timer switches, walking out of a room and leaving the lights on is a bad habit that's hard to break.

The next innovation to increase utility and practicality will likely be LFE (LiFePO4) batteries. In 30 years I have worn out or accidentally destroyed dozens of lead-acid batteries in various forms. They are fragile and heavy. Moving them by boat is brutal. I have high hopes that my current set of replacements will be the last ones for many years.

Electrical loads keep increasing. First lights, then radios and phones. Now laptops and a long-range WiFI link for remote work, and overnight power for CPAP machines. Next up will be DC solar powered refrigeration to displace propane. That will require more panels, more batteries but will have an immediate and long lasting benefit.

It has been a long and mostly satisfying project which has benefitted everyone around me.

This was all happening at the start of my career in computer stuff. I say computer stuff because it was a jumble of all the different things one needed to do in an early startup environment.

It was really exciting not knowing which way things would end up going, I was working on 68k, PowerPC Macs along with x86 Windows 3.1 and NT 3.1 (installed from 5 1/4 floppies!) and super early Linux.

We truly didn't know if Apple was going to survive the Gilbert Amelio era and decided to port everything to Windows. We never even tried to support Netware and it remains a somewhat shameful gap in my skillset.

In my basement at W’land dead computers wait dreaming, yet they shall rise and my kingdom shall cover the Workbench.

Consider the irony of a company named "Negasmart" intentionally adding lead to an ingredient used in children's food.

I expect there are warehouses full of forgotten tapes and punchcards reminiscent of the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Lots of echo-chamber talk about the same information. I haven't seen any new information since the original postings.

My guess is that it would be rather difficult for even nation-state hackers to demolish the US IRS mainframe-based Individual Master File https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Master_File which is still mostly written in Cobol and assembler.

23andMe would like to point out that hackers already have access to 99.9% of your DNA right now. That means they are at most only 0.1% at fault for anything else.

I hope they are working on improving firewall traversal. Lots of firewalls don't allow symmetrical UDP NAT ports, causing clients to fall back to DERP relays on TCP port 443. It's a lot slower. It is possible to work around this by statically mapping inbound UDP ports but that is clearly not an ideal situation. I generally love Tailscale though, amazing work all around.

Alternate clickbait headline: "Hackers have access to 99.9% of YOUR DNA!" It's technically correct which is the best kind of correct.

Inocel has a compact 300KW hydrogen fuel cell that weighs less than 100KG and claims "up to" 60% efficiency.

https://inocel.com/product/

It is possible the internal combustion engine+drivetrain is cheaper but it is unlikely to be lighter than the fuel cell and electric motor, and quite unlikely to be as reliable. Add a small regenerative battery pack or ultracapacitor and efficiency will increase further. Reciprocating engines seem quaint at this point.

Be sure to set a reminder to take your wasabi, at least until it starts working.

Pollution from diesel fueled school busses almost certainly impacts urban kids more than rural ones, so urban districts with shorter routes and lots of stops would be the logical first step for electrification. I don't know what the price premium for the super long range electric bus is but it certainly significant. Hopefully the funding for replacing diesel with electric is made available in a way that benefits the maximum number of people.

I remember riding to school in a smoke belching 2-stroke diesel bus. It sounded (and smelled) distinctly different from our modern diesel technology. I'd like to experience a new electric bus. Maybe I can volunteer to chaperone Science Olympiad again.

I think that if humanity survives another 2000 years, our descendants will know far less about us than we do about our ancestors.

Almost anyone who bought a home more than 10 years ago in a major metro area could afford it if they sold. I could comfortably spend 600K on some sort of boondoggle-mobile but I'd have to live in it full-time. A cellular or Starlink connection and a remote job could keep me going indefinitely.

Hummer is arguably a much better name for an EV than an internal combustion vehicle.

This or something similar would be my ideal RV. Cover the top with solar panels and you could park indefinitely. To top up for trips, many RV facilities have 220v power for charging and I could afford to wait. For boondocking, do it "Martian" style and have a stack of folded panels ready to deploy.

aaand... they went to spider silk space elevators. Good for them. I'll be in line to buy a ticket when they are ready.

Thanks! I consider writing well to be a differentiating skill, especially in IT.

I was summoned to a nondescript industrial building, found my way upstairs and wound up in a grubby room posing as a lobby. I was seated on a low futon and had several discussions with my knees nearly level with my ears. The conversations were overly casual but with some oddly specific IT security questions. I seriously contemplated walking out of what was clearly an amateurish, shoestring operation.

Nope... I have worked there 20 years so far.

My first job was to evict the former sysadmin, and within the first 90 days I was relocating the whole company, building out the new IT infrastructure.

So in the spirit of the recent post about Charlie Munger killing a lot of pilots I would suggest not judging the company solely by its lobby. Make a list of real deal-breakers and consider overlooking the rest.

"Once those items are in the possession of the expert, the expert plans to make a "forensic copy" and then check to see if anything was accessed or altered."

If the seized computers were booted up from their normal OS drive then a whole bunch of timestamps, metadata and logs would be changed. A forensic image of the drive could be used to prove this without altering the original device.

Of course if the police used a forensic image tool in the first place that would leave far less evidence of analysis on the original machine.

My town (named after a window system protocol back in 1835) has implemented activated carbon filtration to remove PFAS from municipal well water. After the carbon filter medium has been saturated it will need to be safely disposed of, including its PFAS load.

Being able to dispose of those filters in-situ by ball milling might make sense if the cost of the machine is less than the ongoing disposal costs for the filters. edit: EPA rulemaking for disposal of spent carbon filters is in process.

I grind on NES Tetris nearly every day at speed 9, game-B. My personal goal is playing "perfect" games where only lines are used to complete rows. These games are by definition finite and sometimes end rather quickly given the nature of tetromino selection. When that gets boring I switch to speed 9, game-B at level 5 which is simply a battle for survival for 25 lines. This is a bit easier.

I will need to see how I fare against a newer version of the randomizer one of these days.

And yet humor and sarcasm can add spice to the conversation. I really did read the entire paper at the level of detail that allowed me to spot the inconsistency in the font. That was not made up, was substantive and should be corrected before it goes to print.

The PS was also very real as the grandparent gets buried under downvotes.

I was with them until I came across Figure D on page 7. It uses Comic Sans and calls the entire paper into question.

Please note: this comment is an attempt at humor. Various people seem to have a difficult time discerning humor or sarcasm and choose to downvote. It is also possible (but unlikely) that I am not funny.

My uncle worked on the Alpha team at DEC in Maynard, MA. After retiring he found a nice opportunity consulting for Compaq and later HP. He referred to it as being Compaqted and I think he was always saddened that the company he devoted his career to came to such an end.

So it goes.

My folks bought a 286-20 from Dell and it was the fastest machine I had ever worked on. Early in my career as a computer entrepreneur I incrementally upgraded it from mono/Hercules to VGA, added a '287 math-co and eventually a bigger hard drive. I think they got 10 years out of that box before jumping to a 486-DX-100.

For my honors thesis in college I splurged on an 80386-40 and ULSI math co-processor. It was a 386 running like a 486. For a brief and shining moment I had the fastest personal machine on campus. As always the moment was fleeting but I didn't replace that machine until Windows 95 came out.