namibj

I want to remind that natural gas fired heat pumps operating with central European winter temperatures on the cold side and toasty warm indoors living room "by the fire place/any clothes are too warm just sitting not even exercising at all" are well established technology.

They're just usually deployed for frozen warehouses, factories that actively freeze large amounts of (usually food), and AFAIK the occasional ice(hockey) rink.

Shitty types that don't even bother with any decent controls/pumps (those 90% boilers use a water loop circulation pump and a combustion air blower together with a bunch of sensors and valves) run propane-fired in many camper vans to do the fridge. But at the scale of an apartment building fit for 50+ residents, a natural gas fired central heat pump can be _quite_ efficient and economical.

Thermodynamically they're a heat engine with high combustion/flame temperature that uses the warm side as the heat sink, mated to a heat pump that consumes the produced "mechanical/electrical grade" power to pump heat from the cold side to _also_ the warm side. You save the turbine! Also the electrics but they're probably not even that expensive relative to the rest of the 200MW-class combined cycle natural gas power plant.

I'm pretty sure the barrier to the lead-gold mass parity is that due to nuclear stuff they're gonna not trade equal proton/neutron count and while of you flip the ratio you are merely dealing with an energy deficit/excess incurred as you're rearranging the protons and neutrons to transmute between gold and lead which by e=mc² is equivalent to mass... You're gonna run head first into the problem that we with our current proven understanding of atomic nucleus quantum physics, expect the energy excess to need to be turned into an equal split of matter *and antimatter*, which will foul your plans.

We're suspecting there to be some symmetry breakage to explain why we don't really see any globs of antimatter with our telescopes (at least none that show any evidence of being antimatter), but so far no (real) luck.

As for the "0.13€ vs. 1€": you're not gonna get much solar yield in peak winter at least in Central Europe, especially it's gonna be that your PV is going to charge <100hour electricity storage when the sun shows up on those winter days and the heat pump (at least the part that spends a little electricity to lift a lot of heat energy from outside temps to indoor temps) runs approximately continuously.

You might have some kind of e.g. water/water heat pump with salted (not table salt though) water deliberately thawing during daytime (by turning on the circulation between it and outside air) to freeze at much warmer than night air temperatures to buffer those "only mildly freezing" temperatures to improve the efficiency (and at that point, likely also the thermal output power) of the heat pump.

The radiators inside and potential fans for them would also go up in flow to make up for the increased losses through the walls/window-glass.

A big reason why at least in e.g. Germany heat pumps are not at all irrelevant vs. electric resistance "space heaters" is that they're also very efficient at handling spring/autumn (lower thermal delta to lift against; referencing to a resistance heater for scale/reference purposes but clearly not expecting that to be a benchmark) while easily offering summer cooling (with relatively minor incremental complexity).

I don't really know how inherently expensive it is to keep around at least for parts of each city, but existing natural gas central heating boilers are very useful to not just trash before they're broken just because one uogrades to a heat pump, specifically because they are already there (sunk cost/little scrap value) and have basically zero issue delivering extremely spiky power during unannounced winter days (well, takes maybe a day of notice to actually get crew in to the storage&distribution facilities, but weather forecasts easily cope).

Sure, it's not _efficient,_ but we could just divert some synthetic methane during summer to refill the caverns: we kinda want that (at least for hydrogen but methane works too at least for storage) anyways for chemical synthesis factories if we're not just gonna feed them crude oil/natural gas, so other than that chemical factories probably/largely prefer direct hydrogen, continuing to use our existing seasonal storage even if it's not getting refilled from NordStream2 but from local summer-only electrolysis plants and with more hydrogen than methane where the geology allows, seems to me just frugal dealings with nature (reduce, Reuse, recycle).

Start by using wet Roomba tech to clean the port prior to opening the seal/door and doing the plugging? Assuming it's accessed from below.

Sorry about the writing :(

We have beaten it but only for an output that's approximately "green smoothie".

We're already better than just LED grow lights for e.g. lettuce, though, from how I recall the linked paper.

Unsure how you conclude that cold outdoors necessitate more meat though; aside from some micronutrients vegan diet works just fine so reverting back to "meat only on Sundays" 1910 style household dinner menu structures would work fine...

Most people could, for example, do with replacing the caloric intake from half the portion of any non-vegan food they consume, with potato.

If outdoor farming breaks from climate meat will get more expensive...

Vertical solar panels mounted like fence panels between fence posts high enough to not get covered by snowdrifts will produce electricity year-round; and we only need around 3x as much solar farm currently to power sealed grow "basements" than the same plant output would need if just farmed on an open field (assuming climate is matched and weather is average). The benefit of it is just that the panels can be other places (like noise barrier walls next to an urban highway) than the plants and the climate can be freely picked. Also no unlucky correlated dry spell weather events that can cut 100 million people's worth of harvest yield down to half or worse.

Grow houses won't fail collectively as much as farming weather is correlated across a region. Pretty much just need to keep measures around to prevent the plants from freezing just because the electric grid falls over for 3 days in winter.

You can just render to the 1bpp text/4bpp images monochrome 300dpi target; perhaps some tone mapping due to the limited contrast ratio of the eink vs. your OLED should be done at rasterization time.

Then just map the resulting 16 brightness levels according to the contrast ratios/progression they have on your eink. Use phone camera and adjust whole image contrast/brightness/black-intensity sliders holding them side by side until the grayscale matches.

Then just pick pixel RGBs from a gray-bars test image you have opened on the remarkable before you took the picture with your pixel 7 pro. Might not easily be done on the phone but can let a python using AI grab those for you. (If it's wrong it'll be obvious or so harmless it doesn't matter anyways.)

Then you take that rasterized-to-1/4-bpp-djvu apply the color palette you just built yourself, and zoom to 300dpi.

Other than the screen backlight which you've taken care of when you held both devices side-by-side and played with the sliders, there's no substantial difference left. Should be pretty representative. Don't look with too much of a magnifying glass though the phone doesn't have exactly the same dpi so there are resampling artifacts your eyes resolve if you're too close to it.

The big thing that was learned all the way back with UT and it's follow up SUT was that semantic nesting structure often incentivizes models that can deploy the very same learned structural parsing intelligence independent of how many layers of nesting had to be unwrapped for this structural pattern to surface.

Think how a reverse polish notation calculator with reasonably limited data stack depth could run efficiently with a plain vanilla transformer.

But if you input classic grade school parenthesized infix with a few levels of operator precedence, you are no longer able to just evaluate the expression during transformer prefill. Even if you add a stack depth bound worth it reasoning tokens between any two input tokens as they're processed.

UTs can, at least if run with encoder (unmasked) attention, resolve the task through technically-flexible iteration count that can and will follow the evaluation order of the infix operator tokens of the input expression.

While masked attention unfortunately limits it's powers, the fundamental benefit of separating task-specific-intelligence (an individual expert of an MoE) from the notion of which transformer layer has it pre-digested just right for that task/processing to be done to it, allows for massive reduction in model parameter count. Note this comes at a penalty of parameter activations (inference will take more compute).

It's just that at some point you can't afford to just train more parameters, without suffering overfitting issues/failures-to-generalize.

The architecture decoupling learned weights from when they're activated also helps with generalization to out-of-distribution structures. Think resilience against yoda-speak and such.

Oh, is the principle of sparse universal transformers finally in SoTA LLMs?

I guess we did manage to eventually seriously crash into the wall "more compute than normal (non-looped/unique-weights) transformers can efficiently consume with the limited training data we have", plus massive focus on highly hands-off agentic tool use reasoning...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07096

Edit: read much of the article, it's brute force predecessor was explicitly called out as an almost-ancient example:

> The looped transformer is nothing new, and the basic idea already appeared in the Universal Transformers paper from 2018

For fast updates / high frame rate, especially also smooth fade from previous to next page, those displays only do black/white. They can typically modulate about 14 levels of gray in-between but reliably (without really bad ghosting, due to strong temperature sensitivity of the pixel's transition response and the display being static so all gray has to be done by carefully interrupting a transition part way through) only from a nice flash-to-black -> flash-to-white -> fade-to-target-greyscale (sometimes one or two alternating full contrast flashes prepended to more intensely equalize the pixels/erase ghosting, but should only be needed every couple dozen page flips in grayscale mode).

I think the nice b/w no-flicker fade transitions chop the transitioning of all changing pixels into small burst/chunks and interleave/alternate the chunks of white-to-black with the chunks of black-to-white, so it's perceptually simultaneous. Or it's actually pulling off some kind of tri-state driving leaving unchanging pixels alone and pulling those that change to either plus or minus polarity depending on what transition direction they are supposed to go in... Sadly IIRC all quite proprietary-gated :(

What that means for djvu is that at least for text-only content on those readers that manage the 300 dpi "threshold" you'd just rasterize to pure 300dpi black/white (1 bit per pixel) comparable to a 300dpi "don't skimp on toner but don't you dare take half a second longer than you must in order to make the text crisp enough for $reader to have no good reason to whine about it being not crisp enough" laser printer job.

Djvu is particularly for displays with more than about 5bits of grayscale as well as for lossy compression of grayscale/color scans. And maybe also some efficiency gains on 1-bit-per-pixel quantized scans, but those aren't usually the target content for these readers, IMO. Might want to try for them, though!

I think back in the days before office workers that happened to do their work on a computer had access to the ancient relatives of "Microsoft Word"/"Libreoffice Writer", it was pretty normal for printers to take care of plain text files, with about as much fidelity as manual operation of a classic purely mechanical Typewriter.

Since then printers progressively forgot how to cope with such "documents", though IIRC good-old HP "PCL" should only require about a bare minimum of framing/job control to get a modern printer to handle ASCII plain text.

Yeah but you can train to perceive the threshold of impending over-hydration and adjust your behavior trigger thresholds to bump up against that more than you bump up against clearly perceived acute dehydration ("very much obviously clearly thirsty").

That's more for the intrusive thought aspects of "being thirsty", which get you to stop "sitting by the campfire" and "walk over the 5 minutes to the stream, to shovel a few handfuls of water into your mouth".

Or these days tell your zoom meeting you'll be right back, muting, and walking over to the water cooler.

Or at home pause the family movie night to get up and refill the water pitcher from the tap (or walk to the pantry and fetch a new "bottled water").

If you're trying you should be able to perceive a difference between when drinking half of this 400ml cup/glass of non-sparkling non-cold (at least nowhere near ice cold) water is something you predict to leave you feeling "more comfy" as soon asyou're "done swallowing" and "have gotten about 2 breaths finished counting from when you have successfully re-assumed your comfy sitting position", vs. "less comfy".

Don't drink the water if you're feeling like you ought to regret it if going by hour-scale average comfy-ness.

To tune your perception make sure to give yourself enough headspace to allow the feeling pre-drinking to temporarily burn into memory ready for later retrieval when you'll reflect back on your hydration actions of the past 2~5 hours. Then you either drink or not drink (usually you'll soft-force by picking whether to go up and fetch a full cup or do nothing (I.e., just keep doing whatever you're engrossed in right then) until next time you remember the idea of hydrating). A few hours later when you remember you burned that feeling into same-day-only/wipe-at-sleep memory you recall what you did/didn't do about hydrating. And now you have the ground truth about if you feel better or worse hydrated than those hours ago.

And you burn in that you either "should go drink some water when you spare a thought about it and feel like this again" or "should refrain from gulping down [more] water when you're considering whether to and you feel like that".

Note that you're not putting your feeling into words for this! You're just focusing "on the moment" for a bit, long enough to make it a moment you'll remember (lack of specialty will make you forget it by the next morning or at least within a few days if nothing special happens). Because you literally don't _know_ how to express it into words: that's literally what you're learning with this entire process.

Note that drinking the water when you feel low key thirsty but don't get (nearly as much) hydration-feel-good out of it by the 30~60 minute mark (depending on how much you just stuffed your gut with food that's kinda in the way of the hydration getting absorbed) as you thought you should have, then you may be suffering from some acute lack of salt/electrolytes.

If it feels bad, like hangover/heartburn and/or substantial headache, take a pile of salt that looks about a third of an inch cubed (60% of a cubed centimeter volume) (technically this is "1/8th US Teaspoon (tsp)"), lick-pour it from your palm onto your tongue or pour the spoon you have it on onto your tongue or whatever, followed by washing it off your tongue and into your belly with about 300~500 ml (10~17 US fl oz) of water ideally not colder than half way between fridge and room temperature (closer to room temperature should help!). Unless you stuffed yourself with more than about 5 bites of food in the past hour, you should feel much relieved after 20~40 minutes. It will take time, usually more than 15 minutes!

In less severe cases you may try to mix a stick/pouch of hydration/"oral rehydration solution" mix with the ideally about 200~250ml (6.8~8.5 fl oz) but make sure to mix to the concentration the instructions tell you (drink only about that much if the pouch had powder for 350 ml (12 fl oz) or more, and drink the reminder an hour later (if less than that; else portion it hourly into this much each; for many hours duration put it in the fridge)). Otherwise you basically do as for plain water hydration perception training detailed above. Learn if that feeling is an acute electrolyte deficiency dehydration. Because beyond the very initial instant satisfaction of the water running down your throat and coating your mouth you pretty much only make it worse from drinking salt-free water :D

Isn't a more proper treatment (assuming the tree itself is healthy) to bump up the pavement target height like a foot or thereabouts and put down some slope smoothing ramps to limit how much it acts as a speed bump? I'd assume it would involve hydrovac digging down between the roots a foot or two deeper than the sub base the roots appeared to believe in, to guide future growth of those roots down (by making that direction easier than to break the asphalt again).

Or perhaps literally just grinding (or otherwise prepping/cleaning by however is suitable given the presence of these roots) the fractured asphalt to improve bonding, and following with a good layer of fresh asphalt over top thick enough to keep the roots deep/the pavement surface resilient against the next decade of the root's growth? Ofc. including start&end ramps to not make an excessive speed bump.

If it's thick enough future crack fixing should probably only require a prius-parking-spot-sized heat lamp/"grill" placed over the cracked asphalt until it's soft throughout the full depth of the cracks, and then run a compactor/stomper over it to smash the malleable asphalt smooth. If needed that's the perfect time to spread a wheelbarrow of fresh hot asphalt in the heated cracks to restore decent coverage thickness over top of the roots. Maybe first grind it down an inch or two to get rid of the weathered topmost bit, but otherwise asphalt is pretty much unlimited recycling suitable, or at least we haven't yet really run out of demand for fresh asphalt to get rid of the used asphalt we're digging up by cleaning it a bit before mixing with new ingredients to dial in target softening temperatures and gravel composition...

Germany had two sizable heatwaves this summer, of which one was so intense that for the first time in about "ever" ACs tripled/quadrupled in price (note this includes those on online stores where the shipping times would allow for trucking them in from all across central Europe)... I'm not referring to installation labor/technicians even. But like window units and similar ones that don't rely on HVAC technicians to take out the box and turn on.

Good thing we've been working on beating photosynthesis efficiency of turning sunlight into carbohydrates (e.g., sugar) by using special electrolysis cells to synthesize plant-accessible carbon-nutrients (one kinda-successful (in beating natural leaves with PV based sunlight electricity and their electrochemistry)) attempt focused on generating a nutrient solution rich in acetate from CO2 feed (and electricity); that's one of the energy carrier molecules that existing plant biology can efficiently utilize.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2024.09.011

And note that by exploiting winter time solar yield and the grow houses with such technology not using sunlight directly and thus allowing easy and efficient thermal insulation, production could run year-round just with the amount of grow houses "online" varying with the average solar yield. Also gives convenient off-times (if they rotate which building runs through the winter) for maintenance.

And eating less meat or at least feeding the meat animals efficiently produced (but not as "tasty/varied/textured") plant/algae(/possibly-microbiological with bacteria or yeast) feed instead of things like Alfalfa that are very resource intensive to farm, would also help a lot with these issues.

Probably we should get back to doing grain bunkers as strategic reserves, though, lasting long enough to realize the problem, slaughter 80% of livestock, and plant low-failure-risk human suitable food crops on farmland that previously had feed crops for those no longer living 80% and land that had things like corn dedicated for ethanol that's then added to gasoline. Ideally ofc. we'd not need to cull as much life stock and could instead just slightly reduce new breeding and switch those corn fields to human food.

Earphones are forgoing the outer parts of your ears and skull.

Speakers don't; a "good" speaker setup with eyes closed and no wind/perceptible airflow and no smell and truthful thermal radiation surroundings is effectively indistinguishable from the real place.

Like, literally.

It's not _possible_ with earphones because you can't not feel their presence without being numb on a good bit of your head.

For your brick wall home situation; polarization duplex combined with some amount of beam forming/spatial-multiplexing plus importantly directional antennas on both sides of the wall would give you substantial gains even without increasing EIRP. Without EIRP increases it's the receiving side that needs the antenna to improve speed.

Yeah you can run stuff through DECT I'm not sure what handheld suitable gateway you'd use and strap to the holster of the associated scanner, but otherwise...

That said, in theory at the level you're asking for it'd be acceptable to run the system as a single frequency network by using the AP locations as remote radio heads and just not telling the handhelds that there are multiple APs in listening range.

I'd probably aim for using the wifi support mechanisms to dynamically fake nearby APs as "mimo antennas" from the POV of the handheld, but not doing so would also suffice, just transmitting from the one AP that's nearest to the specific handheld/client would already basically do the trick and could probably run with hacked firmware on commodity AP hardware basically turning the entire setup into a soft-MAC with that very software juggling the army of radios.

The setup btw. would not have the clients aware they're dealing with more than one radio on the other side.

You could be forced to ask/ping the client from multiple APs one after another if you've not heard from it in a while and it moved, but otherwise, you just rely on hearing it from multiple APs and tracking it so you don't have to make APs across the facility speak up and risk interrupting other clients that try to get a word in.

Oh, and ban by building ordinance usage of any other Wi-Fi on the channel your doing this on, or that's gonna eventually get you problems with congestion.

Have you considered "no password set"?

Liquid hydrogen cooled superconductors (20K) would be good especially if we manage to use some materials that don't suffer hydrogen embrittlement processed/machined economically enough to really play out the cost benefits of not relying on the rare noble gas.

You can use fuel cells; I'm sure external steam reforming based hydrogen (in protein exchange membrane fuel cells) works very well, but I'd not be surprised if some hydrocarbon or alcohol fuel cell beats it in TCO; also I'd expect liquid oxygen to be readily suited to be trucked-in with the fuel they feed these turbines and by the power of a simple dry heat exchanger exchanging between ambient air and combustion "air" they could use exhaust gas recirculation with pure (other than the exhaust gas diluting it so the flame doesn't melt the turbine blades) oxygen which would as a side-effect allow them to condense out water to obtain nearly pure CO2 exhaust. Liquid oxygen is around 100$/ton and you need 3.21 tons of it to burn one ton of methane. If you use kerosene instead you're at about 2.58 tons of oxygen per ton of fuel.

Note that the absence of nitrogen otherwise plentiful in combustion air eliminates NOX formation.

What they do for the oxygen production is they condense air and then distill it; IIRC it's mainly done for steel production where they use it to burn off carbon dissolved in molten iron. It's side product liquid nitrogen and argon are primarily produced from this but are mostly considered side-products of the "oxygen refining".

Ohhh, nice; happy to have a chat on the subject; suggest a messaging option to discuss further if you're interested. Check out keybase on my profile for some listed contact options; you can also use the padlock symbol in the menubar there to PGP encrypt a message to me and share that through any suitable channel that can handle that ascii.

Edit: I've captured and extracted-to-textured-mesh Mirker Bahnhof before it got covered by the scaffolding; if you're going to do another recording I'd highly recommend you include an IMU recording and ideally (though much less critically) a GNSS raw measurements recording that includes carrier phase. I've got a recorder for the latter that exposes a simple USB-serial port that should work great unless the GTW15 windows are EMI-shielding (but iirc they aren't).

Shouldn't be; at least if you count the termination setting trials that already were a thing with DDR4 as "DRAM training".

I'd like to point out that according to a tech blog or similar from years back, Google Maps public transit routing supposedly employs the zone-boundary hierarchy to do similar preprocessing, exploiting that at least in networks like e.g. Germany, there's a hierarchy level roughly corresponding to what is perceptually "same city" where the number of border crossings between the zones has a local minimum (splitting a zone and merging two adjacent zones would both increase the border crossing count of the resulting zone relative to the local minima one).

They then do all-pairs precomputing between the border nodes and connections within the zone; then use this to cheaply handle the long-distance travel, while only needing to do full non-precomputable pathing locally within the start and the end zone (and ofc jumping across the contractions on the way between the border of the start zone and the border of the destination zone).

Sadly it's not too counterintuitive; remember the old "how many r's are in the word strawberry"?

Also different tokens for the same named entity/concept if they almost entirely exclusively occur in non-overlapping contexts, and are themselves rare/uncommon in the first place, will result in behavior that's similar to the speech/phrasing/vocabulary registers humans exhibit, where the aspects of the named entity/concept get largely compartmentalized.

The most severe case along these lines were the old BERT models that ran over straight UTF-8 bytes (plus a handful special tokens).

But for the modern post-GPT2 LLMs such radical simplicity seems to mostly not be considered suitable. Note that CJK (the big one in particular, so Chinese semantic and Japanese Kanji) encodes each one into multiple UTF-8 bytes giving some automatic scaling for semantically dense languages; similar effects also apply to e.g. APL code.

A second angle on the counterfactual savings would be Luna telling them not to pursue a potential session with the expected/extrapolated (from which sessions they did ignore Luna on, e.g. just to keep efficiency statistics current) sunk costs at time of getting shut down used to derive the quoted number.

Pretty sure a court order to return say a "PlayStation Dev kit" a game studio employee had when he got fired during covid remote work mandates, if it's just against the employee personally, would not obligate me to let you in or carry it out to you if that employee left it on the middle shelf of my couch table having told me he'll be back after, say, taking unpaid and non-granted-despite-requested time off for his "common law wife if that was a thing in the state they're in, but legally just unrelated consenting adults (that haven't yet moved in together)" 's funeral and rounding it up to one whole week to grieve at their memorable places, after having crashed at my place (bringing his work with him, thus the dev kit on my table-shelf) as I live much closer to the hospital his "wife" was in for the past 3 weeks and he expressed some psychological worries about spending almost all of his time alone while the love of his life is dying....

In fact, I'd expect you to need a seizure-warrant/distinctly-named-but-to-the-layperson-identical-court-order for my place as, among other things, I don't think I am in a position to legally have standing to challenge an order that's not mentioning me, and lack of me being an active flight risk would probably preclude you from arguing exigent circumstances to secure the dev kit without a judge ordering me to let you.

TL;DR: "complying" with a court order that's filed against a 3rd party is, IMO/AFAIK, a voluntary act, specifically because the party not mentioned in the court order AFAIK has no legal standing to challenge that very order of in court. _Precisely_ because they're not legally mandated to comply, at least not beyond perhaps taking a precautionary legal hold on the referenced information to not get accused of aiding in destruction of data in case the court-ordered party directs the non-mentioned party to delete through the regular customer relationship channels (API? Whatever else?).

Yeah; I haven't read TFA but IMO especially if Iron Mountain is aiding the procurement of said court order through giving some (potentially redacted as required for privacy purposes) "sample" court documents that could be readily used as reference so the lawyer on the Nine PBS side (filing with the court to get a judge to order Iron Mountain to release that data to Nine PBS) doesn't need to waste their time repeating all the drafting from scratch for what I'm assuming would be a (from the legal perspective) straight-forward request (that nonetheless has to specifically account for the particular legal data possession/ownership/access-rights situation under which the data in question is stored at Iron Mountain), especially as relevant for the situation at hand allowing Nine PBS to put a temporary data retention legal hold on these 50TB giving them a fair deadline (not merely "legally 'reasonable'") either on charity (understanding the gravity of the "this Nine PBS data is a public good (at a cursory glance)"/"information wants to be free") or offering general reasonable list price of what they bill for retaining 50TB stored under the storage model at play for "just one more month" (or whatever fair deadline) paid by Nine PBS.

Early detection, while things can be cheaper to mitigate?

Fixing hole in tooth is far cheaper than replacing a full tooth, for example.

Just a regular grid?

That's countable you just go in a spiral.

Salty.