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p1mrxon First enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months

> How come folks can’t conserve energy?

The whole economy runs on energy, and we have a lot of fossil fuels to replace.

p1mrxon T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97°F

Claude Sonnet 5 on openrouter.ai/chat

> Write a song about the T-rex. First line "Hotter than a crocodile, cooler than a chicken". Format for aisonggenerator.io.

Then I copied the output to aisonggenerator.io (1 free song per day), and used Audacity/Tenacity to record the MP3 because they make you pay to download.

p1mrxon T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97°F

With the power of AI slop, you can hear anything: https://pmarks.net/posted_links/trex_ai.mp3

p1mrxon Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

A solar array makes the earth less reflective by a fixed amount, for as long as the array exists.

Every unit of fossil fuel we burn makes the earth permanently less reflective (or at least something on the order of 100 years). You could compare a 1GW solar array (for its lifetime) to a 1GW coal plant running for x days, though I don't have the value of x.

p1mrxon Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)

Even if you ignore my LLM numbers, "what percent of a reactor's output must be reinvested to enrich its own fuel?" is a meaningful contribution to the discussion.

p1mrxon Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)

Take these numbers with a grain of salt because I got them by chatting with AIs, but if you're producing electricity from HALEU, then centrifuges require reinvesting <1% of the output, whereas historical calutrons required 200% (useless) and modern technology could potentially bring that down to 10%.

So calutrons will always be less energy efficient than centrifuges, but if the capital cost and construction time is low enough, calutrons might still be economically viable.

p1mrxon Supersonic Trebuchet [video]

Gravity is not "harvested", it just stores the energy briefly. Someone or something has to lift the weight for every shot, which requires energy.

It's not obvious whether a trebuchet is better than compressed air, like a BB gun.

p1mrxon Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

My favorite '90s weather app was WetSock. The installer was 1.5MB, though I don't recall the RAM usage. It showed a sunny/cloudy/etc. icon in the system tray, with the temperature in a tooltip:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse...

https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu...

p1mrxon AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

Popcorn bags are a significant source of PFAS and microplastics.

p1mrxon We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars

So the content falls down at 10 m/s^2 unless you're falling alongside it.

p1mrxon The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

The openness of those codecs depend on the last patent expiring, not the first.

p1mrxon The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

Note that MPEG-4 part 2 is H.263/DivX/XviD, not H.264.

p1mrxon Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs

https://ibiblio-icon-archive.danq.dev/icons/1.html

It'd be nice to have some way to browse the pages without constantly hunting for the Next button.

p1mrxon I'm a USB-C Maximalist

That sounds less janky than my solution: US wall wart charger -> 6ft extension cord -> international adapter.

(If you want to overvolt an extension cord, make sure it's completely passive: no light, switch, or surge protector.)

p1mrxon CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

They're collecting 10X more data, at roughly the same energy per collision.

p1mrxon Slate EV truck starts at $24,950

> wheel upgrade

At the same size (17"), going from steel to alloy improves performance but reduces durability. Larger wheels (20") are generally a downgrade for performance and ride quality.

Engineering Explained has a video on this topic: NYvKxsYFqO8

p1mrxon Google Hits 50% IPv6

TP-Link hardware is decent, if you buy one with OpenWrt support.

p1mrxon Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

You can escape Switzerland by going straight up into space. It's only "in" the EU in 2 dimensions, maybe 2.5 since you can't dig your way out.

p1mrxon TerraPower in deal with Meta for eight Natrium 345 MW nuclear plants

Sodium (without chlorine or similar) is a metal, not a salt.

They plan to use molten salt for energy storage, but the reactor itself is liquid metal cooled.

p1mrxon TerraPower in deal with Meta for eight Natrium 345 MW nuclear plants

Natrium is expected to spend around 1 month refueling every 24 months.

p1mrxon Dav2d

I think it's a reasonable decision. The only people who will interact with dav2d by name are codec nerds, and a simple increment makes the lineage more obvious to that audience.

p1mrxon Deep under Antarctic ice, a long-predicted cosmic whisper breaks through

Particles don't like being anthropomorphized.

p1mrxon Google Flow Music

I tried to make an orchestra where they smash household objects, and a synthpop song where all the lyrics are burped. Didn't work. Wake me up when we're in the future for real.

p1mrxon Fusion Power Plant Simulator

CFS is ITER with better magnets.

p1mrxon SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit [pdf] (2017)

Dora the Informer.

p1mrxon Why is IPv6 so complicated?

It would be pretty straightforward to change the text selection rule, so that double-clicking anything matching the syntax of an IPv6 address selects the whole address.

The hard part is to find all the places to repeat that change, and convince the code owners to accept it. Probably start with a standard analogous to RFC 5952?

p1mrxon IPv6 is the only way forward

> the only case where a newer version of software comes back closer to an older one

Winamp 3 -> Winamp 5 was closer to Winamp 2. Windows 8 -> Windows 10 was closer to Windows 7.

Though I don't expect this to happen with IP.

p1mrxon IPv6 is the only way forward

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7 exists, but was rarely used.

UTF-8 is convenient because ASCII has a spare bit, but UTF-8 is fundamentally possible because ASCII is variable-length. IPv4 is not variable-length.

p1mrxon Show HN: Made a little Artemis II tracker

Here's the official one, presumably with correct data: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/

p1mrxon Artemis II Launch Day Updates

According to general relativity, you (and the ground) are accelerating at 1g, and feel weight because your inertia resists that acceleration. If you jump off a cliff, you'll stop accelerating for a bit, until the ground hits you.

Edit to reply:

> I am standing on the ground. I feel 1G acceleration. My speed is not changing. How much am I accelerating?

You are accelerating at 1g through curved spacetime. Newtonian "speed" behaves strangely in curved spacetime.