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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • TAPR or CERN OHL, probably— Kit cars do already exist, though are apparently aimed at hobbyists, and usually just partial cosmetic customizations. “Metal box on wheels with motor” ain’t exactly rocket science, although quality could be challenging and that’s especially important when it comes to safety.

    That said, surely the production costs of modern vehicles needed to do their basic job— Efficient-ish and safe-ish transportation from point A to point B­— Can’t possibly be worth their increasingly inflated costs? There’s probably something to be said about the marketability of a sub-$10,000 basic OHL car that you can choose to scratch build or kit-build or buy fully built.





  • Yes. And I’m saying that’s not really a valid comparison, because those phones are generally just monolithic slabs that have been glued shut, whereas Fairphone has to implement a user-serviceable modular design with actual seals and stuff.

    Would giving it both water-sealing and a headphone jack be worth increasing the price by another €20, because it adds a new potential ingress point that the rest of the phone might have to be redesigned around? What if the jack is one of the biggest parts that isn’t replacable? Fairphone 5’s apparently only rated IP55, while Fairphone 4’s only IP54. That’s barely even really “waterproof”, but more like “splash-proof”. Would adding another hole in the frame be worth possibly reducing that rating to IP53 or IP52 (“drip-proof”)? Would it be worth reducing the warranty by 4 years, because some amount of dust and moisture still works its way in over time no matter how robust the rest of the phone is?

    Personally I think I would probably rather have the jack even if it meant no waterproofing at all. But that might not be the direction the market is leaning in, and we don’t know what tradeoffs exactly they’ve considered to arrive at their final design with decent-ish waterproofing and good reparability but no headphone jack.

    They have written about this directly in some detail, it seems. If nothing else, it shows that they have put some thought into the issue, and they’re aware that removing the headphone jack will be disappointing for some users, but overall they see making the phone thinner and adding IP rating as being the higher priority:

    https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/9836188988049-Audio-Jack-3-5mm


  • We spent more on the Manhattan project than the disorganized fusion projects have spent in a decade, and will spend in the next decade as well.

    That cost was overwhelmingly slanted towards implementation though, not research. The theory for fission was very simple compared to nuclear fusion: Gather enough fissile material in one place rapidly, and it explodes. Once the basic parameters and theory were proven, the actual project cost went overwhelmingly to just enriching enough nuclear material and then, separately, getting the Silverplate Superfortresses ready. They were so sure of the science that they didn’t even bother to test the bomb they dropped on Hiroshima. It wasn’t like fusion research at all, where for over half a century every new device that’s supposed to produce power instead just discovers new plasma instabilities which mean it simply doesn’t work.

    Also, the cost comparison you’ve made is simply false. The Manhattan project cost no more than $20-30 billion, inflation-adjusted. ITER’s cost (from 2008 through to ~2025) is going to be at least €22 billion, and apparently $65 billion if the US is to be believed. That’s of course not even counting the various other “disorganized fusion projects”, like the ongoing operating costs for W7X, the NIF, JET, and whatever the Z machine, Shiva star, etc., and assorted Chalk Los Sandia Livermore national laboratories are doing for fusion research. Still worth it, probably— Hell, if it cost $10 trillion, it would probably still be worth it, as long as it actually works— But let’s not pretend it’s cheap or free or a safe bet or easy solution.

    Thorium is a safe bet, but it also needs significant research.

    On the other hand, why not both?

    That would be far too much foresight, obviously.

    …But there’s also never enough resources to go around, and you don’t want to be the country that sank all its money into a technology that didn’t pan out.



  • Current uranium reserves are expected to be depleted by the end of the century, at current use.

    More like somewhere between 200 years and a couple million years, assuming we fire back up and finish developing some 60-year old technologies.

    Fission as a serious replacement for just coal plants is a pipe dream without asteroid mining.

    pipe dream without asteroid mining

    …Yeah, no. At least, not yet. Plus, the energetic and engineering challenges to just throw “asteroid mining” into the conversation are insane— So you’re burning either fossil or synthetic/biofuels for the launch, electric ion (which is itself insanely difficult and expensive) I presume (so, I.e. nuclear or solar) for in-orbit maneuvering, for rocks that aren’t even that that big and which you don’t even have the technology to do anything with.

    We have most minerals in sufficient quantities in the Earth’s crust. And more importantly, we have the industrial processes to extract them efficiently. Fission is viable, has been for a long time, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

    contrary to what people pretend we still don’t have a good answer for the waste.

    It’s rocks. Processed “nuclear waste” is literally just rocks. (Well, technically it’s solid glass covered in welded steel.) It’s not like air pollution that we end up breathing in, and it’s not like the chemical waste from other industries (including from batteries and rare earth extraction) which finds its way to the water cycle where it then bioaccumulates. If you’re picturing a glowing green river, or a barrel full of leaking sludge— Well, that’s not it.

    It can’t hurt you unless you powder it and huff it or build furniture with it or do something insanely stupid like that. And there are other much easier and more dangerous ways for malicious actors to hurt you too, that don’t involve breaking into secure facilities to steal the some of the heaviest elements known to exist.

    Dig a big hole and toss the waste a kilometer or two down the Canadian Shield, and it will sit there inert for a billion years long after it’s burnt through all its dangerous levels of residual radioactivity.

    We need a global fusion research project

    We already have a couple of those. If everything goes perfectly for them, they might become commercially widespread right around the same time the hard-to-reverse effects of climate change might become truly apocalyptic in the second half of this century. If the past history of this field of research is any indication, they quite possibly won’t really work, will work but only a decade or two behind schedule and several times over budget, or will lead nowhere except for some media coverage that’s good for military-industrial stock prices or whatever.

    This isn’t Sid Meier’s Civilization, where you can click “Global Fusion Research Project” and get a +100% boost to production after 20 turns. To quote Randall Munroe, “Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell’s equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations”. Fusion is hard, or else we’d already be doing it, and though we know it’s definitely possible, there’s no guarantee of anything when it comes to actually engineering it.

    orbital solar.

    Uhh… No. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to blast photovoltaics into an incredibly hostile environment, where they can’t even be cooled by dissipating into the atmosphere, is not probably going to bring energy costs down, at current or near-future technology levels.

    Plus any system capable of precisely beaming terawatts of power from space into localized collectors on the planetary surface is (1) probably by definition an omnipresent death ray and (2) probably at least going to fuck up a lot of migrating birds and components of the atmosphere.

    Simple as that.



  • There’s probably some programs that you always want to run with the dedicated GPU, though.

    Copy the launchers for those from /usr/share/applications to ~/.local/share/applications, and edit the Exec= line to include prime-run?

    Or, assuming prime-run is inheritable (since otherwise apps that need renderer subprocesses wouldn’t work), run an application launcher/menu itself with prime-run?

    Actually, it looks like prime-run just sets a couple environment variables anyway. So set those however you want for each program.

    What does “NVIDIA Control Panel” look like these days? It’s been a couple years since I’ve seen it. No options in there?

    I’m assuming you still want the IGPU and not the discrete GPU for rendering the desktop/simple programs, for power consumption and performance reasons, so you’re not willing to just turn the IGPU off or stick your entire session under prime-run or export its environment variables in ~/.profile or whatever.


    It looks like there are also GPU switcher taskbar applets for both KDE and GNOME. This sounds like it would be easy enough.

    …I think back when I was setting up a NVIDIA laptop, I might have just put a toggle for optimus-manager somewhere, or something.


  • My point was its all a separate tool which defeats the point. […] Just makes no sense.

    Ah, well, “UNIX Philosophy”, maybe. Each tool does one thing, and does it well, and it’s up to the user to figure out what they want to accomplish by using multiple tools together— Though it probably made more sense in CLI than in the GUI realm. I think it works for 95% of cases. I don’t want to need an entire office suite just to be able to make a mark on a page. But when you’re working a lot on one particular document (be it a PDF, video edit, source code, digital illustration, or whatever), then yeah, having a “complete solution” with an efficient workflow can be hugely important as well.

    I honestly willing to pay for a complete solution I dont want it for free.

    You could check if CodeWeavers Crossover, the money behind the WINE project, can run your preferred Windows applications but do it on Linux:

    https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility

    Or maybe WINE will do it for free:

    https://appdb.winehq.org/