They call it jailbreak because this is an issue of freedom

I support your position and the right to repair, but that’s not the origin of the term jailbreak in the context of computing.

The term jailbreaking predates its modern understanding relating to smartphones, and dates back to the introduction of “protected modes” in early 80s CPU designs such as the intel 80286.

With the introduction of protected mode it became possible for programs to run in isolated memory spaces where they are unable to impact other programs running on the same CPU. These programs were said to be running “in a jail” that limited their access to the rest of the computer. A software exploit that allowed a program running inside the “jail” to gain root access / run code outside of protected mode was a “jailbreak”.

The first “jailbreak” for iOS allowed users to run software applications outside of protected modes and instead run in the kernel.

But as is common for the English language, jailbreak became to be synonymous with freedom from manufacture imposed limits and now has this additional definition.

This also leads to stupid rules like you can’t change your password more than once a day, to prevent someone from changing their password 5 times and then changing it back to what it was before.

It is, but lead based chemistries tend to wear out and need replacing a lot sooner than lithium ion.

You’re core idea is correct though, there’s a lot of battery techs that are cheaper / better when size and weight are irrelevant.

Whoever wrote that article is playing fast and loose with the definition of exponential.

Here’s the actual data of global electricity source on a log scale for the past ~15 years

Notice that the line for both wind and solar is inflecting to the right. If it was exponential it would be straight.

The time between each doubling of output is increasing.

It’s close, but not enough to be exponential growth.

It was exponential for a while but it’s slowing down in the last decade or two.

It’s not an exponential curve. It’s slower than that.

It’s more than linear; we are adding more capacity each year than the year before. But added capacity per year as a percentage of the previous years total is a decreasing.

If it was exponential the growth would be a straight(ish) line when plotted on a logarithmic scale… it’s not. On a log scale the line inflects.

Such an incredibly misleading article.

1 GW of nuclear capacity generates several times more electricity than 1 GW of PV capacity.

Nuclear power plants run at almost full capacity pretty much 24/7/365. With the occasional shutdown every few years for maintenance and to replace the fuel rods.

PVs only generate electricity during the day, and only hit their maximum capacity under ideal conditions. The average output of PVs is 15-25% of their capacity.

Globally we generate more electricity from nuclear than we do from all PVs together.

At the typical sizes we’re building them you need dozens of PV farms to match the energy output of a single nuclear reactor.

It depends on the jurisdiction, but in most cases if you have a salaried position with say 3 weeks of PTO but you only take 2 weeks of it. The employer is usually required to pay you over and above your salary for working during your “vacation time”.

If there’s an unlimited PTO policy, they don’t have an obligation to pay you extra for working during vacation time.

It’s a lie.

By making it “unlimited” they don’t need to pay you out of you don’t use all of PTO days.

If you use it more than they think you’ve earned you get terminated.

Employees end up afraid of taking their PTO days and typically end up taking even less time off than if they knew there was a expectation of 3 weeks or whatever.

My favourite thing ever seen in source code was a comment that read “this code is temporary” with developer initials and a date that was at the time about 5 years ago.

Followed by another dated comment from about 3 years later that read “Temporary my ass”

😂

Tesla’s biggest issue is Musk.

Tesla held a commanding lead over the other automakers in the self-driving segment a few years ago. Now they’ve all mostly caught up thanks to Musk’s unhinged firings. Tesla lost some of its best talent for no other reason than not wanting to work for an egomaniacal billionaire nut job.

Tesla needs to fire Musk before he runs it into the ground just like he’s done to Twitter.

Genuinely curious, what new features did that updated firmware have that were valuable to you?

“Green Hydrogen” is made by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. There’re no carbon emissions in that process, but to be truly “green” the electricity must come from a carbon free source like wind, solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric.

The process of electricity to hydrogen to compressed hydrogen to fuel cell to electricity is about half as energy efficient as electricity to li ion battery to electricity. As a form of electricity storage green hydrogen is significantly less efficient than batteries.

Green hydrogen only makes sense as a fuel in situations where batteries are not feasible.

And right now making green hydrogen at all does not make sense because if you build a new low carbon source of electricity it will make a larger impact if you use it to displace fossil fuel based electricity generation rather than using it to create green hydrogen.

Your math checks out.

Charging a 600 mi battery in 9 minutes would require a charging station that can output somewhere north of 1.2 MW.

We need major upgrades to the electrical grid as well as doubling our electricity generation capacity for charging stations and vehicles like that to be common place.

This is the trolley problem.

The trolley problem is a series of thought experiments that should be morally equivalent. In all variations, the reader can choose to take an action that will directly result in the death of an innocent person who was otherwise ‘safe’, or do nothing and allow a larger group of people to die, and ask what is the morally correct choice.

There’s no right answer to the trolley problem. The interesting take away is that what most people agree is the morally correct answer depends how the problem is framed.

When the situation is framed as “you’re deciding between one person dying and many people dying” most people will agree the morally correct choice is the one where the fewest people die.

But when the situation is framed as “are you justified in murdering an innocent person to save many” most people agree the morally correct answer is no.

There’s even one variation where is is considered by most morally correct to murder one person to save many, if the person you’re murdering is responsible for putting the larger group in harms way in the first place.

It’s not like the country was massively relying on nuclear energy at any point in time really.

Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors were generating almost 30% of its electricity a decade ago before they started phasing them out. It was their second largest source of electricity after coal.

Despite having built literally 100s of solar and wind farms in the past decade they still had to increase their coal output by 40 TWh to make up for the gap. A nuclear reactor generates a fuck ton of electricity.

And for what? Statically speaking 800x more people are killed in coal mining accidents per TWh generated than are killed by all nuclear power accidents combined. They phased out their largest source of carbonless electricity and the decision likely killed more people than would have died even if there was a nuclear accident.

I bought a dashcam for my vehicle, and choose to use it to protect myself from false accusations.

Body cams should be like dash cams, something used by employees to exonerate the person wearing them.

I’m not a LEO, and I can respect that maybe it’s not this simple… but I would expect “honest” cops to voluntarily wear one to protect themselves from false accusations of abuse of power.

But when it crosses over from protecting the employee to big brother watching over you that’s the line.

Body cams used to protect the wearer - Good Body cams used to punish the wearer - Bad

I remember a time when ads weren’t crazy intrusive. They weren’t being shoved into every os and app and website.

There wasn’t 20 of them on every page, and advertisers weren’t trying to harvest my data to the point where they knew every last detail of my personal life.

And I didn’t mind having them in order to have “free” content. But they got greedy and now I’ll block them in every chance I get.

Maybe forcing ads into everything isn’t the answer.

I feel genuinely bad for any democrat supporter with an ear injury right now.

You’re not wrong.

Wholesale prices do bounce around significantly in a day, occasionally even going negative. And some miners do shutdown for brief periods during high demand due to a high electricity price. Some miners aren’t buying electricity from the grid, and have their own generation sources with different economic inputs. And there’s lots of day to day volatility in mining rates that has nothing to do with economics.

There’s no formula or methodology that could tell you how much energy is being wasted at any given moment. That impossible. There’s no way of knowing how many miners are operating globally at any given point in time. We can’t even reliably tell which country a block was mined in. We can only make reasonable estimates of global averages over the last few weeks.

You can get closer with more detailed modelling, but the equation I gave using global averages for bitcoin and electricity prices in the last few weeks will get you to an accurate estimate.

Yes somewhat… the formula has several factors that are constantly in flux, Bitcoin mining is a random process the value can be off entirely by chance. But it’s designed to self-adjust over the long run towards that formula, individual fluctuations cancel out in the long run.

For electricity price specifically, wholesale prices of electricity tend to be fairly close everywhere bitcoin is mined. Bitcoin mining is more profitable where electricity is the cheapest and is uneconomic in places where the price of electricity is above average. So it only happens where the wholesale price is globally competitive.