Well, also, LLM servers get much more efficient with request queue depth >1 - tokens per second per gpu are massively higher with 100 concurrents than 1 on eg vllm.
>This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself.
Neither solar panels nor Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries require cobalt. Pretty sure all the emphasis on that is mainly meant to cloud things and try to paint these things as just as bad for the environment as eg coal, and apparently it's been very successful based on how frequently I see it repeated, but it's not true currently. It was true with NMC batteries, but I think those have fallen out of favor even in EVs, and grid scale is dominated by LFP. Don't think solar panels have ever needed cobalt, they're glass, aluminum, silicon, and a bit of silver/copper. Thin films have cadmium sometimes, but those aren't the ones in use en masse for solar farms.
Something to consider, and something I got a vivid demonstration of while playing with solar panels, DC arcs aren't self-extinguishing, unlike AC arcs. At one point I stuck a voltage probe in, and the arc stuck with it as I pulled the probe away. It also vaporized the metal tip of the probe.
My understanding is that DC breakers are somewhat prone to fires for this reason, too.
Heh - I vaporised a fairly large soldering iron tip (probably 4mm copper cylindrical bar?), when I fucked up soldering a connector to a big 7 cell ~6000mAHr LiPo battery and shorted the terminals. Quite how I didn't end up blind or in hospital I don't know. It reinforced just how much respect you need to pay to even low-ish voltage DC when the available current was likely able to exceed 700A by a fair margin momentarily. I think those cells were rated at 60C continuous and 120C for 5 seconds.
heh man, I'm glad you got out of that easy, I definitely wore safety glasses 100% of the time after my experience. I think a lifetime of experience with dangerous wall outlets and harmless little 1.5V/9V DC cells teaches us the wrong lessons about DC safety. I've since heard stories of wrenches exploding when they fall across EV high voltage battery terminals. Wrenches aren't supposed to be explosive.
The electricians I was working with also told me stories about how with the really big breakers, you don't stand in front of it when you throw it, because sometimes it can turn into a cloud of molten metal vapor. And that's just using them as intended.
A bunch of those big breakers require two people. One person in a flash suit and another with a 2m long pole around the first person. That way if an arc flash happens, the second person can yank the first person to safety without also getting hurt.
Ruins the fun and interrupts instilling respect deep into the bones of interns.
Allegedly
While on "work experience" from high school I was put on washing power lines coming straight out of the local power station near the ocean - lots of salt buildups to clear.
Same deal, flashover suits and occasional arcs .. and much laughter from the ground operators who drifted the work bucket close.
This reminds me of the sailor who [decided](https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html) to measure his internal resistance by pushing probes through the skin on his thumbs and electrocuted himself with the 9V multimeter battery.
Mythbusters time. Salty fluids can be remarkably conductive. Blood qualifies. What's interesting though is that you have to wonder if there isn't some contributing factor here, as a kid I did this quite a few times, so that's one more for that list of stuff that could have killed me. At the same time: I didn't have nice insulation piercing tips back then (I do now) and that may be what saved me. I will definitely not try this again.
Another story in the same line is that I heard that a horse got killed by contact with a lantern battery, but I don't have any reference for that, just a story by a family member that collected coaches.
I have a couple of those narrow escapes one of which led me to put a significant chunk of Eastern Amsterdam out of power. Another involved Beryllium oxide. 9 lives are barely enough.
Ah! Perhaps you are a member of the gigawatt club? Eligible for entry once you have accidentally tripped off 1000 MW of load or generation! No sweeping that under the table
You brought back a memory, a second hand one, but still a great story. A guy I knew long ago had emigrated from NZ to NL. His main claim to fame in NZ was that one day he showed up drunk for work. In itself this wouldn't have been memorable, if it wasn't for his job, which was to manage a relatively small hydro plant on one of three shifts. On that particular day the plant had to be brought back online after being out for service and since it was really old the synchronization was manual. You had to control the flow of the water, monitor two concentric spinning wheels with the one driven by the grid and the other driven by the local genny and when the phase markings were lined up 'just so' you had to engage this frankenstein level switch to couple the grid to the generator and from there on inertia did it's thing so you could open up the gate to allow more water so the generator would start leading the grid effectively generating power.
Any kid could do it. Probably. But not a drunk one and instead of waiting long enough for both wheels to stay synchronized indicating there would be only a small jump in phase he just said f* it and connected the two anyway. Predictably, this led to a serious disturbance to the grid which in turn caused a whole lot of other stuff to disengage. Since his chances for re-employment on account of his new-found fame were somewhat minimal he decided to emigrate instead :)
I'm the idiot that sent a fairly high voltage spike into the grid setting off a cascade. Even years later I do not fully understand how it could happen, you'd think the grid would be low impedance enough to absorb a spike like that. But it set off a cascade on a part of the local grid that was known to be weak.
> DC arcs aren't self-extinguishing, unlike AC arcs. At one point I stuck a voltage probe in, and the arc stuck with it as I pulled the probe away. It also vaporized the metal tip of the probe.
It would have self-extinguished if you waited long enough for the probe to vaporize.
> My understanding is that DC breakers are somewhat prone to fires for this reason, too.
I think its that DC breakers are more expensive, so people use AC rated breakers instead. They are both rated for 400v @10 amps, its the same thing right?
It turns out they are not, and most people, even electronics types rarely play with 200v+ of DC.
Doesn't lightning settle basically instantly, while still being decentralized? You're just trading signed transactions iirc, with settlement happening whenever.
The settlement happening whenever is a problem. Instant authorization is very different from a practical settlement model.
At least with card networks, there are layers of liability if solvency issues occur. There’s merchant protections from the acquiring bank and if for some reason the acquiring bank fails there is the guarantee of the card network.
On the issuing side there are chargebacks. I hate chargebacks as much as the next startup bro but consumer protections are a necessary aspect of a functioning payment rail. There are reasons we don’t use ACH for everything.
I think hand waving the pesky settlement details is absurd. The settlement process is the payment rail.
If you do want those protections you end up back with a custodial wallet, which brings us back to a centralized model.
I’m not arguing crypto doesn’t have its place in the universe, I am arguing it’s a very bad payments product.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but my only point was you don’t have to wait 15 minutes for a really decentralized experience. Yeah, you do need to be ok with not being able to later chargeback your grocery store, just like with cash. Which is fine for your example of groceries in hand, less great for large purchases over the internet.
Maybe we don’t need an alternative when Visa handles everything, but it might be nice to not pay a 3% markup on everything. Alternatively, we could try to be more like India and Brazil, which each built instant bank to bank transfer setups you can use at the grocery store, without the risks that come with losing debit/credit cards. Convenient without poor people with no rewards cards subsidizing everyone else to cover Visa’s take.
>Yeah, you do need to be ok with not being able to later chargeback your grocery store, just like with cash.
Well the reason that works is because in grocery stores you have a concept of card present so the liability shifts to the issuing bank... so there are no chargebacks. Concepts like card present and card not present demand a centralized authority and really can't exist in a decentralized payment rail, unless you're going to somehow invent decentralized pos hardware for merchants. Once you enter the world of atoms, you have re-introduced centralized trust into your payment rail though.
> Convenient without poor people with no rewards cards subsidizing everyone else to cover Visa’s take.
I fully agree. This is a crappy part of ccs and the best remedy is to disallow rewards programs for credit products. This isn't a fault of the card networks its a fault of issuing banks (and the airlines). Every crypto company in 2021 was offering 8% APY, you think those guys would have been better about this than Amex?
> Maybe we don’t need an alternative when Visa handles everything, but it might be nice to not pay a 3% markup on everything.
I'm actually not bothered by a take from the banks and networks involved. They are underwriting risk and affording insurances to me and the merchant. I guess my main argument is that it's good to have centralized insurance in money transfer facilitation. 3% is high and a failure of Dodd Frank. The Durbin Amendment should have reigned in cc fees and not just focused on debit interchange.
> Alternatively, we could try to be more like India and Brazil, which each built instant bank to bank transfer setups you can use at the grocery store, without the risks that come with losing debit/credit cards.
I don't disagree. As you pointed out it really comes down to the crappy reward programs from the issuing banks that make merchants and poor people suffer.
I don't mind crypto as an idea. I don't have a horse in the crypto race either. What I mind is the notion that it is somehow a viable payment rail. I'm sorry, it's been 20 years and crypto's best use case for payments has been buying acid on the internet because it was the only payment option.
I think one of the most interesting business stories in the world is about the guy who invented the Visa network, Dee Hock. It truly is a story of decentralization at its finest. John Coogan did a great video on him a couple of years ago I highly recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNbi2cUZt1o.
Apparently I'm the only one here who finds it to be one of the worst things I ever have to do, I hate managing the combinatorial tab explosion by hand. Compounded by the adversarial nature of the price-setting algorithms that jack up the price on you if you show too much interest by researching too intensively. Just booked a flight for our family in two parts, and booking for one set of us made the price for the second set of us with a slightly different itinerary massively more expensive, because it was "in demand".
Do you think an agent is going to do all of that and get you the best price/time/comfort combination for your exact preferences. Or do you think it's going to pick the first that looks reasonable? Or do you think it's going to sacrifice one dimension too much?
We already have agents for this if you really want to avoid it, they're called travel agents. They're pretty good at complex travel booking and not very expensive.
Maybe, I've never used a human travel agent. Based on my experiences with human agents in other industries (especially real estate), I think the LLM version will probably already know my preferences a good bit better than most human travel agents would bother to learn - they're infinitely patient, and not trying to maximize earnings by minimizing time spent per booking.
I just booked a round trip for myself, plus two more flights for quicker hops while I'm away, and I didn't spend much time on it at all. I just looked at Google flights, picked the flights I wanted, and then ended up buying them through Chase with points. Chase's travel website is among the worst I've ever used, but it wasn't hard. Then I went to the airline's website and changed my seats (Chase doesn't know I have status and couldn't directly book the seats I wanted) and did an upgrade for one of the legs using miles I had at the airline. Half hour of work, maybe?
The price-setting algorithms are garbage, but an LLM isn't going to fix that.
Agree with the other sibling posters that if this annoys you so much, you should just call up a human travel agent. I haven't used one in many years, but when I did (mostly for business travel), it was always pleasant, and the agent knew my preferences and took care of things if there were any snags or changes needed. At the time, they usually got me flights cheaper than if I were to book them myself, even with their fee on top.
But I do wonder what the profession is like now. I can imagine some sort of website where you often don't even deal with the same person, who won't get to know your preferences and will be sort of like a customer service agent, just trying to close as many cases as fast as they can. But hopefully there are still smaller shops around, where you can talk to the same person (either phone or email) every time. Dunno.
Booking flights/tickets is terrible. And then the dark patterns… wonder if OpenClaw can navigate these? Anyway, it is nothing compared to sourcing electronic components, there are literally thousands and thousands of different manufacturers, lead times, moq’s … for the same component, leading to super hard to search and filter database/websites that are slow as molasses.
Seriously. Have you tried Octopart? One of the very early YC companies, dedicated to electronics part search (I haven't used them recently, so no idea if they're good these days, just remember them from like a decade and a half ago).
I used it, mainly for 3d models and footprints. I source most of my parts from LCSC because of the assembly integration nowadays. Sticking to their part ID’s works well for known parts, but yeah, still need to find the part first. It is so time consuming.
I think we literally have those agents today, albeit implemented in meat rather than silicon. Any particular reason you elect not to use the free-to-you travel agent? Generally they are the same or less expensive and able to work in your best interests.
Travel agents duh. Reminds me of the classic silicon valley startup trope that most tech bro’s are basically trying to pitch a product that replaces their mother.
It kind of doesn’t matter. The thing that makes Reddit, to me, is its size. Lemmy will never get there, so it won’t be able to replace it for me.
I love Mastodon, it’s what I use, but it’s not what I lost with Twitter. Some stayed, some went to BlueSky, some Threads, some just gave up.
And we’ll never have it again. Assholes destroyed a whole world out of selfishness.
I’m honestly amazed they tried that. It’s been so long, it felt like a play to cache in on the name but I feel like a huge chunk of people don’t really remember it or weren’t even around for it.
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