• 0 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: September 14th, 2024

help-circle
  • It wouldn’t be a 30% higher electrical bill overall. It would be 30% more for whatever power you’re using for this specific device, which, if it’s ordinarily 10W while in sleep and an average 100W while in use, and you use it 50 hours per week, or 215 hours per month, that’s a baseline power usage of 21500 watt hours in use and 5050 watt hours from idle/sleep/suspend. Or a total of 26550 watt hours, or 26.5 kWh. At 20 cents per kWh, you’re talking about $5.30 per month in electricity for the computer. A 30% increase would be an extra $1.60 per month.



  • Many kid movies raise some troubling implications about personhood and moral agency with anthropomorphized non-human characters (Toy Story and life/death/abandonment, what do obligate carnivores in Zootopia eat, etc.).

    But Bee Movie inexplicably just dives right into it instead of leaving it unexplored on the edges. If the bees are fully intelligent beings with rich inner experiences, what moral obligation do we owe them? It’s a mess of a concept.




  • Lazard is a pretty respected analyst for energy costs. Here’s their report from June 2024.

    In the U.S., peaker gas plants that are only fired up between 5-20% of the time, the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is between $110 to $230 per MWh. The levelized cost of storage for utility scale 4-hour storage ranges from $124-$226 per MWh, after subsidies. Before subsidies, that 4-hour storage costs $170-$296.

    Residential storage, on the other hand, doesn’t come close. That’s $882 to $1101 before subsidies, or $653 to $855 after subsidies.

    So in other words, utility scale storage has dropped down to around the same price as gas peaker plants, in the U.S., after subsidies.


  • Yeah, people are working on it.

    The EIA estimates that there’s about 30 GW of battery capacity in the U.S., mostly in storage systems that are designed to store about 1-4 hours worth.

    That’s in comparison to 1,200 GW of generation capacity, or 400 times as much as there is storage.

    It’s coming along, but the orders of magnitude difference between real-time supply and demand and our capacity for shifting some of the power just a few hours isn’t quite ready for load balancing across a whole 24 hour day, much less for days-long weather patterns or even seasonality across the year. We’re probably gonna need to see another few years of exponential growth before it starts actually making a big impact to generation activity.




  • Focusing on ultra processed foods specifically calls out the obvious problem - we were significantly healthier before these foods were invented, and are less healthy after.

    But what confounding variables have also increased during this time? Do we have endocrine disruptors in our drinking water or food packaging or in the foods themselves, from microplastics or whatever? Have we been fertilizing our fields with industrial waste containing toxic “forever chemicals”? Have we become more sedentary at home and at work? I mean, probably yes to all of these.

    I do believe that nutrition is more than simple linear addition of the components in a food. But insights can still be derived from analyzing non-linear combinations (like studying the role of fiber or water or even air in foods for the perception of satiety or the speed that subject ingest food), or looking towards specific interactions between certain subsets of the population with specific nutrients. We can still derive information from the ingredients, even if we move past the idea that each ingredient acts on the body completely independently from the other ingredients in that food.

    And look, I’m a skeptic of the NOVA system, but actually do appreciate its contribution in increasing awareness of those non-linear combinations. But I see it as, at most, a bridge to better science, not good science in itself.


  • “Very little fiber”, “Frequently have a lot of oil”, and “Relatively high in salt and sugar” aren’t a classification, they’re vibes.

    What you’ve listed aren’t classification criteria. These are generally common characteristics within the category, and a basis for investigating what causes ultra processed foods to generally be bad.

    I’m in this thread arguing that the scientists have the data to be able to just analyze correlations and trends of those characteristics directly, rather than taking the dubious step of classifying them into the NOVA category to begin with.

    It’s not pseudoscience or not science though. The models are the models, and I think they’re bad models, but I don’t think they’re outright unscientific.



  • The NOVA classifications are difficult to work with, and I think the trend of certain nutrition scientists (and the media that reports on those scientists’ work) have completely over-weighted the value of the “ultra processed” category.

    The typical whole grain, multigrain bread sold at the store qualifies as ultra-processed, in large part because whole grain flour is harder to shape into loaves than white flour, and manufacturers add things like gluten to the dough. Gluten, of course, already “naturally” exists in any wheat bread, so it’s not exactly a harmful ingredient. But that additive tips the loaf of bread into ultra processed (or UPF or NOVA category 4), same as Doritos.

    But whole grain bread isn’t as bad for you as Doritos or Coca Cola. So why do these studies treat them as the same? And whole grain factory bread is almost certainly better for you than the local bakery’s white bread (merely processed food or NOVA category 3), made from industrially produced white flour, with the germ and bran removed during milling. Or industrially produced potato chips, which are usually considered simply processed foods in category 3 when not flavored with anything other than salt, which certainly aren’t more nutritious or healthier than that whole wheat bread or pasta.

    If specific ingredients are a problem, we should study those ingredients. If specific combinations or characteristics are a problem, we should study those combinations. Don’t throw out the baby (healthy ultra processed foods) with the bathwater (unhealthy ultra processed foods).

    And I’m not even going to get into how the system is fundamentally unsuited for evaluating fermented, aged, or pickled foods, especially dairy.




  • Spit out a random e-mail address and record which e-mail address was given to each IP.

    The author mentions it’s a violation of GDPR to record visitors’ IP addresses. I’m not sure that’s correct, but even so, it could be possible to make a custom encoding of literally every ipv4 address through some kind of lookup table with 256 entries, and just string together 4 of those random words to represent the entire 32-bit address space, such that “correct horse battery staple” corresponds to 192.168.1.100 or whatever.


  • Base64 encoding of a text representation of an IP address and date seems inefficient.

    There are 4 octets in a ipv4 address, where each octet is one of 2^8 possible integers. The entire 32-bit ipv4 address space should therefore be possible to encode in 6 characters in base64.

    Similarly, a timestamp with a precision/resolution in seconds can generally be represented by a 32-bit integer, at least up through 2038. So that can be represented by another 6 characters.

    Or, if you know you’re always going to be encoding these two numbers together, you can put together a 64-bit number and encode that in base64, in just 11 characters. Maybe even use some kind of custom timestamp format that uses fewer bits and counts from a more recent epoch, as an unsigned integer (since you’re not going to have site visitors from the past), and get that down to even fewer characters.

    That seems to run less risk of the email address getting cut off at some arbitrary length as it gets passed around.


  • The use of a “+” convention is just a convention popularized by Gmail and the other major providers. If you have your own domain, you should be able to do this with any arbitrary text schema, and encode some information in the address itself, especially if you don’t care about sending email from those aliases: set up your email service to have a catchall inbox that can further be filtered/forwarded based on other rules.

    It can be cumbersome but I could see it working at getting the information you’re looking for.