LostXOR @ LostXOR @fedia.io

Your average science guy, Linux nerd, and Minecraft player. Left Reddit for

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1 yr. ago

GrapheneOS can be rooted, though they don't recommend it as it's bad for security. For an archival device I imagine security isn't a big concern.

Definitely one of my more controversial posts to be sure.

He speaks the truth, why be futile when you can do something with your life?

I'm tired of people ascribing any sort of intelligence to AI. It's not thinking, it's not seeing you as a threat, it's just predicting a probable response based on its training data.

Seems like a reasonable donation prompt; it's infrequent, unobtrusive, and can be easily dismissed and disabled. Some people are so sensitive to the idea of any sort of soliciting that they forget projects do need money to function.

Now that's an interesting idea; basically external regenerative braking. Not too helpful on a highway, but I suppose it would be useful in the situations you described.

That's a fair point, a device could theoretically harvest energy that would have otherwise been wasted, and that would be green energy. I imagine a wind system could work, though it might result in cars experiencing additional drag from slower wind speeds.

However, the piezoelectric generators mentioned in the article quite clearly do not use waste energy. They compress under the weight of the cars, turning a small amount of gravitational potential energy into electricity. That energy must be made up with extra fuel.

Finally, even if all of the vehicles on the road were powered by clean electricity, it would still be a useless system. Piezoelectrics are nowhere near 100% efficient, so you're just taking electricity from the vehicles at a loss.

n=2, highly significant results!

Last year the California Energy Commission posted the results of a study aimed at assessing efficiency of deploying piezoelectric systems to generate clean electricity from roadways.

“Based on the laboratory evaluations and road tests, the application of the piezoelectric energy harvesting system in one lane of a one-mile-long roadway has the potential to generate 72,800 kilowatt-hours of energy per year,” the team reported.

How is that clean energy, in any sense of the word? Any system that gains some energy from a passing car must necessarily decrease the (kinetic) energy of the car by an equal or greater amount. And the vast majority of cars get their kinetic energy by burning fossil fuels. Sounds like a more expensive, less direct, and less efficient version of a gasoline generator.

I saw a comment back when they announced they were "canceling" it, saying the same thing. It seems they were right. Microsoft will do anything to get their grubby hands on as much user data as possible; of course they're not going to give up that easily.

To be fair, that is pretty much exactly what it's doing. It just falls behind so much eventually that it ends up where it started.

Small correction: You'll want to be at the photon sphere, not the event horizon (1.5x the Schwarzschild radius). You can theoretically hover there for an unlimited time, and even escape, as long as you don't mind the immense acceleration necessary. :)

Yeah I switched to PAYG to lessen the chance of that happening. So far I've managed to not accidentally spend $5000 in some dumb way, so it's basically equivalent to the free tier.

Yep, it's all backed up locally. I figure eventually they'll shut it down as they're losing a fair bit of money.

You can sign up here, and it comes with 200GB of storage and 10TB of monthly bandwidth. And apparently a $300 credit, that wasn't around when I signed up.

Edit: Nevermind, must've not noticed it.

Yep, it's Oracle. It's a really great deal; I've been using their services for a couple years now and haven't had any problems.

Yeah, doesn't look like it affects GrapheneOS. More validation of my choice to run Graphene I guess.

Yeah, I've got to imagine as you cram more ads into a platform the effectiveness of the ads drops dramatically. Especially once users start leaving from being overwhelmed by ads.

Some intern is having a bad day right now.

A "planet" traveling at the speed of light would need to be composed entirely of photons, and (assuming an Earth-sized relativistic mass) would have 5.37x10^41 J of energy. That's around 2.3x the gravitational binding energy of the Sun, so I assume it would be obliterated, along with all of its planets.