abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

No - a gas electricity generator, powering a heat pump, will use an order of magnitude less gas than if you used the gas directly to heat your home. That's how efficient heat pumps are.

honestly, “efficient” can imply several things, and they don’t seem to clarify what (at least from my first pass of this doc).

How would you like to define it?

How about this for an analogy - which of these two is more efficient:

1. Plant some wheat in your back yard, buy fertilised eggs to hatch into chickens, plant tomatoes and basil, plant an olive to grow a tree, and eventually, years down the track, you can make yourself a bowl of pasta.
2. Notice your next door neighbour already cooked some pasta and made more than they can eat. Ask politely and they'll just give you a serving.

Obviously - the second option is more efficient, and that's effectively what a heat pump does. They don't heat up your home, they just take a bit of heat from the air outside and move (pump) it into your home. It's far far more efficient than creating new heat from scratch with a gas system.

Exactly how much more efficient will depend on the outdoor and indoor air temperature, and on the brand/model of heat pump you buy, and other factors (such as the length of the pipe between the outdoor unit and the indoor unit). You really should ask for specific advice on your home - but in general, a heat pump is extremely efficient.

Where I am, electricity is pretty cheap, but natural gas is tremendously cheaper per jule… so we can actually pay less by using the “inefficient” fuel for our home.

Have you actually looked into it, or are you just making assumptions?

I can tell you that my heat pump, in my house (yours will be different), in my climate, adds about $5 per week to my electricity bill. Is your gas bill less than $5 per week?

Or at least - that's how much it cost before I had solar panels. Now that I have solar... it uses about 20% of the power typically produced by the solar panels on my roof leaving plenty of excess power that we sell to the grid for about the same amount of money as what we spend buying power overnight. Since we installed solar our entire electricity bill is about $0 (and we use power for a bunch of other stuff, including to cook breakfast and dinner when the sun typically isn't shining*). We don't have a large solar system either - in fact, installing solar cost less than installing heat pumps.

(* our solar system comes with instruments and software to measure our consumption - and I can tell you that heating up a family meal with an electric cooktop uses more electricity than heating an entire house with heat pump... because the cooktop is creating heat, and the heat pump is simply moving heat)

I don't even know what Turbo 8 is

Maybe you should find out?

The idea behind Turbo is your server sends HTML/CSS to the client, and when the content needs to be updated... the server simply sends new HTML which Turbo will inject into the page. You can also annotate links so they fetch new content from the server instead of navigating to a new URL.

Your server side code can be written in whatever language you prefer... Turbo being a 37Signals project I assume they're using Ruby. It'd work fine with TypeScript too if that's your thing. Turbo just uses HTTP / JSON to talk to the server and doesn't have a server side component.

You can have client side code, but AFAIK there's pretty minimal interaction with Turbo - you might for example add an event listener that processes the HTML and as converts ISO date/times into Date.toLocaleString().

If you're writing complex client side code then you shouldn't be using Turbo at all.

This change doesn't affect, at all, the language used by users of Turbo. What's changed is the Turbo dev team themselves have chosen to write Turbo in vanilla javascript. And there are advantages to vanilla JS - it removes the compilation step from one language to another, for example.

Our business accounts are now with ANZ

Why?

The last referendum happened before I was born so, can’t speak much to that. I imagine it would be similar to the recent federal election

Probably you mean "before I was voting age" rather than "before I was born". The last referendum wasn't that long ago and it was about recognising indigenous Australians in the constitution. Australia voted No.

Anyway, it'll be closer to a plebiscite than an election - which we've done more recently (gay marriage, and Australia voted Yes). Turn up at one of your ocal schools/halls/etc, preferably with photo ID so they can find your name, select "yes" or "no" on a slip of paper, fold it up and put it in a tamper proof box. Then go home and watch the count at the end of the day.

You might be tempted to write a message (or draw a middle finger) on the slip of paper. Don't do that. It'll probably just result in your vote being discarded. And nobody who sees it will care - it'll just be set aside and ignored.

emergency GPS devices often fail under canopy cover.

GPS often fails, but a PLB should work. UHF works too (obviously short range, but useful when the PLB has told them roughly where you are but they can't see you yet).

The video industry is perfectly capable of good standards. SDI, for example, was invented in 1989 and it's still the best way to transmit video today. DisplayPort has advantages, but it's worse than SDI in most ways.

Chat GPT does know the answer to this particular question, and provides a very good answer. Why stop using something that works so well?

Nah - sometimes you just get a server that's overloaded and slow. Hit stop, then regenerate, it'll be fast.

But word is available.

Not for me. It's just too expensive for a task that I very rarely need and there are good free alternatives (like Wordpad - though that's not the one I use personally).

When I browse All on Beehaw I see a bunch of topics that I'm not even remotely interested in. I'm sure most of it is interesting to the members of those communities, but it's definitely not how I use Lemmy.

When I go to my "Subscribed" tab on lemmy.world, it's full of great content that isn't available on Beehaw.

On some unix systems (MacOS for example) you can't even do that with root.

You'd need reboot into firmware, change some flags on the boot partition, and then reboot back into the regular operating system.

To install a new version of the operating system on a Mac, it creates a new snapshot of your boot hard drive, updates the system there, then reboots instructing the firmware to reboot on the new snapshot. The firmware does it's a few checks of it's own as well, and if it fails to boot then it will reboot on the old snapshot (which is only removed after successfully booting on to the new one). That's not only a better/more reliable way to upgrade the operating system, it's also the only way it can be done because even the kernel doesn't have write access to those files.

The only drawback is you can't use your computer while the firmware checks/boots the updated system. But Apple seems to be laying the foundations for a new process where your updated operating system will boot alongside the old version (with hypervisors) in the background, be fully tested/etc, and then it should be able to switch over to the other operating system pretty much instantly. It would likely even replace the windows of running software with a screenshot, then instruct the software to save it's state and relaunch to restore functionality to the screenshot windows (they already do this if a Mac's battery runs really low - closing everything cleanly before power cuts out, then restore everything once you charge the battery).

When I last used a computer that had a single mode (about 20 years ago), I was in the habit of saving my work about every 15 seconds and manually backing up my documents (to an offline backup that wasn't physically connected to the computer) multiple times per day.

That's how often the computer crashed. I never had a virus in those days, it was always innocent and unintentional software bugs which would cause your computer to need a reboot regularly and occasionally delete all of your files.

Trust me, things are better now. I still save regularly and maintain backups, but I do it a lot less religiously than I used to, because I've lost my work just once in the last several years. It used to be far more often.

They don't literally mean no batteries. They just mean small batteries. The 50Wh battery in my (modern, efficient) laptop lasts about 18 hours for example.

You'd also have battery powered lighting.

The real challenge is heating and cooling. If you want to be able to keep your house a comfortable temperature, your food cool in the fridge, your food hot when you eat it... that's not easy to do with small batteries. But it can be done, e.g. with good insulation and by changing your habits a little (cook during the day, etc).

You can also, as it says in the article, use "non battery" storage. We already do that. For example lots of people keep hundreds of litres of hot water next to their house. That hot water can be used, for example, to keep warm overnight. You can also fill empty air space in your fridge with water - unlike air, which is instantly replaced with warm air every time you open the door, the cold water will stay in the fridge and help the fridge stay cold much much longer. Easily overnight.

Of course, you could also just use gas for all of that... but if one of your motivations is to avoid carbon emissions then that's off the table.

While zero incidents is naturally what they should be aiming for, it’s more of a goal for continuous improvement, like it is for air travel.

As far as I know, proper self driving (not "autopilot") AVs are pretty close to zero incidents if you only count crashes where they are at fault.

When another car runs a red light and smashes into the side of an autonomous vehicle at 40mph... it wasn't the AV's fault. Those crashes should not be counted and as far as I know they currently are in most stats.

What liability can/should we place on companies that provide autonomous drivers that will ultimately lead to safer travel for everyone?

I'm fine with exactly the same liability as human drivers have. Unlike humans, who are motivated to drive dangerously for fun or get home when they're high on drugs or continue driving through the night without sleep to avoid paying for a hotel, autonomous vehicles have zero motivation to take risks.

In the absence of that motivation, the simple fact that insurance against accidents is expensive is more than enough to encourage these companies to continue to invest in making their cars safer. Because the safer the cars, the lower their insurance premiums will be.

Globally insurance against car accidents is approaching half a trillion dollars per year and increasing over time. With money like that on the line, why not spend a lazy hundred billion dollars or so on better safety? It won't actually cost anything - it will save money.

nearly 1 year ago, ChatGPT was released to the world. It was the first time most people had any experience with a LLM. And everything you sent to the bot was given to a proprietary, for profit algorithm to further their corporate interests

You might want to pick another example, because OpenAI was originally founded as a non-profit organisation, and in order to avoid going bankrupt they became a "limited" profit organisation, which allowed them to source funding from more sources... but really allow them to ever become a big greedy tech company. All they're able to do is offer some potential return to the people who are giving them hundreds of billions of dollars with no guarantee they'll ever get it back.

Avoiding dangerous scenarios is the definition of driving safely.

This technology is still an area under active development and nobody (not even Elon!) is claiming this stuff is ready to replace a human in every possible scenario. Are you actually suggesting they should be testing the cars in scenarios that they know wouldn't be safe with the current technology? Why the fuck would they do that?

So no, I would absolutely not say they are “less prone to accidents than human drivers”.

OK... if you won't accept the company's reported data - who's data will you accept? Do you have a more reliable source that contradicts what the companies themselves have published?

to say nothing about the legality that will come up

No that's a non issue. When a human driver runs over a pedestrian/etc and causes a serious injury, if it's a civilised country and a sensible driver, then an insurance company will pay the bill. This happens about a million times a week worldwide and insurance is a well established system that people are, for the most part, happy with.

Autonomous vehicles are also covered by insurance. In fact it's another area where they're better than humans - because humans frequently fail to pay their insurance bill or even deliberately drive after they have been ordered by a judge not to drive (which obviously voids their insurance policy).

There have been debates over who will pay the insurance premium, but that seems pretty silly to me. Obviously the human who ordered the car to drive them somewhere will have to pay for all costs involved in the drive. And part of that will be insurance.

I don’t expect them to never fail, I just want to know when they fail and how badly.

"Over 6.1 million miles (21 months of driving) in Arizona, Waymo’s vehicles were involved in 47 collisions and near-misses, none of which resulted in injuries"

How many human drivers have done millions of miles of driving before they were allowed to drive unsupervised? Your assertion that these systems are untested is just wrong.

"These crashes included rear-enders, vehicle swipes, and even one incident when a Waymo vehicle was T-boned at an intersection by another car at nearly 40 mph. The company said that no one was seriously injured and “nearly all” of the collisions were the fault of the other driver."

According to insurance companies, human driven cars have 1.24 injuries per million miles travelled. So, if Waymo was "as good as a typical human driver" then there would have been several injuries. They had zero serious injuries.

The data (at least from reputable companies like Waymo) is absolutely available and in excruciating detail. Go look it up.

And a thing blocking the road isn’t exactly unforeseen either.

Tesla's system intentionally assumes "a thing blocking the road" is a sensor error.

They have said if they don't do that, about every hour or so you'd drive past a building and it would slam on the brakes and stop in the middle of the road for no reason (and then, probably, a car would crash into you from behind).

The good sensors used by companies like Waymo don't have that problem. They are very accurate.

Just because Tesla is worse than others doesn’t make it not self-driving.

The fact that Tesla requires a human driver to take over constantly makes it not self-driving.

so they can take over instantly.

Humans fundamentally can’t do that. If you sit a human in a self driving car doing nothing for hours, they won’t be able to react in a split section when it is needed.

The Human isn't supposed to be "doing nothing". The human is supposed to be driving the car. Autopilot is simply keeping the car in the correct lane for you, and also adjusting the speed to match the car ahead.

Tesla's system won't even stop at an intersection if you need to give way (for example, a stop sign. Or a red traffic light). There's plenty of stuff the human needs to be doing other than turning the steering wheel. If there is a vehicle stopped in the middle of the road Tesla's system will drive straight into it at full speed without even touching the brakes. That's not something that "might happen" it's something that will happen, and has happened, any time a stationary vehicle is parked on the road. It can detect the car ahead of you slowing down. It cannot detect a stopped vehicle.

They've promised to ship a more capable system "soon" for over a decade. I don't see any evidence that it's actually close to shipping though. The autonomous systems by other manufacturers are significantly more advanced. They shouldn't be compared to Tesla at all.

Is anybody actively testing them in bad weather conditions?

Yes. Tens of millions of testing and they pay especially close attention to any situations where the sensors could potentially fail. Waymo says their biggest challenge is mud (splashed up from other cars) covering the sensors. But the cars are able to detect this, and the mud can be wiped off. it's a solvable problem.

Unlike Tesla, most of the other manufacturers consider this a research project and are focusing all of their efforts on making the technology better/safer/etc. They're not making empty promises and they're being cautious.

On top of the millions of miles of actual testing, they also record all the sensor data for those miles and use it to run updated versions of the algorithm in exactly the same scenario. So the millions of miles have, in fact, been driven thousands and thousands of times over for each iteration of their software.