You can use a number as a unique identifier for each person that everybody stores. You can also use a number as a secret code to authenticate yourself.
But you can’t use the same number for both purposes.
The idea is to cast much larger pieces than before. Traditionally it might have been dozens of pieces. Tesla is currently doing the underbody in only three pieces, and they were trying to cast it as a single piece.
Does that warrant a new word? I don’t know. But there is an innovation here in how it is manufactured.
It's my understanding this a way to cut manufacturing costs. One wonders what impact it has on repair costs, though. Tesla isn't going to replace the entire underbody whether it's a single piece or three pieces, are they? So how easy are these pieces to repair?
I’ve always assumed the energy cost to pump the water would make it cost prohibitive, but I wonder how it compares to rerouting ships or moving containers over land.
You can cross fill and use separate storage - their new locks already use this - but my understanding (possibly wrong) was old locks may not have been using all possible options - it’s a cost / benefit trade off
- "The hydraulic cylinders enable the water used by the locks to be pumped back. Up to 48,000 cubic metres of water are displaced in a single lockage operation. In periods of low discharge on the Meuse, the screws can pump back the water lost due to the passage of a ship through the lock to the upper canal reach."
In Belgium on the Albert Canal (a big canal for Belgium but nothing compared to Panama Canal) they started installing pomps 15 years ago for the exact same reason.
Ok, I’m no civil engineer, but couldn’t you design a siphon system that would only require opening and closing valves to capture the water without any pumping?
Siphons only really "work" if the final position of the water is lower than the starting position. Siphon effect allows the water to pass through an intermediate higher elevation without continuous external pumping energy, but on average the water must still be going downhill to utilize the siphon effect.
Omg, I wasn’t thinking. The surface of the target liquid needs to be lower than the source. I was thinking of a pipe coming in lower than the lake, but that wouldn’t work.
If it makes you feel better I have a degree in chemical engineering, and a few months ago made the exact same mistake as you for an automatic watering system where I put a reservoir of water in the cabinet below a plant and wondered why water was traveling from the planter into the reservoir and overflowing and spilling all over the cabinet and floor.
Some days we're just dumb, even if most days we're pretty smart.
Why is that? Britain is covered with a preindustrial canal network with thousands of locks which use nothing but channels doors and gravity. Literally made of wood and operated by hand.
Raising water on the low side to the level on the high side simply requires joining the two sides together.
If sea level is their high side, I don't understand why they can't use this supply forever.
I think the thing you are missing is that raising the low side means that the next boat to use the lock going up has to drain the high water into the low canal. The Panama Canal has system to conserve that water but some water still moves down the locks both for raising and lowering.
The British locks depend on a source of water at the top of the canal. I watched a video recently about Canal Trust rebuilding lock reservoir. The water levels definitely can limit if locks and canals are usable.
The Panama Canal has a reservoir at the top, Gatan Lake, but the water is low. Sea level is never the high side, it is always the low side.
Some lock flights have pumps to keep the ponds at the top full of water because they are near the highest point in the area so they can't refill naturally fast enough or simply to avoid depleting the upstream water source. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caen_Hill_Locks
You'd have to deal with the Chagres (assuming the current drought ends) as well.
The original excavation was done mostly dry and massive by any standards: 27kt of dynamite were used.
I'm also not a digger, but 26 meters of dredging over a 13km distance sounds crazy expensive. You would have to also widen the valley to prevent landslides into the canal.
Siphoning only works if the destination is lower than the source, otherwise you're looking at free energy, which would definitely be a win for everyone :D
Suez is (was? lets ignore geopolitics instead of physics for now) so successful because it's lock free (ha! tech joke on HN, I'm rocking this :D). The Panama canal was made by creating a massive artificial lake above "sea level" rather than digging a path down to sea level through mountains. Historically this worked, but alas enough corporations profit enough by offloading the costs of their industries onto everyone else as a form of socialism we call subsidized global warming.
The government didn't call it Star Wars, they called it SDI. Some lobbyists used that term and they were the ones that Lucasfilm tried to sue.
The lawsuit was dismissed, btw.
> On November 26, 1985, the suit was dismissed by Judge Gerhard Gesell of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, on the grounds that the lobbyists' use of the mark in a noncommercial and non-trade context fell outside the jurisdiction of trademark law. [1]
GP never said the government named it that. Besides which, "Star Wars" was not a term used only by lobbyists, even if they coined it. It's a very common name for that program among the general public.
Case in Point: I really like Costco, but if I ever cancel my membership then it is because of how they seem to reshuffle significant parts of the store every few weeks.
I don't know if they think I will buy more if I run around for fifteen minutes looking for something, but man it's annoying.
They probably think of it as 'increasing engagement'. To me it's just wasting my time.
> They probably think of it as 'increasing engagement'. To me it's just wasting my time.
Here you've stated the fundamental truth about the so-called attention economy. The core tenet of it, is that money is made on friction. Attention is a finite resource everyone prefers to conserve for their own needs, therefore it needs to be stolen, so it can be redirected to ads, upsells, and other form of behavior manipulation.
That's why supermarkets are reshuffling stores so frequently. That's why so many websites are full of dark patterns and general annoyances. That's why ergonomics all but disappeared from software. Their inefficiency - wasting your limited lifespan in countless tiny ways - is how they make money.
That might be for other reasons, because according to a study I've seen, Costco basically runs their stores "at cost" and wants to just make money off of the memberships
Do you mean the app or the physical store? Maybe I'm a luddite for going to the physical store but I go to 4 different Costcos in the Bay area with some frequency and a couple others in SOCAL and I find their interstore layouts different but their intra-store layouts extremely consistent over years. One in San Diego I can confidently say is consistent over a decade.
I barely use the app except for the card and an occasional lookup for something not available in store.
Judging by the price tag of 9.1 Ksh/kWh listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Kenya (and looking up historical exchange rates because of the date of the link and their persistent inflation), that's about 0.085-0.090 USD/kWh.
iirc it works well in Kenya because the thermal gradient is really steep and the heat is right near the surface. I don't think that's common around the world. Local expenses (labor, etc...) are also cheaper than in many parts of the world.
Geothermal is however one of the electricity sources with the fewest negative externalities so definitely should be pursued where possible.
Touring the geothermal at Hell's Gate Park in Kenya is wild. If you've seen The Lion King, it's the inspiration for "the shadowy place over there" where the hyenas live.
Extract enough heat from Earth and Earth loses its magnetic field and then its atmosphere and oceans (from the effects of the solar wind) which sounds like a negative externality to me.
While it's true we would die first, I bet we'd transition to other power sources even earlier. If we ever get fusion working reliably, that will probably be more convenient than geothermal, and at that point the geothermal plants will start slowly going defunct with no replacements.
If you haven't done a calculation incorporating an estimate of the heat content of the Earth's interior, then you cannot know whether humanity will be dead by then.
Assuming just the inner core, using the lower bound for its temperature, specific heat capacity of iron, 20 TW being extracted, ignoring the extra power inputs in the form of radioisotope decay, crystallisation, tidal heating, I get 800 million years, which is close to when photosynthesis stops because of geological processes locking all the carbon away (trees stop working at about 600 million years, not sure about plants in general).
In theory the cost of the whole thing blowing up should offset this investment costs but Don't Look Up (2021) convincing the folk about potential natural disasters.
This is more like insurance. If you move to the mountains, you have to pay for special fire insurance because mountains have forest fires.
The U.S. is an extremely productive economy with at least one enormous cyclical natural catastrophe attached to it. If this natural catastrophe is preventable, and the costs of prevention are outweighed by the costs of losing the US economy, then it's probably worth doing.
I just assumed that it was one of those things that isn't economically or technically feasible.
Don't mistake price of production and selling price.
When it takes times to construct additional production, you can sell the electricity at very high cost but have a low production cost.
You can even do this when you don’t know the exact interval by using probabilities. The Allies used this method to estimate German tank production in World War II by analyzing the serial numbers of captured or destroyed tanks.
I’m a lawyer and using sequential IDs in a fraud case right now, to determine the number of victims.
Unfortunately, so far, I only have the IDs of two victims, and those are from just within about a month, whereas the fraud has likely been going on for several years. Just simply extrapolating that growth rate isn’t going to be very accurate.
Also, I suspect that the perpetrators did not start at ID 1.
It would be significantly above the average unless the company is ridiculously top-heavy or has shockingly little variation in salary. Or if the "salary" for the CEO ignores certain compensation (eg: paid a salary of $1 + stock options).
Sure thing. I could have worded it better, but I was trying to say that it would be much more skewed if the two samples were, say, CEO and the CFO, or two janitors.
Even with n=1 you can get something useful. IIRC "on average" if you have ID x than the best population estimation is 2*x. Of course the error margin is immense, but it's still better than nothing.
If I ask it what color an orange it and it says blue, that would be wrong.
If you ask it a question and it makes up a completely fabricated story, like for example the case files in that recent legal case [1], then saying it was “wrong” doesn’t really seem to capture it.
Calling it a hallucination is a great analogy, because the model made up a plausible sounding, but completely fabricated story. It saw things that were never real.
Fair enough and thanks. I felt hallucination was too forgiving a term but I can see how others would rank them the other way around and suppose it works.
The more accurate term I’ve seen floating around is “confabulation”. It’s also a human phenomenon, but it doesn’t bring all the baggage of hallucinations.
You can use a number as a unique identifier for each person that everybody stores. You can also use a number as a secret code to authenticate yourself.
But you can’t use the same number for both purposes.
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