How is this sustainable as the gap between self generated and stored energy and the grid price continues to diverge?
If present trends hold it won't be long before a few years worth of energy bills even in Europe finance a full off grid deployment. There doesn't seem to be much room to cut on the energy companies pricing which remains variable and pointlessly complicated vs "I bought this off grid system and now I never think about energy anymore".
Just people in high density housing, people in a lease, and those who can't afford the up front cost will constitute the majority of residential grid energy usage and purchasing?
Other than southern Spain, France, Italy and Greece, you're not going to run off-grid anywhere in Europe. Too little sun in the winter for heating needs. Unless you're considering small-scale wind power installations, but I cannot imagine what costs those could incur in installation alone.
Up in Orkney on vacation, the pretty constant wind all year (according to relatives) with a little solar, battery storage and heat pumps, I reckon off-grid might be possible. Add in starlink for internet and I might just stay here.
Not sure of the cost (need to do the research) but all of the above are getting cheaper. A small wind turbine can’t be that costly, surely.
Wind turbines in my research are pretty terrible unless run at scale (massive). YMMV but when I last looked into it, small turbines tended to be 1) noise polluters, 2) not very large power generators and 3) poor build quality.
The dilemma with wind turbines is that the small ones tend to be inefficient (and still much more expensive than solar), and large ones require huge up-front investments.
I'd love to be proven wrong about this though, if anybody has links to affordable wind turbines / generators, I'd be interested.
When I’ve looked into this before for a client in Scotland, it seems the smallest size that made sense in terms of the factors other commenters have mentioned was about £50,000 to install. Also it requires planning permission which is much harder to get for a wind turbine than for solar PV which you can often install without getting explicit permission under ‘permitted development’ rules.
You can run a generator to charge batteries or provide additional capacity when needed.
It would be ideal to have full coverage with "renewables" (isn't oil and gas a renewable just on a longer timeline?) but don't let perfect be the enemy of good if you want to move off-grid.
I do lack familiarity with the European environment, but between geothermal, wind, hydro and natural gas backup, is it really feasible as it is in places where solar gives 0.01 USD kWh prices?
That vicious cycle is a problem ever more expensive electrical grids will need to contend with over the next couple of decades.
The variable per Kwh costs are historically generally pretty low relative to the fixed capex and opex (eg. maintenance, idle runtime) costs.
Mostly this has been made palatable for residential use by hiding these fixed costs in a higher per-Kwh rate. This works great as long as consumption is high and growing. If consumption trends reverse, then self-generation becomes a real possibility for the heavy consumers leaving fewer total Kwh to spread the fixed costs over.
Left unimpeded this leaves the poorest with very high energy bills when everybody else has shifted to a private, cheaper, micro-grid.
Self-consumption can be envisaged, particularly for buildings with air-conditioning systems. In this way, you pay for part of the air-conditioning consumption with solar energy when you use it most during summer.
But operating completely disconnected from the grid, especially in winter, is extremely difficult. Luminosity is much weaker, the sky more overcast and the number of hours of sunlight reduced.
Wild Ass Guess: Everyone OpenAI is negotiating with is likely considering how much they can gain from potential future revenue. This typically leads them to demand high rates.
However, this move flips the question: instead of asking how much they can make, they must consider what happens if their competitors partner with OpenAI. The concern then shifts to what competitors can achieve in the market that could threaten not just their economic interests but potentially their entire business model and worldview.
Suddenly, the desire to be the one partnering with OpenAI isn't just about accessing a lucrative revenue stream; it becomes a strategic imperative to mitigate risks and maintain competitive parity.
I understand it perfectly and loathe it, not for the reasons people typically do, but because what it pretends to be able to do it cannot, and actually does the opposite of.
> Unlike every other attempt at electronic cash that came before it, Bitcoin also doesn't need the approval of any person, police force, legislative body, military, or government. I'd challenge people who hold negative views on Bitcoin to name some other systems for which this holds true.
This isn't actually true, BTC requires a certain amount of subsidy every ten minutes from the global economy. If that subsidy is not forthcoming it ceases to function. That subsidy is constantly increasing in terms of purchasing power.
Further, the regulatory authorities of the world have complete power over the transactions that take place on the ledger, and pretty much full visibility into and out of the ledger when it comes to their controlled fiat currencies.
Neither of the above hold true for many other cryptocurrencies, but I'm not interested in shilling for them, because the entire cryptosphere as a whole is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, largely because of attempts to force the above status quo from BTC onto the remainder, which given the multitude thereof, and the ability for them to endlessly replicate and spawn, is basically doomed to failure.
Note: I am well aware that the popular opinion of BTC is not aware of much of the above, but I didn't say "people believe x" I just said "x".
"DAMN! I didn't trip over myself fast enough to make sure this personality was immediately demonetised on every internet social media platform after they were accused of a crime on a TV channel!"
The plausibility factor is rather high (Occam's Razor) - he has millions in the bank and his little believing cult - he will survive this if he is innocent.
It's not clear whether you're missing the point on purpose or not, so I'll just come right out and say it; his guilt for any crimes of which he is accused is entirely unrelated to how sensible the proposition is that entities ought to be able to completely shut down people on every social media platform by accusing them of something and then immediately demanding that they be demonetized by these platforms.
I do a version of this that doesn't require restore at all, I have three separate physical systems that all share a VPN across the world, and wherever I am at any given time zfs snapshots are syncing across that VPN to those three physical systems depending on which one is the primary I'm using at any given point in time. They also use the VPN layer to check if they have peer status on a faster local network like the wifi or LAN and use that instead for the snapshot transfers if so.
If for any reason any one of these systems either is destroyed or is no longer master, picking up from where I left off is as simple as picking another system up and marking it "master". No restore process, no changes, nothing at all, and it picks up from exactly where I left off when I was working on the other system. Means I can just grab my EDC laptop and stuff it in a bag not knowing how long I'll be out or where I'll be going and also know that it will be completely up to date with my datasets, or I can grab my desktop replacement laptop and its enormous external disk if I am going to be on a different continent for an extended period of time and want full geographic dataset locality. At no point in time does any of the above require the manual running of any process or replication or anything like that.
Reprovision and restore would take a whole lot longer than this, wouldn't give the abilities that it provides, and the above is only possible because of zfs snapshot replication.
I also use a USB C external SSD that is a member of a ZFS mirror and a md raid group that is bootable, so even if my EDC laptop were to spontaneously combust, I could immediately get up and running on any similar laptop with roughly comparable hardware simply by putting that SSD in and booting from it, then adding the SSD on the laptop to the zfs mirror / md raid group.
I use sanoid to do basically the same thing as this, and was interested in giving it a shot to see if it was more hands off but it's definitely a more complex setup to begin with, given you have to setup your own SSL certs etc, not sure why they wouldn't just use SSH transport for this like everything else.
Because it's nonsense and if you wanted to actually lay out the criteria for this, it would be obvious. You'd have to start with "Who defines what BTC is" and the answer would be "one guy with commit access to the bitcoin core repo" and all pretense of "decentralization" disappears in a puff of vapour.
If "one guy with commit access to the bitcoin core repo" pushed a change that wasn't in the interest of miners and heavily invested groups, why would they install it?
Foundry + AntPool alone make more than 51.7% of the hashrate. Next are F2Pool, ViaBTC and Binance with about 10% each.
So this "decentralization" requires what, the agreement of 2-5 parties.
Realistically, if the pools wanted, BTC core could be replaced because the software is mature and the big pools can trivially hire somebody to work on it if they had a need to.
The big exchanges probably also have some say.
But guess who doesn't? Anyone else. People running their "full node", or just random joes using the system don't really have a vote.
It's a very much top-down system with a few fat cats sitting on the top, and none of them were even elected, and quite a few are effectively anonymous.
Because if they're not using the same node software as the exchanges, they can't trade with other people trading the BTC instrument. The exchanges allocated the BTC ticker to "whatever the bitcoin core node software says it is" and that is defined by the one guy who has commit access to the bitcoin core repo.
Wrong, because even if the exchanges pick a chain that is completely ridiculous in terms of rules, say they permanently limit the tx throughput for the entire world to 3, or something absurd like this, and the exchanges and users who can see how absurd this is sensibly opt out of mining or transacting on that chain, the profit for defecting is great, because mining is a zero sum game.
As long as some suckers are trading actually liquid assets for the instruments on the sabotaged chain, it is economically rational for the miners to mindlessly rubberstamp the rules of the chain.
Former Bitcoin Cash developer Amaury decided he wanted a subsidy to himself. He forked, forming his own extremely minority coin, Bitcoin ABC (now eCash) which pays him 8% of everything mined. Despite being very conclusively rejected, and the chain having undergone attacks, eCash still retains some value, and Amaury still gets to pocket a percentage of everything that gets mined.
The underlying code for that is the same as for BTC. So at any time, if the cabal thought cratering BTC would be worthwhile if they got to pocket enough of what remained, they could do it with complete impunity. All it'd take is the agreement of a very few people and a viable exit plan.
That's an interesting thing I didn't realize until not very long ago. If setting fire to 99% of the ecosystem allows you to pocket a fraction of the 1% that remains, and that works out well enough to not have to work again -- that's a very favorable tradeoff for a lot of people.
Right, this and BTC both, although Amaury's proposal was less insultingly stupid than the proposal that split BTC (I require an 8% of the coinbase donation to continue optimising this chain vs I require this chain be completely dysfunctional and useless, and force the intermediaries back into it for it to be of any utility at all, when the entire original purpose of the ledger was to disintermediate them)
Even so, an A100 is not actually faster than an RTX 4090, right? So basically the reason you would want to use something like this instead is because you need the VRAM?
Yes, 0x008 makes a valid point regarding this topic. Data center GPUs and RTX Series use different technologies and optimizations for different purposes.
Our intention is not to discourage anyone from purchasing their own GPUs. We offer our GPU cloud services as an alternative for those who may not have the resources or prefer the convenience and flexibility of renting GPUs on-demand. We apologize if the discussion took a different direction, and we appreciate your understanding.
https://lambdalabs.com/gpu-benchmarks for those who are curious, ends up being quite the difference no matter which way you slice it, up to 60% better. Of course, this is probably due to the increased interconnect bandwidth and memory rather than raw compute horsepower, but for the workloads in question that's relevant.
If present trends hold it won't be long before a few years worth of energy bills even in Europe finance a full off grid deployment. There doesn't seem to be much room to cut on the energy companies pricing which remains variable and pointlessly complicated vs "I bought this off grid system and now I never think about energy anymore".
Just people in high density housing, people in a lease, and those who can't afford the up front cost will constitute the majority of residential grid energy usage and purchasing?