I was a bit frustrated with my performance in an online game (Battle royale genre) so I just messaged the once EU/NA #1 leaderboard player if he would do some coaching... Did it for one year, once a week, it was such a great experience. He is such a great individual and I took a lot of the mindset he taught me into my professional life
Are power outages even a thing? My PC at home (germany) is always on, so I'd notice, and I'm involved with energy at our data center (Frankfurt, Germany) and home and external data center had no outage for the last 20 years, at a minimum.
Hetzner's hardware is custom built by the manufacturers, for example motherboards by asrock, they even get their own mainboard microcode from asrock. SSDs come from Micron, they have their own chassis etc.
They have a _huge_ testing lab with insane amounts of testing equipment. I never had any problems with their hardware at all. Networking was not that good years ago but is stellar now.
Some is custom built, some (in their server auction) are just bare consumer-grade ATX motherboards in compact shelves.
We ran two dedicated servers at Hetzner for about three years and had two disk failures. These, too, were consumer-grade Seagate disks, and both of them had been in use by prior customers. All in all it was not a bother and we definitely got our money's worth.
How is messaging social media? WhatsApp is basically a more acessible IRC with only one server, images, audo and file transfer. But that's not social media.
Depends on how narrow a definition of 'social media'. I presume with messaging apps you have social circles and you share content whether your own or of others.
I do agree that 'social media' has been used to describe large scale public social media platforms specifically by the reporters/media.
Whatsapp is the best example of how it is social media specifically because the social graph and influences function the same way - although I’m not sure how you all are willing to define it but we can at least acknowledge the overlapping functions - the group chats Im in receive forwarded messages that can contain poor sources, Whatsapp is pretty unique in that it doesnt tell you who it was forwarded from or who created the message originally. I’m in large 256 person group chats, and ideas/news/controversies/coordination spreads like wildfire!
Telegram is much better since people dont see your phone number if you don't want (I dont use telegram for its optional encryption feature), the group chats can be way larger and the source of forwarded messages can be seen and accessed
One important thing to notice is that uranium is a finite non-renewable resource. The Red Book says there are about 3.3 million tons that are extractable for a price of 130 USD/ton. In 2017 the total uranium production was 60.000 tons. Thats about 55 years of uranium left at the current production rate. The Red Book assumes there are another 2.1 million tons likely to exist from geological data, but not found yet and another 4.8 million tons assumed to exist but yet to be discovered.
Now imagine that nuclear power production would be greatly increased. How many years of uranium supply would we have left?
We have basically unlimited uranium. There’s no risk of shortage. The average cubic meter of crust has more breedable fuel energy in it than a cubic meter of coal.
Fission is effectively as unlimited as renewable energy is, about a billion years’ worth of crust. Even if we stick with typical U235 reactors, sufficient uranium ore exists for hundreds of years, although no one will bother to formally “prove” the reserves for a constraint 100 years in the future.
What’s limited is the atmosphere’s capacity for CO2. Not much else matters in the mid/near-term, except perhaps for ensuring we have enough energy for civilization to function.
There is, however, no reason that fission power need be restricted to uranium as a fuel source. Use of breeder reactors would allow power consumption at our current levels longer than the sun is likely to exist.
Even if fission power is not the long-term solution, it is the desperately needed current solution. Running out of power would definitely kill us slowly. Current rates of CO2 production will kill us quite quickly.
This is where fast reactors can help. Fast reactors can be fueled with reprocessed waste from thermal-neutron reactors. This produces many times the energy for the same amount of fuel. We can meet the US's energy needs for well over 100 years with the nuclear waste that we've already stockpiled, and the ultimate waste products have a half life measured in decades and not millennia.
> One important thing to notice is that uranium is a finite non-renewable resource.
One important thing to notice is that place on earth to put wind turbines and solar panels is limited. Now imagine that electricity needs greatly increased ...
We could provide for all the needs of our current power consumption by use of a single very large solar array in central africa or the middle east. The problem is no the availability of wind and solar- those can provide a monumental amount of energy. The problem is that energy and power are not the same thing. We need to be able to store energy widely throughout the grid and make massive transmission system improvements to facilitate the movement of energy from place to place.
Both of these are not fundamental problems, only financial / political ones. If we decided tomorrow that we really wanted these things we could have them.
They are though - we know how to build high capacity transmission, we know how to build complex dispatch control systems, we know how to build energy storage. All we need is the money and factories and brains and hands to build a lot more of them. All that requires is powerful entities to decide it's important - i.e. politics.
Politics is not powerful entities. Do you mean politicians, or governments?
Either way this is a category error. Tesla needs those things and used venture capital. A correct thought would be: governments are one way to do this.
That place is much larger than you'll ever need at the very least in this century (maybe in a thousand years we'll be in trouble, but I imagine that in that era, we'll have completely different issues anyway).
From what I've read[1] it looks like we should be able to use nuclear fission for a significant amount of time (>1000 years). This would involve using uranium and thorium as well as breeder reactors.
> Uranium-235 is a finite non-renewable resource.[1][3]
> As of 2017, identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg were 6.14 million tons (compared to 5.72 million tons in 2015). At the rate of consumption in 2017, these reserves are sufficient for slightly over 130 years of supply. The identified reserves as of 2017 recoverable at US$260/kg are 7.99 million tons (compared to 7.64 million tons in 2015).[9]
They mention multiple (more or less optimistic) scenarios in respect to finiteness of U235, plus, they talk about the experiences using fast breeders and their current state with respect to market needs.
They calculate 130 years of supply at current consumption rates. Nuclear power supplies something like 5% of the global primary energy, so scaling this to 100% would deplete the estimated reserves in a few years.
Breeders would help, but have so far not been very successful. For example, the German Thorium breeder THTR-300 is considered one of the greatest technological failures in postwar history.
Scaling nuclear power supplies to 100% of global primary energy would change the economics of extraction, do you claim you can predict these things? BTW, scaling it to 100 % is not necessary.
AFAIK, THTR-300 is only one of the different breeder models, CEFR from China <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Experimental_Fast_Reacto...> seems to be working, as a new model <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600> is being built since 2020, sure, recycling uranium is not needed at the moment, so you could argue this is not demonstrating the interest of breeding though it seems to be working to a certain extent.
I think you are missing the important part. Lowballing it, a typical 50 year old reactor produces about 10^7 megawatthours or 10^6$ in power per kilo of uranium. And that actually leaves most of the fissile unused. So... How much uranium can be extracted at a reasonable fuel price like 10% of the end user price? i.e. about 10^5$ per kilo?
Its silly to consider availability at 0.03% of the end product price.
Those links suggest that peak uranium is driven by lack of demand, and not lack of supply, or renewability (including suggestions that we could create more uranium for as long as the sun lives)
And that'll make Europe dependent on Russia. Doesn't sound much of a problem to me but down here, Putin is seen as a somewhat bad person. So, Europe will have to bow to him to have not too expensive gas, I'll have a lot of fun hearing our politicians telling that, poor them, they have to negotiate with him :-)
On the other hand, making Europe economically dependent on Russia lowers the likelihood of war between them and fosters cooperation in other areas. Germany doesn't buy the US narrative that Russia should be treated with hostility at all costs.
> On the other hand, making Europe economically dependent on Russia lowers the likelihood of war between them
No, it doesn't.
Attempting to break economic dependence, or to preempt such attempts in the anticipated future, is at least as common a cause of war as geopolitical competition between powers that aren’t in a dependency relationship.
The CDU has a wing that still depends on old coal-burners for their jobs. Shutting down nuclear was their idea of keeping those folks “working” for longer while solar and (especially) wind were spooled up.
To that end, it’s looking better now that the Greens are in the ruling coalition.
The directive says that the motor (when preheated) may not exceed a temperature rise of 25°C over a certain period of time, nothing else. I sure don't understand why all people talk about 250W. Its a myth.
My pedelec (bosch perfomance line CX motor) definitely peaks at over 1kW of power (plus my power), so for example uphill I have a combined power output of around 1500 W.
> pedal cycles with pedal assistance which are equipped with an auxiliary electric motor having a maximum continuous rated power of less than or equal to 250 W, where the output of the motor is cut off when the cyclist stops pedalling and is otherwise progressively reduced and finally cut off before the vehicle speed reaches 25 km/h; (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...)
The key is continuous rated power, which is measured with the temperature-controlled method over 30 minutes (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:42...), and thus it can have a way higher peak-power, and manufacturers have a lot of leeway massaging the system design to formally keep in that limit. So both "there is a 250W limit" and "my bike gives out way more" can be true.
Quite the contrary, at least with austrian police. My pedelec (e-bike, worth around 4.000 €) got stolen at 3am a while ago and it had a GPS tracker.
I called the equivalent of 911 and briefly explained. The said: "wait, we pick you up", and in the same moment I hear sirens a few streets later heading in my direction. What followed was out of a movie. We raced with emergency lights to the current location, constantly updading other units on the current position. We must have missed the thief only by seconds and found construction containers where the signal was coming from. The police said they would call the construction companys 24h contact and open the containers with them, but I could go home for now.
One hour later the GPS tracker said the bike was moving again. I called again and the operator of emergency services said "didn't you call before?" and they picked me up again. When we arrived at the - now outdoor - location of the bike, there were 5 police cars and 15 police around it, but no thief, it was locked to a regular bike stand. They called in the equivalent of SWAT to open the lock and I got my bike back. They took fingerprints of the lock and luckily the thief stopped at an residential address for a minute or two, so we figured that might be the home address. Investigation is ongoing.
I could more or less prove that I was the owner by having the dealers invoice, serial number and pictures on my phone btw.
I was really shocked by a friend in Los Angeles that was mugged at gun point from their car and the police did essentially nothing.
The audience here on Hacker News has a pretty realistic idea of how quickly you can track down the location of people using a set of credit cards that are known-- not to mention two phones which were also stolen and shockingly not powered down. I am not saying that the process is infallible, but there are companies I have worked for where you could have given the known information (phones, credit cards) and they could have tracked down the location in real time with a 70-80% certainty.
Catching car jackers with a 70% certainty (or 33% even) will shut down a car jacking ring pretty quick. This sort of crime is exploding in Los Angeles this year.
That the police don't try as hard to track a person down as a mobile ad server would, makes me wonder about the incentives to curb crime.
The only solution I have found for preventing thefts from my construction sites in St. Louis is to pay a stipend to local economically disadvantaged people to live at the site, and provide firearms for the purpose of discouraging thieves. At the request of the St. Louis city police, we stopped reporting incidents of attempted theft.
The DA in my area recently stopped attending murder trials. This is what the powers that be want. When the prosecutor does not show up in court, the case cannot proceed.
Yes, there is a substantial portion of the population that believes it is inhumane for the police to arrest a black man if he does not really feel like being arrested.
A modern successor to gopher, with some extra features to make it more useful in the modern day.
Gopher was a competitor to the early web. It had a distinction between contentful pages and link pages, so it was less flexible than the HTML based web. I'm pretty sure this is one of the things Gemini fixes
Gemini is because some people are sick of the modern web.
In the (idealised) olden days, the web was a place people posted content. An amateur could make a geocities that showed people their interests, an academic could have a collection of pages that acted as notes for their lectures, or a company could advertise the products that they sold.
In the (distopianised) modern days, the web is a giant network of interlinked computer programs, none of which can be trusted, but most of which offer at least some attractive distraction, whose primary purpose is to develop a small number of competing databases about you to maximise the amount of money that can be extracted from you while minimising the amount of value that can be returned to you. The providers of the computer programs take particular steps which should cause rational people to distrust them (e.g. hiding the button that says "Save my choices" to discourage you from doing what you want and what they are obliged to permit you to do), but healthy people can only tolerate so much distrust in their day-to-day life that they become exhausted.
Gemini starts with extensions to Gopher to develop something a little bit more like the first one. It acts as something like a safe space. It is based on a similar sort of principle to the black-and-white mode on a lot of modern phones, to discourage you from overusing it by making it less attractive. Although Gemini does support form submissions and CGI, the primary form of interaction as far as I know is to have multiple gemlogs.
(I tried using Gemini last year when it was mentioned in this place. But the content I want - e.g. programming language API documentation - is not on Gemini, and I think the Hacker News proxy is read-only, so I began to forget about it. I think Gemini is perhaps a little bit too far over.)
> the web is a giant network of interlinked computer programs, none of which can be trusted
Agreed, but Gemini does address the problem of surveillance.
All metadata are still leaked: IP addresses, DNS queries, FQDNs in the TLS session opening. Also timing attacks.
Furthermore, there's nothing that Gemini can do to prevent unofficial extensions, e.g. browsers detecting and loading HTML/CSS/javascript found on a Gemini page.
> All metadata are still leaked: IP addresses, DNS queries, FQDNs in the TLS session opening. Also timing attacks.
That's the problem with the current iteration of the internet. If you run a Gemini-based hidden service, they go away.
> Furthermore, there's nothing that Gemini can do to prevent unofficial extensions, e.g. browsers detecting and loading HTML/CSS/javascript found on a Gemini page.
That's the problem for the client to take care of. Those clients that aren't built with web technologies are unlikely to be subject to accidental web technology execution.
