Right, OP writes up crypto as being this terrible disease with no meaning. But outside of crypto there aren't many jobs that have real meaning either. I worked for the UN at one point, and that was actually one of the worse.
At the end of the day you are always just working to make someone else rich or to give them the promotion they want. If you get rich yourself along the way, take that as a win.
I respectfully disagree. Even if you told me that you felt like working at the UN was a waste of time, I’d still tell you that at least you contributed to a historically unique global institution which at least strives to bring people across the world together.
I had a couple of netbooks, and they weren't very useful other than as basic devices to check email or SSH. The screen was too small, the aspect ratio and resolution was weird, they keyboard was too small, they were severely under powered - in that they would struggle to play a YouTube video.
I had a couple in the late 00s to avoid having to lug around my 15" MacBook Pro when on-call. For that they worked great, but other than that I avoided it.
Later I got the 11" MacBook Air, and that had many of the same issues (especially weird screen size). It also wasn't that small, by today's standards, as it had a massive bezzle.
Nowadays I have to check if my 13" MacBook Pro is in my bag, as it's small and light enough not to notice. However I'd love a MacBook Air that is same aspect ratio as the 13" just smaller width and depth (No Apple, it doesn't need to be thinner), maybe with a 60% keyboard so typing isn't weird.
Yeah. I have Pro MacBook models but even with better magnetic keyboards for iPads, I think MacBook Airs are pretty competitive for travel. I used to try to use downsized travel laptops when I was traveling a lot but I'm not sure it makes sense any longer even if there were good options available--which there mostly aren't.
The screen and keyboard of your average netbook were too small for fully grown adults, but that exact same diminutive size was and is perfect for kids.
For nearly a decade I've been using Google Photos with a love-hate relationship. I've tried a few alternative photo apps, even tried building one myself as a side side side side project, but nothing really felt like it could replace how I use Google Photos (haven't tried in the past couple of years mind).
I have a daughter, and my family lives in another country, so I want to be able to share photos with them. These are the feaures I need:
- Sharing albums with people (read only). It sounds pretty simply, but even Google fucked it up somehow. I added family members by their Google account to the album, and somehow later I saw someone I didn't know was part of the album. Apparently adding people gives (or did?) them permission to share the album with other people which is weird. I want to be able to control exactly who sees the photos, and not allow them to share or download them with others. On the topic of features, I should note that zero of the other social features (comments / reactions) have ever been used.
- Shared album with my spouse (write). I take photos of the kid, she takes photos of the kid. We want to be able to both add our photos to the shared album.
- Automatic albums or grouping by faces. Being able to quickly see all the photos of our kid is really great, especially if it works with the other sharing features. On Google you could setup Live Albums that did this... (automatic add and share between multiple people) but I can't see the option anymore on Android. I feel it could be a bit simpler though, just tagging a specific face, so that all photos should be shared within my Google One Family.
- The way we use it is we have a shared album between us or all the photos, and then a curared album shared with family members of the best photos.
Other than that I just use it as a place to dump photos (automatically backed up from my phone) and search if needed. Ironically the search is not very good, but usually I can remember when the photo I need was taken roughly so can scroll through the timeline. In total my spouse and I have ~200GB of media on Google Photos, some of it is backed up elsewhere.
What about automatic background sync without ever having to open the app on mobile? Does that work or do you have to open the app regularly for it to sync properly?
This doesn't work properly on Nextcloud (it sometimes gets out of sync and then I'm screwed because I have to reset the app on my family member's phone and have them resync for hours).
From 2017-2023 I had Thinkpads and some Acer which was well supported by Linux and sleep was the worse part. On numerous occasions across different devices I'd put the laptop to sleep, put it in my bag, and pull it out in a coffee shop to find it was on and now the battery is down to 50%. Why is sleep so hard?
Ever since Microsoft added "modern standby" it's not a problem anymore. Chips became power-efficient enough that we can just "fake sleep" now, which means disabling all but one core and downclocking it to the lowest possible frequency. My AMD laptop was 400mhz, draining about 15% per day.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but sometimes a strong leader can make good things happen (TPM2 and modern standby)
Well it's being discussed on here in most linux laptops thread.
On x86 it's because linux relies on the acpi tables which vendors don't bother to do properly.
On Apple ARM hardware/linux it's because Apple don't bother releasing any docs.
On other ARM SoCs... not sure. In theory every vendor wants volume orders for phones so they should be able to sleep properly?
It's sad if you're an Apple hardware + software slave and used to just closing the lid on your laptop and having it basically lose no battery for days, especially since ARM.
Right, and in my country you can even mix and match it.
I went to see my GP, paid for by public health, they referred me to a specialist.
I chose to pay €100 to see a private doctor who was available sooner (the next day) and had better ratings.
They referred me for an MRI which was done at another private provider, paid for by public health.
I went back to the private doctor and paid for a non-surgical treatment, which wasn't available on public health.
If that doesn't work, later I can opt for surgery, paid for by public health.
And even more importantly: There is one system that tracks all diagnoses, treatment, medication etc used by both public and private healthcare providers, so medical history is available instantly to everyone.
Honestly one of my main healthcare related complaints about living in Canada is not having centralized health records. Sometimes Europe feels like living 2 decades in the future lol.
I was involved in the early days of OpenTTD and one of the big issues was the first version was basically just a decompiled version of the original TTD binaries. Giving any kind of blessing would basically relinquish control of IP - that due to publisher contracts he may or may not actually be able to do. Legally this is the only thing he can say.
I would be surprised if this hasn't existed for a few decades already.
Back in 2009 I was working at a place where O2 was a client, and they gave us an API that could identify the cell tower (inc. lat/lng) any of their customers were connected to. The network needs to track this data internally to function, so the API is basically the equivalent of their DNS.
I've always wondered why we don't build homes with a buried tank of water used as heat storage. In the summer it can be heated with solar thermal to around 90c, and in the winter heat can be drawn out and go through radiators or underfloor heating, with a mixer valve. You just need a few pumps and valves, not even a heat pump is needed.
If you assume a modern house with a heat load of 1800kWh per year (fairly standard for a new build medium sized home where I live, in Northern Europe) that means you'd need a tank roughly 50m3, or 10,000 gallons for Americans. In terms of insulation you'd need around 50cm of XPS foam, and it would be buried a meter below ground.
It's nothing terribly complicated in terms of construction or engineering. Of course you'd pay more upfront, but then your heating bills would be practically zero. In warmer climates it would be much simpler, you could probably get away without burying it.
This is essentially what a ground source heat pump system is. Except instead of a sealed water tank you just make a tall hole that fills with water and the sun will warm it for you during the summer automatically.
1800 kWh is very little. We use around 12000 kWh and our neighbours' new house uses around 8000 kWh annually and most of that is heating. I'm not sure how many houses can hit 1800.
A ground source heat pump (also geothermal heat pump) is a heating/cooling system for buildings that use a type of heat pump to transfer heat to or from the ground, taking advantage of the relative constancy of temperatures of the earth through the seasons.
You can also recharge your geothermal well or ground heat collection field by heating the outgoing thermal collection liquid with either cheap electricity (rooftop solar?) or direct solar heat collection. I think this will be a growing thing as the earliest mainstream ground source heat wells start to be a few decades old. Many of them are sized so that they don't fully recover during the summer, so the heat output slowly drops.
A modern house in Finland needs around 15-24kWh a year of heat energy if it's well insulated. On the higher end for big + northern houses, and less if you're smaller and further south.
Some get this energy by burning wood, others with heat pumps, and some with direct electricity.
My 90sqm bungalow in the U.K. uses about 15MWh a year for heating - 1500 litres of oil, almost all in winter. Peak load is about 2.5kW over a day (60kWh)
I think you are off by about 3 orders of magnitude as my Austrian flat need about 7MWh a year for heating and 3MWh of electricity. I could generate 24kWh per year on an indoor bicycle.
I can't find the link now, but there was an episode of Grand Designs here in the UK (a show detailing private individuals developing interesting or unusual homes) where the owner was building a passively heated house based on an idea by his architect father.
The ground beneath the footprint of the house was insulated around the sides to a depth of about 2m, effectively extending the thermal mass of the house into the ground. After construction, it took about 2 years (IIRC) to warm to a stable level, but thereafter required little to no energy to stay at a comfortable temperature year round.
I remember that one, but also can't find a link. Wasn't the heat from the people living there, and from appliances etc. enough to keep it at a comfortable temperature?
> I've always wondered why we don't build homes with a buried tank of water used as heat storage. In the summer it can be heated with solar thermal to around 90c, and in the winter heat can be drawn out and go through radiators or underfloor heating, with a mixer valve. You just need a few pumps and valves, not even a heat pump is needed.
Because building houses is already expensive, and that would add significant amount, pushing it into "can't afford it in the first place". And zero ability to realistically service it means anything going wrong might make whole investment moot.
On top of that, any investment like that competes with "why not just put the money into low risk fund"
> 1800kWh per year
now factor in losses for months
now factor the fact the energy you're using for heating is one you're not using for... energy or selling
also is that heat or energy ? Because if that's "what power heat pump used", multiply that by 3-4
It's just... expensive to do it like this. Expensive enough that most people that could did the math and it wasn't mathing
I'm not sure if the 1800kWh is correct here. I'm guessing it's one of these two:
- You're talking about what heat pumps use in electricity. However, the system would store heat. If a heat pump uses 1 kWh to get 3 kWh of heat into the house, a heat based storage system needs to store the 3 kWh.
- You're confusing gas & electricity. 1800 m3 in gas would be about correct. However, that's about 9,5 kwh per m3 in heat.
There are interesting heat storage methods though, there is a long term basalt heat storage system in 'Ecodorp Boekel' in The Netherlands. It uses solar to heat during the summer and heats the homes with that in winter.
Due to size though, it only really works in 'collective' communities. The bigger the size, the more heat it can store per size.
Sounds like it didn’t go so well:
In 2020, the system started showing signs of deterioration resulting in significant maintenance issues. System components, knowledge, and technical expertise for repairs were becoming increasingly challenging to find. In response to system failures, the Drake Landing Solar Company added redundancies to the system to be sure that homes in the community were receiving heat… In 2024, a decommissioning process for the Drake Landing Solar Community began, where the majority of the 52 homes were converted to natural gas-fired furnaces.
Nowadays, solar thermal collectors are completely obsolete except in very niche applications. Solar PV is so cheap that it’s literally cheaper (not to mention much less maintenance) to wire a bunch of PV panels to a resistance hot water heater than it is to directly heat the water with thermal collectors!
> I've always wondered why we don't build homes with a buried tank of water used as heat storage
Skip the tank completely. Use the ground directly. This is what geothermal heating does.
Drill a deep hole and drop tubes into it. Use a heat pump to pump heat into or out of the ground. There is so much easily accessible thermal mass in a borehole that you don’t need to deal with a giant underground water tank
Its kind of done. Active heating systems often have the intake air go through the foundation so it heats up in summer and cools down in winter reducing both heating and cooling costs.
Some PassivHaus designs incorporate such systems. There is also district thermal storage which services multiple homes with a thermal storage reservoir.
Thorstein Chlupp, of Rienna LLC, built several net-zero homes in the Fairbanks, AK, area. He hasn't been active for a number of years now, but released several videos in the mid-2010s detailing his design, construction, thought, and results.
At the core of Chlupp's homes was a thermally-stratified 5,000 gallon storage tank. This was ideally aligned vertically (to improve thermal stratification), though at least one home had a horizontal alignment. The tank was inside the core of the home, which means it occupies significant internal space. I don't know if there have been any mechanical / technical issues with the design over time, though at least initial results were strongly positive.
This is basically how services like Uber Eats work in my country. The basics of it are foreign students want to earn extra income by working a few hours per week. This is allowed on a student visa, but it's limited hours, so real businesses like restaurants or bars don't usually want to hire students.
First of all you need a means of transport. There are small companies that will rent to you - on a weekly basis - an electric bike or a 20 year old Toyota Prius that is barely legal to drive (we have strict technical inspections here, so it's not that bad). They handle all the maintenance and insurance, you just pay your money and get a vehicle.
Next up you probably can't use your drivers license from home here to drive, as once you have a residence visa you need a local license. Many people just risk it, but if you want to do it legally you need to have a minimum number of lessons with an instructor and then pass the test. The test is only in the local language, so if you don't speak it (zero chance as a student that's been here 3 months), you need to hire a translator to accompany you on your test. They may or may not help to ensure your answers are correct. (You can only exchange a driver's license from other EU countries)
Finally you need a worker account on the delivery service, and the bag. You can register as self employed, file all the documents, go through the training course. That will take time, plus I think they are not always looking for new people due to high demand from workers. So you can skip all that and just rent an account from someone else, and hope they pay you at the end of the day.
So there is an entire industry dedicated to helping people earn a side income. I'm surprised the delivery services themselves don't start getting involved in this as it is a lot of money they are leaving on the table - although most of it has a questionable legal status.
That's actually happening. Commercially you can buy a 0.55T system such as the Siemens Free Max for around $500k.
There are also developments in ultra-low-field fMRI (<0.1T) which use permanent magnets, which are estimated to retail in the five figure range, however it's more for structural usage (can identify a tumour or stroke progression).
What you are saying sounds like being able to control your own heart rate if you see it on a monitor. Maybe combining low resolution fMRI with models trained on higher resolution data, could give you enough visibility that you could learn how to activate other areas of the brain that you wouldn't normally use for tasks.
At the end of the day you are always just working to make someone else rich or to give them the promotion they want. If you get rich yourself along the way, take that as a win.
reply