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Comment Re:Move the schools, not the world (Score 1) 128

Schools themselves should just have a period of "winter schedule" where they can get the earlier sunrise. It might confuse some, but DST already confuses some. It's better to shift school times than shift everyone's time.

If you shift school times, you impact parents who have to go to work, so businesses will need to shift their times, too. At that point, you've just reimplemented the clock shift, but in an ad-hoc, unsynchronized and patchwork fashion.

Comment Re:WFH again? (Score 1) 114

I do like my WFH time, less distractions, my home office is really nice, and most of the time, I'm super productive. But without the in-person time, it wouldn't work anywhere near as well. The networking is kinda critical, especially since I have to issue orders, and who is going to pay instant attention to someone that is only an avatar?

I've done it for most of my career, probably 20 of 35 years, including the near-decade I was a manager -- and I was WFH full-time, not half-time (1000 miles from the office). I did try to get onsite for a week every couple of months. Making it work requires a lot of overcommunication, but it can be done.

Comment Re:The only thing stopping us (Score 1) 108

The only thing stopping us from an immediate switch is billionaires want to be in control of the energy supply

Nonsense.

Oh, there are some forces slowing us down, especially the orange man, but even if all of those forces went away or even reversed course 180 degrees there's no way we'd make "an immediate switch". It would and will take many years. It's complicated, there are a lot of moving parts, and we'll get to a point (CA is already there on a lot of days) where renewables frequently have to be curtailed because there isn't enough storage to shift that generation to times of low renewable generation.

It's really hard to get people to grasp any level of nuance.

Indeed. Case in point immediately above this post.

Comment Re:Small battery == fast charging, what? (Score 1) 119

Yeah, I hate this in general about EV coverage. Everything fixates on 'time to charge to full' instead of 'miles replenished per time'.

To be useful, miles per minute of charge is a better figure.

Indeed. Though, total capacity matters, too. I had a 2014 Tesla that only had ~200 miles of range, and road-tripping with that car was moderately painful. It was especially bad in areas where Superchargers were further apart and when there was a lot of elevation increase from one to the next, because it meant that I often had to charge to full to be able to reach the next. The smaller battery meant a lower miles per minute figure even at the best charge rate, but if you have to charge to full you're also waiting through the abysmal charge rate of the worst miles-per-minute part of the charge cycle.

I don't think you can really boil it down to just one figure. Though if I had to, "miles per minute while charging from 10% to 60%" is probably the best.

Comment Re:Small battery == fast charging, what? (Score 1) 119

So a smaller battery charges much faster, as the amount of energy to put into it, is much smaller.

Absolutely wrong. A 1C battery is a 1C battery, regardless of how large it is. Different chemistries and configurations can affect this, but size absolutely does not, assuming the charger is capable of delivering power at the max rate the pack can take it at peak flow -- but 350-400 kW chargers are the norm.

Also, learn how to post. All it takes is trivial HTML markup knowledge.

You morons are not even utterly uneducated how stuff works

Name-calling, especially when coupled with calling me clueless while demonstrating your own complete lack of understanding, earns you a Foe, which means it's unlikely I'll ever see your posts again.

Comment Re:Small battery == fast charging, what? (Score 1) 119

"unless your input power is limited by something"

Input power is always limited by something, even if it's only the desire not to melt the cables.

Not really. You size the power to what the batteries can take at the fastest phase of charging. 350 kW is the norm for fast charging now. A 50 kWh 1C battery that charges at 4C when low (meaning that if it could sustain that rate for the whole recharge it would charge empty to full in 1/4 hour), would max out at around 200 kW. 3C is a more typical max rate, so 150 kW.

Comment Small battery == fast charging, what? (Score 1) 119

From the summary:

The small battery pack also means faster charging times

That's not how this works. Charging time is unrelated to battery size, except that in a given amount of time a larger battery can take in more energy. You charge all of the cells in a battery in parallel, so unless your input power is limited by something, charge time is dominated by how long it takes a single cell to go from empty to full. The number of cells (i.e. the size of the battery) is only relevant to how much power your charging system needs to deliver so that all of the cells can charge as quickly as possible.

There's a little variability among chemistries, but to a first approximation, the Li-ion cells we use today all take about 1 hour to fill from empty, when given power at the highest rate they can handle without sustaining damage. And they can take it faster when they're close to empty.

If you want to minimize the amount of time it takes to add X miles of range, what you want isn't a smaller battery, it's a larger battery. Suppose you want to add 50 miles of range in two minutes. Assuming 165 Wh/mile, you need to add 8.25 kWh. In two minutes a low battery (say, 20% SoC) can add about 10% of its capacity, so to get 50 miles in two minutes at the assumed mileage, you need an 82.5 kWh battery, and a 250 kW charger.

I'm sure Tesla has done the math carefully and weighed size and cost against range and charge times for their expected usage pattern and determined that 50 kWh is the right balance. But a smaller battery doesn't reduce charging times. For a given demand profile, a smaller battery increases charge time and a larger battery decreases charge time.

Submission + - Elon Musk just spent $185 million on a mysterious AI data center deal in Memphis (nerds.xyz)

BrianFagioli writes: Elon Muskâ(TM)s AI ambitions appear to be getting even bigger after a mysterious SpaceX subsidiary reportedly bought the Colossus I xAI data center property in Memphis for $185 million. The 217-acre facility, already tied to xAI operations, represents another sign that the AI arms race is increasingly becoming a battle over physical infrastructure rather than just software models. GPUs, power delivery, cooling, networking, and datacenter ownership are quickly becoming strategic assets as companies race to scale AI systems.

Oddly, the press release never identifies which SpaceX subsidiary actually purchased the property. It also refers to âoeX-AIâ as a subsidiary of SpaceX, which is not how xAI has traditionally been described publicly. Whether that wording reflects legal restructuring, corporate overlap, or simply sloppy PR language is unclear, but it adds to the growing sense that Muskâ(TM)s companies are becoming more interconnected behind the scenes.

Submission + - 'Underminr' CDN Vulnerability Hides Malicious Traffic Behind Trusted Domains (securityweek.com)

wiredmikey writes: Threat actors are exploiting a vulnerability dubbed "Underminr"i n shared content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure to hide connections to malicious domains. Researchers say the vulnerability could impact roughly 88 million domains and can bypass DNS filtering and protective DNS controls, potentially enabling stealthy command-and-control communications and other evasive attacks.

Submission + - Air France, Airbus guilty of corporate manslaughter in 2009 Air France 447 crash (bbc.com)

UnknowingFool writes: The Paris Appeals Court found that both Air France and Airbus were "solely and entirely responsible" for the crash of Air France 447 over Atlantic Ocean which killed 228 people on June 1, 2009. The court overturned a lower court's April 2023 ruling which had cleared both companies. Both companies were fined the maximum of €225,000. While both companies blamed the cause of the accident on pilot error, prosecutors contend that poor training and failing to fix an known flaw led to the accident. In the accident analysis identified a root cause of the accident was pitot tubes which iced up during certain flying conditions. That icing caused erratic air speed readings fluctuating between low to supersonic within seconds of each other. Those conflicting readings led to a chain of confusing errors and warnings from the flight system including a stall warning. The plane was stalling however the flying pilot's (PF) attempted to climb out of a stall by pulling back actually caused the plane to stall into the ocean.

While not in the official report, a contributing factor noted by experts is the design of Airbus cockpits. One issue is the electronic fly-by-wire controls where the physical position of certain controls like the throttle does not match the input in the system. In this case, the autopilot had lowered the thrust output during flight, but it could not move the throttle position. The throttle position appeared that plane had more thrust than it did. In the Airbus cockpit, joysticks are used instead of a control yoke. The joysticks are symmetric in the layout of the cockpit in that the pilot on the left has the joystick on the left and the pilot on the right has their joystick on the right. The joysticks are also not linked to provide feedback to each other. The other pilot (pilot in command or PIC) could not know the PF was trying to climb unless he was looking directly at the PF's hands. The PIC realized the error too late to overcome the stall.

As for responsibility, Airbus had identified an icing problem on their Airbus 320 model planes and recommended those pitot tube be replaced as early as September 2007. Air France 447 was an Airbus 330, and Air France delayed replacing the pitot tubes until further recommendations. However, Air France themselves recorded had nine incidents between May 2008 and March 2009 on Airbus 330/340 planes where the pitot tubes failed due to icing conditions. Air France found six unreported incidents after the AF447 crash.

While the cockpit situation was confusing, crash investigators faulted the pilots for failing to follow procedures which would have been to first re-establish controls after the autopilot turned off. After the accident, pilot training now includes scenarios like AF447 where there is conflicting warnings. Also there was more emphasis placed on manually flying instead of relying on the autopilot.

Comment Re:"Processed foods"!? (Score 1) 189

Maltodextrin is easy to buy online and I imagine you could get it in stores that sell supplements for athletes (it's a common quick-energy booster, being a very rapidly-absorbed carbohydrate). The emulsifier and color you don't really need, though I suspect you could find them pretty easily if you wanted. The emulsifier is mostly to increase shelf life, and the color is for color.

Submission + - AMD (Xilinx) changes FPGA dev tool licensing, excludes Linux in free tier

Sun writes: AMD has announced a change to the way they are licensing Vivado, their FPGA development tool. The spotlight of their announcement is the shift to yearly subscription instead of a one-time license.

Unsurprisingly, they are phrasing it as an improvement, saying "Annual subscriptions offer lower entry cost and continuous access to the latest updates."

Hidden between the lines of the announcement, however, is the change to the free of charge tier. AMD is adding more devices to be supported in this tier, which is supposedly the carrot. The stick, however, is the removal of certain debug features.

The thing that's likely to hit the hobbist community the worst, however, is that the free tier will now not be available on Linux.

AMD are saying that old licenses are still in effect, so it appears that if you hurry to install Vivado now, you'd still be able to use it moving forward. It is not clear, however, whether it'll still be possible to install Vivado 2025.2 after Vivado 2026.1 becomes available.

Comment Re:Lets Race! (Score 1) 39

Blue Origin is far, far from having "caught up". They've had three launches, with a 33% mission failure rate. They are now where SpaceX was fifteen years ago, but with a much worse record (Falcon 9s first mission failure was launch 19, though it did have a partial failure on launch 4 -- primary payload successful, secondary payload failed). New Glenn has done better on booster recovery, but they weren't the ones learning how to do it.

And even if SpaceX never manages to make Starship fully-reusable, they can always punt, build a lighter, fully expendable second stage and have a launch platform that blows every other heavy lift vehicle in the world away.

The Chinese are moving pretty fast but they're also a generation behind.

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