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Comment Re:Invert the process (Score 1) 146

> After they practiced doing it wrong for an hour at home as their first exposure to the idea? Great plan with no drawbacks!

No, they would not be practicing anything for the first time at home. The whole point is they review the lecture/reading materials/youtube videos or whatever on their own in a way that suits them and the application of that knowledge happens in class.

> There's not one right way for students to learn, because different people learn best in different ways

Which is exactly why you let them do that, at home, and monitor their progress in the classroom and make corrections as needed.
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Comment Invert the process (Score 3, Insightful) 146

There's long been a school of thought that the homework should be the learning portion of the curriculum, and the classwork should be the practice portion. The exact opposite of how it's currently done. Students can read the assignments or learn at their own pace using whatever methods they find suits them, and then can demonstrate their understanding and practice their new knowledge under supervision of a teacher who can help them with any difficult spots and recommend tools/methods that might work better.

This also solves the "cheating" problem because you can't copy someone else's knowledge without actually learning it and an LLM can't learn it for you either.
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Comment Re:Let's heat the world! (Score 3, Informative) 37

Couple things here.

First; The amount of heat rejected to the atmosphere for all of human production would be a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what is already reaching the Earth from the sun; over 170,000 Tera-watt hours of energy in the form of sunlight per hour, which is roughly how much energy all of humanity consumes per year. All of human energy use is ~0.01% of the energy the Earth receives from the sun.

Second, we're already adding that energy to the atmosphere. How do yo think coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power work? Even solar and wind capture energy and turn it into heat. The point is to not produce CO2 in the process, because;

Third, the heat gain is more than offset by the reduction in greenhouse gasses that keep that heat from radiating back out into space, which is what causes the warming in the first place.
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Comment Re:When I hear Climate Tech (Score 2) 37

> Not sure about the geothermal(does it scale outside of special cases?)

Depends on what you mean by "scale." It's geologically limited, as in you need to find the right spot to build them, so in that sense they do not scale well... but otherwise the Earth has a functionally unlimited amount of heat energy to tap, so in that sense they scale better than nuclear since we have a definitely finite (if large) amount of nuclear fuel on this planet.

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Comment Re:Emergency Egress? (Score 1) 139

Yeah but if you drive into a lake, even without the panic and well practiced motions, untangling yourself from a seatbelt could delay your escape by 5 to 10 seconds; a significant portion of the estimated 30-45 seconds you'll have to escape a sinking vehicle. You'll probably say something like "It doesn't take me even 5 seconds to undo my seatbelt" so I'll just point out that every time you've done so to date, your car was not nose-down like an amusement park ride.

> Its air bags I object to having to pay for. Have never been in a situation where they would have been an advantage, and that includes 62 years of driving.

Good for you. Unfortunately for your argument, the entire point of a safety device is that you hope to never need it. Have you ever been in a collision bad enough that the seat belt broke a rib or at least left bruise marks across your chest? If not, you have also never been in a situation where a seatbelt would have been an advantage... but you seem to at least understand their efficacy, because you wear them. Meanwhile, airbags save an order of magnitude more lives than the number of people who drive into bodies of water, let alone die as a result.

The fact that drowning in a sinking car is so rare is what makes the national news almost every time it happens. Someone gets into a severe collision and the airbags and seatbelts keep them alive is so common it hardly gets mentioned as part of a local traffic report.

Yet here you are arguing against airbags, yet for rear windows based on some hypothetical advantage they might offer in an already rare occurrence... despite protocol for rescuing people from sinking vehicles not involving rear windows because dragging someone over/between the front seats in near zero visibility in a moment where every second counts is far worse an option than busting out the side window and opening the door. It is the definition of irrational.
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Comment Re:The value - and cost - of being first to market (Score 1) 180

Something can be 'technically superior' but still not the 'best' solution, because 'solution' includes a lot of factors beyond 'technological superiority.'

First to market is a crapshoot; sometimes it makes you the baseline, and sometimes it just gives your competition free market research. This is where Apple lived for a long time; let Microsoft or whoever do something, then do it better.

Comment Re:Pseudoscience. The "probability" is meaningless (Score 1) 175

It seems a tad doubtful you understand much of Statistics 101, since you seemingly fail at basic reading comprehension. Unlike you, this guy does understand it, as can be seen from the fact that he speaks about probabilities, not certainties. Giving you the benefit of the doubt here, perhaps you need a refresher? This is basic survival analysis after all.

And that is even assuming you can even make anything other than a wild-ass-guess about this probability.

This is about the only thing you are vaguely meaningful about. He probably has some kind of model in mind for estimating that 2%. It can be reasonably accurate, inaccurate or wrong. It would be interesting if he shared it. As to the "wild-ass-guess" part, statistics of rare events is a thing, but somewhat past the 101 level. War chances can be (and indeed are) modeled statistically. Additional assumptions are needed for nuclear escalation and those can be reasonable or not, but the whole process is not by default a magical hand-waving as you imply.

Comment Re:Same as it ever was (Score 5, Informative) 294

> EV's for long trips aren't great. I have a Chevy Bolt 2023 EUV. Cross-state trips take 50% longer than a gas car.

I know it's a cop-out to blame your choice of vehicle for your experience, but please understand that the 2023 Bolt EUV has a max DCFC power of 55kw. That's about a third what the majority of vehicles are capable of (150kw peak) and about 30% less than what my 2020 Kona EV can pull (75kw) - another vehicle that was comparatively under powered when it was new.

Your 2023 Bolt EUV is literally the second worst charge-performing EV you can find in the US, with the #1 spot being the 2024 Fiat 500e.

I hope you're not too disillusioned with EVs because of it; the EUV is a perfectly fine vehicle for daily use especially for the price. Just know that your experience is not typical.
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Comment Re:Octopus (Score 1) 151

> I'm talking about load shifting, you're talking about base load and frequency maintenance.

And I'm saying you cannot effectively do load shifting without storage. Renewables tend to peak mid-day, especially solar, and the ability to soak up that surplus energy is dependent on actually having loads that can be dispatched at that time. We're talking about domestic energy use which is not very flexible; Okay great you can do your laundry with cheap solar electricity at 10AM but that's not helpful if you're not home at 10AM. There's very little a typical homeowner can do here unless they've invested in additional equipment. Storage batteries and water heaters are the most obvious choices and are easily scheduled to take advantage of electricity rates. Taking a half day off work to do all your household chores is a bit less practical.

> If I can shift enough of the load away from 7pm, then I don't have to turn on a coal plant in anticipation of base load need at 7pm.

That's exactly not how coal power works, and that's actually the core problem. You can't turn a coal plant on and off on a whim; it can take north of a full day to get one of those things started. This means you can't afford to turn off a coal plant from 10AM to 3PM when renewables are peaking because you won't be able to turn it back on in time for the 4PM peak demand. The coal plant stays on, and now you have to soak up the surplus energy to avoid blowing up the grid. In case you missed it, this is *exactly* the reasoning discussed in the article.

This is not about saving you, the consumer, money. If electricity is expensive to buy then that cost gets passed on to you. The only economic factor at play is the cost of curtailing renewables - curtailment also costs money and those costs CANNOT be passed on to the consumer. Utilities want to avoid curtailment and would rather give electricity away for free than absorb those costs. This point is, again, in the article.
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Comment Re:Octopus (Score 3, Interesting) 151

Not exactly. Electricity must be consumed at the same time it's generated, and the stability of the grid hinges on supply and demand being balanced. Load shifting requires storage, which there isn't enough of, so using electricity now usually does not help much to avoid using electricity later unless you have some form of storage (e.g batteries, thermal storage tanks)

That's happening is you have inflexible electricity sources - your so-called "base load generators" - that cannot be throttled down, and renewable power that is very "use it or lose it" since they cannot be dispatched on demand, resulting in a surplus of generation. Wholesale electricity prices go down because supply exceeds demand, and continues into negative wholesale prices because you cannot tolerate a surplus of generation without destabilizing the grid.

So yes it's about "using power when it's there" but it has nothing to do with "not using it when an expensive plant would have to be turned on." It has to do with the fact that you can't turn some plants off and they need to encourage extra usage during times of glut to avoid crashing the whole system. Operators have no problem with people using "expensive" electricity 'cause they're gonna pass those costs on to you anyway.
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