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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • My guess is that in a climate like Germany’s, solar isn’t consistent enough to provide the steady baseline power that coal plants can.

    One of the complexities of power infrastructure is that demand must be met instantaneously and exactly. Coal and solar typically occupy different roles in a grid’s power sources. Coal plants are slow to start, but very consistent, so they provide baseline power. Solar is virtually instantaneous, but inconsistent, so it’s better suited to handle the daily fluctuations.

    So, in a place like Germany, even in abundance, solar can’t realistically replace coal until we have a good way of storing power to act as a buffer. Of course, nuclear is a fantastic replacement for coal, but we all know how Germany’s politicians feel about it…



  • This is pretty cool! Wondering about a couple of these features though: locking setup after a forced reset and locking stolen devices which are offline for extended periods. Do these features activate when I determine the phone is stolen? Or do they happen automatically? This might make used phone sales a major PITA if the seller doesn’t properly reset it first.



  • I’m curious, what about Bluetooth makes it insecure? Is it that vendors create insecure implementations, like Android, or is it a human issue like connecting to things by default? I recall the Bluetooth spec being unbelievably complex and verbose, which obviously increases risk and makes it harder to audit, but it doesn’t get many updates, and I don’t recall seeing many issues with the spec itself. I mean it’s not like it’s fixing a CVE every quarter like with netty packages.




  • Depending on their impact, it is often worthwhile to seek alternatives that are less effective or convenient, but also less dangerous. We’ve had materials in the past which were also deemed “essential”, and yet we moved away from them.

    A lot of miracle substances tend to be extremely dangerous. There’s nothing quite like asbestos when it comes to fire and heat resistance, but we can still make firefighters’ clothes, or fireproof buildings, or brakes, even if it means they’re heavier or harder to manufacture. R134 and especially R12 make fantastic refrigerants for car AC systems, but we phased those out in favor of substances that are more complex and costly to implement because of the calamitous effect they had on the ozone layer. Carbon tet is an incredible solvent and great at extinguishing fires too. But we don’t use that anymore either.

    You could be right, maybe there is truly no way around PFOAs, but I’m just calling out a pattern here. And maybe there’s no workaround right now that doesn’t cause more harm, but with enough research and investment, we can get there in the future.


  • I’m cool with it in that state. But my concern here is that while it starts out innocent, if demand increases, it’s only a matter of time until they start mining it and chartering more ships to transport it. Especially in an economy like Greenland’s.

    This same pattern has been followed a thousand times in the past. Lots of instances of abusing our natural resources start out innocently.



  • That’s very concerning! Sounds eerily similar to how Google killed XMPP back in the day. Honestly we probably shouldn’t allow any federation with them to stay safe.

    There was a really good writeup I saw recently either here in Lemmy or on Hacker News somewhere, can’t seem to find it. In short though, Google adopted the decentralized standard, built it into Gmail so everyone uses their client, then eventually dropped support for talking with other XMPP clients.