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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Nope! And most hydrogen is fossil fuel (methane) derived and horribly energy inefficient. At this point it’s green washing at best.

    Edit: adding data:
    Steam-Methane Reforming (SMR) accounts for about 95% of all hydrogen production on earth. It uses a huge amount of heat, water, and methane to produce hydrogen.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SMR%2BWGS-1.png

    For inputs:

    • 6.2MWh of Heat
    • 2.2 tons of Methane
    • 4.9 tons of pure water

    The outputs are:

    • 6 tons of CO2
    • 1.1 tons of H2

    The overall energy in vs energy out is at most 85% efficient. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016236122001867

    Hydrolysis, the main competing method, and the one most touted by hydrogen backers, accounts for about 4% of hydrogen production.
    This method takes in only pure water and electricity, but it’s efficiency is abysmal at some 52%. In every case, a modern kinetic, thermal, or chemical battery will exceed this efficiency.

    Other methods are being looked into, but it’s thermodynamically impossible for the resulting H2 to produce more energy than it takes to create the H2. So at best today we could use H2 as a crappy battery, one that takes a lot of methane to create.




  • My favorite city builder in decades. A few notes.

    Pros:

    • Easy mode is relaxing and quite easy.
    • Medium mode is a fun challenge at first, eventually becoming fairly chill as you advance in skill and confidence.
    • Hard mode is always fairly hard, especially on harder maps.
    • There are many resources to manage, but none that feel burdensome.
    • The game is extremely thematic, it feels alive with charm.
    • Graphics are excellent, though sometimes graphical glitches can still be encountered.
    • The water. It’s so hard to explain to someone who hasn’t encountered this system before, but water is life in this game, and it’s both beautiful graphically, and extremely well simulated by physics. Learning to control the water, and see the shortest paths to end water scarcity with beaver engineering is an amazingly fun and unique aspect of the game.
    • Mods are well supported and the community is vibrant.

    Cons:

    • Not a ton of content. They’ve been very good about adding new mechanics (badwater, extract, etc) but there’s still just 2 races of beaver and a dozen or so maps.
    • No directed experience. In similar games I’ve enjoyed a campaign, challenge maps/scenarios, weekly challenges, a deeper progression system, just… Something to optionally set your goals. There’s nothing of the sort in the vanilla game. It’s fully open ended and there’s only one unlock outside of your progress though the resource tree in a map.

    All in all, I highly recommend it, especially at the modest asking price. If you love city builders, charming and beautiful art, thematic settings, dynamic challenge, and solution engineering, this is a fantastic game for you.

    Other games I’ve enjoyed that scratch similar itches:

    • KSP
    • Cities: Skylines (but Timberborn has been far more compelling)
    • Factorio
    • Mindustry
    • Planet Zoo (Timberborn has less of a directed experience, but is otherwise completely superior)
    • Gnomoria
    • Banished
    • Tropico series (though I view this as more casual)

    Get it and have fun is my recommendation.


  • Author doesn’t seem to understand that executives everywhere are full of bullshit and marketing and journalism everywhere is perversely incentivized to inflate claims.

    But that doesn’t mean the technology behind that executive, marketing, and journalism isn’t game changing.

    Full disclosure, I’m both well informed and undoubtedly biased as someone in the industry, but I’ll share my perspective. Also, I’ll use AI here the way the author does, to represent the cutting edge of Machine Learning, Generative Self-Reenforcement Learning Algorithms, and Large Language Models. Yes, AI is a marketing catch-all. But most people better understand what “AI” means, so I’ll use it.

    AI is capable of revolutionizing important niches in nearly every industry. This isn’t really in question. There have been dozens of scientific papers and case studies proving this in healthcare, fraud prevention, physics, mathematics, and many many more.

    The problem right now is one of transparency, maturity, and economics.

    The biggest companies are either notoriously tight-lipped about anything they think might give them a market advantage, or notoriously slow to adopt new technologies. We know AI has been deeply integrated in the Google Search stack and in other core lines of business, for example. But with pressure to resell this AI investment to their customers via the Gemini offering, we’re very unlikely to see them publicly examine ROI anytime soon. The same story is playing out at nearly every company with the technical chops and cash to invest.

    As far as maturity, AI is growing by astronomical leaps each year, as mathematicians and computer scientists discover better ways to do even the simplest steps in an AI. Hell, the groundbreaking papers that are literally the cornerstone of every single commercial AI right now are “Attention is All You Need” (2017) and
    “Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge -Intensive NLP Tasks” (2020). Moving from a scientific paper to production generally takes more than a decade in most industries. The fact that we’re publishing new techniques today and pushing to prod a scant few months later should give you an idea of the breakneck speed the industry is going at right now.

    And finally, economically, building, training, and running a new AI oriented towards either specific or general tasks is horrendously expensive. One of the biggest breakthroughs we’ve had with AI is realizing the accuracy plateau we hit in the early 2000s was largely limited by data scale and quality. Fixing these issues at a scale large enough to make a useful model uses insane amounts of hardware and energy, and if you find a better way to do things next week, you have to start all over. Further, you need specialized programmers, mathematicians, and operations folks to build and run the code.
    Long story short, start-ups are struggling to come to market with AI outside of basic applications, and of course cut-throat silicon valley does it’s thing and most of these companies are either priced out, acquired, or otherwise forced out of business before bringing something to the general market.

    Call the tech industry out for the slime is generally is, but the AI technology itself is extremely promising.












  • It was the bad old days of sysadmin, where literally every critical service ran on an iron box in the basement.

    I was on my first oncall rotation. Got my first call from helpdesk, exchange was down, it’s 3AM, and the oncall backup and Exchange SMEs weren’t responding to pages.

    Now I knew Exchange well enough, but I was new to this role and this architecture. I knew the system was clustered, so I quickly pulled the documentation and logged into the cluster manager.

    I reviewed the docs several times, we had Exchange server 1 named something thoughtful like exh-001 and server 2 named exh-002 or something.

    Well, I’d reviewed the docs and helpdesk and stakeholders were desperate to move forward, so I initiated a failover from clustered mode with 001 as the primary, instead to unclustered mode pointing directly to server 10.x.x.xx2

    What’s that you ask? Why did I suddenly switch to the IP address rather than the DNS name? Well that’s how the servers were registered in the cluster manager. Nothing to worry about.

    Well… Anyone want to guess which DNS name 10.x.x.xx2 was registered to?

    Yeah. Not exh-002. For some crazy legacy reason the DNS names had been remapped in the distant past.

    So anyway that’s how I made a 15 minute outage into a 5 hour one.

    On the plus side, I learned a lot and didn’t get fired.