• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: January 8th, 2024

help-circle



  • USB-c cables can vary drastically. Power delivery alone ranges from less than 1 amp at 5 volts to over 5 amps at 20 volts. That’s 5 watts of power on the low end to 100 watts of power on the high end and sometimes more. When a cable meant to run at 5 watts has over 100 watts of power run through, the wires get really hot and could catch fire. The charger typically needs to talk to a very small chip in the high power cables for the cables to say, yes I can handle the power. Really cheap chargers might just push that power out regardless. So while the USB-c form factor is the one plug to rule them all, the actual execution is a fucking mess.



  • Just a bit of history, in WWII the Allies didn’t know for certain that the Holocaust had occurred. Remember that it was the 1940s, information could travel quickly but only so much. It wasn’t as easy for them back then to pickup the metaphorical ‘signal’ of the Holocaust happening to the ‘noise’ the rest of the war was making. So while there were rumors of mass executions of Jewish people as early as the summer of 1941, it’s often said that the Allies didn’t know about the Holocaust until winter 1945. Now when the Allies went from ignorant, to suspicious, to all but certain but with doubts and finally to certain without a doubt has been debated for decades and will probably be debated until the sun expands and swallows the earth whole. There was definitely a lot of hateful rhetoric being spouted about Jewish people in the 1930s that maybe should have been stopped before it nearly took over Europe, but looking back at history we have the advantage of hindsight.




  • Yeah I’m going to agree with you on this one. It blows my mind that as a species we have changed the night sky. When I was a child seeing a satellite dart across the sky was exciting because it was as rare as a shooting star. Now I look up and see a satellite every few minutes. That said, there have been a few times recently that Star Link was the only method of communication I’ve had in remote areas. It has been very helpful. I think as poorly of Musk as much as the next person but I can at least recognize the ingenuity SpaceX and Star Link.


  • I can’t find the source but I remember an article thatdiscussed the rate solar energy is adopted. The researchers made lower and upper bound predictions, and what if all solar PV development stopped immediately. The worst case scenario based on availabile data suggested a three fold increase in solar PV electricity generation, the number used by the article you cited, to a best case scenario of solar PV increasing to the power of three, really big exponential growth. Now the optimistic model seemed a bit too optimistic for me, but it at least suggested that there is a lot more capacity to build out solar PV. If that capacity is realized or wasted was the biggest unknown factor in that study, which like duh. Still, I took it to mean that the future will probably be a little bit more optimistic than the most pessimistic projections. It’s a small comfort.