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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • If it’s being powered by wind, it’s not adding additional energy to the environment, at all. It all comes down to conservation of energy, and no chemical changes are occurring.

    Electrical energy is being generated by harvesting kinetic energy in the wind, that’s essentially just moving energy, converting it from one form to another. Energy can be swapped and converted around, but in the end, it almost always ends up turning into heat or light.

    That wind, one way or another was going to convert its energy into heat. Most often it does that by convection, causing water vapor in the air to change state, after condensing, the now warmer water release its heat into the ocean when it falls as rain.

    Turning a wind turbine to generate electricity, to run computers, is a much more elaborate route to take, but the result is the same. The wind is moving slower, a lower energy state, but the ocean is warmer, a higher energy state. It all evens out.

    Edit: I just realized, that sometimes that kinetic energy from wind contributes to storms and sometimes those storms generate lightning, and while most of the energy from lightning does turn into heat, some of that energy generates light, and some of that light shoots out into space (actually escaping the earth). So probably, higher wind speeds do result in cooling the earth a very little bit (but it’s likely negligible)





  • Well I hear those complaints, I feel like I used to be a gamer, and now that I have a family and a whole bunch of responsibilities, these days I’m more of a guy with a fancy PC.

    I read some other posts in this thread saying it was too easy, and I guess I can understand that. There weren’t a lot of places that had me stumped for long.

    I think they do need to consider adding in some new mechanics to the puzzles, I think they lean heavily on the light beams and I’d love to see some weirder stuff. For instance, the way that portal 2 added liquids, and the liquids had cool interactions with the existing mechanics. Cubes could bounce or slide on them. The streams of liquids could flow through portals, etc. In Talos, they add new mechanics from time to time, but they don’t always interact with each other in interesting ways. I know that’s difficult to do, but that might be the key to a good puzzle game sequel.




  • Well using water for cooling is a way to save money in some regions, but it doesn’t even work everywhere, most data centers don’t use a lot of water.

    When it comes down to it, you can have a datacenter anywhere, including in space, but you do need to keep it cool. Cooling can be harder or easier in different environments, space is probably one of the hardest environments to keep electronics cool in.

    I but I guess the most direct answer to your question:

    How are they going to cool these in space

    They’ll do it with radiators, lots of radiators. And they’ll do it at 50x the price it would cost on earth. With that in mind, I welcome the space datacenters, build as many as you want. I can’t think of any better way for an AI company to drive itself to bankruptcy.


  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhen Escalator Breaks, It Turns Stairs
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    7 days ago

    If you’re afraid of this kind of thing, then don’t use escalators when they aren’t moving, that’s fine.

    According to a quick Google search, there are 2-3 escalator related deaths per year in the US. That’s not just counting malfunctioning escalators, it also counts morons doing dumb things on escalators (and “within the US” includes every Florida Man out there).

    You can worry about this if you like worrying, but it’s probably not worth it.



  • They’re also more expensive than regular copper or aluminum wiring, and in this case I suspect that their required proximity would be a downside.

    I think I’m going to have to say “citation needed” here.

    There are different grades of fiber optic cable, but for short distances you can generally use the lowest grade, so that’s probably what would be used if they were just components in a device, and that stuff is dirt cheap.

    On the other hand, currently audio equipment tends to need higher end copper wiring, shielded cables, gold plated connectors, etc. digital interfaces are much less demanding of course, s/pdif or HDMI for example.

    As for your comment about being vulnerable to drops and bumps, yeah I think you’re certainly right about that. And honestly, there are some other potential issues with the idea too. Foremost, a microphone like this would probably require a whole lot more analysis and signal processing than you really want for a simple audio input.



  • Oh no… You absolutely can’t be doing maintenance on an escalator while people are walking on it. Not only unsafe, that’s just not going to work at all most of the time. The maintenance crew and the public would be in each other’s way.

    On the other hand, when it breaks on a Monday, and the crew says they can be there to do the repair on Thursday, that means that it’s safe to use the escalator as stairs for a couple of days while you wait.