danhor

Nintendo used the same file format as used for pirated ROMs, so people assumed Nintendo simply used downloaded ROMs. As it turns out one of the people working at Nintendo for emulation previously worked on emulators outside Nintendo, so it's likely that just the file format was reused. The Nintendo leaks showed that Nintendo has extensive internal archives and the likelihood of them needing to download ROMs of the Internet is low.

More than 40% of the german railway network isn't electrified, which supports around around 10% of of traffic. Simply looking at https://openrailwaymap.org/ shows you just how many small branch lines and less significant lines don't have overhead power for dozens of kilometers.

This means that for large parts of the network there is some traffic, but far from enough to justify electrification which costs around 1M€/km (and, with some tunnels, might even mean expanding the tunnel diameter). There is a reason DMUs are widely used for these lines, and expectations are that BEMUs might be even cheaper to run.

More lines should be electrified, but expecting it to cover everything is not realistic nor economically justifiable. See https://vm.baden-wuerttemberg.de/fileadmin/redaktion/m-mvi/i... for a study on how to run non-electrified lines in Baden-Württemberg which comes to result that BEMUs are cheaper for around half of the lines that full electrification.

I'm not aware of BEMUs getting some special subsidy (meanwhile electrification is heavily subsidised, IMHO for good reasons), looking from the perspective of the ones financing and specifying the operations.

At least historically that hasn't been the case nearly as much as for PV panels.

I unfortunately haven't been able to find great timelines for electrolyzer costs apart from https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cost-of-electrolyser-tec.... This suggests that costs fell around 50% between 2000 and 2015. Solar panel prices fell around 90% in the same timeframe: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices?time=2000... (and even faster between 2006 and 2021 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices?time=2006...).

Solar cost decreases have been amazing, but for example wind was less impressive and solar thermal didn't scale well.

No, I'm assuming rooftop solar users just use their solar themselves, thus significantly reducing the demand the grid sees. Since there is (and will be) no way to penalize using rooftop power yourself, demand might still be below the generation left even with renewables feeding into the grid turned off. This, of course, assumes widespread rooftop solar usage and a lot of "conventional" slow power generation online (the latter will likely remain the case in France for the next few decades, since they're in no hurry to reduce their nuclear power plant stock).

I'm also don't understand why a fixed feed-in price has to be a subsidy? Is a fixed electricity price or a fixed gas price a subsidy? It could be that home owners are more comfortable selling their electricity for a fixed price and power brokers have determined that accurately measuring feed-in over time and adding remote-curtailment functionality is not worth the cost for small installations. I doubt we will see feed-in prices without any subsidies in the near future, but it could certainly happen.

Right now this is the case, but if roof-top solar is used more widely, it can happen even without subsidies. For owners of roof-top solar it should never be beneficial to turn run from the grid if not necessary, so coal and nuclear power plants that take a while to spin down might still produce oversupply, leading to negative prices

The issue with this line of thinking is that electrolyzers are very expensive. I've read papers that estimated that using free electricity would only be cheaper than running 100% on the time for normal electricity prices of 8-9 ct/kWh (in germany) if free electricity was available at least 25% of the time. With energy storage for the daily variations already shaving some of the peaks off, I expect this to be surprisingly little energy (not even covering applications where hydrogen usage is pretty certain based on the lack of great alternatives).

While hydrogen EMUs were first used in germany in planned service (with battery EMUs coming into service later this year), it seems that BEMUs might be more mature right now. The only HEMU being used right now is the iLint, and it has been in development for many years while the first "real" deployment is plagued with issues (to be fair, not all of them stemming from the iLint itself). Meanwhile it seems that BEMUs are being offered by nearly every company, with trains from three different manufacturers starting service in the next 12 months.

Hydrogen will probably see some use in railways, but more for freight and long-distance applications, mostly outside of Germany. I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of freight and long distance service in the US ran with hydrogen, with commuter trains mostly using batteries and conventional overhead electrification.

Overhead wires take quite a while to plan and build and for non-frequent service (1tph) and/or short trains installation costs and maintenance are quite high compared to buying e.g. BEMUs. Many of these services are shuttle runs with electrification at one or both ends and route lengths of less than 100km, so e.g. a Mireo Plus B with ~120 seats only a 580kWh battery (or less than 6 Tesla Model X batteries ) is used (https://www.vde.com/resource/blob/1979350/a41e9c3559af76fee9... page 24)

HEMUs for these types of services I don't understand. It's laudable that transit providers want to get away from fossil fuels (and putting up overhead wire is a long and arduous process, fraught with delays), but getting hydrogen today almost certainly isn't "green". Maybe "Technologieoffenheit" virtue signalling.

But looking at the plans of various german transit agencies for future service on non-electrified lines, it's pretty obvious that hydrogen has already lost for rail-based transit, with almost every tender that doesn't prescribe a technology going to BEMUs and studies showing that BEMUs and partial electrification or full electrification almost always makes more sense than HEMUs

> At all computer sizes, a GPU probably will have more multiply circuits than an equivalent cost FPGA

Very likely yes, but FPGAs often have hundreds to thousands of hardware multipliers, as part of the DSP blocks. Here for example newer AMD FPGAs: https://eu.mouser.com/datasheet/2/903/ds890_ultrascale_overv...

My package manager certainly doesn't sync settings and save files between multiple systems. But I'd be interested in one that does!

Wasn't the issue with Texas that renewables were behaving as expected (unfortunately not producing a lot of electricity), but fossil fuel power sources were failing unexpectedly due to the freezes? Thus the issue not being renwables.

I'm also surprised at the mention of a coal renaissance in germany. While coal isn't reduced as much as it should, all the data I found pointed to a continual downwards trend over the last years.

(Somewhat) confusing UI, delayed key exchange ("the sender hasn't sent the key to this device so the message can't be displayed yet" or something similar) and just in general a much less polished experience.

> But an expansion of nuclear could have happened

Very unlikely. Nuclear (in the West) hasn't been expanded in the last 30 years, partially due to overblown safety concerns but also due to cost issues. There has been no hugely successful nuclear build, all that tried took almost as long as the renewable industry has existed in any real sense and cost absurd amounts of money. Looking at other large german projects during that timeframe, it's unlikely there would have been more than one plant opening. The hope of nuclear advocates is that by increasing economies of scale in production and reducing it on the individual plant level the economics of NPP will work out in future. I'm highly doubtful but hope they're successful.

> Wind and solar themselves are highly volatile and require an additional stable energy source like coal or nuclear.

For wind and solar to make sense, you need complimentary power sources. Wind and solar do have very complimentary characteristics (night/day as well as winter/summer), but not perfectly. This means "base load" power sources which should run as much as possible like (lignite and somewhat black) coal or especially nuclear work very badly (economically), due to the high cost of the plant and low utilization factor. B

In a fully renewable grid, most of the day power will solely come from wind and solar, probably with batteries filling the gaps during morning and evening and some form of long term storage like P2G/Hydrogen/... will cover dunkelflauten (time spans without solar nor wind) during winter. There should be overproduction during most of the time.

In an almost fully nuclear grid, solar might be used during summer to cover ACs or similar things, but storage is still required to avoid needing build enough NPPs to supply peak power usage. France uses large amounts of hydrostorage on the alps and the european power grid to reduce the NPP overcapacity needed during the day.

This is in contrast to gas, most forms of hydroelectricity, batteries or (hopefully) P2G/Hydrogen, whose costs primarily scale with the amount of energy, not power.

Building an grid almost only based on nuclear and wind/solar without some form of flexible generation is economically nonsensical. Both can be used in the same grid to some amount, but don't complement each other well.

EDIT: https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/the-duck-in-the-room-the... explains the duck curve and the issues for base load power sources because of it nicely

The renewable push in germany came because the greens (and other parties) wanted to shut down nuclear and replace it. If the exit from nuclear was never started, germany would have been much less willing to invest in renewables. German invesments in the early 2000s were one of the steps towards renewables being viable.

If germany kept nuclear as-is the counterfactual might look worse due to the expansion of renewables not happening.

Dine in food vs. take out food also has different tax rates in Germany of 19% vs. 7%, but vendors offering both will offer the same price after taxes (and ask you so they can do their taxes).

Different products in supermarkets also have different tax rates, most "good" food will have a 7% tax rate while it's 19% for everything else (with many exceptions).

But the pre-tax price is only shown in fine-print, you as the consumer don't need care what taxes are now on the product while shopping.

The choose some other manufacturer. E.g. Aisler will do assembly for 10 Boards for around 200€ in Germany, more than JLCPCB (this is probably in part due to the scale and automation with which JLCPCB operates), but much less than 1k.

Bad example, JLCPCB will do PCBA for just a few dollars.

I've seen quite a few intersections (Germany) that only feature one car road, but a crossing pedestrian/bike street that after pressing the beg button immediately begin to switch the light, resulting in a consistent, short wait (apart from signal priority stuff for busses). But anything more complicated, nothing comes to mind.

I'm guessing the original commenter was confused between heating with gas and cooking.

Using electricity for cooking is much more efficient when using induction heating (which is the only kind of electric cooking anyone should use). Cooking with gas might be very efficient in converting gas to heat, but more than half of the heat gets lost without heating the pot/food and escapes by the side (approx. 40%), so using induction is about twice as efficient as using a gas stove (and conventional electric stoves aren't much worse). With the typical efficiency of a combined cycle gas plant, this cancels out to be approx. the same but gets better when more renewables are used (and, of course, worse with coal).

Gas stoves still do have a lot of other valid issues and I am kind of amazed a culture war broke out over it (when e.g. in germany less than 10% of households use gas stoves without a massive demand for new gas stoves).

> and allowed for propane tanks at new single family homes that really want a gas stove

As far as I can tell from the reporting [1] this is stopping new gas hookups (maybe including the equipment at the time of construction?) but there seems to be at least nothing stopping you from adding a gas stove and powering it from propane. I was unfortunately unable to find the text in the bill (or the exact bill), but as far as I can tell nothing suggests otherwise and if that is the case:

> That would have preempted 90% of the valid criticism.

That doesn't seem to have happened

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-state-bans-natural...

But most things have to be electric to be able to be clean. If we want lower emissions, most stuff needs to be electrified and supplied with cleaner electricity. The latter is increasing all around the world, the former is the more worrrying bit.

But there are only few countries around the world where it's cleaner to run an ICE vehicle than an electric vehicle, due to the large inefficiencies of engines.

(There are other approaches that don't involve electricity, but most very likely won't work or won't make sense on a large scale)

It really depends, but in germany (has a large OSM community) OSM has so much better quality & detail for almost everything except buisnesses. It suffers from poor search, routing that doesn't take traffic jams or roadworks into account and a lack of high quality apps and thus only "nerds" use it instead of Google Maps or others.

In addition to the other points, "regular users" unfortunately still quite often use only a few passwords, shared between all their services. So only 3-4 passwords (and variations) to remember!

At least according to some, this isn't the (only) cause: https://pedestrianobservations.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/t... People get paid similar to other countries, but the whole structure is much less productive. There are also many other issues.

While the US is investing less in transit than other countries, the projects themselves are silly expensive compared to other countries. For how little transit is used in the US, it's amazing how much (relative) funding there is.

To get the US towards building much more transit (and other infrastructure) there are many hurdles, but one of the main ones is building useful things for non-obscene amounts of money.

Where? As far as I know, all the Deutsche Bahn Tickets for regional traffic use the Deutschlandtarif, which is accepted in all "normal" (excluding heritage trains and the likes) regional trains in all of Germany.

Both are great, since while the daily cycle is a problem with solar, the seasonal variations are a far larger issue (since much mobe energy storage is needed). But both complement each other.

Wind is stronger in the winter and solar is strong in the summer. The best consistency is achieved when both are used, not one or the other.

Unfortunately the equipment isn't cheap (though getting cheaper), so it only makes sense if it can run a significant portion (I've heard 25% in the coming decade for germany) of the time.

> free or negative power cost at peak supply times,

The electricity price already turns negative in quite a few countries with larger shares of renewables at peak times, but isn't really being exploited right now due to the high capital cost and low usage for most things that need electricity.

> if I wanted to block tracking I could

Are you sure? It starts from simple supercookie-like stuff and ends at TrustPID where the network provider aids in tracking.

Decathlon does this (at least in the stores near me). You put the items into a bin at the self-checkout and everything is recognized.

My guess is that that the time savings aren't large enough to offset the cost for stores with lower-cost goods (especially since most time-intensive products in a supermarket are things like produce that needs to be weighed and self-service pastry).