fpoling

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In 10 years when the batteries will cover 24 hours of demand to cover few weeks without sun and wind nuclear will be too expensive as reactors requires maintenance even when they do not work. Coal will be vastly cheaper beating even natural gas as one can store coal in bulk.

But right now we do not have excessive capacity and smoothing the curve for nuclear allows to burn less coal and natural gas. Essentially right now batteries are killing peaker natural gas plants, not nuclear or coal.

Storage is still expensive. But if there is enough storage to cover the demand for couple hours then it can also be used to store excessive energy from nuclear making throttling down the reactor output much smoother. In few years when the storage will be cheap enough to last the whole night it will kill nuclear, but while the capacity is low why not to use it to make running nuclear more efficient.

Modern coal plants are more efficient and have bigger daily throttling capacity offsetting some of the above.

EDIT: batteries also help on China scale to throttle coal output much more smoothly and efficiently. Eventually the batteries will kill coal but for the next 5 years in China they are making coal plants cheaper to operate.

The problem with nuclear is that their daily throttling capacity is low leading to those minimal price contracts. So it makes sense to pair nuclear with batteries as coal plants in US started to do. With that having nuclear as a base load during winter or prolonged bad weather would still make sense.

Batteries are still too expensive to cover the whole night. So it will take few years before they will threaten nuclear base load. But they are already cheaper to serve electricity from solar or wind during 4 hours evening peak consumption than running natural gas peaker plants. Plus they reduce the scale of grid upgrades in many cases.

Battery at a coal plant also allows it to operate at less variable output which is more efficient. Modern plants can throttle more than the old ones, but even with them a battery to smooth the load curve make sense economically to use less coal.

I had a dentist who preferred to see patients each 12 months for a relatively cheap routine check while avoiding doing anything if something was discovered during the check if that could wait. She fixed a minor cavity for me like after 4 years of checks. At some point she stopped accepting new patients because she had too many of them.

The upside is that you can know everything of almost any person as well. Whether that upside is beneficial for you is a different matter.

EV in China with a reasonable range is already cheaper to manufacture and to buy. Inevitable the same will happen in Europe in the next couple of years. Given the massive improvements in charging infrastructure I do not see why EV would be a default option.

The point of diesel heater is to remove the need to plugin hybrid in many cases and just go with EV plus heater.

I meant in heat pumps in cars due to size constrains. For homes there are heat pumps that work even at minus -30C, but one just cannot fit that into a car.

And I really do not get why there is no even option to have a diesel heaters in cold climates. It adds like 100 kilometres per long trip for a litre of fuel when it is cold and allows to use smaller and cheaper battery in EV.

50% power efficiency is for burning gasoline, not oil. Once accounting for energy spent on refining oil into modern gasoline it is like 35%. And with that it will consume less oil to burn it on modern power plant approaching 50% efficiency even accounting for refinery losses and then use that in EV.

New EV from Renault and Fiat are below 25K Euro in Europe without subsidies. They are still more expensive than similar sized gasoline cars with manual gear shift, but the difference is small and will pays off in few years.

Heat pumps are mostly useless when it is minus -20 C. Diesel heater is the most practical solution. Sodium or LMFP batteries will help, but even with them the range reduction in winter due to the need for heating and increased drag from cold air is just too great.

SeL4 or proof assistant are not panacea. They do not help if assumptions about the task are wrong. And correctly formulating the task in real world is very messy.

So physical security is just as important. I really like how ARINC serial bus on planes work. One can have a reader that is physically incapable of sending anything to the writer. This allows to connect entertainment systems to flight data sensors safely.

In Airbus this system is replaced with Ethernet switches that in software ensures separation of traffic. The software was proven mathematically. But I am skeptical that it is absolutely bulletproof as a client under malicious control can influence Ethernet signaling and may exploit hardware bugs.

At least people get paid during the gardening leave.

Stratis does not support data integrity checksums. There is dm-integrity hack but it slows down the write speed by halve.

LLMs are good at refactoring. So function color mismatch is no longer a problem while explicit io helps to read and understand the code.

Swap is required for hibernation. And with fast ssd or properly tuned zram/zswap one can run task that use 10%-20% more memory than installed RAM. Surely there is a slowdown, but it is not that big especially when SSD can read write more than 5GB/s.

Zram also supports a block device for pages that do not compress. So the primary advantage of zswap is that one can use its swap for hibernation while it does not work with zram.

On x64 CPU for laptops the memory bandwidth is rather limited and a fast compressor like lz4 can saturate it. As the result latest SSD are faster then z-ram when using hardware encryption on SSD.

EV is committing irrespectively of what refineries are doing at this point. The latest Chinese models with a reasonable range are cheaper to manufacture than ICE cars. So I can see why refineries want to get as much money as possible now before the massive switch to EV.

Russia stopped exporting diesel due to Ukrainian strikes. That badly hurt Turkey and to lesser extent Brazil. And Brazil started to get diesel from US allowing US companies to make a lot of profit. So Ukrainian strikes clearly affect global prices.

But then it also makes Chinese EV including trucks extremely attractive replacement. So China making a profit as well.

Refineries in US are making even bigger profits. They even skip on maintenance running at 95% capacity non-stop.

In Soviet Union times in eighties in Belarus it was considered ok that a child could stay alone at home from age of 7 when they started a school. Some parents opted for after-school programs and some relied on grandmothers like it was for me but some of my schoolmates stayed at home alone for few hours until their mothers would be back from work (fathers typically worked longer and further away from home).

And from the age of 9 there was no after-school options at least in my school.

The article title is misleading. It is not that Rust compiler was not able to optimize some low-level operations. Rather the author came up with encoding schema that fit most things the interpreter dealt with into 64 bit. This replaced the previous schema that used 128 bit for everything but that can be directly mapped into Rust enums. The catch was that it was necessary to allocate some things on the heap and use pointer indirection but that was used for rare values so on average the new schema provided nice win.

One cannot expect a compiler to come up with such encoding.

Arbitrary subranges of int types were available in Ada for over 40 years via static enforcement via Spark and compilers were able to optimize them nicely.

For a system language I wish Rust would support such things rather than coming with NonZero hacks.

After certain size benefits of hyperscale do not compensate for the harm done to society.

A phone line from before WWII works fine to make a call but absolutely sucks for DSL.

And in London many buildings are declared as historic making it hard to get a permit for any work. The best chance is to wait until old pipes bursts and digging has to be done in any case to put fiber along the pipes.