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My father has a Mitsubishi air-water heat pump, generating hot water for the iron radiators in the house. Uses R32 refrigerant, not CO2 as in this article, but still. While efficiency is reduced by the need to have decently high temperatures in the radiators, it's still decent-ish. IIRC he still gets a COP of around 2-2.5 when it's -15C outside.

This is in Europe, might be different on the other side of the pond.

I believe there are propane using split AC systems where propane is used only in the outside unit. The outside unit has a heat exchanger transferring the heat to some glycol-water solution which is what then circulates through the inside unit.

Per the latest IPCC report, GWP of propane is estimated to be 0.02, previously it was estimated to be around 3.

If you do positioning in degrees, minutes, and seconds (or decimal minutes which I guess is more common nowadays), a 'natural' length unit for navigation is a minute of longitude, which is the original definition of the nautical mile. And then we get velocity as nautical miles per hour, or knots.

Blame the French for reinventing the wheel instead of, say, using a 1/1000th of a nautical mile as the definition of the metre. Alas, that's all water under the bridge by now.

If you want to do navigation in SI units, the UTM projections (see sibling thread) typically do positioning in metres inside each grid square.

IIRC Calutron's were basically abandoned because they were massively inefficient compared to gaseous diffusion and, particularly, centrifuges.

What has changed here to make them competitive again? Or are they counting on selling small quantities at close to any cost for R&D reactors?

Speaking of which, whatever happened to laser enrichment? That was apparently very promising at some point?

A number of years ago I implemented xoshiro256** for the GFortran compiler. Previously it used Marsaglia's KISS generator, which wasn't bad but perhaps no longer state of the art on the TESTU1 etc. tests. Additionally, xoshiro256** can be used in parallel by multiple threads; that took a bit of clever hacking to work around the limitations of the Fortran intrinsics API.

What's so uniquely bad about the tube in London? Poor ventilation and brake dust?

Absolutely.

It's annoying though that EV's need that extra Darth Vader on wheels sound to warn pedestrians, I'd prefer them to be as quiet as possible.

Yes, but compared to RISC-V neither OpenSPARC nor OpenPOWER are really going anywhere. Not really sure why, maybe the lawyers read the fine print about the level of openness they actually provide and decide that nope, not gonna touch that one?

Technically just looking at the ISA both SPARC and POWER seem fine enough. So why is nobody interested?

(Talos is interesting but not really an answer to the question, as it seems to be focused on building affordable-ish systems around an existing CPU, not developing new CPU's.)

We read some passages from Decameron back in high school. Lovely book really, I should take the time to really read it cover to cover.

I suppose, hypothetically, you could gather up the excess fuel in the forests and burn it in a power plant.

Probably impractical at scale though..

Given how European car companies, German in particular, are sticking their heads in the sand and lobbying the commission to delay the EV transition, I suspect the end game will be that the manufacturers will be bought by the Chinese car companies. The future VW, BMW, Mercedes etc will be Chinese cars with the traditional marque on the hood.

Maybe Porsche can survive by going independent, downsizing drastically, and selling 911's to the nostalgic faithful.

Apparently there is a plan for interoperability between vipps and wero. https://epicompany.eu/media-insights/bancomat-bizum-epi-sibs...

This is about replacing a turboprop with a slightly smaller turboprop and electric motor/generator+battery. The turboprop burns Jet-A, not leaded aviation gasoline.

But if it does, we'll make sure the plane crashes outside the environment.

Operation from aircraft carriers, obviously. /s

So we should ignore the Mirai sales numbers and conclude, uh, what, that the entire $40B investment is wasted and hasn't produced anything of value?

Or if we want to be charitable, surely the $40B has resulted in some advancement of the scientific knowledge. From which we can conclude that the "hydrogen economy" remains a pipe dream despite all the investment so far?

Um, Europe had pretty ubiquitous copper phone wiring long before cellular became a thing.

Many developing countries, however, were able to leapfrog the wired phones stage.

Some engines, nowadays mostly large marine diesels, are reversible. Change the valve timing, and start it in the opposite direction, and off it goes.

I work in HPC and at some point we had a dozen or so racks with blade systems in our cluster. IIRC it was HP c7000 blade enclosures, 16 nodes in a 10U chassis. We had 4 such chassis in each rack. So reasonably dense, and there was a bit less cabling compared to individual servers.

OTOH, much of the cost saving of less cabling was eaten up by the vendor charging higher prices for equipment like HCA's or switches compatible with the blade enclosure. And unless you went for a fully non-blocking IB fabric there were a bunch of unused IB switch ports.

Also, while the blade enclosure had this fancy web GUI for management, at scale we had built our OOB management automation around IPMI anyway, so this wasn't a feature worth much for us. If anything it was a bit of a chore, as in the cases when we needed to do something which IPMI wasn't capable of, there was an extra step of figuring out the node->chassis mapping to know which chassis to connect to, and then figuring out which blade in the chassis corresponded to the node in question.

For the next generation we got these "twin" systems manufactures had started coming out with, with 4 nodes in a 2U chassis. A bit more cabling than the blade systems, but in the end it was somewhat cheaper.

Here in Northern Europe there seems to be something of a renaissance of traditional linseed oil paints, both because of people being more environmentally conscious and wanting to avoid VOC's and microplastics, but also because there's plenty of scare stories of people rotting their houses after painting them with more modern but less breathable paints like the usual alkyds or acrylics.

Not saying it's not possible to be successful with the modern paints, but they demand a different style of construction that allows air to flow on the backside of the facade.

Yes. Why the heck do LLM's produce prose like this? It's de facto standard in the narration for all these slop videos drowning YouTube.

No human writes like this, so what is the training material that has taught LLM's that this is the way to write?

E.g. on this link you can see a picture of how the yards on a square rigger would be set for each wind direction.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/patrickobrianappreciationsoc...

At no point should you (nor would it be physically possible to) set the yards in the direction of the ship. At most during sailing they would be turned maybe 45 degrees which would correspond to "close hauled" at which point you may be able to reach about 60 degrees from the wind direction.

Thus, a simple linear function that would show the optimal angle of the yards as a function of the wind direction (0 = wind straight ahead, 180 = wind straight from behind) could be something like f(x) = -3/8 x + 67.5.

And as a slight visual cue, please show the mast when it would be visible before the sails as well. I found that I was often confused whether I had the yards sheeted all the way one way or the other way.

Also I think it would be clearer to show the yard position indicator as 0 degrees when the yards are squared, that is perpendicular to the ship. Then sheeted to the maximum would be 45 degrees either way from 0.

Rust and Ada are about equally safe, both have advantages and disadvantages. Perhaps you're thinking about SPARK ADA, but that's a different kettle of fish.

It's a bit like saying you should program in C, because formal verification tool X generates C code hence C is safe.

But thanks to the magic of the Interwebs, most of those jobs don't have to be in the city, region, or even the same country as the one where the DC is located. So for a local politician, most of those jobs won't get them reelected.

If the owner of the stack (Logio or whatever it was called, see upthread) doesn't understand it, the consultants will run wild and soon it will require a hectare-sized datacenter running a zillion containers, and another DC for HA of course.

Which in turn relies on a stack largely written in, shock and horror, C, such as the Linux kernel, libc, openssl, nginx, etc. etc.

Even if you believe language X to be the bees knees, are you going to stop using it until everything below it in the computing stack has been rewritten in X? Of course not.

Good news for FOSS FPGA toolchains, I suppose. Eg https://f4pga.org/ for some kind of umbrella project.

The inevitable drama between Kent and Theo would melt the internet, for sure. Bring the popcorn.

The question is whether the current situation is a short burst of action, and once those most critical bugs get fixed the hype around AI vulnerability scanning will die down, or whether the current crop of system/infra software written in vulnerable languages like C are beyond redemption and they will provide an endless source of critical bugs for AI to find until we fix them by rewriting them in Rust/Go/whatever.