bjorney
@bjorney@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable 1 week ago:
We’re at a point where it’s no longer profitable for individual miners
We have been at that point since GPU mining stopped being feasible in 2014, it’s just gotten worse. ASICs made it so the only people who could profit off mining were people who could place a wholesale sized order of hardware from bitmain, etc. Anyone else who claimed to be mining profitably was likely someone who was:
- buying old hardware 2nd hand (or new hardware at MSRP) and capitalizing on free electricity in their rental
- not selling their Bitcoin immediately (they weren’t making money from mining, they were making it from speculating)
- lived in Quebec and could double dip (North America’s cheapest grid + free heating for 8 months of the year)
unless there’s a radical change in bitcoin’s algorithm
The algorithm already does this though. Every 2016 blocks if it took more than 10 minutes per block, the difficulty of mining bitcoin goes down, not up. This is why every halving event you see a radical drop in difficulty, because at a given kWh you are producing half as many bitcoin - meaning people turned off their miners because it’s less profitable. The flipside is the rate of issuance goes down, so there is a lower inflationary effect, and the price of Bitcoin usually also skyrockets (which means eventually these miners re-enter, and difficulty eventually goes back to where it was). It can never get to a point where Bitcoin mining is completely unprofitable unless the price goes to zero, because there will always be a guy with a solar panel and fully paid-off hardware who can mine it for free. Granted, it can get to a point where a lot of people have to take a huge loss on capital expenditures if the price nosedives and never recovers
- Comment on Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable 1 week ago:
Miners like Riot Blockchain are operating at a loss
I’m not a finance wizard, but I peeked at their last SEC filing, and first 3 quarters of 2024 they posted a 35m operating loss, but added almost 900m worth of assets to their balance sheet (mostly Bitcoin), which to me tells a very different story
- Comment on Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable 1 week ago:
New data tells us that mining a single Bitcoin or one BTC costs the largest public mining companies over $82,000 USD, which is nearly double the figure it did the previous quarter. Estimates for smaller organisations say you need to spend about $137,000 to get that single BTC in return. BTC is currently only valued at $94,703 USD, which seems to be a problem in the math department.
Bitcoin mining will always be profitable for the people with the cheapest electricity and largest economies of scale. There is a difficulty adjustment algorithm in the protocol that ensures this. When the price tanks people turn off thier miners, difficulty adjusts downwards, and then it takes less electricity to find a block.
tl;dr title is wrong
- Comment on Are there extensions that turn every comment on your posts into hate comments? 3 weeks ago:
Sounds like a prank I would have pulled on a roommate back in college (e.g. change desktop background to a screenshot of desktop, and then delete all the shortcuts)
- Comment on ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ Has the Most Words Per Minute of Any TV Show, Study Finds 4 weeks ago:
Gilmore girls isn’t mentioned in this article but it’s been measured before, it’s less than it’s always sunny
- Comment on ggplot2 is love. ggplot2 is life. 5 weeks ago:
It absolutely improves with practice, and once you have settled on an aesthetic you like you can simply reuse the code, e.g. store all your color/line properties in a variable and just update each figure with that variable
My thesis had something like 30 figures, and at multiple points I had to do things like “put these all on a log scale instead” or “whoops, data on row 143,827 looks like it was transcribed wrong, need to fix it”
While setting everything up in ggplot took a couple hours, making those changes to 30 figures in ggplot took seconds, whereas it would have taken a monumental amount of time to do manually in excel
- Comment on Should I withdraw/stop putting into my 401k? 1 month ago:
Not an American, but basically decide how much risk you want to take on - then depending on that answer set aside money (0-40%) for safe investments - things like bonds (guaranteed returns) or potentially gold (lower volatility). The rest goes into a 80/20 (or 60/40, or 90/10, no one can say what’s best) split between domestic and international index funds. Things like the S&P500, Dow, and US whole market index, and then some into EU, Asia/Oceana, and emerging market index funds.
- Comment on Avowed is the most fun I’ve have had since Skyrim! 2 months ago:
and I’ve encountered zero bugs so far
This is my only complaint - it crashes a lot for me
- Comment on Can I lose a beer belly working out one day a week? 2 months ago:
An absolute bastard of a workout will use up maybe 100 on top of that
An hour run burns like 600
- Comment on Can I lose a beer belly working out one day a week? 2 months ago:
I run a half marathon 1-2 times a month, and the costco poutine (2000+ calories) really hits different when it’s guilt free
- Comment on People who live in hot climates, how do you deal with the heat? 3 months ago:
You can’t grow anything in the winter,
Globalization! And before that, preserves. Good thing is nothing spoils when the world is your fridge/freezer
don’t the pipes freeze and burst?
Water mains are buried deep enough that they don’t freeze. Tap water is noticeably colder.
Is it bad for the roads and bridges?
Yes. The cold isn’t, but freeze/thaw cycles are. Most asphalt roads needs to be resurfaced every 15 years or so
Do the homeless freeze to death?
Yes, but most cities have heated shelters around here where people can come when it gets too cold to sleep outdoors
The squirrels?
Northern mammals evolved to handle it
What about reptiles, snakes and lizards?
What are those?
- Comment on brains! 5 months ago:
Ok, not in the US so idk. the last CFL bulb I bought was long before 2009.
Either way, the brain still uses more power than a 13W CFL, and the tumblr post is from 2018, and the Reddit post is even more recent. “It would have been technically correct if it was posted 20 years ago” doesn’t really change the fact that it’s not true anymore
- Comment on brains! 5 months ago:
Yeah and LED bulbs were the norm 15-20 years ago. my point is this is a repost of a Reddit repost of a Tumblr comment that was reposting a factoid that was already wrong when it was originally posted 5-6 years ago.
- Comment on brains! 5 months ago:
Brain uses more wattage than a lightbulb, unless we are counting incandescent bulbs because it makes the stat seem more impressive.
- Comment on Before buying this printer, I made a quick search to confirm that it has wifi connectivity... (the algorithm lied to me) 5 months ago:
The library is a mile from me too, that’s a 30 minute round trip, or I have to drive and pay for parking
I bought a $60 inkjet 10+ years ago. Every 3-4 years I buy a multipack of aftermarket ink for $30. Every 18 months when the cartridge dries up half full in my printer I chuck it knowing the $5 of ink I just wasted saved me $400 in billable hours
- Comment on Before buying this printer, I made a quick search to confirm that it has wifi connectivity... (the algorithm lied to me) 5 months ago:
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if I didn’t have a printer I would need a standalone scanner, which costs almost the same amount
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Driving to Staples to print a $0.10 page wastes $50 worth of time and gas
A cheap printer pays for itself very quickly.
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- Comment on Funny but it's even less funny 5 months ago:
AFAIK if you spend at least 2 years studying here you automatically qualify for a 3 year work permit. I think rolling that into permanent residency is a lot easier than just applying for a work visa or PR out of the gate
International student tuition is way more expensive here in Canada than it is for citizens, but I’m not sure how it stacks up against normal US tuition.
Grain of salt, everything I’ve said is based on anecdotes from people I know who went through it
- Comment on Why am I seeing "plan your voting day strategy" so often? 6 months ago:
Murica.
This was literally the overarching plot for the last season of curb
- Comment on Cords 8 months ago:
Yes, but if someone trips over the cord there is a 50% chance the wrong side comes unplugged and potentially kills them, hence why they don’t make these cords
- Comment on Hacker Shows How to Get Free Laundry For Life 9 months ago:
lol. Did this in my old building - the dryer was on an improperly rated circuit and the breaker would trip half the time, eating my money and leaving wet clothes.
It was one of the old, “insert coin, push metal chute in” types. Turns out you could bend a coat hanger and fish it through a hole in the back to engage the lever that the push-mechanism was supposed to engage. Showed everyone in the building.
The landlord came by the building a month later and asked why there was no money in the machines, I told him “we all started going to the laundromat down the street because it was cheaper”
- Comment on Wolfs Was Written Specifically For George Clooney And Brad Pitt: ‘It’s Like Two Michael Claytons’ 9 months ago:
“says”
- Comment on SQLite is likely used more than all other database engines combined 10 months ago:
Sqlite is absolutely installed on the most devices, but there is a big grey area depending on how you count “used”
I have 30 apps on my phone, am I a single sqlite user? or 30 of them?
Facebook/Netflix/etc. uses postgres/mysql, does that count as 1 user or a billion?
- Comment on Size Matters? Penis Dissatisfaction and Gun Ownership in America 11 months ago:
We find that men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises are less likely to personally own guns across outcomes
- Comment on I was handed this lovely flyer while grocery shopping 1 year ago:
A couple of them fall into the “technically true, but misleading territory” - I’m sure the person handing this out couldn’t identify which though - broken clock right twice a day and all
“Can you reverse effects” - no you can’t make your immune system forget how to work. Probably not what they are going for here though.
“Risk of […] or other side effects?” - yeah the vaccines generally give people a headache and short lived fever symptoms
“Have there been deaths?” - The astrazeneca vaccine had like a 0.000001% mortality risk (more likely to die driving to the pharmacy), and was pulled in many countries because that was deemed too dangerous. Person handing out the flyer has likely been parroting “mRNA vaccines cause blood clots” nonsense for years while being completely unaware that AZ was a traditional viral vector vaccine
“Are there doctors recommending NOT taking it” - yeah, there are many notable anti-vaccine doctors, what they typically have in common is they earned their doctorate in computer science, social studies, or some other field that gives them no qualifications to talk about immunology
- Comment on Movies that “go from 0-100” in the last 15 or so minutes? 1 year ago:
Hereditary
- Comment on Linux share on Steam bounces back to nearly 2% for March 2024 1 year ago:
Could go either way.
I ALWAYS share my stats for the steam surveys, because higher Linux market share = better Linux support
- Comment on Teams apparently can't call when using Firefox 1 year ago:
Problem with that is that when you click a link in the teams PWA it opens in edge rather than your default browser. I just use the unofficial teams electron app
- Comment on If only it was like that 1 year ago:
“the perfect scale”
Proceeds to list completely arbitrary temperatures and link them to completely subjective opinions
I can make all the same points about celsius but they make even more sense
0 freezing 10 cool 20 room temperature 30 hot 40 very hot
- Comment on Jesse is smarter than what we give him credit for. 1 year ago:
64 bit computers exist