ByteSorcerer

@ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s the renewables on the grid that have to make a difference. If you’re powering an electric car purely out of electricity generated with fossil fuels you’re effectively building a series hybrid with extra steps, with the combustion engine being outside of the vehicle. Or I guess you could also compare it to a diesel-electric locomotive with the generator outside the vehicle, which he also explained in the video would not be good for efficiency. And yes at the scale of power plants you can do some things more efficient, but it’s not actually that much as the efficiency is mostly limited by similar thermodynamic processes than that happen inside an engine. A typical coal power plant also has an efficiency of 30-40% (so effectively a mediocre coal plant is similar in efficiency to a very efficient engine). But when you get the energy from a power plant you still have distribution losses on the grid, conversion losses when charging the battery and again when discharging the battery, and the efficiency losses in the electric motor, while you do not have grid losses and charging/discharging losses and losses in an electric motor with a combination engine is directly driving the wheels.

  That’s why it’s important to keep investing in renewables. You indeed don’t need a whole lot of renewables to offset the efficiency losses of the battery and distribution, but you do need at least some of it. And you also should not just look at the grid as a whole, but at how the additional load of charging the vehicle gets handled. If all renewables on the grid are operating at maximum capacity all the time, and there is a coal plant that is used to burn extra coal when extra capacity is needed, then any additional load can be considered to be running on pure coal power even if the grid contains many renewable sources. But if you live in a neighbourhood where there is a constant overproduction of solar power while the grid and can charge your car at times of overproduction, then you effectively charge your car with fully green energy even if the grid contains a lot of fossil fuel plants.

  You can consider electric cars to be the infrastructure that enables the transport sector to become more green, but we do also need to actively increase energy generations via green sources to actually make use of that “infrastructure”. Though I guess there is also some good news: Powering an electric car from exclusively fossil fuel energy sources puts the efficiency of the full chain somewhere between regular cars and hybrids. So it should at least never be worse than driving a regular car. Worst case it’s just equivalent. But it does need investments in green energy sources as the demand on electricity increases to become significantly better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The EU requires phone makers to fit 'readily removable' batteries from next year — but there may be a notable exception⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the “80% after 1000 cycles” isn’t ambitious enough. 1000 cycles is still very easy to reach, and some phones already barely last a full day when new so even that 20% lost capacity can really degrade the experience. I’d argue that it’s not even an ambitious target at all, as even bog standard lithium ion batteries are frequently rated for that lifespan or more.

  I could understand it if they had an exception for potential future technologies that would be pretty much guaranteed to outlast the useful lifespan of the device (such as solid-state batteries which could in theory last for tens of thousands of cycles and thus last for decades, if it is ever able to leave the lab). But as it is now with the unambitious goal of 1000 cycles so many batteries will be exempt by default that I don’t think it’ll change much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The blue light from your phone isn't ruining your sleep⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Blue light is visible, so emitting more or less blue light Alters how colours are perceived on the display. That’s also why enabling the blue light filter makes the screen look yellow.
  Screens calibrated for the same colour temperature and wilth equal brightness should emit the same amount of blue light.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BYD's latest EVs can get close to full charge in just 12 minutes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The total voltage or amperage of the battery pack does not mean anything for the battery cells. You can put more cells in series and get a higher voltage at lower current, or more in parallel and get a higher current at a lower voltage. But all individual cells will run at the same voltage in either configuration (iirc between 3 and 4V), and the current per cell will also be the same for a given load regardless of the situation.

  The main thing a higher battery pack voltage accomplishes is that the cables connected to the battery don’t need to be as thick, as the required thickness of a cable depends only on current, not voltage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve heard a teacher using that as a test to see which students are using AI: If the student turn in a report full of em-dashes, then the teacher would put them in front of a laptop running Word and asks “can you please show me how you type those long dashes that you used all over your report?”

  If they can’t do it, then their report is considered AI-generated or plagiarism (which are considered equivalent by the school). If they could do it they would get the benefit of the doubt, but when I heard it he hadn’t had a single student pass that test yet.

  It’s a better and likely far more accurate test than those complete bullshit “AI detectors”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Memory price hikes will kill off budget PCs and smartphones⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately not likely going to happen since AI is used more and more to write software, and AI doesn’t tend to write very efficient software.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ai will surely save us all⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Alternatieve metgod tot know thing from future: wait.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve also experimented with this. In my experience, getting the NPCs to behave the way you want with just a prompt is hard and inconsistent, and quickly falls apart when the conversation gets longer.

  I’ve gotten much better results by starting from a small model and fine-tuning it on lore-accurate conversations (you can use your conversations with larger models as training materials for that). In theory you can improve it further with RLHF, but I haven’t tried that myself yet.

  The downside of this is of course that you’re limited to open-weight models for which you have enough compute resources available to fine-tune them. If you don’t have a good GPU then the free Google Collab sessions can give you access to a GPU with 15GB of VRAM. The free version has a daily limit on GPU time though so set up your training code to regularly save checkpoints so that you can continue the training on another day if you run out. Using LoRa instead of doing a full fine-tune can also reduce the memory and computational resources required for the fine-tune (or in other words, allows you to use a larger and better model with your available resources).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I am typing this on a 5 year old Android phone. It has 128GB of memory and 8GB of RAM, very decent cameras, a beautiful OLED screen and a processor that is more than fast enough for everything I do with it. And even now the battery still lasts two days with normal use. It cost me about €300 at the time.

  Unfortunately the Android version is getting so far behind that some apps are starting to get a few issues, so I have been checking out some black Friday deals for new phones, but they look very disappointing.

  In the current market it seems like I’d have to pay about €500 to effectively just get a side-grade. All €300 offerings look like just a straight up downgrade in any way apart from the more recent android version.

  So I think I’ll hold on to this one a while longer. Hardware-wise it’s still in perfect condition, and if software support really becomes an issue then perhaps I’ll try out a custom ROM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The main reason is tech debt and proprietary software. Most companies have decades of software infrastructure all built on Microsoft based systems. Transitioning all that stuff to Linux is a massive investment, especially taking into account the downtime it’ll cause combined with the temporary decrease in productivity when everyone has to get trained and build up experience with the new platform.

  And then you have to deal with proprietary software. A lot of niche corporate or industrial hardware only supports Windows. And you probably have to regularly interact with customers who use Windows and share files with you that can only be opened in Windows only proprietary software.

  Linux also frequently struggles with a lot of weird driver issues and other weird quirks, causing an increased burden on the IT department.

  Basically you’re looking at a massive investment in the short term, for significantly reduced productivity in the long run. And all that mostly to save a bit of hardware costs, which are only a fraction of the operating costs for most companies. Just sticking with Windows ends up being the more economical choice for most companies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For me it’s mostly for text and content with fine lines where the difference is the most obvious. I use a 1440p monitor at work and a 4k one at home. Text is noticeably sharper and easier to read on my 4k monitor and remains readable at smaller font sizes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stellantis abandons hydrogen fuel cell development⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Natural hydrogen deposits do exist, but they’ve only been mapped out quite recently and it is still unknown if it can be extracted in a safe and economically viable manner.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Like it or not, developers are experimenting with AI for their remasters and remakes - but can they ever be any good? [Eurogamer]⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are probably more remakes/remasters that do use AI upscaling for background assets than those that don’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the problem is that, while the model isn’t actually reasoning, it’s very good at convincing people it actually is.

  I see current LLMs kinda like an RPG character build with all ability points put into Charisma. It’s actually not that good at most tasks, but it’s so good at convincing people that they start to think it’s actually doing a great job.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare CEO warns AI and zero-click internet are killing the web's business model⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately no one else is interacting with it either. I miss the old style forums, and most of the ones I used to frequent are still online. But they all haven’t had any real activity in years, so they aren’t really usable anymore unfortunately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The enshittification of Duolingo has already been going on for quite a while. It has really gone downhill in the last few years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Overblown quantum dot conspiracy theories make important points about QLED TVs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on viewing conditions. As of yet there isn’t an objectively superior display technology.

  OLEDs have the best contrast in a dark room as black pixels can be fully turned off, but they are generally less bright and use more power than comparable LCD TVs or monitors (especially when you compare models of a similar price range).

  LCD based monitors and TVs can get brighter and can actually achieve a higher contrast in a well lit room as the black pixels on an LCD are less reflective than black pixels on an OLED, and when viewing in daylight the ambient light is more than enough to drown out the backlight bleed.

  There are also other smaller pros and cons. OLED for example has a better pixel response time, while IPS LCDs are more colour accurate. Text rendering and other fine graphics also generally look slightly sharper on an LCD than on an OLED display (when comparing displays of equal resolution / pixel density) due to the subpixel layout.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'You can now jailbreak your AMD CPU' — Google researchers release kit to exploit microcode vulnerability in Ryzen Zen 1 to Zen 4 chips⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Any guesses how long it will take for someone to use this jailbreak to get Doom to run on just the CPU?
  In theory, at least some of the affected processors should have more than enough cache to run it directly from there, right?

  Though I have to admit that I don’t understand CPU internals well enough to know if the microcode even has enough control over the chip to make that physically possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On May 5, Microsoft’s Skype will shut down for good⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It was successfull for a while up to 10 years or so ago, when it was the main free option for video calling. But nowadays there are plenty of alternatives, pretty much all of which do a better job than Skype ever did.

  Skype has now been pretty much obsolete for years so I don’t think it’s too bad that it’s ending.

  The Google approach would have been to already have killed it in 2004 before it ever even had a chance to be successful.