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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • AlotOfReading@lemmy.worldtoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas
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    14 days ago

    Just did a quick eBay check. The cheapest 350hp ICE I could find was a rebuilt $3,000 Chevy engine. A new one is more like $6-8k. An equally powerful, brand new Siemens motor was $1,500.

    This makes sense when you think about it though. An electric motor is basically just steel with a bunch of coiled wire with some control electronics. An ICE is hundreds of pounds of precision cast and machined metal. The cost driver in electric vehicles is not the motor, it’s the batteries.




  • I’m not the one who posted the initial response, I’m just explaining what they meant.

    Also, this isn’t intended to be dismissive or insulting because I recognize that everyone comes from different backgrounds and experiences, but it’s pretty widely known that different crops have different labor costs. Everyday is a chance to learn something new though. Here’s a quick overview from UC Davis on the subject.

    I’d also recommend the book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies if you want a more personal, on-the-ground understanding of (some of) the human costs of agriculture. Understand that no book can cover everything though and there’s much worse costs than anything it covers.

    None of this human cost is inherently related to concepts like monocropping either. Rather, they’re related to the economic and political context agriculture exists in, especially how those impact current mechanisation capabilities. Harvesting things like cereals is so efficient in large part because of the huge demand from livestock agriculture for cheap feedstock to justify the development/purchase of things like combine harvesters.

    Some crops aren’t heavily mechanized though, and modern agriculture hires cheap laborers instead. These tend to be the expensive things at the grocery store for fairly obvious reasons, but not always. If you’re buying Spanish produce in Europe (e.g. bell peppers), there’s a reasonable chance it was harvested by migrant workers working under inhumane conditions in a greenhouse. Things like coconuts tend to have slavery and animal cruelty in their supply chains and that’s the basis for a good chunk of cuisine in South Asia.

    Another way to directly tie specific crops to their human costs is to look at the daily dead body reports by US border patrol. They tend to spike a couple weeks before/after certain crop harvests. Strawberries and tomatoes show up particularly strongly in this kind of analysis, which is why I mentioned them. You can also see the spikes from things like grapes, lettuce and beans.





  • WSL is just a well integrated VM running Linux. It’s mainly intended for CLI tools, but there’s nothing preventing you from e.g. running an X server and having programs appear in the Windows “window manager”.

    The super key is largely inaccessible though. It’s tied very deeply into Windows, which is still the one talking to the keyboard.


  • I’m not assuming it’s going to fail, I’m just saying that the exponential gains seen in early computing are going to be much harder to come by because we’re not starting from the same grossly inefficient place.

    As an FYI, most modern computers are modified Harvard architectures, not Von Neumann machines. There are other architectures being explored that are even more exotic, but I’m not aware of any that are massively better on the power side (vs simply being faster). The acceleration approaches that I’m aware of that are more (e.g. analog or optical accelerators) are also totally compatible with traditional Harvard/Von Neumann architectures.



  • There’s probably a bunch of reasons for the multi wing design, but the big one is going to be improving lift/carrying capacity without increasing the width.

    The most efficient wings for low speeds are glider wings: as long and thin as possible. That makes them inconvenient to pack and folding joints are weak points. The second wing adds lift, but also problems: it’s less efficient than a single wing of the combined length would be and the front wing makes the rear wing less efficient. The winglet improves the situation somewhat. Facing downward also improves maneuverability.





  • TCP has been amended in backwards incompatible ways multiple times since 1993. See e.g. RFCs 5681, 2675, and 7323 as examples.

    Plus, speaking TCP/IP isn’t enough to let you to use the web, which is what most people think of when you say “Internet”. That 1993 device is going to have trouble speaking HTTP/1.1 (or 1.0 if you’re brave) to load even the most basic websites and no, writing the requests by hand doesn’t count.




  • I haven’t explained what the differences are because almost everything is different. It’s like comparing a Model T to a Bugatti. They’re simply not built the same way, even if they both use internal combustion engines and gearboxes.

    Let me give you an overview of how the research pipeline occurs though. First is the fundamental research, which outside of semiconductors is usually funded by public sources. This encompasses things like methods of crack formation in glasses, better solid state models, improved error correction algorithms and so on. The next layer up is applied research, where the fundamental research is applied to improve or optimize existing solutions / create new partial solutions to unsolved problems. Funding here is a mix of private and public depending on the specific area. Semiconductor companies do lots of their own original research here as well, as you can see from these Micron and TSMC memory research pages. It’s very common for researchers who are publicly funded here to take that research and use it to go start a private company, usually with funding from their institution. This is where many important semiconductor companies have their roots, including TSMC via ITRI. These companies in turn invest in product / highly applied research aimed at productizing the research for the mass market. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it’s extremely difficult. Most of the challenges of EUV lithography occurred here, because going from low yield academic research to high yield commercial feasibility was extremely difficult. Direct investment here is almost always private, though there can be significant public investments through companies. If this is published (it often isn’t), it’s commonly done as patents. Every company you’ve heard of has thousands of these patents, and some of the larger ones have tens or hundreds of thousands. All of that is the result of internal research. Lastly, they’ll take all of that, build standards (e.g. DDR5, h.265, 5G), and develop commercial implementations that actually do those things. That’s what OEMs buy (or try to develop on their own in the case of Apple modems) to integrate into their products.