Admit it: running fediverse sites is fun and addictive!

It seems there’s some deflationary forces at work, but you gotta be careful because inflation and deflation aren’t linear. It’s entirely possible that deflation causes feedback loops that trigger more inflation.

Good idea to stay debt-free for now, I’d say. If you’re gonna buy solar panels, buy with cash you can scrounge together, and if you can’t scrounge together cash, save what you’ve got. 2023 will be the year to make it through I think.

When I was looking into 3d printed wind turbines early on in my 3d printing “career”, it seemed to me that there are designs that are omnidirectional that are more likely to be useful for actually generating power and being printable than something this complicated.

hmm… Now that I’ve gotten much better at 3d printing, I should revisit that idea!

Brilliant.

I started dating the woman who would become my wife just a few weeks before starting a new job in another city, and we clicked so quickly and easily that we decided to move together. It worked so perfectly that 12 years later we’re going strong.

The answer to the question “What is the optimal length” seems to me “mu”; unask the question, because it is wrong. In my case we moved in almost immediately, but I’ve seen many cases where moving in together ended up destroying the relationship.

On the other hand, maybe then the answer should be “as quickly as possible” because by moving in you quickly can end things if you’re not compatible rather than waste time on a doomed relationship.

On the other other hand, some people don’t want to reach married with kids and a white picket fence. For those people, maybe the answer is to never move in together.

To me the most exciting display technology shift since the transition from crt to lcd.

Our society has turned decadent, and so a lot of people have a bunch of skills that only makes sense within a deeply abstracted existence far from any relation to the fundamental stuff we need to live.

I think that across the board there’s a thirst to recover those skills, to learn how to be self-reliant without depending on an omnipresent and sinister machine.

Extremely interesting work, it probably isn’t easy getting so much stuff together to pull data out of so many different types of software.

For obvious reasons, I wish more places would migrate their communities to something that supports activitypub. FediBB looks pretty interesting for people who are used to phpBB.

Hopefully it ends up supporting porting to platforms that support ActivityPub in the future!

It’s tough to say, it depends on the failure modes.

Certainly one failure mode is just “wearing out” – Being exposed to light and heat for a long time just causes changes in the structure of the panel that prevents it from producing power anymore.

Another failure could be related to damage to the frames or wiring, another could be related to stuff like kids throwing rocks or fat birds landing on them or high winds.

The first one could be highly overestimated because they test MTBF by running in an oven basically, and so if their models of thermal acceleration of damage are off, it could be a problem.

The second on the other hand could be highly underestimated.

Yet another failure mode I just thought of is “no failure mode at all”. People will replace solar panels not because there’s anything wrong with them, but because there’s a newer shinier model out there. It happens, believe it or not!

Big reason for a secondary market to develop. Lots of people would happily install second hand solar panels with 40 years of life left.

The first step towards making electricity from scratch is to create the universe.

ngl, this seems like someone chatting up basic food tech as something special.

Modifying food using microbes is ancient technology…

Honestly, if we get to a point where whole-body crispr for adults is developed, that’ll be the end of the beginning of human history.

It’ll be like nuclear bombs. The states that can get the technology will end up so overwhelmingly powerful that nobody would dare directly oppose them.

https://www.primalsurvivor.net/living-off-grid-legal/

This is a great site that discusses the laws per-state by service type, and several states make it illegal to disconnect from the grid. Besides state laws, there’s also local codes and zoning laws requiring connection to the electrical grid.

I’ve also seen stories where parents living off the grid with children could have issues with social services if the local authorities consider grid electricity, city water and city sewer to be basic services and a lack of them may constitute neglect. That being said, I suspect that while that may legally be the case, social services probably aren’t going to spend a lot of time seeking out otherwise idyllic families that happen to have some solar panels and a battery bank, and a well and a septic field.

The thing that’s really sinister is that you’ll actually get in trouble for going off grid in a lot of places.

Like, you could be producing all the food all the water all the electricity that you would ever need and then the state will step in and tell you that that’s not acceptable. It’s literally illegal to not have grid power.

This sort of thing is stuff that you don’t think about, because most of us live on grid, but it’s kind of messed up when you think about it. You are being forced to pay for a service that you don’t want.

I agree with you on all this, I’m more concerned because the abstract of the article is so breathlessly excited about the practical applications of the research.

As basic research it’s important by itself.

I’m no big city doctor, but I can see something moving in the motionless unit.

Wondering if they’re using venturi effect to take laterally moving wind and converting it into a pressure difference between the bottom and the top and run a turbine with that pressure difference.

I’m interested in how these hold up in -40C or blizzard conditions, since solar panels are a non-starter up here but wind isn’t necessarily.

Feels like there’d be ethical implications to growing brain tissue to work in our disposable electronics.

“It will come later to ejabberd Community Edition.”

That would be a game changer – I’m running a matrix home server beside ejabbered, but I would probably shut it down if my xmpp server could do what I wanted anyway!

After my experiences self-hosting, I think every house should have a low electricity server people do most of their stuff from. Not having to ask permission to use your own services is a liberating feeling.

I live somewhere that solar isn’t an option for about 9 months a year, but it would be awfully cool running my hardware using directly collected renewable energy for those 3 months a year!