Sure, but electrolysis is only around 30% efficient — so you need 3 units of energy to produce the hydrogen to drive a vehicle x distance, whereas a BEV would only need one unit to travel the same distance.

That is, you can use the electricity generated from that nuclear power plant to drive three times the distance with a fleet of BEVs than you’ll get out of a fleet of hydrogen powered vehicles.

Ask your dad if he knows why people steal catalytic converters from ICE vehicles.

For anyone not aware, it’s because they’re filled with Palladium — a precious rare earth metal. One where 40% of the world’s supply comes from Russia.

Palladium’s prevalence in the Earth’s crust is about 0.015 ppm. Lithium’s prevalence is 20 ppm — or around 1300 times more abundant than palladium. Which is why people steal catalytic converters in the first place.

The Fediverse by design prevents this, while the internet of the old age had little if any guardrails against this specially since the platforms never really federated with another.

I see someone is too young to remember USENET.

The Fediverse is a bit more like the old USENET days in some regards, but ultimately if it ever becomes more popular the same assholes that ruin other online experiences will also wind up here.

What made the Internet more exciting 30 years ago was that it was mostly comprised of the well educated and dedicated hobbyists, who had it in their best interest to generally keep things decent. We didn’t have the uber-lock-in of a handful of massive companies running everything.

It’s all Eternal September. There’s no going back at this point — any new medium that becomes popular will attract the same forces making the current Internet worse.

Depends on what you mean by “back in the day”. So far as I know you could be ~30, and “back in the day” for you is the 2005 era.

For some of us “back in the day” is more like the early 90’s (and even earlier than that if we want to include other online services, like BBS’s) — and the difference since Eternal September is pretty stark (in both good and bad ways).

I’ve been a fan for a really long time — Astro Bot Rescue Mission is still one of my favourite VR games ever. Team Asobi really knocked this one out of the park it seems. I’m happy for their success — and happy for us to have such a great game to play (I too only got an hour in tonight — had to put my daughter to bed, and she wants to play with me so I had to put it away until tomorrow).

There are a lot of manufacturer-agnostic smart home devices out there, and with just a tiny bit of research online it’s not difficult to avoid anything that is overly tied to a cloud service. Z-wave, ZigBee, Thread/Matter devices are all locally controlled and don’t require a specific companies app or environment — it’s only really the cheapest, bottom-of-the-barrel WiFi based devices that rely on cloud services that you have to be careful of. As with anything, you get what you pay for.

Even if the Internet were destroyed tomorrow, my smart door locks would continue to function — not only are they Z-wave based (so local control using a documented protocol which has Open Source drivers available), but they work even if not “connected”. I can even add new door codes via the touchscreen interface if I wanted to.

The garage door scenario can be a bit more tricky, as there aren’t a lot of good “open” options out there. However, AFAIK all of them continue to work as a traditional garage door opener if the online service becomes unavailable. I have a smart Liftmaster garage door opener (which came with the house when we bought it), and while it’s manufacturer has done some shenanigans in regards to their API to force everyone to use their app (which doesn’t integrate with anything), it still works as a traditional non-smart garage door opener. The button in the garage still works, as does the remote on the outside of the garage, the remotes it came with, and the Homelink integration in both of our vehicles.

With my IONIQ 5, the online features while nice are mostly just a bonus. The car still drives without them, the climate control still works without being online — most of what I lose are “nice-to-have” features like remote door lock/unlock, live weather forecasts, calendar integration, and remote climate control. But it isn’t as if the car stops being drivable if the online service goes down. And besides which, so long as CarPlay and Android Auto are supported, I can always rely on them instead for many of the same functions.

Some cars have much more integration than mine — and the loss of those services may be more annoying.

The people who follow those religions would disagree. The Copts even have their own Pope, so it’s pretty hard to consider them “Catholic” in any normal sense of the word.

Actually pretty much the only Christians until Martin Luther and the Reformation.

I think the Coptic Church (AD 41), Greek Orthodox Church (1st century AD), Syriac Church (514 AD) would like to have a word.

…until the CrowdStrike agent updated, and you wind up dead in the water again.

The whole point of CrowdStrike is to be able to detect and prevent security vulnerabilities, including zero-days. As such, they can release updates multiple times per day. Rebooting in a known-safe state is great, but unless you follow that up with disabling the agent from redownloading the sensor configuration update again, you’re just going to wing up in a BSOD loop.

A better architectural solution like would have been to have Windows drivers run in Ring 1, giving the kernel the ability to isolate those that are misbehaving. But that risks a small decrease in performance, and Microsoft didn’t want that, so we’re stuck with a Ring 0/Ring 3 only architecture in Windows that can cause issues like this.

That company had the power to destroy our businesses, cripple travel and medicine and our courts, and delay daily work that could include some timely and critical tasks.

Unless you have the ability and capacity to develop your own ISA/CPU architecture, firmware, OS, and every tool you use from the ground up, you will always be, at some point, “relying on others stuff” which can break on you at a moments notice.

That could be Intel, or Microsoft, or OpenSSH, or CrowdStrike^0. Very, very, very few organizations can exist in the modern computing world without relying on others code/hardware (with the main two that could that come to mind outside smaller embedded systems being IBM and Apple).

I do wish that consumers had held Microsoft more to account over the last few decades to properly use the Intel Protection Rings (if the CrowdStrike driver were able to run in Ring 1, then it’s possible the OS could have isolated it and prevented a BSOD, but instead it runs in Ring 0 with the kernel and has access to damage anything and everything) — but that horse appears to be long out of the gate (enough so that X86S proposes only having Ring 0 and Ring 3 for future processors).

But back to my basic thesis: saying “it’s your fault for relying on other peoples code” is unhelpful and overly reductive, as in the modern day it’s virtually impossible to do so. Even fully auditing your stacks is prohibitive. There is a good argument to be made about not living in a compute monoculture^1; and lots of good arguments against ever using Windows^2 (especially in the cloud) — but those aren’t the arguments you’re making. Saying “this is your fault for relying on other peoples stuff” is unhelpful — and I somehow doubt you designed your own ISA, CPU architecture, firmware, OS, network stack, and application code to post your comment.

——- ^0 — Indeed, all four of these organizations/projects have let us down like this; Intel with Spectre/Meltdown, Microsoft with the 28 day 32-bit Windows reboot bug, and OpenSSH just announced regreSSHion.
^1 — My organization was hit by the Falcon Sensor outage — our app tier layers running on Linux and developer machines running on macOS were unaffected, but our DBMS is still a legacy MS SQL box, so the outage hammered our stack pretty badly. We’ve fortunately been well funded to remove our dependency on MS SQL (and Windows in general), but that’s a multi-year effort that won’t pay off for some time yet.
^2 — my Windows hate is well documented elsewhere.

Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM.

Creative Labs did wavetable synthesis well before the AWE32 — they released the Wave Blaster daughter board for the Sound Blaster 16, two full years before the AWE32 was released.

(FWIW, I’m not familiar with any motherboards that had FM synthesis built-in in the mid 90’s. By this time, computers were getting fast enough to be able to do software-driven wavetable synthesis, so motherboards just came with a DAC).

Where the Sound Blaster really shined was that the early models were effectively three cards in one — an Adlib card, a CMS card, and a DAC/ADC card (with models a year or two later also acting as CD-ROM interface cards). Everyone forgets about CMS because Adlib was more popular at the time, but it was capable of stereo FM synthesis, whereas the Adlib was only ever mono.

(As publisher of The Sound Blaster Digest way back then, I had all of these cards and more. For a few years, Creative sent me virtually everything they made for review. AMA).

Trogdor was a man! I mean, he was a Dragon Man! Or maybe he was just a dragon! But he was still TROGDOR! TROGDOR!

Burninating the countryside, burninating the peasants, Burninating all the people in their THATCHED ROOF COTTAGES! THATCHED ROOF COTTAGES!

AND THE TROGDOR COMES IN THE NIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!

(I’m not ashamed I know it by heart after all these years 🤣).

We’re already past the point where calculating more digits of pi is either interesting or useful. The formula for calculating pi is well known, so at this point all it is is how much compute power and time can you throw at the infinite series equation.

Pi is only useful for practical purposes out to around 21 digits — with that many digits you can calculate the diameter of the entire universe down to an accuracy of a single electron. Anything more has no real practical benefits. Even NASA only uses 16 digits of Pi for any calculation in-solar system; anything more is just burning compute power (and possibly running into issues with floating point rounding issues) for no additional benefit.

Ten years from now when computers are significantly more powerful, someone will break this record for the lulz.