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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Hydrogen is troublesome as an energy storage. The roundtrip efficiency (electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity) is just… very not worthwhile compared to batteries. Then beyond efficiency there is still the question of “how do we store hydrogen safely?”

    Storing energy indefinitely is not a problem for electricity storage, since we are pretty much guaranteed to use the stored energy up in a single day.


  • It is all quite complicated.

    1. A renewable producer (e.g. solar panels) cannot produce energy 24/7. And when it produces energy, you are not guaranteed the production is stable.

    2. A consumer cannot consume energy 24/7. And when they consume energy, you are not guaranteed the consumption is stable.

    3. To make the issue worse, a producer may not be producing energy when the consumer wants it, and vice versa.

    4. Currently, energy storage is not widely installed. Hence any produced energy must be consumed at the same time.

    The factors above combined means that there will be a mismatch. If the production is too great, your electricity appliances will probably explode and whatnot. If the consumption is too great, you experience blackouts. Neither are desirable.

    Now consider there is a middleman. The grid. Producers sell energy to the grid. Consumers buy energy from the grid.

    At some point in time, due to the factors above, the grid will need (A) zero to negative prices to encourage consumers to buy & use more energy from it, and to encourage producers to produce & sell less energy to it. Or (B) increased prices to encourage consumers to buy & use less energy and producers to produce & sell more energy. A flat price is not realistic. (Residential users only have a flat rate because our demand patterns are more stable.)

    But due to the production patterns of renewable energy and consumption patterns of our society, there is a not-insignificant risk that renewable producers will consistently face scenario (A) above making it difficult to cover back the costs.




  • Last time I asked around about this question, the answer was surprisingly “probably not much”! When a low-power x86 chip (like those mobile chips) is idling (which is pretty much all the time if all you are doing is hosting a server on it) it consumes very little power, about the same level as an idling Pi. It is when the frequency ramps up that performance-per-watt gets noticeably worse on x86.

    Edit: My personal test showed that my x86 laptop fared slightly worse than my Pi 3 in idling power (~2 watts higher it seems), but that laptop is oooooooold.
















  • One of the issues at hand is that X11, the predecessor of Wayland, does not have a standardized way to tell applications what scale they should use. Applications on X11 get the scale from environment variables (completely bypassing X11), or from Xft.dpi, or by providing in-application settings, or they guess it using some unorthodox means, or simply don’t scale at all. It’s a huge mess overall.

    It is one of the more-or-less fundamentally unfixable parts of the protocol, since it wants everything to be on the same coordinate space (i.e. 1 pixel is 1 pixel everywhere, which is… quite unsuitable for modern systems.)

    Wayland does operate like how you say it and applications supporting Wayland will work properly in HiDPI environments.

    However a lot of people and applications are still on X11 due to various reasons.