gandalf_der_12te

joined 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

without watching the video - google search is falling apart because there's a lot of shit content, a lot of bad articles being written.

and there's a lot of bad articles being written because there's a lot of authors that just want to make money from advertising, without actually caring about the content. in other words, it's advertising's fault that the quality of content is dropping. and ironically, it's mostly google's fault that advertisement on the internet got so big as it is today.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

we live in very special times. take a step back and appreciate how transformative the recent years are.

for a billion years, life existed on earth. in the last 200 years, we invented electricity, electric cars and transistors.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

it's me me meee right?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

what keeps the water going while it makes its journey from the Alps to the sea?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

I disagree that it's "hardwired in our brains". It certainly has a strong cultural bias. Also, I kinda look at it like a gynologist: If you've seen 20 of them naked, it gets boring and you stop staring, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I assume it's because France is a sane country.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

"freedom" as in "free to economic growth" but not "free" as in "free to do what you want"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You might also be interested in the Panopticon.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

In humans, there's good things and there's bad things. But most of it is actually in-between.

If you take out everything bad, that satisfies you for the moment. And then you go on, looking for further progress. You take out the almost-bad, the somewhat-bad. In the end, it leaves only the good. But that is not enough for a human to live on.

Constant surveillance leads to burnout and extremely high stress-levels.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I hadn't read it before, and I thought it was interesting, and the article is still as relevant as it was back then. I thought many others missed it too. It's also pretty well written.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

You do deserve it. Everybody deserves a stable living condition :)

 

As we all know, AC won the "War of the Currents". The reasoning behind this is that AC voltage is easy to convert up/down with just a ring of iron and two coils. And high voltage allows us to transport current over longer distances, with less loss.

Now, the War of the Currents happened in 1900 (approximately), and our technology has improved a lot since then. We have useful diodes and transistors now, we have microcontrollers and Buck/Boost converters. We can transform DC voltage well today.

Additionally, photovoltaics produces DC naturally. Whereas the traditional generator has an easier time producing AC, photovoltaic plants would have to transform the power into AC, which, if I understand correctly, has a massive loss.

And then there's the issue of stabilizing the frequency. When you have one big producer (one big hydro-electric dam or coal power plant), then stabilizing the frequency is trivial, because you only have to talk to yourself. When you have 100000 small producers (assume everyone in a bigger area has photovoltaics on their roof), then suddenly stabilizing the frequency becomes more challenging, because everybody has to work in exactly the same rhythm.

I wonder, would it make sense to change our power grid from AC to DC today? I know it would obviously be a lot of work, since every consuming device would have to change what power it accepts from the grid. But in the long run, could it be worth it? Also, what about insular networks. Would it make sense there? Thanks for taking the time for reading this, and also, I'm willing to go into the maths, if that's relevant to the discussion.

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