cgdcraig · HackerTrans

cgdcraig

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vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Humans are the most flexible and reconfigurable system for assembly. They can identify and deal with near infinite variations in position and condition of your inputs. If you look at automated assembly like 3/4 of the automation is to make sure the robot has the pieces is in the right place or orientation and the movements that are used are not complicated. Meanwhile for a human you can toss a bag of parts and they'll just fish through the bag or reoriented whatever as needed. Put a piece sideways into a machine that wasn't made to deal with it and it'll just flip out. Also reconfiguring assembly lines on the fly is feasible, change what the line is doing could be as easy as workers grabbing a different tool box. Fixed assembly lines are only good at scale and if the product will change incredibly slowly.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Elon has always been one of the main drivers of innovation over there, Gwenn has been the one keeping stuff afloat but Elon has been the one driving the "the hell I'm paying that much for a piece, I'll make it myself" culture as well as the iterative process.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

I'd imagine a lot of places where software is part of a safety critical system also come with physical fail safes. An example being burst plates on pressure vessels, if the software that controls pressurization spasms and causes an over pressure the physical fail safe will prevent a catastrophic accident.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Fun fact, Canada had the 3rd largest proven reserves of oil in the world, mostly in the oil/tar sands.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Rock isn't necessarily airtight more so in mines. A fractured host material for the ore is very desirable as it means less explosives and higher ore production numbers.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

The compressed air systems anger the thermo gods though

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

That data is the secret sauce for mining and oil and gas companies. Them giving it away would be like Facebook giving away their datasets.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Right but my point is if you're premeditating the theft to the point where you've studied the manuals/practiced in flight simulators then a key isn't going to be the thing stopping you. I mean will that person realistically go "oh man, I've spent 100 hours learning how to pilot this thing, snuck into the plane, properly fueled the plane and did weight balancing but shit I don't have the keys, guess I'll just go home!". Nah, that guy is hot wiring that plane or stealing the keys on his way into the plane.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

It's not like the engine start procedure on one of those things is a turnkey solution. The amount of domain knowledge needed serves as a form of soft security.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Atmospheric concentrations are low so you need to harvest a lot of air. To put in context the earth has ~2E9 km^3 air, if you wanted to process every cubic meter of air in the world once in 10 years you'd have a system that could process ~6km^3/s , using air flowing at 30kph(18mph) would require ~800km^2 of collecting area.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Not an issue if you have low abandonment of subscribers but an issue if everyone exchanges papers that way. You get a lot of value out of being able to search all the journals in one place. Also what happens if the author is dead or has dropped off the face of the planet.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

The article says that Australia has 14% of global reserves not that they're only mining 14% of what they have. We've also found all the easy stuff already, the cost of exploration will only increase over time since the good stuff will be deeper or in more random places.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

You should look into building elements with micro encapsulated phase change materials. They're becoming popular nowadays, and you can find ceiling panels and wall panels from commericals suppliers. The pcm melts during the day cooling down the room, you recharge it at night by using a whole house fan to continuously pass cool air throughout the house.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

That's true only of devices that don't convert the energy into work(motors), light(LEDs) or other voltages(transformers). All other electronics convert all the power into heat. Basically any computer is a heater that so happens is able to do math as well. Energy is consumed for doing a computation but it's 6-7 orders smaller than what the heat produced

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Dealing with cold energy(coolth) storage whether it's in ice or chilled water is tricky mostly because of the capital cost involved with adding a storage system that can only do one thing, namely store cold. They're great for specific regions where you'll be using them on a daily basis. Chilling water outside of the peak times for use during peak cooling has been studied a lot in litterature there's a recent article here about storing excess solar energy in cooling energy:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221067071... , the main problem with the system is one of practicality. In order to effectively use the cold storage you need to use liquid cooling like the ones used in commercial buildings, that or switch to a water source chiller with a cooling tower. You can build it, but whether the total cost of that system is less than buying a bigger AC unit and paying more for power depends entirely on local conditions(seasonality,diurnal temperature changes, whether you pay for demand as well as power and whether you're on time of day metering).

------------ Using it for winter and summer does increase the utilization and would be best practice but places with winter/summer seasonality have a golden zone where you don't need active heating or cooling. If you're below 24c and above 18c you don't need much energy to maintain thermal comfort, provided you're not in a high humidity environment. During the winter it's better to use solar collectors with a thermal syphon for heat collection instead of stocking up heat since peak thermal demand occurs at night.

------------ They're known as earthpipes or earth hear exchangers and they come with their own problems, namely proximity to surface and thermal load imbalance over seasons. The earth is a really shitty thermal reservoir because it bleeds heat out the side and the top, the really big thing that it has going for it is that it's free. When you use the system in an environment thats either mostly hot or mostly cold you change the ground temperature in the long run, either increasing it or decreasing it over time. This in turn affects the ability of the system to condition air, there's also the problem that it can only bring the air temperature up to that of the ground during winter so you still need a heating system to supplement it; works great for cooling though. Basically the system gives you thermal energy at no operational cost(other than the fan) but you have to either accept whatever temperature it gives you or have a way to further condition it. Earthships generally use the sun in the winter to bring the temperature up during the day and have a thermal mass inside the house that maintains the temperature at night.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Cold energy storage has always had the problem of utilization and capital cost. You need to buy the storage system and then that storage system may only be useful for 3-6 months of the year during 6 hours of the day. From a thermal efficiency perspective they're great but in general they get offed by the economics. For the price you'd end up gettinf better value off a battery storage system to do load shifting.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Ish, solar thermal has its own set of problems and limitations; they don't work during cloudy weather and the storing the thermal energy is tricky because you need a lot of high quality thermal mass