petrocrat (u/petrocrat)

petrocrat commented on Tesla market share in US drops to lowest since 2017 reuters.com/business/auto... · Posted by u/nabla9

jmward01 · 9 hours ago

There is a lot of discussion of the brand being hurt, but I will say that personally I just don't want a new car period and Tesla specifically in large part because of privacy concerns. My understanding it that Tesla is one of the worst offenders in a group of massively offensive (to privacy) options. Are there actually privacy preserving options left in the market at all and in the EV market specifically? If Tesla promised, and delivered, privacy (actually didn't track) it would go a long way to rehabilitating them as a brand in my eyes. It probably wouldn't be enough, but I would at least look at them again.

petrocrat · 7 hours ago

The Slate truck might be the only one to have less digital tracking just due to how they are skipping so many electronic bells and whistles to keep costs in the $20k range.

petrocrat commented on Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat wired.com/story/extreme-h... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

tejohnso · a year ago

> Demand for air conditioning is expected to more than triple by 2050

Which further exacerbates the problem. Another unfortunate feedback loop for us.

petrocrat · a year ago

Though demand for heating should be falling simultaneously, no? I wonder what the net CO2 tradeoff is there. At least historically with burning fuels to create heat, that likely contributed more per unit of degree-change than AC, however with Heat pumps now that's probably either a wash or reversed, if I had to guess.

petrocrat commented on The Erlang Ecosystem (2018) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=7AJR6... · Posted by u/rramadass

cangeroo · 2 years ago

As usual, it depends on the use case. Enterprise vs hobbyist, for example.

I greatly admire the principles, but in practice, the Erlang platform underdelivers in a modern context, because applications are usually not deployed by hot-swapping, but by rollout on Kubernetes. High availability is achieved by load balancing over horizontal scale-out of pods. Distributed systems today use external systems for state, like databases, keyvalue/caching stores, message queues, etc.

Elixir is a convenient language, like Python, with lots of convenience tools.

But for a long list of reasons, I wouldn't use it for anything other than prototyping/hobby projects.

petrocrat · 2 years ago

WhatsApp, famously launched and served millions of users with a small team using Elixir. Seems to me that speaks to the language's production capability, or enterprise capability, if you will. Considering that, can you go more into detail about your assertion here?

> But for a long list of reasons, I wouldn't use it for anything other than prototyping/hobby projects.

petrocrat commented on Training immune cells to remove ‘trash’ helps resolve lung inflammation today.uic.edu/immune-cell... · Posted by u/clouddrover

CameronNemo · 2 years ago

I believe that the concept is called Hormesis.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

petrocrat · 2 years ago

The term for the parent comment's concept is anti-fragile

petrocrat commented on Irrigating more U.S. crops by mid-century will be worth it, researchers say phys.org/news/2023-08-irr... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

hx8 · 2 years ago

The essential issue here is that for typical land you can produce more food with plants than you can with animals. Animals act as an extra 'processing' step for food production. Imagine the food chain for eating a plant vs eating an animal. The extra step is highly inefficient by a lot of metrics, but humans have a major diet preference for eating beef/pork/chicken.

Plant -> Person

Plant -> Farm Animal -> Human

Edit: My goal is to explain the basics of the argument that the parent comment was unfamiliar with, not to advocate.

petrocrat · 2 years ago

The over simplification here is that not all plants are equal and not all soils and/or climes can support all plants. So for soils or climes that can only really grow "weeds" that are inedible to humans, if you put them through an animal (specifically a ruminant), then it converts biomass that is inedible to edible for humans.

The effect of this on your diagrams is in diagram 2, with the intermediate farm animal, there are many situations in that scenario where the calories from those plants would be entirely lost, not simply rerouted losslessly to human consumption.

petrocrat commented on A 100GW phased laser array for interstellar lightsail propulsion (2021) opg.optica.org/josab/view... · Posted by u/gus_leonel

benfarahmand · 2 years ago

Could these ground based lasers be used for deflecting asteroids?

petrocrat · 2 years ago

Interesting, I was thinking of them for another use as well: dumping surplus photovoltaic/wind collected energy into space as a thermostat of sorts to help control global average temperatures and buy more time to handle CO2 emissions. Not sure but maybe its cheaper than using batteries for time-shifting that energy to reduce fossil fuels during the transitionary period.

petrocrat commented on A 100GW phased laser array for interstellar lightsail propulsion (2021) opg.optica.org/josab/view... · Posted by u/gus_leonel

civilitty · 2 years ago

So it only requires 40% of all power produced by California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia combined [1]? For a few minutes? No problem then!

Jokes aside, I don't think there are any interconnectors on the planet that can handle that amount of power for even a split second, let alone the infrastructure to supply it for minutes at a time to a single location. The biggest grid interconnectors in the world cap out at a few gigawatts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection

petrocrat · 2 years ago

If it's meant to transfer momentum to a lightsail, then there is no requirement that the power must be delivered to a single point on the electrical grid. Several of these lasers in a smaller form factor dispersed over a rather large geographic region can all focus on a point in orbit and transfer nearly the same momentum as a single laser focused on that point would.

petrocrat commented on Recreate the cavity-preventing GMO bacteria BCS3-L1 from precursor manifund.org/projects/rec... · Posted by u/flaque

teryasdasd · 2 years ago

Even if you only eat meat (or whatever else besides grains), bits of food will still get wedged between into your gums and then rot away with your teeth.

petrocrat · 2 years ago

It's not the fact that there is food stuck in your teeth that causes cavities, it's what pH results from the bacteria metabolizing that food. Bacteria breaking down carbs produces acidic conditions, but when they break down protein or fat the reaction products from that are much closer to neutral pH.

petrocrat commented on Migrating from Supabase blog.val.town/blog/migrat... · Posted by u/stevekrouse

kiwicopple · 2 years ago

hey hn, supabase ceo here

the Val Town team were kind enough to share this article with me before they released it. Perhaps you know from previous HN threads that we take customer feedback very seriously. Hearing feedback like this is hard. Clearly the team at Val Town wanted Supabase to be great and we didn’t meet their expectations. For me personally, that hurts. A few quick comments

1. Modifying the database in production: I’ve published a doc on Maturity Models[0]. Hopefully this makes it clear that developers should be using Migrations once their project is live (not using the Dashboard to modify their database live). It also highlights the options for managing dev/local environments. This is just a start. We’re building Preview Databases into the native workflow so that developers don’t need to think about this.

2. Designing for Supabase: Our goal is to make all of Postgres easy, not obligatory. I’ve added a paragraph[1] in the first page in our Docs highlighting that it’s not always a good idea to go all-in on Postgres. We’ll add examples to our docs with “traditional” approaches like Node + Supabase, Rails + Supabase, etc. There are a lot of companies using this approach already, but our docs are overly focused on “the Supabase way” of doing things. There shouldn’t be a reason to switch from Supabase to any other Postgres provider if you want “plain Postgres”.

3. That said, we also want to continue making “all of Postgres” easy to use. We’re committed to building an amazing CLI experience. Like any tech, we’re going to need a few iterations. W’re building tooling for debugging and observability. We have index advisors coming[2]. We recently added Open Telemetry to Logflare[3] and added logging for local development[4]. We’re making platform usage incredibly clear[5]. We aim to make your database indestructible - we care about resilience as much as experience and we’ll make sure we highlight that in future product announcements.

I’ll finish with something that I think we did well: migrating away from Supabase was easy for Val Town, because it’s just Postgres. This is one of our core principles, “everything is portable” (https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/architectur...). Portability forces us compete on experience. We aim to be the best Postgres hosting service in the world, and we’ll continue to focus on that goal even if we’re not there yet.

[0] Maturity models: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/maturity-model

[1] Choose your comfort level: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/architectur...

[2] Index advisor: https://database.dev/olirice/index_advisor

[3] Open Telemetry: https://github.com/Logflare/logflare/pull/1466

[4] Local logging: https://supabase.com/blog/supabase-logs-self-hosted

[5] Usage: https://twitter.com/kiwicopple/status/1658683758718124032?s=...

petrocrat · 2 years ago

Echoing most of the comments here: Love your product! This feedback in the article isn't even a setback, just a learning opportunity that Supabase users know will only make it better. You guys/gals at Supabase are crushing it!

petrocrat commented on The four times the United States government defaulted on its debt (2021) thehill.com/opinion/finan... · Posted by u/itronitron

neodymiumphish · 2 years ago

I'm curious who is engaging in the gamesmanship in this scenario. This has been an issue long in the making with our deficit ballooning, even after significant increases in federal revenue. The bill signed by Republicans is hardly extreme, and when we considering the amount of expenses being paid to interest alone, it's clear the federal government needs to do something at this point.

Legislators across both aisles have demonstrated they have no interest in decreasing spending. This bill forces their hand while there's still leverage.

petrocrat · 2 years ago

The term ballooning is so qualitative and subjective that it is essentially a Barnum statement. How would you determine if the number for the debt is too high? And why?

And how would you determine if it is too low?

For example would the calculation consider the current population? the current factory capacity? Agricultural capacity? the year? Interest Rates? Tax Revenue? The populations desired rate of saving? The current desires and goals of the nation and its citizens? If there is no exact formula, then would a representative body that debates and agrees on a best estimate number be a reasonable way to decide that? If so isn't that what congress does already?