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ryao commented on Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury   a16z.substack.com/p/why-a... · Posted by u/walterbell
rkomorn · 3 months ago
I don't think it's just "most Americans don't know."

When I installed AC in my former Bay Area home, I would have needed multiple mini split units to cover 1200sq ft, with questions about how many you could have on at once to still get the right performance. I went with a single central air unit instead.

It also (at the time at least) didn't come with a centralized thermostat, which meant managing each room individually (that would've been fine with me, personally, but it's a drawback for lots of people).

On top of that, many (if not most) mini split units are also somewhat aesthetically displeasing.

In my new home (on a different continent), I have mini splits. I'm somewhat satisfied with them, at best. I'd still prefer central air but it's not a thing for residential homes here.

ryao · 3 months ago
If I were to ask most people I know offline, I suspect only a small number of them would know what a minisplit unit is. For most people, A/C is like plumbing. They do not think about it until it breaks. Learning that there are better options is just not something that people do.

That said, I was replying to someone from Vietnam. Assuming that things in Vietnam are similar to China and Japan, people will only heat or cool the specific rooms that they are using, rather than heating or cooling everything like how many Americans do things. Those in the US who cannot afford to heat or cool everything, who are likely very underrepresented here, would be those using window units, since they are cheap upfront. A minisplit would be cheaper over the long term, but the high upfront cost dissuades people in thing market from even looking at them.

Finally, I had Fujitsu minisplit units installed in my basement two years ago. They are far more aesthetically pleasing than window A/C units.

ryao commented on Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury   a16z.substack.com/p/why-a... · Posted by u/walterbell
esperent · 3 months ago
Here in Vietnam nearly all ACs are these minisplit type. It costs about 500,000VND ($19) to get one serviced, including replacement coolant. It's cheap enough that I get it done at least once or twice a year for all units (the coolant doesn't always need replacing but I get it cleaned and serviced).

I know the US and Vietnamese economies are very different, but something doesn't add up there.

ryao · 3 months ago
Minisplit AC units are not very popular in the US. The US mainly uses either central air conditioning units or all in one AC units that are designed to be installed in a window. The window units are cheap, but inefficient. The central units are more efficient, but very expensive. Minisplit units are more expensive than window units (by probably a factor of 10), but are more efficient than either. I suspect most people in the US do not know that minisplit units are even an option.

In my home, I recently had a heat pump unit replace my central A/C with some minisplits that connected to the exterior unit installed in the basement. The entire setup cost as much as it originally cost to install the central A/C, despite parts of the central A/C being reused.

Note that in the US, what we call air conditioners only support cooling and not heating. When they support both, we call them heat pumps despite that being the scientific name which applies to the cooling only units too.

ryao commented on Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury   a16z.substack.com/p/why-a... · Posted by u/walterbell
matwood · 3 months ago
For a non-obvious leak it's pretty normal to recommend a new system at that age. The reason is that a tech's time is expensive, and finding a leak can take a lot of time. Then once it's found, if the leak is in the exchange you're looking at a fairly large replacement part cost.

At least in the US, refrigerant costs have been high because of a shortage, not taxes.

https://www.coolingpost.com/world-news/us-ac-companies-move-...

ryao · 3 months ago
If you need R410A refrigerant, the high costs are due to government regulations causing the shortage. I very much hope that the heat pump I had installed 2 years ago does not leak. Theoretically, if the leak occurs under warranty, it should be covered. The central A/C unit I replaced with the heat pump had developed a leak right before the warranty expired, which resulted in a costly repair being covered. Unfortunately, we paid another company to refill it before learning that it would be covered as part of the warranty repair by the company that installed it. It then developed a second leak several years later, so I had a heat pump installed. Of course, that heat pump uses R410A refrigerant.

The leaky A/C unit had been made by Lennox while the new heat pump was made by Fujitsu. I very much hope that Fujitsu engineered its heat pump to last. The heat pump had also replaced an oil heating system that was around 25 years old and still could have been used for many more years. Expecting similar or better longevity out of a heat pump does not seem unreasonable.

ryao commented on Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury   a16z.substack.com/p/why-a... · Posted by u/walterbell
ryao · 3 months ago
> If you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall.

While this is true, the costs are inflated because you need to repaint the entire room to get the original look, rather than only pay the cost of merely replacing the drywall. Of course, some handymen are much more expensive than others, so it is possible that is more expensive too.

If you are one of the few using wallpaper and have extra wallpaper for just such emergencies, using the extra wallpaper to paper over it should be cheap.

ryao commented on First recording of a dying human brain shows waves similar to memory flashbacks (2022)   louisville.edu/medicine/n... · Posted by u/thunderbong
ryao · 3 months ago
> On the spiritual side, I think it is somewhat calming. I face this at times when you have patients that pass away and you talk their families; you have to be the bearer of bad news. Right now, we don't know anything about what happens to their loved one’s brain when they're dying. I think if we know that there is something happening in their brain, that they are remembering nice moments, we can tell these families and it builds a feeling of warmth that in that moment when they are falling, this can help a little bit to catch them.

I do not see any connection between this and spirituality. I also see no reason to think that they must be remembering nice moments. It is possible to be remembering painful moments. This seems especially likely in cases of PTSD.

ryao commented on Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)   needleful.net/blog/2024/0... · Posted by u/gudzpoz
jacquesm · 3 months ago
As a very long time C programmer: don't try to be smart. The more you rely on fancy preprocessor tricks the harder it will be to understand and debug your code.

The C preprocessor gives you enough power to shoot yourself in the foot, repeatedly, with anything from small caliber handguns to nuclear weapons. You may well end up losing control over your project entirely.

One nice example: glusterfs. There are a couple of macros in use there that, when they work are magic. But when they don't you lose days, sometimes weeks. This is not the way to solve coding problems, you only appear smart as long as you remember what you've built. Your other self, three years down the road is going to want to kill the present one, and the same goes for your colleagues a few weeks from now.

ryao · 3 months ago
ZFS has a very nice set of macros that work very well:

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/blob/master/include/os/freebs...

See P2PHRASE() and friends. They were inherited from OpenSolaris.

ryao commented on Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)   needleful.net/blog/2024/0... · Posted by u/gudzpoz
JSR_FDED · 3 months ago
It’s cool that you can do this in C! And it’s cool that this article explores that.

As developers we have to decide where and when this makes sense, just like with other language features, libraries, architectural patterns, etc.

ryao · 3 months ago
It uses multiple non-standard extensions to C. A strictly standards conformant compiler would refuse to compile it.
ryao commented on Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower   supercarblondie.com/elect... · Posted by u/chris_overseas
davedx · 3 months ago
Could lead to significant efficiency gains for EV's, because 1/4 of the motor weight means better power-to-weight ratio... a lot of things will automatically get better.

YASA was founded in 2009, a spin out from Oxford University following the PhD of founder and still CTO, Dr Tim Woolmer.

"Over the decades that followed both of these technologies were explored. But despite the potential for weight reduction, smaller size, shorter axle length and increased torque, it was the difficulty in manufacturing the axial flux technology that limited its commercial viability, because the motor could not be made by stacking laminations, as with radial machines."

"The breakthrough innovation came by segmenting the axial flux motor in discrete "pole-pieces", so the motor could be manufactured using Soft Magnetic Composite material.

SMC can be pressed at low cost into a wide variety of 3D shapes. This removed the need for the complex laminations, overcoming the major manufacturing challenge of the axial flux machine."

"In 2025, after a £12m investment, YASA opened the UK's first axial-flux super factory, in Oxfordshire.

The opening of this facility boosts YASA’s manufacturing capacity, setting new benchmarks in e-motor technology and quality, and enabling production to scale beyond 25,000 units per year."

This is awesome. Lighter motors also make electric flight more viable

ryao · 3 months ago
There is no statement about the efficiency of the motor itself. If the energy conversion efficiency is low, then the weight savings will not matter and the car will have even less range.
ryao commented on Raspberry Pi Pico Bit-Bangs 100 Mbit/S Ethernet   elektormagazine.com/news/... · Posted by u/chaosprint
kragen · 3 months ago
Or just a few cents! Possibly that will only last until war in Taiwan, though, or until it becomes impossible to find anything but counterfeits.
ryao · 3 months ago
This depends on the PIO in the RP2040/RP2350. As far as I know, that is an innovation exclusive to the Raspberry Pi company, so it would not be possible to do this on another microcontroller:

https://magazine.raspberrypi.com/articles/what-is-programmab...

The microcontroller has additional cores called state machines in the PIOs that are specifically designed for bit banging and have their own custom ISA that reportedly only has 9 instructions.

ryao commented on Raspberry Pi Pico Bit-Bangs 100 Mbit/S Ethernet   elektormagazine.com/news/... · Posted by u/chaosprint
ryao · 3 months ago
This would be a great starting point to make a USB Ethernet NIC if someone were inclined to do it.

It could even have a very practical use if it were made to impersonate a USB Ethernet device that the Nintendo Switch / Nintendo Switch 2 supports. They only support gigabit NICs, but it should be easy to just pretend that the other side failed to negotiate gigabit and only supports 100Mbps.

u/ryao

KarmaCake day4479August 18, 2014View Original