willglynn (u/willglynn)

willglynn commented on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act bbc.com/news/articles/cjr... · Posted by u/phlummox

bravesoul2 · 20 days ago

We need new 6xx codes. "Requests that are fine, need no redirection and have no errors but are blocked because of politics, overbearing laws or regime"

willglynn · 20 days ago

For example, "An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles":

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7725

willglynn commented on Weather Model based on ADS-B obrhubr.org/adsb-weather-... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

MrGilbert · a month ago

I remember that during COVID, the weather forecast got noticeably worse. One of the explanations I read was that, because so many planes were grounded, there was far less data for the models available. I‘m not sure which source that was from, though.

willglynn · a month ago

This was TAMDAR data, which is a self-contained instrument package intended specifically for meteorological observations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAMDAR

Observations definitely fell off a cliff as commercial air travel slowed to a crawl. In terms of impact, though… it turned out not to be a big deal.

> Aircraft reports suffered a 75% decline in numbers from mid-March to mid-April 2020; in May the number started increasing again. Despite the loss of data there is no clear signal in the forecast skill—partly because the skill shows considerable variability on daily, seasonal, and interannual timescales (Figures 3 and 4). …

> …

> Overall, we can find no evidence that the decrease in aircraft observations has handicapped numerical forecasts of extreme weather to an extent large enough to incur significant economic impact.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...

willglynn commented on Rust running on every GPU rust-gpu.github.io/blog/2... · Posted by u/littlestymaar

slashdev · a month ago

This is a little crude still, but the fact that this is even possible is mind blowing. This has the potential, if progress continues, to break the vendor-locked nightmare that is GPU software and open up the space to real competition between hardware vendors.

Imagine a world where machine learning models are written in Rust and can run on both Nvidia and AMD.

To get max performance you likely have to break the abstraction and write some vendor-specific code for each, but that's an optimization problem. You still have a portable kernel that runs cross platform.

willglynn · a month ago

You might be interested in https://burn.dev, a Rust machine learning framework. It has CUDA and ROCm backends among others.

willglynn commented on Impacts of adding PV solar system to internal combustion engine vehicles jstor.org/stable/26169128... · Posted by u/red369

Mashimo · 2 months ago

Or above the parking lot. Shadow and energy for the car :)

willglynn · 2 months ago

Yes! Exactly this.

My last EV used 22 MWh over 6.5 years. That works out to 390W.

My solar array is located at high latitudes (northern Minnesota), the mounting angle isn't great, it's occasionally covered in snow, etc. In these conditions, I need 6.3 solar panels to produce 22 MWh over 6.5 years.

The area used by 6.3 solar panels -- enough PV to cover _all_ my EV's energy needs -- works out to be a parking spot large enough to fit the vehicle but not large enough to fully open any of the doors.

willglynn commented on Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi? jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/transpute

close04 · 2 months ago

> But newsflash: used is different than new.

I'd put it differently, "you can't have used without the new". They might not be all that different in practice but you can't have everyone buying used. For every used unit sold, someone had to buy it new first.

I agree with the rest. Having a bunch of RPi up to RPi4 in the house, I'm having a harder time finding its proper niche. I don't need the GPIO or the relatively small footprint in general, and from power and performance perspective it doesn't have an edge anymore. RPis stopped excelling at many things they used to, as the price to fix some of the bigger downsides. It just doesn't strike the best compromise for most of my uses (same from what my RPi-fan friends tell me).

But despite reviews like this everyone should make their own assessment. There's no one size fits all. I run a RPi because I could power via PoE. Another one because there was no room for anything larger.

willglynn · 2 months ago

I've had great results with N100 mini PCs including Power over Ethernet. Here's an N100, PoE, 2.5GBASE-T, case, 8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD for $129 refurbished:

https://refurbished.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-s100-...

I have zero applications where a Pi5 makes more sense than either a mini PC or a large microcontroller.

willglynn commented on Amazon Wants to Be a Satellite-Internet Powerhouse. It Has a Long Way to Go wsj.com/business/telecom/... · Posted by u/fortran77

lupusreal · 4 months ago

The terms of their FCC license require them to have half their presently licensed constellation, roughly 1600 satellites, in orbit by July of 2026. They're almost certainly not going to make it, but I would be very surprised if the FCC doesn't grant them an extension if they can show they're making serious progress and aren't just squatting on that spectrum.

The curveball is Trump/Musk influencing the FCC's decision making processes, which is definitely possible. On the other hand, the FCC must know that they will be accused of being corrupt if they don't grant an extension.

willglynn · 4 months ago

This is not discretionary for the FCC:

> A station authorization shall be automatically terminated in whole or in part without further notice to the licensee upon:

> …

> (d) The failure to maintain 50 percent of the maximum number of NGSO space stations authorized for service following the 9-year milestone period as functional space stations in authorized orbits, which failure will result in the termination of authority for the space stations not in orbit as of the date of noncompliance, but allow for technically identical replacements.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

_Congress_ can change this, but as written, Federal law compels the FCC to automatically terminate the authorization for failing to deploy half the satellites under 47 CFR § 25.161(d), just as they must automatically terminate the authorization when the license expires under 47 CFR § 25.161(b).

willglynn commented on I found a backdoor into my bed trufflesecurity.com/blog/... · Posted by u/riverdroid

moolcool · 6 months ago

I wonder if there'd be a cottage industry for new control boards which de-shittify IOT devices but keep their functionality. Like buy the bed, and then buy a little pre-programmed ESP32 logic board to replace the factory board.

willglynn · 6 months ago

ESPHome fills much of this niche for me. It's a framework for turning YAML device definitions into custom microcontroller firmware, with myriad supporting tools. The official device database at https://devices.esphome.io lists 554 devices but that's nowhere near the end of it.

Most manufacturers bolt on IOT functions by dropping an off-the-shelf module onto their device-specific board. It's sometimes possible to replace the factory firmware with ESPHome, sometimes even using over-the-air updates. For example, AirGradient air quality sensors: https://github.com/MallocArray/airgradient_esphome

Even when it isn't possible to commandeer the factory IOT module, the fact that it _is_ a module is still useful, because it's almost always possible to inhibit or remove the factory module and connect your own instead. The factory IOT module controls and senses the device, so your replacement module can too, using the same pins. For example, an IOT air filter: https://github.com/mill1000/esphome-winix-c545#final-assembl...

Some devices are designed around multidrop communication busses. These are usually even easier, since the ability to join the bus is an intended design feature, even if the device you're using is not intended. For example, many Samsung residential HVAC systems: https://github.com/omerfaruk-aran/esphome_samsung_hvac_bus/d...

willglynn commented on S1: A $6 R1 competitor? timkellogg.me/blog/2025/0... · Posted by u/tkellogg

UncleEntity · 7 months ago

One could hope...

Even at the height of the Cold War there was always a human between <leader presses button> and <nukes go aflyin'>.

--edit--

...which has me wondering if a president even has the constitutional authority to destroy the entire planet and if one could interpret their command as a 'lawful order'. Makes one think.

willglynn · 7 months ago

On the topic of fail-deadly nukes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand

willglynn commented on Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast phys.org/news/2024-12-goo... · Posted by u/lemonberry

tfehring · 9 months ago

I’m by no means an expert in weather forecasting, but I have some familiarity with the methods. My understanding is that non-“AI” weather models basically subdivide the atmosphere into a 3d grid of cells that are on the order of hundreds to thousands of meters in each dimension, treat each cell as atomic/homogeneous at a given point in time, and then advance the relevant differential equations deterministically to forecast changes across the grid over time. This approach, again based on my limited understanding, is primarily held back by the sparse resolution and the computational resources needed to improve it, not by limitations of our understanding of the underlying physics. (Relatedly, I believe these models can be very sensitive to small changes in the initial conditions.) It’s not hard to imagine a neural net learning a more efficient way to encode and forecast the underlying physical patterns.

willglynn · 9 months ago

This is true for many but not all weather models.

GFS and IFS are both medium-range global models in the class Google is targeting. These models are spectral models, meaning they pivot the input spatial grid into the frequency domain, carry out weather computations in the frequency domain, and pivot back to provide output grids.

The intuition here is that, at global scale over many days, the primary dynamics are waves doing what waves do. Representing state in terms of waves reduces the accumulation of numerical errors. On the other hand, this only works on spheroids and it comes at the expense of greatly complicating local interactions, so the use of spectral methods for NWP is far from universal.