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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It’s not like the country was massively relying on nuclear energy at any point in time really.

    Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors were generating almost 30% of its electricity a decade ago before they started phasing them out. It was their second largest source of electricity after coal.

    Despite having built literally 100s of solar and wind farms in the past decade they still had to increase their coal output by 40 TWh to make up for the gap. A nuclear reactor generates a fuck ton of electricity.

    And for what? Statically speaking 800x more people are killed in coal mining accidents per TWh generated than are killed by all nuclear power accidents combined. They phased out their largest source of carbonless electricity and the decision likely killed more people than would have died even if there was a nuclear accident.



  • You’re not wrong.

    Wholesale prices do bounce around significantly in a day, occasionally even going negative. And some miners do shutdown for brief periods during high demand due to a high electricity price. Some miners aren’t buying electricity from the grid, and have their own generation sources with different economic inputs. And there’s lots of day to day volatility in mining rates that has nothing to do with economics.

    There’s no formula or methodology that could tell you how much energy is being wasted at any given moment. That impossible. There’s no way of knowing how many miners are operating globally at any given point in time. We can’t even reliably tell which country a block was mined in. We can only make reasonable estimates of global averages over the last few weeks.

    You can get closer with more detailed modelling, but the equation I gave using global averages for bitcoin and electricity prices in the last few weeks will get you to an accurate estimate.


  • Yes somewhat… the formula has several factors that are constantly in flux, Bitcoin mining is a random process the value can be off entirely by chance. But it’s designed to self-adjust over the long run towards that formula, individual fluctuations cancel out in the long run.

    For electricity price specifically, wholesale prices of electricity tend to be fairly close everywhere bitcoin is mined. Bitcoin mining is more profitable where electricity is the cheapest and is uneconomic in places where the price of electricity is above average. So it only happens where the wholesale price is globally competitive.


  • Money isn’t the limiting factor though.

    There’s plenty of money waiting to be spent on green electricity projects that’s bottlenecked by grid connections, permitting, panel and turbine manufacturing, rare element supply chains and host of other factors slowing down how quickly we can build new renewable capacity.

    Also the typical LCOE cost comparison approach doesn’t factor in the cost of grid connections, which is lower for a nuclear power plant than it is for an equivalent capacity of renewables. Nuclear is still more expensive on average, but the difference isn’t as clear cut and there a cases where nuclear might be cheaper in the long run.

    Everytime nuclear comes up on Reddit/Lemmy we always seem to argue whether nuclear or renewables is better choice like it’s a choice between the two. Both nuclear and renewables are slam dunk choices compared to fossil fuels on every metric if you factor in even an overly optimistic case analyisis of the financial impacts of climate change. (Nevermind giving considerations of the humanatarian impact.)

    80+% of our planet’s energy still comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewables have been smashing growth records year over year for a long time now and yet we haven’t even reached the point where we’re adding new renewables capacitiy faster than energy demand is increasing. We’re still setting new records annually for total fossil fuel consumed. Hell we haven’t even gotten to the point where we stopped building new Coal-fired power stations yet.

    The people who argue that “we don’t need nuclear, renewabes are cheaper and faster” you’re missing the reality of sheer quantity of energy needed. We can’t build enough new renewables fast enough to save us regardless of how much money is invested. There aren’t enough sources of the raw materials needed to make that happen quickly enough, we can’t connect them to the grid quickly enough, we cant build new factories for solar panels and wind turbines fast enough. Yes, we will undoubetly continure to accelerate our new renewables projects at a record setting paces each year but it’s not enough, it’s not even close. Even our most optimistic , accelerated projections don’t put us anywhere close to displacing fossil fuel consumption in the next 10-20 years.

    We need to stop arguing over which is better. We need to do it all.


  • Not sure where you’re getting 250kwh/m2/year from. If it was one contiguous solid panel maybe you could achieve that and then you’d be correct it would be about 560,000 km2. Or roughly the size of France.

    But you need to leave space between the panels in a solar farm for them to be at the optimal angle without casting shadows on each other. Real world solar farms have much lower density than that.

    The density can vary significantly, our hypothetical solar island could be anywhere from the 6th to the 50th largest country but regardless we’re still talking about something in the area of a trillion individual solar panels.

    Assuming money isn’t the limiting factor (which it isn’t in most countries) we don’t have anywhere close to the ability to manufacture and deploy that many panels by 2030 or 2035.

    Assuming we maintain exponential growth of both wind and solar (doubtful) we’re still a least two decades away from eliminating fossil fuel electricity generation never mind meeting the 2-3x generation capacity needed to transition transportation and other consumers of fossil fuels over to electricity.

    Renewables growth has shattered estimates before, you never know, but the transition is not happening any where near as fast as people seem to think.



  • The economics of Bitcoin mining at scale force it to find an equilibrium where the cost of mining a Bitcoin is just a bit less than the current market value of a Bitcoin.

    Electricity is the only significant variable cost at scale so the amount of electricity needed to mine a bitcoin ends up being a little less than however much a bitcoin can buy.

    Thus one can estimate the total amount of electricity very accurately by simply taking the block rate (6/hr) times the block reward (~6.25 BTC) times the current price of a bitcoin divided by the wholesale price of electricity. You’ll get the upper bound for the amount of electricity being consumed.

    Which by the way works out to around a TWh costing tens of millions of USD every single day. Which is more electricity than a small country

    The only thing that will stop the waste is if the price of bitcoin drops. You can legislate it away, that won’t stop it, it will just move when it’s happening.



  • Sandford Fleming (the guy who invented time zones) actually made it easier.

    Before timezones, every town had their own clock that defined the time for their town and was loosely set such that “noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky.” Which couldn’t be measured all that accurately.

    If it wasn’t for Fleming, we’d be dealing with every city or town having a separate time zone.




  • I question the methodology here. The same site lists Linux desktop share at 2% in my country specifically. It feels like if it was that high you’d see it on people’s laptops more in coffee shops and what not… but I’ve yet to see a single other person using Linux on the desktop.

    I know most of that 4% is in India… but still feels like it should be more ubiquitous if the number is that high.



  • It’s called home realm discovery. It’s common in business apps though it’s usually used with email & password logins not username & password logins.

    It’s done that way to support federated logins. Larger companies will often used a single sign on solution like Okta or Azure AD. Once the user’s email address is entered it checks the domain against a list of sign on providers for each domain and redirects the user to their company’s federated login if it finds it there instead of prompting for a password.

    This has several benefits:

    1. The user doesn’t have mutiple passwords to remember for different apps. Which is know to result in users either reusing passwords or writing down passwords somewhere.

    2. When an employee quits or is terminated the company only needs to disable their account in their company directory and not go into potential dozens of separate web apps to disable accounts.

    3. The software vendor never receives the password, if the vendor’s system is compromised they don’t even have password hashes to leak. (Let alone plain text or reversibly encrypted passwords)

    Websites that work that way are (usually) doing it right. If that doesn’t work with your password manager, you should (probably) blame the password manager not the website.


  • Reddit never expected the new api pricing to be a fountain or money. This was never about LLMs or the lack of ad revenue.

    If it was just about LLMs they could have made one price for api users that were primarily harvesting data and a different price for api users that contributed significant content or moderation. Which would make good business sense to do so as content contributors are what bring the eyeballs (and therefore the value) to the platform.

    It wasn’t about ad revenue either, by all estimates the revenue from a third-party app user would have been many times more than the opportunity cost from the ad revenue they were missing out on from 3rd party app users. If they wanted to profit from the api pricing, they only needed to give the community more time to transition business models. They didn’t even need to give everyone more time, just a dozen or so major third party apps.

    This was always about killing off the third party apps. The ones they let survive had low user counts to begin with and went even lower.

    I don’t know their real motivations here but so far there’s only two possibilities that i can think of.

    A) Reddit’s leadership and board of directors are beyond incompetent

    B) They collect significantly more data from the first party app than they were able to from the third party apps, and they’re selling that data for a significant sum of money beyond just their own ad ecosystem.


  • Wow… lots of people in here bashing the subscription model, but let me point out it’s maybe not as bad as you think…

    If you sell a product under a perpetual license model (I.e the one-time purchase model). Once you’ve sold the product, the manufacturer has almost no incentive to offering any support or updates to the product. At best it’s a marketing ploy, you offer support only to get word of mouth advertising of your product which is generally a losing proposition.

    Since there’s little incentive to improve the experience for existing customers. Your main income comes from if you can increase your market share which generally means making products bloated often leading to a worse experience for everyone.

    If the customer wants support, you need to sell them a support contract. If they want updates you have to make a new version and hope the customer sees enough additional value to be worth upgrading. Either way we’re back to a subscription model with more steps, more risk, and less upside than market expansion so it takes a backseat.

    If you want to make a great product without some variation on a subscription. You need to invest heavily upfront in development (which most companies don’t have the capital to do, and investors generally won’t invest in unproven software)

    From a product perspective, you don’t know if you’ve hit the mark until people start using your product. The first versions of anything but the most trivial of products is usually terrible, because no matter how good you are, half to three quarters of the ideas you build are going to be crap and not going to be what the customers need.

    Perpetual licensing works for a small single purpose application with no expectation of support or updates.

    It works for applications with broad market needs like office software.

    For most niche applications, subscription models offer a better experience for both the customer and the manufacturer.

    The customer isn’t facing a large transition cost to switch to a competitor’s product like they would if they had to buy a perpetual license of it, so you have a lot more incentive to support and improve your product. You also don’t see significant revenue if the customer that drops your service a couple months in… even more reason to focus on improving the product for existing customers.

    People ought hate the idea of paying small reoccurring fees for software instead of a few big upfront costs. But from a business model perspective, businesses are way more incentivized to focus on making their products better for you under that model.