The watthours is what gas is for. Germany’s pipeline network alone, that’s not including actual gas storage sites, can store three months of total energy usage.

…or at least that’s the original plan, devised some 20 years ago, Fraunhofer worked it all out back then. It might be the case that banks of sodium batteries or whatnot are cheaper, but yeah lithium is probably not going to be it. Lithium’s strength is energy density, both per volume and by weight, and neither is of concern for grid storage.

Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.

That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.

3d not being required makes a hell a lot of sense and of course it wasn’t people have been drafting on paper for ages. They might’ve ended up on Mac or maybe Amiga, but an SGI workstation is quite an investment when you don’t even need to spin polygons. IRIS GL dates back to the early 80s, doesn’t seem so much to be a timeline but price and need thing. And it’s not like you can’t have a 3d view without acceleration, just would take a while to render and a frame every five seconds might still be usable.

There apparently was an IRIX version at one time but with no user base preference, more likely they were thinking “where’s my C: drive” so once 3d acceleration hit the mainstream everyone happily switched back to Microsoft. Meanwhile you have 3d artists complaining that they can’t move windows with meta+lmb on windows.

I mean back in the days they should have been running on IRIX, and SGI switched over to Linux when they made the switch to x86 CPUs. Plenty of movie studios switched over to Linux workstations because of that, porting from IRIX to Linux is trivial compared to porting to Windows, why didn’t the same happen with CAD?

Wintel-PCs for the longest time just weren’t suitable for 3d work, they were office machines.

AutoCAD

It’s always funny with 3d. Graphics? You need Houdini? Of course it runs on Linux, it’s a UNIX-native program after all, first version ran on IRIX because what else would you use for 3d work but an SGI workstation and Linux is the commercial successor to IRIX. Blender, the same, just 5k bucks cheaper (and not everything is nodes, not yet). CAD? Everything’s suddenly windows-only because… how the hell did that came to be? Were they running 1990’s CAD software on Excel machines?

OpenEXR. Though it probably could use a spec upgrade, in particular add JPEG-XL to the list of compression algorithms. It’s not like OpenEXR’s choices are bad, the lossy ones are just more geared towards fidelity than space savings, kind of the opposite of what you want for the web where saving space is often paramount and fidelity a bonus.

Bonus: Supports multi-channel, so not just RGBA. Not terribly useful for your run off the mill camera, very useful in production where you might want to attach the depth buffer, cryptomatte etc and I guess you could also use it for the output of light field cameras. Oh there’s also multi-view so you can store not just stereo images but also whole all-around captures and stuff. There’s practically nothing pixel-related you can’t do with it though it might require custom tooling.

Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason. Same goes for business methods and other stuff.

In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.

Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.

If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.

DeepL has always used machine learning, and they already switched to LLMs for some language pairs – not rebranded ChatGPT, but their own stuff. They’re also quite open about the model not being perfect, they’re advertising with things like “blind tests show our results sound more natural than the competition”, “our model output needs fewer edits than the competition”, etc.

And yeah they definitely didn’t edit this one much from the English original. English sentence structure and American idiomatics all over the place, it’s tedious to read. Quite, but not entirely, as bad as this.

The vast majority of sales are made to US based firms so they likely have a lot of sway.

The sway is TSMC uses ASML EUV lithography machines and the US holds patents on those because they did foundational research regarding EUV lithography. Also, the EU hasn’t put China on the “it is illegal for EU companies to kowtow to US sanctions” list. Ironically ASML could sell to Cuba and Iran. If the EU were to tell ASML to sell to China the US would be free to not buy ASML machines any more and, doing that, kill off Intel’s fabs.

None of this stuff has military relevance, you don’t need or even want to use small nodes (which require EUV) in military applications you want hardened chips instead. Run off the mill consumer chips go all frizzy if an EMP looks at them sideways. This is about the US protecting US fabs, foremost Intel. Not the chip design part but the manufacturing one.

Europe hasn’t played the high-end end-consumer chip market for ages and I doubt we’ll do it any time soon. Having ASML, Zeiss etc. means that whoever actually produces that stuff wants to be friendly with us and strategically, both military and economy, our own production facilities are perfectly sufficient. Hence also why ESMC will only go as small as 12nm, it’s the most cost-effective node size and performance is perfectly adequate for a missile, a CNC mill, or a car infotainment system. Or the gyroscope chip in your phone (it’s almost certainly a Bosch), EUV doesn’t make a lick of sense when you’re doing MEMS. Where we have to catch up is chip design lets see how that RISC-V supercomputer chip turns out.

I mean, sure, that’s a domination relation but it doesn’t really get at the core of domination, either, but tells us where dominance fits in the larger context. The core idea is much easier: f : A -> X dominates g : B -> X if there is an h : B -> A such that g = f . h. That is, if there’s a way to turn potato mash into food, and one to turn sliced potatoes into food (say, a hot pan with some oil) then frying mash dominates because there’s a way to turn potato slices into mash, but none to turn mash into slices. It can also be the case that two functions dominate each other, e.g. when you look at cooking tea with a teabag, and without a teabag: As bagged tea can be unbagged, and unbagged tea bagged, both dominate, in fact, they’re equivalent. All this is up to equivalence of fried potatoes and hash browns which can be easily established by trying both with eggs and ham, and both with apple sauce. Best paired with a doughnut of coffee¹.

¹ I have the feeling mug manufacturers don’t get any of this.

Because political lesbianism has been so terribly effective at anything last time around? Short of breeding massive amounts of transphobia, of course.

How about this instead.

that meme makes is that it’s clear the gal doesn’t want to participate in the conversation due to body language.

Not trying to argue against the meme, how it’s used and understood etc, but: You can’t interpret body language from a still image, you need at least like two or three movements, you need to see how someone reacts to their own movements so to speak. She might just as well be going “woah, cool”, slight backward surprise movement, and the two are the most wholesome couple you’ve ever met. Or she actually really wants to get out of there. That’s the point: The still image itself is too little information to make the distinction.

Mostly they’re dried, including pod, the rest is genetics.

They are botanically nuts, though: They are indehiscent, meaning they do not open to release their seeds. They’re also fruit. It’s e.g. pine nuts which aren’t nuts because pine cones do indeed open and release the seeds. Of which you should roast a couple and mush up with a wee bit of garlic, a metric pound of basil, some salt, some proper hard cheese, and quantum satis good olive oil. Use a mortar the basil wants to get squeezed, pre-chop everything or you’re going to be there forever. Throw your pasta, shape is not that important as long as it’s bronze-cut, into a pan at lowish heat, put your pesto on top, add some of that pasta water (incl. the starch in there), the saponids in the garlic will help with emulsifying everything. Reduce very carefully you don’t want to denature the cheese.

I guess making a distinction, in the culinary context, between nuts and peanuts makes sense because allergy considerations, legumes are a class of their own there.

There are virtual spaces that are currently occupied by native inhabitants and deep pocket billionaires are literally bulldozing their way into the space

Nope. Usenet has been dead and conquered ages ago, others are up and on the rise (hey you’re posting on one) but mass adoption doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon. Yes, the internet has changed after the Eternal September, the normies brought their economical system with them.

What I wonder, though, is what that has to do specifically with underpaid Kenyan data sorters or are you colonising their struggle with ours?

Tigers are territorial and solitary but quite social, they don’t usually get into fights when they meet, that only happens when they have an actual territorial conflict because there’s too many tigers on too little land. They’re perfectly fine with others visiting their prowling grounds, they might even hunt together, just don’t overstay your welcome. Actually not that terribly different from how humans treat their houses.

Everything that comes out of a petrochemical plant can be made without oil, in fact BASF had recipes in place for decades now and is switching sources as the price shifts. Push come to shove they can produce everything from starch. It’s also why they hardly blinked when Russia turned off the gas.

The carbon that actually ends up in steel is a quite negligible amount (usually under 1%, over 2% you get cast iron), you can get that out of the local forest, and to reduce the iron hydrogen works perfectly, the first furnances are already online.

That implies that we can make electricity everywhere, which is technically true but not really the case because there’s countries with more and with less free space, with more suitable places and less suitable places to put renewables.

Those ammonia tankers will happen. At that point btw we’re not just talking about electricity, but also chemical feedstock.

Quick intuition boost for the non-believers: What do things look like if you’re standing on the surface of the bowling ball? Are feather and earth falling towards you at the same speed, or is there a difference?

As to “what’s falling faster” my point is still that everything’s falling at the same speed, because the only non-arbitrary reference point to measure things from is the centre of gravity of the whole system, earth, feather, ball, all of them together.

Well it may still be arbitrary, but at least it’s not geocentric or feathercentric or ballcentric. All three can be unhappy with the choice which means it’s fair.

Flip that reference point to the earth though and yes the ball is approaching ever so slightly faster than the feather (side note: is our earth spherical or are we at least making it an oblong?). Flip it to the ball and the feather is falling a lot slower towards it than the earth is. Which is probably how I should have started explaining this: The mass difference between feather and earth with respect to the ball is so massive that it actually makes quite a difference while between feather and ball wrt. earth it’s negligible.

I understand and agree with red’s math, and I said no such thing as you put into quotation marks there.

Clarity of presentation is never a trivial matter. You can be right all you like if you don’t get it across then it will be for nought but inflating your own ego.