That's pretty neat! But it seems to me it's not storage because they're not putting energy in to get out later. It's more like mining naturally-occurring potential energy from the Earth's crust. Probably that potential energy formed millions of years ago when tectonic plate activity pushed the rock up to its present elevation. So - it's geothermal energy with extra steps.
hallettj
joined 2 years ago
Everything gets done so mind-bogglingly slowly! There's always someone you have to talk, who has to talk to someone else. Bureaucratic processes often end up taking hours or days!! I knew to expect this - but experiencing it firsthand is a shock. How do people get anything done? They've computerized some things which helps. But every interface and every database schema has to be designed by a human which I'm told is expensive and takes even longer.
I like to use Obsidian for this kind of thing. It has tagging, and you can link notes and see the network of links in a visualizer. There's also a "canvas" feature that lets you lay out notes spatially in whatever way makes sense to you. I assume there is a web clipping plugin which could make it easy to grab the comment content and link at the same time.
NixOS puts your full system configuration in a portable set of files. You can easily reproduce the same configuration on another machine. I also like that instead of accumulating a growing list of packages that I don't remember why I installed I have package lists specified in files with comments, and split into modules that I can enable or disable.
IMO NixOS works best when you also use Home Manager to apply the same benefits to your user app configurations and such. (OTOH you can use Home Manager to get those benefits without NixOS. But I like that I get consistency between the OS-level and user-level configurations, and that both use the same set of packages.) I use Home Manager to manage my list of installed packages, my dot files, Gnome settings, Firefox about:config settings, and so on.
You might be installing packages imperatively with nix profile install or with nix env -i. If that's the case you're not going to see the full benefits of a declarative system in my opinion. I prefer to install packages by editing my Home Manager configuration and running home-manager switch.
I like that NixOS + Home Manager automates stuff that I used to do by hand. A couple of the things that I do or have done are to,
- test an experimental window manager, Niri
- use Neovide (a GUI frontend for Neovim) with a custom patch to tweak font rendering
Now I have that kind of stuff automated:
- Since there was no packaging for Niri when I started trying it I wrote my own in my NixOS config with a NixOS module to set up a systemd unit to run it. Because Nix packages are effectively build scripts, whenever I update Nix automatically pulls the latest version of Niri and compiles it without me having to think about it anymore.
- I use the Neovide package from nixpkgs with an override to compile with my custom patch. Like with Niri my configuration automatically gets the latest Neovide version and builds it with my patch when I update, and I don't have to think about it anymore. I use this overlay to do that:
modifications = final: prev: {
neovide = final.neovide.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
patches = (oldAttrs.patches or [ ]) ++ [ ./neovide-font-customization.patch ];
});
};
You can see that I compile some things from source. That's fine on my desktop, but takes a while on my travel laptop. But I don't need to compile on my laptop because I can use Nix's binary cache feature. I push my NixOS and Home Manager configurations to Github, and I have Garnix build everything that I push. Garnix stores everything it builds in a binary cache. So when I pull my latest configuration version on my laptop it downloads binaries from that cache.
The notion of programming languages that use non-word symbols reminds me that I want to try out Uiua. I guess it doesn't exactly fit the non-English category because the recommended way to enter symbols is to type names that are derived from English, which are replaced by symbols by the formatter. But I suppose it would be easier than most languages to internationalize since words are used in an entry method, not in the shared code.
I'd sure want to be very careful with health-risk assessments. But nickel-63 is pretty low-energy. According to this fact sheet absorbed radiation from exposure to skin is negligible without shielding. And that level of radiation is easy to shield so the battery casing presumably blocks all of it. (Tbf I believe fact sheets like that assume that your dead layer of surface skin cells has a small shielding effect, so the calculation is different if it gets in your body.)
The article also mentioned a possible variation with strontium-90 which is stronger stuff. It's emissions are 8 times more energetic than Ni-63, and instead of decaying to stable copper, strontium-90 decays to yttrium-90 which emits radiation several times again more energetic than strontium-90. Here's another fact sheet. (Sorry about using two different sources for fact sheets. I had a hard time finding one source with facts on both isotopes.)
The term "radioactive waste" suggests products from uranium fission, and the isotopes they decay to which can have extremely high-energy emissions, and decay through chains of several radioactive isotopes before finally decaying to stable elements which means extremely long half-lives overall. IMO the comparison is misleading. It's kinda like comparing one "moderate" air quality day to many days inside a smoke stack.
Thanks for the heads-up!
I'm also a PaperWM fan. For switching I mostly use spatial window-switching controls: Meta+ left/right to switch windows, page up/page down to switch workspaces. Plus I use Gnome overview's search-driven app finder, and Advanced Alt-Tab Switcher but only for its fuzzy search feature to switch to specific windows within an app.
PaperWM has an option to hide windows in a "scratch" layer. I put chat and music programs there, and summon them with AATS.
I have an ultrawide monitor, and I put a terminal and editor side-by-side in a ¼-¾ ratio. I set browser windows to ½ width. Those ratios let me see important parts of a browser window next to the editor if I slide the terminal out of view to partially expose a browser on the other side. Or I can move the terminal next to the browser and see both fully.
The first computer I used was (I think) a CP/M system that could run BASIC, and I used to use it to play Castle in the early '90s.
The first computer of my own was a Gateway laptop for college in 2002. It was the first Wi-Fi device I laid hands on. I immediately set it up to play music to wake me up in the morning, and I listened to the fans running all night.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If the thinking is that AI learning from others' works is analogous to humans learning from others' works then the logical conclusion is that AI is an independent creative, non-human entity. And there is precedent that works created by non-humans cannot be copyrighted. (I'm guessing this is what you are thinking, I just wanted to think it out for myself.)
I've been thinking about this issue as two opposing viewpoints:
The logic-in-a-vacuum viewpoint says that AI learning from others' works is analogous to humans learning from others works. If one is not restricted by copyright, neither should the other be.
The pragmatic viewpoint says that AI imperils human creators, and it's beneficial to society to put restrictions on its use.
I think historically that kind of pragmatic viewpoint has been steamrolled by the utility of a new technology. But maybe if AI work is not copyrightable that could help somewhat to mitigate screwing people over.
It looks like there is at least one work-in-pprogress implementation. I found a Hacker News comment that points to github.com/n0-computer/iroh