What’s up?

Apparently not my nginx >_<

Small trick that took me far too much time to realize and that may interest other French out there: if you own a relatively recent freebox (The box given by Free Telecom, one of our main ISPs) you can run docker images on it! That’s a way to set up a server really easily and painlessly.

At one point we had a long back and forth with my cousin, a post-apo fan, about the credibility of various scenarios, various shortage, various technological regressions. My conclusion: if humanity loses the ability and the knowledge to make CPUs, then CPUs are not the first thing you will miss.

It would have meant that a generation-long obscurantist crusade would have purposefully destroyed that knowledge.

I don’t see anything natural nor a human-made disaster that could durably erase all knowledge and industries on a global scale. You would need an intelligence geared at destroying knowledge specifically.

Uh…

These obvious things are why solar power CO2/kWh estimates are not zero. And I personally think that counting these indirect costs should not be automatic and is even fraudulent in some cases. For instance, in the picture that this guy denounces talks about what pieces of tech are part of the jigsaw of a sustainable future. For these, indirect costs do not matter. For all intent and purpose, electric cars and photovoltaics have 0 g CO2/kWh of direct emission.

Mining needs to become renewable, transport needs to be renewables, and electric vehicles are a part of that.

Actually, when you want really heavy mining machines, thermal engines do not cut it anymore, you need to go electric.

It is actually a good trick to assume that when a renewable “innovation” happens in the US, it has already been deployed somewhere else already. I love this 2012 picture of the Indian project:

Really weird title. TL;dr: ESG-conscious banks fail to account for the impact of mining in their accounting.

I see this kind of articles as a good thing: mining is a polluting process that can be much cleaner but lacks incentives to do it. The only incentive right now is to be the cheapest. If some actors start accepting to pay an extra for ethically and environmentally friendly mining, the industry can change.

Haha I should have guessed! Thanks for the info

That would be really great! Codeberg.org has been a bit involved in the fediverse, they may be open to the idea too.

That lazy line again:

During the heatwave between 28 June and 2 July, 17 out of France’s 18 nuclear power plants in the country faced capacity reductions, with some shut down completely.

Nuclear power plants n France have scheduled maintenance in summer (because despite what the article suggests, this is a low in power consumption)

Capacity reduction happen in that context, with extremely stringent regulations in some rivers that prevent any sort of warming of the water above some temperatures.

It does not impact the power plants that rely on water evaporation which, let’s remind it, release colder water than they take in (but in a lower volume)

TIL, I thought it was more

All the neighbors of France rely on its nuclear capabilities to keep the light on when wind/sun is low. Renewables are finally at a point where they are competitive but we really need some intermittence absorbing capabilities. Batteries or dams.

I go back and forth between these positions. Not jut on IT but on infrastructure as a whole, you can’t just do like you can be independent from society and live in a totally untrustworthy world. There is a strong link between privacy and democracy. Some tools allows us to bypass temporary authoritarian restrictions, but at one point, when goons come to take your servers away, technical solutions are not enough.

Even the most self-hosted decentralized solution bases itself on legal assumption and freedoms defended by laws.

Take the dire situation of smartphones for instance. It is very hard to connect to a 5G network without giving your ID. The few ways that remain are seen as loopholes by authorities and are being plugged quickly. Same could happen for hosting. “Want to open a port on a public IP? ISPs require proof of ID for that” “Want to run an encrypted service there? You need to register your keys with the police for the port to be open”

There is no clean separation between the technical and political side there, privacy can’t hinge on a purely technical solution. I understand that trust is seen as fundamentally less solid that crypto algorithms, but it is unavoidable at a certain level.

Nuclear plants have been decommissioned and restored to regular use in the past. There is nothing prospective about the costs of the operation.

People receive a free superconductor pair of wires and still complain!

DC motors will tend to be optimal only at a set speed/torque whereas BLDC motors do need a microcontroller to be driven, but are able to optimize the flow in a much wider range. Coils in a DC motor are basically ON or OFF whereas they can ramp up in a BLDC depending on the speed.

Careful: negative price ≠ negative cost. Below zero prices are a market artifact usually.

The fact that this happens during peak HVAC use is a nice thing though.

And yes, we need intermittent industries, but the problem is, when you invest money in hardware, even to mine bitcoin (I would rather sell GPU time to train deep learning models personally) or to produce hydrogen, every hour not spent running your capital-intensive hardware is considered a cost that is not really compensated by energy price unless you run on donated hardware.

Circuits breakers are an obvious solution and there seems to be reasons why these are not implemented. I am not knowledgeable enough about the question but there seems to be a lot of counter-intuitive incentives that makes the energy market drop sub-zero occasionally. It is more of a market artifact than the absence of circuit breakers.

I have seen people in France explain that this is Germany undercutting prices to ensure France can’t have profitable private solar power companies but this sounds a bit conspiracy-theory to me, as Germany is not the only one doing it (but the biggest one in terms of volume)

These are the prices on the European market for electricity exchange between countries. It has a whole can of worms when it comes to problematic incentives, but it is indeed not consumer prices and (IMO) designed to enrich useless intermediaries.

RTE (French national grid operator)'s realtime data. It is indeed awesome to have realtime trackers of that!

EDIT: looks like the link in english is dead right now, here it is in french: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-aux-frontieres

I’ll give another factoid:

In a sunny day, around noon, many EU countries have below-zero prices for electricity exports:

It comes with a different set of issues, but this is not prospective or a hypothetical: this is the world we are living in, with the operator of the French grid warning that we are currently at solar saturation.

Now we need the other part of the puzzle: energy storage. On a HUGE scale.

It took 40 years to have solar energy and batteries up to the task, and we are not there yet. Yes, it could have been a choice to more massively invest in R&D in these fields, but you still need electricity while you shut down nuclear plants. Don’t do it unless you are ready to replace them with something else than coal. We are not there yet. Germany relies on France’s nuclear capabilities to import electricity at night.