

Fun fact, copper, brass, and silver are anti-microbial, so a lot of old-time door handles were anti-microbial. Odd coincidence, isn’t it?


Fun fact, copper, brass, and silver are anti-microbial, so a lot of old-time door handles were anti-microbial. Odd coincidence, isn’t it?


You just change the definition of your isolated system. It takes less energy to move heat from one place to another than it does to excite matter to release energy. For resistive or combustion heating, the isolated system is your house, plus the gas if using gas heat. For heat pumps, you include the rest of the world.
As an aside, heat pumps are generally considered good when they reach 300% efficiency, i.e., when every watt of energy expended adds 3 watts of heat to your home.


This is no longer correct. We have heat pumps that can be more than 100% efficient, even air-sourced heat pumps in -30° weather. There are still many places where this will still be more expensive than a gas furnace.


What you’re saying is mostly right, and in a practical sense is right, as well, but not as much from a technical sense. This is the specific block that is problematic.
Risc CPUs like the arm in the raspberry pi are really good at not doing anything, or doing a really small subset of things (it’s in the name!), but x86 is great at doing some stuff and being able to do a wide variety of stuff with its big instruction set. If you raise an eyebrow at my claim, consider that before gpus were the main way to do math in a data center it was x86. If the people who literally count every fraction of a watt of power consumption as billable time think it’s most efficient it probably is!
This is generally correct, per cycle. Overall, it really depends. The problem is, the x86 architecture does okay as long as it’s kept busy and the work to be performed is predictable (for the purposes of look-ahead and parallelization). This is why it’s great for those mathematical calculations you referred to, and why GPUs took over - they’re massively better performers on tasks that can be parallelized such as math calculations and graphics rendering. Beyond that, the ARM use case has been tuned to low power environments, which means the computing does poorly in environments that need a lot of calculations because, in general, more computing requires more power (or the same power with more efficient hardware, and now we’re talking about generational chip design differences). Now, couple that with the massive amount of money spent to make x86 what it is, and the relatively lower amounts that RISC and ARM received, and the gap gets wider.
Now, as I started with, even a basic x86 computer running at mostly idle is going to have pretty low power consumption, dollar-wise. Compare that to the power draw on a new router, or even a newer low-power mini PC, and your ROI is not going to indicate the need for that purchase if you have the hardware just sitting around idle. And it will still perform better than a raspberry pi configured to act as a router if your bandwidth is above about 250 mbps, if I remember correctly (and something like 120 mbps for the v4 and earlier generations).


While that would be nice to see, if they do it as poorly as this case appears to be going, the wrong group would benefit.


I think nerdy stuff is attractive to people on the autism spectrum, and while people on the spectrum tend to like consistency, they also have trouble recognizing social norms, let alone following them. So some act that is in large part (from other people’s perspective, at least) a deviation from social norms isn’t that much of a problem to them. And why wouldn’t trans people prefer to be in spaces where people don’t care how they’re living their life? Now, add on that exposure tends to normalize social experiences, and people on the spectrum are already weird in their own way, and the neurotypical people in those nerdy spaces are already used to dealing with weird people. Adding a different flavor of weird isn’t that much of a stretch.
Or, to put it another way,


The good news is RFC 3339 doesn’t have this problem and is an unambiguous subset of ISO 8601.


A single point of data rarely answers the question unless you’re looking for absolutes. “Will zipping 10 files individually be smaller than zipping them into a single file?” Sure, easy enough to do it once. Now, what kind of data are we talking about? How big, and how random, is the data in those files? Does it get better with more files, or is the a sweet spot where it’s better, but it’s worse if you use too few files, or too many? I don’t think you could test for those scenarios very quickly, and they all fall under the original question. OTOH, someone who has studied the subject could probably give you an answer easily enough in just a few minutes. Or he could have tried a web search and find the answer, which pretty much comes down to, “It depends which compression system you use.”


The Pebble Time 2 has a heart rate monitor. I can’t say if the rest of your statement is correct or not.
I doubt I’ll ever be bald, although I expect I’ll be pretty thin in my 70s and later, and I haven’t really cared one way or another about baldness. I got my first grey hair in my teens and it hasn’t stopped, and I don’t care too much about that, either (it was cool when I had the flashes of grey above my ears like Reed Richards in the old comics, which I thought looked so fake). My beard is shit, and I don’t care. I shave because it looks like shit, tho. It’s great if we can accept what we are.
I’m glad you’re happy with your skullet and epic beard.