• 0 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle







  • Coal plant burns coal to heat water, makes steam, and the steam powers a turbine to produce electricity. A nuclear power plant uses nuclear fuel to heat water and produce steam similar to a coal plant. It may do this indirectly (e.g. second loop between the nuclear fuel and water loop to prevent the water becoming radioactive). This means that to build a nuclear plant you essentially need to build a coal plant, and then also the nuclear reactor and safety stuff, which makes them more expensive. Since coal plants are being turned off anyways, it might be more cost effective to just retrofit old coal plants so the only cost is the nuclear reactor side of things (plus any necessary maintenance and upgrades)


  • Also if you want a domain but dont care about the actual address, a .xyz domain composed entirely of numbers with less than 10 digits is $1-2 + same as renewal fee per year. $1.22 for me on porkbun

    Just be sure to redact the whois information bc you will get a call from scammers trying to get you to register your domain on some “internet map” for a small fee acting as if its some step in your setup process you havent done yet




  • What kind of emails are you sending to what kind of people, and how frequently that AI increases your productivity? I don’t think I ever have emails that AI could do better or faster, since it’d probably take longer to explain to the AI what I need it to write than to type it out myself. Then again I’m in an engineering setting and it’s pretty much just numbers, confirmations, basic requests, and issue descriptions, IT tickets, mostly








  • There are a number of factors involved. Each phone will support a number of protocols and charging speeds, as will the charger. The two devices will typically perform a handshake to negotiate a charging speed before charging begins. This is what allows the voltage to be adjusted, for example to 9/12/24V rather than the 5V default. Then you have to consider the maximum power to be delivered. Some devices might negotiate a higher power, which at the same voltage will result in slower charging.

    Tldr on voltage vs power vs current: power = voltage * current. You want to minimize current in the long wires and connectors/ contacts where there is high resistance because resistance causes power loss, so you use higher voltage until it reaches the end device before dropping it back down.

    If the Android device negotiated 18W and the apple device 25W for example (idk what apple does) then the apple device will charge faster. Also, if the apple device has a smaller battery, it will charge faster. You may be able to get faster charging with a different combination of port/cable, charger, or settings on the Android device. For example, I restrict my phone to charge to at most 85% and slow charge because it keeps the battery from degrading as quickly, so I can still use my phone in several year’s time without having to recharge it every few hours.


  • Many of these types of ideas are to use an easily compostable material and mix it into the plastics as a filler or add tons of binders. The most common 3d printing plastic PLA, is technically biodegradable but will only undergo sufficiently rapid degradation in industrial composters which have elevated temperatures. I was investigating using cellulose acetate based filament but it seems there are still quite a few issues with what I was able to find in the literature (low flexibility and brittle, additives can interfere with biodegradability). Some proposed methods use other plastics that seem to respond well when mixed with cellulose and the same plasticizers but I haven’t seen much other literature focusing on making cellulose based (as the main polymer, not as an additive) filament (not printed dissolved in a solvent as a gel and then dried).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCsnVp6mEbk

    As for this method, if using binders that are easily and cheaply made, and are biodegradable, then I see no issue other than needing to use specialized printers. TBH I wouldn’t mind prints which can’t withstand being dipped in water because most prints probably aren’t being wetted anyways.