They call it jailbreak because this is an issue of freedom

I support your position and the right to repair, but that’s not the origin of the term jailbreak in the context of computing.

The term jailbreaking predates its modern understanding relating to smartphones, and dates back to the introduction of “protected modes” in early 80s CPU designs such as the intel 80286.

With the introduction of protected mode it became possible for programs to run in isolated memory spaces where they are unable to impact other programs running on the same CPU. These programs were said to be running “in a jail” that limited their access to the rest of the computer. A software exploit that allowed a program running inside the “jail” to gain root access / run code outside of protected mode was a “jailbreak”.

The first “jailbreak” for iOS allowed users to run software applications outside of protected modes and instead run in the kernel.

But as is common for the English language, jailbreak became to be synonymous with freedom from manufacture imposed limits and now has this additional definition.

This also leads to stupid rules like you can’t change your password more than once a day, to prevent someone from changing their password 5 times and then changing it back to what it was before.

It is, but lead based chemistries tend to wear out and need replacing a lot sooner than lithium ion.

You’re core idea is correct though, there’s a lot of battery techs that are cheaper / better when size and weight are irrelevant.

Whoever wrote that article is playing fast and loose with the definition of exponential.

Here’s the actual data of global electricity source on a log scale for the past ~15 years

Notice that the line for both wind and solar is inflecting to the right. If it was exponential it would be straight.

The time between each doubling of output is increasing.

It’s close, but not enough to be exponential growth.

It was exponential for a while but it’s slowing down in the last decade or two.

It’s not an exponential curve. It’s slower than that.

It’s more than linear; we are adding more capacity each year than the year before. But added capacity per year as a percentage of the previous years total is a decreasing.

If it was exponential the growth would be a straight(ish) line when plotted on a logarithmic scale… it’s not. On a log scale the line inflects.

Such an incredibly misleading article.

1 GW of nuclear capacity generates several times more electricity than 1 GW of PV capacity.

Nuclear power plants run at almost full capacity pretty much 24/7/365. With the occasional shutdown every few years for maintenance and to replace the fuel rods.

PVs only generate electricity during the day, and only hit their maximum capacity under ideal conditions. The average output of PVs is 15-25% of their capacity.

Globally we generate more electricity from nuclear than we do from all PVs together.

At the typical sizes we’re building them you need dozens of PV farms to match the energy output of a single nuclear reactor.

Tesla’s biggest issue is Musk.

Tesla held a commanding lead over the other automakers in the self-driving segment a few years ago. Now they’ve all mostly caught up thanks to Musk’s unhinged firings. Tesla lost some of its best talent for no other reason than not wanting to work for an egomaniacal billionaire nut job.

Tesla needs to fire Musk before he runs it into the ground just like he’s done to Twitter.

Genuinely curious, what new features did that updated firmware have that were valuable to you?

“Green Hydrogen” is made by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. There’re no carbon emissions in that process, but to be truly “green” the electricity must come from a carbon free source like wind, solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric.

The process of electricity to hydrogen to compressed hydrogen to fuel cell to electricity is about half as energy efficient as electricity to li ion battery to electricity. As a form of electricity storage green hydrogen is significantly less efficient than batteries.

Green hydrogen only makes sense as a fuel in situations where batteries are not feasible.

And right now making green hydrogen at all does not make sense because if you build a new low carbon source of electricity it will make a larger impact if you use it to displace fossil fuel based electricity generation rather than using it to create green hydrogen.

Your math checks out.

Charging a 600 mi battery in 9 minutes would require a charging station that can output somewhere north of 1.2 MW.

We need major upgrades to the electrical grid as well as doubling our electricity generation capacity for charging stations and vehicles like that to be common place.

It’s not like the country was massively relying on nuclear energy at any point in time really.

Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors were generating almost 30% of its electricity a decade ago before they started phasing them out. It was their second largest source of electricity after coal.

Despite having built literally 100s of solar and wind farms in the past decade they still had to increase their coal output by 40 TWh to make up for the gap. A nuclear reactor generates a fuck ton of electricity.

And for what? Statically speaking 800x more people are killed in coal mining accidents per TWh generated than are killed by all nuclear power accidents combined. They phased out their largest source of carbonless electricity and the decision likely killed more people than would have died even if there was a nuclear accident.

I remember a time when ads weren’t crazy intrusive. They weren’t being shoved into every os and app and website.

There wasn’t 20 of them on every page, and advertisers weren’t trying to harvest my data to the point where they knew every last detail of my personal life.

And I didn’t mind having them in order to have “free” content. But they got greedy and now I’ll block them in every chance I get.

Maybe forcing ads into everything isn’t the answer.

You’re not wrong.

Wholesale prices do bounce around significantly in a day, occasionally even going negative. And some miners do shutdown for brief periods during high demand due to a high electricity price. Some miners aren’t buying electricity from the grid, and have their own generation sources with different economic inputs. And there’s lots of day to day volatility in mining rates that has nothing to do with economics.

There’s no formula or methodology that could tell you how much energy is being wasted at any given moment. That impossible. There’s no way of knowing how many miners are operating globally at any given point in time. We can’t even reliably tell which country a block was mined in. We can only make reasonable estimates of global averages over the last few weeks.

You can get closer with more detailed modelling, but the equation I gave using global averages for bitcoin and electricity prices in the last few weeks will get you to an accurate estimate.

Yes somewhat… the formula has several factors that are constantly in flux, Bitcoin mining is a random process the value can be off entirely by chance. But it’s designed to self-adjust over the long run towards that formula, individual fluctuations cancel out in the long run.

For electricity price specifically, wholesale prices of electricity tend to be fairly close everywhere bitcoin is mined. Bitcoin mining is more profitable where electricity is the cheapest and is uneconomic in places where the price of electricity is above average. So it only happens where the wholesale price is globally competitive.

Money isn’t the limiting factor though.

There’s plenty of money waiting to be spent on green electricity projects that’s bottlenecked by grid connections, permitting, panel and turbine manufacturing, rare element supply chains and host of other factors slowing down how quickly we can build new renewable capacity.

Also the typical LCOE cost comparison approach doesn’t factor in the cost of grid connections, which is lower for a nuclear power plant than it is for an equivalent capacity of renewables. Nuclear is still more expensive on average, but the difference isn’t as clear cut and there a cases where nuclear might be cheaper in the long run.

Everytime nuclear comes up on Reddit/Lemmy we always seem to argue whether nuclear or renewables is better choice like it’s a choice between the two. Both nuclear and renewables are slam dunk choices compared to fossil fuels on every metric if you factor in even an overly optimistic case analyisis of the financial impacts of climate change. (Nevermind giving considerations of the humanatarian impact.)

80+% of our planet’s energy still comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewables have been smashing growth records year over year for a long time now and yet we haven’t even reached the point where we’re adding new renewables capacitiy faster than energy demand is increasing. We’re still setting new records annually for total fossil fuel consumed. Hell we haven’t even gotten to the point where we stopped building new Coal-fired power stations yet.

The people who argue that “we don’t need nuclear, renewabes are cheaper and faster” you’re missing the reality of sheer quantity of energy needed. We can’t build enough new renewables fast enough to save us regardless of how much money is invested. There aren’t enough sources of the raw materials needed to make that happen quickly enough, we can’t connect them to the grid quickly enough, we cant build new factories for solar panels and wind turbines fast enough. Yes, we will undoubetly continure to accelerate our new renewables projects at a record setting paces each year but it’s not enough, it’s not even close. Even our most optimistic , accelerated projections don’t put us anywhere close to displacing fossil fuel consumption in the next 10-20 years.

We need to stop arguing over which is better. We need to do it all.

Not sure where you’re getting 250kwh/m2/year from. If it was one contiguous solid panel maybe you could achieve that and then you’d be correct it would be about 560,000 km2. Or roughly the size of France.

But you need to leave space between the panels in a solar farm for them to be at the optimal angle without casting shadows on each other. Real world solar farms have much lower density than that.

The density can vary significantly, our hypothetical solar island could be anywhere from the 6th to the 50th largest country but regardless we’re still talking about something in the area of a trillion individual solar panels.

Assuming money isn’t the limiting factor (which it isn’t in most countries) we don’t have anywhere close to the ability to manufacture and deploy that many panels by 2030 or 2035.

Assuming we maintain exponential growth of both wind and solar (doubtful) we’re still a least two decades away from eliminating fossil fuel electricity generation never mind meeting the 2-3x generation capacity needed to transition transportation and other consumers of fossil fuels over to electricity.

Renewables growth has shattered estimates before, you never know, but the transition is not happening any where near as fast as people seem to think.

You might want to do some basic math on the current rates at which renewable energy and global energy demand is growing.

The world burned 140,000 TWh worth of fossil fuels last year, a new record because global energy demand is still growing faster than total new renewable generation.

Let’s say we built an island of floating PV panels in the ocean large enough to generate that much energy.

It would be the 8th largest country in the world.

No we’re not going to hit 70% by 2035 even assuming it maintains exponential growth, not even close.

The economics of Bitcoin mining at scale force it to find an equilibrium where the cost of mining a Bitcoin is just a bit less than the current market value of a Bitcoin.

Electricity is the only significant variable cost at scale so the amount of electricity needed to mine a bitcoin ends up being a little less than however much a bitcoin can buy.

Thus one can estimate the total amount of electricity very accurately by simply taking the block rate (6/hr) times the block reward (~6.25 BTC) times the current price of a bitcoin divided by the wholesale price of electricity. You’ll get the upper bound for the amount of electricity being consumed.

Which by the way works out to around a TWh costing tens of millions of USD every single day. Which is more electricity than a small country

The only thing that will stop the waste is if the price of bitcoin drops. You can legislate it away, that won’t stop it, it will just move when it’s happening.

The old 8” floppy disks were more expensive but known for being incredibly reliable.

The newer 5.25” and 3.5” floppies used cheaper and mass produced coatings on the magnetic surface, plus the smaller and higher density tracks had less surface area per byte and less material to hold the signal.

The net result was the newer floppies often couldn’t be reliably read after a few years of use.

It’s not at all surprising they stuck with the more reliable system for so long.

No.

MW is the maximum capacity not the average.

A nuclear reactor runs at close to its maximum output pretty much 24/7/365.

A solar farm only operates during the day, and even then it only operates at maximum output in the middle of a clear sunny day.

The overall average output of a nuclear plant is typically around 90% of its capacity.

The overall average output of solar farm is 20-25%.

This massive farm will still only output a bit more electricity than what a single nuclear reactor outputs.

A nuclear power station typically has more than one reactor, so compared to a typical nuclear power station this isn’t even close to the average nuclear plant.

Though it does beat a few of the smallest nuclear plants that only have a single reactor.

Nuclear outputs a fuck-ton of electricity for its size.