TechTakes

combined heat and power isn't a technology unique to eastern block countries, but surely centralized city planning makes it easier to pump waste heat into municipal heating grid (or out to some chemical works or such). tbh it didn't even occur to me that there are serious cities (population 100k+) that don't have city-owned heating grid, even 50k towns and smaller can have their own CHP plants (tiny one, fits in shipping container or two)

and it's not just some towns no no no. it was implemented everywhere where it was practical. near big cities - these need both power and heat, so okayish coal is shipped to them by rail, burned there and provides both heat and energy. beijing for example runs on 10 or so large CHP plants iirc. near lignite mines - lignite is burned there (does not make sense to ship it anywhere else, too shitty) and nearby town has free heat. where there's neither, either coal was shipped to be burned in heating plants, centralized or individual, or gas was delivered by pipelines also for heating, and energy was delivered from larger centralized facilities. if there's fuckton of energy somehow, like in russian far east with their abundant hydropower, or nothing else is practical, in some places heating was electric

NYC has steam pipelines running around the city, doesn't that use CHP plants?

This is true, with the important distinction that presumably the next generation of GPUs will produce more calculation per unit of input energy, as opposed to proof-of-work crypto mining, where the coin generation is constant in time, by design.

Years ago a friend of mine asked me if I was interested in IoT/smart devices and I said I didn’t want to be locked out of my house if the wifi was out. His reaction indicated to me that he lost some amount of respect for me, and in turn I lost respect for him.

Since then I’ve only really seen IoT stuff in the homes of tech people, everyone else just DGAF. I think AI is following that same trajectory.

PS Years later pretty much the same exchange happened with brain simulated “immortality”, with the same mutual loss of respect.

PPS I currently have some smart lights installed. Once the initial novelty of having a bunch of RGB lights wore off, I pretty much just use them as normal bulbs, except with their brightness turned all the way down.

PPPS I also have some google speakers. None of them are in use.

But for electronics basically all heat is excess. Brakes are literally supposed to turn kinetic energy into heat. A GPU is supposed to solve linear equations quickly. The generated heat is because we don't know how to not generate it. If I could power my oven with all the energy waste while playing Crysis I totally would.

Plus, heat of the brakes is also technically waste. Case in point, Formula 1 cars have specially designed systems whose purpose is converting energy dissipated during braking back into battery charge to power the hybrid engine.

instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove?

I'm 99% sure this person eats only gig-work delivered food