perestroika

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I've been hearing about ZFS and its beneficial features for years now, but mainstream Linux installers don't seem to support it, and I can't be bothered to switch filesystems after installing.

Out of curiosity - can anyone tell, what might be blocking them?

Edit: answering my own question: legal issues. Licenses "potentially aren't compatible".

Due to potential legal incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL, despite both being OSI-approved free software licenses which comply with DFSG, ZFS development is not supported by the Linux kernel. ZoL is a project funded by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop a native Linux kernel module for its massive storage requirements and super computers.

Source: https://wiki.debian.org/ZFS

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

“The City is evaluating the chemical compounds in the spray to determine if they are a hazard either inhaled in aerosol form by humans and animals, or landing on the ground or in the bay.”

If it comes from the bay, I think it's safe to assume it can go into the bay. :)

As for the rest, I think it's OK for them to evaluate - and they are likely to reach the concusion that spraying seawater into the air is what the sea does on its own, and humans are pretty well adapted to reasonable amounts, so the instruction will be:

  • "spray it from the leeward side, it's polite that way"
  • "don't put your face in front of the working sprayer"
  • "don't use the sprayer during algal blooms"
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

There's a pretty high chance that when it does come together, it will be presented somehow on c/offgrid on this very server. :)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Well, there's a DIY electric car which needs both axles to be re-designed. They didn't pass driving tests in the field. Design is complete but welding cannot start before weather turns nicer.

Also, my house needs a battery shed on wheels - wheels to keep away construction bureaucrats, shed because it's uncomfortable to sleep under the same roof with a very considerable amount of lithium cells. I'd like to keep some distance from them so that if something goes wrong, it's would be just the cells. :) The bottom platform with wheels is complete, walls and roof and everything such - nope, not a trace, not even a good drawing. :)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Would be great if they could do it. But it feels like lower-hanging combinations could be easier to pick. :o

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

I agree that Hamas is a response to conditions. I do recall that a long while ago, Israel did fund Hamas, in hope of counterbalancing Fatah.

But, just like many other movements, Hamas seems to perpetuate the conditions which created it. Their rule is Gaza hasn't only brought a war with Israel, but also a suppression of democracy and repression of people from competing Palestinian movements (mainly Fatah).

Israeli forces do often act like they're a recruitment branch of Hamas, stirring up anger. I don't doubt it the slightest that Hamas has received many recruits because the IDF again killed someone who randomly got in their way (or again made the calculation that for a junior Hamas official, 15 civilian lives are OK to take).

But, despite knowing the above-mentioned - I don't see a way out of the long-term conflict without both sides changing.

As long as Israel behaves like it wants to destroy (or drive away) all Palestinians - there will be Palestinian politicians who call for the destruction of Israel and support terrorist tactics, with considerable support among the population, even if their rule is not democratic (the rule of Hamas in Gaza only started democratically). Meanwhile, fear of revenge and terror, fear of appearing weak and another Arab-Israeli war - this ensures that politicians in Israel who promise to deal harshly with Palestinians get votes and frequently attain power.

Since the conflict is now quite old (at least 70 years) and the fighting parties have lost a viable framework for solving it, they need either massive luck or considerable foreign assistance / advise / pressure to find a stable solution.

Re: one state solution: did you mean two state solution? Because I think - but I could be wrong - that Israel must somehow come to the point of understanding that a Palestinian state with a reasonably defined territory (not a patchwork-of-enclaves territory) can be their neighbour, but the current situation is unstable.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

Though the projection is about solarpunk, a side note about the situation in Gaza...

...recently, the UN demining agency (I've forgotten their acronym) published an estimate of war damage in Gaza. They assessed that there was "more rubble in Gaza than Ukraine". Since that seemed unbelievable, I consulted various sources, among them a review by the Lund University Center for Middle-Eastern Studies named Monitoring Israel's Destruction of Gaza from Space.

What I found out:

  • the UN measures war damage in kilograms of rubble per square meter
  • Gaza is tiny and densely populated
  • thus despite a hundred times less (approximation) munitions getting fired than in Ukraine, Gaza has massive damage to infrastructure
  • the rubble density is currently 300 kg / m2
  • the most damaged settlement is Gaza City (75% of buildings damaged or destroyed)
  • the least damaged settlement is Rafah (31% of buildings)
  • on average, 57% of houses are damaged or destroyed
  • war was waged in an un-evacuated city: this typically produces high civilian losses
  • the current estimate is 30 000, so Israel's response has caused 30 x more losses than the initial attack by Hamas
  • night time satellite photos suggest that electricity is missing in most of the strip
  • crop monitoring photos indicate that agriculture has mostly stopped (and irrigation is likely broken)

For me, journalistic photos from Gaza most remind of what happened in Grozny, the capital of Chechnia during the First Chechen War (disproportionate amounts of Russian firepower reduced it to a trash heap).

Since both sides are responsible for war crimes (Hamas at first and now Israel) and the military response has overshot any goal associated with justice, I support any action that makes the conflict stop. Hamas started this war, but Israel has gone far beyond sanity while responding. Later on, I think the leaders of both sides ought be brought before the International Criminal Court and answer charges of war crimes (which could take decades).

How to ensure another war won't happen... much harder without structural change in both societies. Considering the way Israel currently functions and how the Palestinian Authority functioned in Gaza (Hamas militants took it over, things seem better on the West Bank), there's a high chance that someone from either side could ignite a new conflict in future.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

From a person who builds robots, three notes:

  1. Camera

Raspberry Pi has two CSI (camera serial interface) connectors on board, which is a considerable advantage over having to deal with USB webcams. This matters if your industrial robot must see the work area faster, your competition robot must run circles around opposing robots, or more sadly - if your drone must fly to war. :( On Raspberry Pi, in laboratory conditions (extreme lighting intensity), you can use the camera (with big ifs and buts) at 500+ frames per second, not fast enough to photograph a bullet, but fast enough to see a mouse trap gradually closing. That's impossible over USB and unheard of to most USB camera makers.

  1. Optimized libraries

I know that Raspberry Pi has "WiringPi" (a fast C library for low level comms, helping abstract away difficult problems like hardware timing, DMA and interrupts) and Orange Pi recently got "WiringOP" (I haven't tried it, don't know if it works well). I don't know of anything similar on a PC platform, so I believe that on NUC, you'd have to roll your own (a massive pain) or be limited to kilohertz GPIO frequencies instead of megahertz (because you'd be wading through some fairly deep Linux API calls).

  1. Antenna socket

Sadly, neither of them has a WiFi antenna socket. But the built-in WiFi cards are generally crappy too, so if you needed a considerable working area, you'd connect an external card with an external antenna anyway. Notably, some models of Orange Pi have an external antenna, and the Raspberry Pi Compute Module has one too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It might interest people that the soon-to-be previous biggest thermal energy store is also located in Finland, under the island of Mustikkamaa in the capital city of Helsinki. The city heating company Helsingin Energia "charges" the store by pumping heat out of sewage in summer. I think it was about 10 gigawatt-hours and it's not pressurized, so water can only reach 90 C over there.

(A side note: if you allow water at 140 C to boil in a controlled manner, you get steam, which can also produce electrical power, although probably in a suboptimal manner.)

Finnish bedrock seems more suitable than average rock for such ventures (which I would call "artificial geothermal energy") - granite is a poor thermal conductor and a reliable rock for making caverns.

I hope it goes well. :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Copying out the noteworthy bits.

Claim:

the UAE’s National Center for Meteorology told CNBC it had not seeded any clouds before the storm struck on Tuesday

Verifiable with a bit of FlightRadar searching:

seeding operations tend to take place in the east of the country, far from more populated areas like Dubai. This is largely because of restrictions on air traffic, and means it was unlikely that any seeding particles were still active by the time the storms reached Dubai.

Verifiable with a weather map:

perhaps the best evidence that cloud seeding wasn’t involved in these floods is the fact that it rained all over the region. Oman didn’t do any cloud seeding, but it was even more badly affected by flooding, with a number of casualties.

Now, if I was running a cloud seeding programme and saw a mega-rainstorm coming, I would quickly consult with a person who knows about drainage and call off the flight, saying "we've got enough coming". It doesn't take superintelligence to make that decision, just a functioning meteorological office and a bit of sense.

...and the final conclusion:

Dubai is comically ill-equipped to deal with rainfall

(because they typically don't get any)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I think most people already have this firewall installed, and it's working too well - they're absorbing minimal information that contradicts their self-image or world view. :) Scammers just know how to bypass the firewall. :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

They 100% know that electrolysis methods won’t be economically viable.

I would argue against that any day. Electrolysers are viable, they are just not the current state of the industry because dirt cheap solar and wind weren't around in previous decades.

It's the storage that might not be viable in most countries (because only some have geology that allows for underground gas storage). Producing hydrogen from water at 95% efficiency is doable with today's tools, if you have somewhere to put it.

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