LikeBeans

Brilliant

You are probably right. Surprisingly the first controller I tried didn't work. I assumed the voltage was too high since it worked in my other (much older) car. I found a reference online of people that tried a particular brand/model and that's what I went for. Thankfully my car isn't the model with the internal 18v battery.

Very cool. Over a year and a half ago I installed a towing brake controller in my Tesla Model Y. Found the location of the plug, how to access and the pinout online (confirmed via a voltmeter..) so the car's side felt straight forward. But then I needed to find a brake controller that can work with the higher voltage (14.4v vs the normal 12v). Then built a cable from the brake controller to the connector that plugs into the car that I found on eBay. I velcro'd the controller under the dashboard. It works pretty well. I towed my small camper several times with it last year with no issues. Yay! However my little project is nothing compared to this post. Love people hacking away. So cool.

Yeah the Google Maps was my primary goal. But I was also thinking a person can add other options. For example different search engines. Or maybe your favorite AI agent search.

A while back I wanted more menu options with Firefox so I made an extension [1]. Basically when you highlight a word or a sentence on a page a menu popups up with some options like to copy, search, or lookup on Google maps. Or whatever option you want. I use it often and find it useful.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/popup-tooltip...

I think pulling for live pricing by inverters and appliances is not realistic on a grand scale. Using time of day pricing is much simpler imo.

Great explanation about the grid being a giant machine that couple smaller machines with each other. About your last point, the buffer, I think batteries (chemical and also physical) seems to be the main key going forward.

Good point. I was thinking more about areas without much water and a large field of poles each hoisting several blocks. Sort of wind turbines but without the blades.

I wonder how does it compare to hoisting a concrete (or something heavy) block up a pulley system as an energy store? When you need the energy you let it slide down pulling some steel cable that turns a generator, or multiple cables into multiple generators. Or even a cascade of concrete blocks at different heights as a space saver.

I like your idea. We can now generate substantial amount of power from floating wind turbines. Coupled with floating batteries (ie on cargo ships) we perhaps build floating charging stations along major shipping routes. There is no need for nuclear or to only charge at ports. Would it work?

Actually thinking about it some more why not park a couple of dozen older cargo ships along major shipping route. Equip them with wind turbines and batteries in shipping containers. Now the actual cargo ships passing by can stop for a few hours, plug in and charge. Use sodium ion batteries that can support thousands of cycles. Even use regular fuel as a backup in the charging ships. You can build and maintain anywhere and then haul them to the right location.

Clusters of floating wind turbines each with their own battery storage might be useful here. I imagine along strategic (ie major) shipping channels. Would it pencil out? I have no idea.

Because of the rising tax rate relative to income. Ours is projected to increase to about 20% of our net income. That's why.

So yeah nice on paper that the house is worth a lot more than we bought it... but that value matters if we sell and move. There is a lot more to that decision than just the property tax, however it sort of putting a time limit to it.

Yeah. Unfortunately the real market value grew so fast that when the assessed value catches up over the next few years the property tax is going to take a nice chunk of my net income.

Honestly, this is not a hardship but a nice problem to have. I grew up chronically poor and I feel fortunate and grateful that we have a comfortable home that is ours with equity while a lot of people have housing insecurity.

I agree on the windfall part but selling to get that money is not that simple in the current real estate market and political climate. ie you got to live somewhere... and everywhere you desire is expensive.

It depends on the appreciation and in turn the property taxes. I own my house outright. Completely paid off. But the increases in property taxes is forcing us to sell and move, likely in the next 5 years. Too bad, love the neighborhood and the area.

No buddy, you're replacing the doer engineers that built your company and made you rich with some form of automation.

For my EV, which I charge about once a week on average, with 4,000 cycles that means about 77 years!! That's a huge deal. CATL quoted 10k cycle battery too. Wow. Very cool. Yeah energy density and operating profile and all that. But color me impressed.

I'm skeptical too however I think AI can add value by increasing knowledge worker productivity. Maybe save some money by needing less staff for some tasks. Maybe to mine vast amounts of data looking for a pattern. So I think it is useful however my skepticism is about the cost vs reward. Is it really worth the amount of money pumped into it, not sure. Time will tell.

So perhaps the differential air speed between the intake and exhaust is a big factor in the efficiency equation? The bigger the difference the more work is needed..

I'm surprised, at least for businesses, small cell wifi is not a thing. For example, if you walk into an office building everyone seems to have a physical phone on their desk that is hard wired. What if that is also a small cell AP. Like a personal AP. Using automation and central provisioning and analytics can make this doable. Yeah handoff and roaming has to be seamless and quick but it doesn't feel that hard, no? If so this would be pretty neat and would solve the contention issue in the air.

Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah I meant Wh not kWh. Oops. I fixed my post.

We get 2-3 power outages every year where I live. Mainly due to trees with ice/snow/wind. My solution was to buy three power banks. A 500Wh, and a couple of 300Wh. I have a pluggable camp fridge too and a gas fireplace. So one battery powers the fan in the fireplace, another for the cooler to keep the food from spoiling. And the third one for a couple of the lights (with LED bulbs). Works great and we can handle an outage that lasts about 4-5 days. Also we got 4 of these rechargeable lanterns for lights around the house. I just keep the batteries and lanterns charged. Really easy and my investment is about $1000.

I think the problem is the loss of the middle class. The ones on top getting a lot of the resources while the rest have to fight for whatever is left. It doesn't matter how hard or how smart you work.

I think that's a neat idea. I often use Google Sheets as a database for my projects. I read 'setup' data and 'log' data. Works well. Most often just append a row at the end for writing. But I can see why a CSV can be a decent idea too especially if it can be edited with a spreadsheet app. So I would put this on a server (a file share) and edit it as needed with Excel/Numbers/Google Sheets etc... and click save. My apps can read it and if writing appends a line then hurray! cool idea.

I think both are great. It depends on what you need and the requirements you want to hit. I use an RPi for as a Pi-Hole for example. It works great. Low power and just that one task. Performs nicely. And cheap. However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN into it. Also works great for that task. So I think of it in terms of 'task' and it's footprint (ie storage/mem) and throughput.

Often yes but sometimes they both go down. However bonds don't decline as fast. The actual strategy I follow is stock/bond/short-term. The short term is like a buffer currently invested in short term treasury fund. Think of it like a game. If stocks are low then sell bonds and when that is also low then use the short term investment to live on to wait out the market recovery. Also if you are retired like me you would tighten expenses when drawing from the short term during a downturn.

Lookup VUSXX. It is a vanguard short term treasury fund. That's where I put my cash. It is currently paying 4.24% that is state tax free (I live in Oregon).

Unfortunately it is hard to predict if that rate will stay high enough. Previously I had 'cash' in iBonds which for a while paid 8-9% early in the pandemic when inflation was high. If none of the above pays well enough I look into treasuries, or CDs.

MBAs and MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

Yeah, I think current tech assumes a server relay. However imo, and if I were to imagine a solution, in this case I think a message would need a ttl, say 24 hours. In a local mesh/hive everyone would store a copy of the undelivered messages. When people move between hives they would sync these undelivered messages where ttl didn't expire. With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages. Undelivered means a destination user that didn't show in a hive. Wdyt?

In simple terms, if I understand quantum computing, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the big benefit is parallel computing at a massive scale whereas classical computing is serial in nature. If yes likely both method are useful. But a very useful use case for quantum computing is AI training to create the models. Currently consumes a lot of GPUs but QC has nice chance to impact such a use case. Did I get it right?