slavik81

Natural gas burns at ~2200 K. Ambient temperature is ~300 K. 1 - 300/2200 = 86% as the Carnot limit?

If you slide off the road and get stuck in a ditch in the middle of the night, an EV is a lot more comfortable. Standard advice for keeping warm is to run the engine for ten minutes every hour and keep the window cracked open due to risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. By contrast, you can leave the EV with the heat on all night.

Americans were our brothers. We had been partners for over a hundred years.

I keep thinking back to that e-card, "once you hate someone, everything they do is offensive."

I don't think tech companies appreciate the extent to which they used to get the benefit of the doubt just because people liked them.

China is the world's largest exporter of alternatives to oil. This adventure has done nothing but strengthen their relative economic position.

Options are a bit riskier than RSUs. If you have RSUs issued at $100 and the stock goes down to $50, then your RSUs are worth half. If you have the option to buy stock at $100 and the stock goes down to $50, then that option is worthless.

Not everyone was so optimistic. Many people argued that the money spent going to the moon would be better spent on problems here on Earth.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Tom_Lehrer_song_lyrics_(...

That had more or less been the explanation in the books for decades, and even in George Lucas' notes from 1977:

It's a very simple ship, very economical ship, although the modifications he made to it are rather extensive – mostly to the navigation system to get through hyperspace in the shortest possible distance (parsecs).

In our case, it was suggested that the first transfer of the first cycle had a 15% chance of success. Whether that's "very rare" is perhaps a matter of perspective. It was low enough we assumed it would be a failure and we were surprised when it succeeded, but to a doctor it's a frequent occurrence.

The total number might be a little out there due to her non-medical treatments, but the general sentiment is accurate for IVF. My wife filled up an entire sharps box with the injections she needed to take and that was with success on the first try of the first round (which is very rare).

As someone who is a bit squeamish around needles, I don't know if I could have done what she did.

Taiwan's biggest problem is that the average age is currently ~45 and in 15 years it will be ~55. It's going to be hard to keep the economy going once half the country's retired.

It's understandable that parents are upset, but tech companies are not the ones harmed by these laws. When we've outlawed privacy, it will be the public who suffers.

Do you mean Dory, the fish from Finding Nemo?

instagram and the like are uniquely and disastrously harmful

Could we perhaps regulate them to require that they be made less harmful for everyone?

anything the reduces the power those companies have over our lives (and our politics)

If we're concerned about politics, I presume we're talking about the impact on adults, but these age-based restrictions are not intended to change anything for adults.

It was in the manual and the Player's Guide. You can find ditto on page 47 of the latter.

https://www.scribd.com/document/586237858/Pokemon-Red-Versio...

https://archive.org/details/NintendoPower1998PokemonRedBlue/...

The £700M (960M USD) spent on fish protection measures at Hinkley Point C would be a topical example [1]. It's expected to save an average of a few hundred twaite shad, six river lamprey, and eighteen allis shad per year, plus one salmon every twelve years, and a trout every thirty-six years.

https://www.salmonbusiness.com/nuclear-plants-new-700-millio...

If manipulative algorithm are the problem, then perhaps we should consider regulations that would protect everyone.

The comments on Reddit from folks who claim to have worked for Northvolt are pretty wild. I would take them with a grain of salt, but they're interesting to read. https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1fl8d4y/c...

Shade on older solar systems would impact energy production disproportionally. You would typically see dramatic reductions like 50%-80% reduced output due to 10-20% shade. New shade-tolerant solar systems are closer to being proportional.

The Greener Homes Grant and Greener Homes Loan you describe have ended, but the 160% tarrif on imported solar panels remains. Solar prices in Canada are still quite expensive, and regulations are needlessly strict. Solar fencing is illegal in many jurisdictions, balcony solar is illegal everywhere, and utility-scale solar is effectively prohibited in the regions with the most sunlight.

Solar production in Canada will continue to grow, but we're not doing nearly as much as Europe to encourage it.

The proposed bans on open source 3D printers in Washington and New York would be examples of bad laws proposed by Democrats in the name of gun control. https://hackaday.com/2026/01/19/washington-state-bill-seeks-...

The next salvo is going to be US statehood for Alberta and Saskatchewan. There is already partisan support within those provinces, and Trump is going to offer money to push it.

The polling puts it at 20% support and 80% opposed. This is not going to happen. As a Canadian who was born in Alberta and has lived in Alberta all my life, I will be remaining in Canada.

Corsair Vengeance 128 GB (2 x 64 GB) DDR5-6400. $339 in Sept 2025. $1599 in Jan 3026. 4.7x increase. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/LPvscf/corsair-vengeance-12...

I cancelled my plans to upgrade my workstation, as the price of 256 GB of RAM became ridiculous.

the Mazda CX90 is a real car

A Mazda 3 has been my daily driver for the past decade and I really wanted to like the Mazda CX90 PHEV when I was buying a larger vehicle last year. It was pretty difficult to justify the CX90 PHEV, though. It gets 42 km of range on an 18 kWh battery (2.4 km/kWh). For comparison, the EV9 I ended up purchasing gets 450 km of range on a 100 kWh battery (4.5 km/kWh).

Don't get me wrong. The CX90 PHEV is still the most efficient CX90 by a wide margin. I had seriously considered buying one, but the efficiency was a deal-breaker. I don't love the giant touch screen on the EV9, but I can live with it. If I couldn't, I would have gone with the Ioniq 9 for more physical controls.

My copy of Mirror's Edge from EA is unusable due to DRM. It's still listed on my EA account as belonging to me and I can download the game from them, but it can only be installed five times and I have reached that limit.

What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a four-way stop.

It's worth noting that upstream gdb (and clang) are somewhat limited in GPU debugging support because they only use (and emit) standardized DWARF debug information. The DWARF standard will need updates before gdb and clang can reach parity with the AMD forks, rocgdb and amdclang, in terms of debugging support. It's nothing fundamental, but the AMD forks use experimental DWARF features and the upstream projects do not.

It's a little out of date now, but Lance Six had a presentation about the state of AMD GPU debugging in upstream gdb at FOSDEM 2024. https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/events/attachments/fosdem-20...

Snowboard Kids 2 was a great N64 game. It was one of a number of racing titles inspired by Mario Kart, but the snowboarding added a bit of a different feel. The battle items were clever, and the stages were really well made given the technical limitations they faced. As a kid with two brothers, we played a lot of competitive multiplayer.

I also remember a few things in the singleplayer being very difficult. The number of times I had to fight/race Dameian in his giant robot running down the mountainside... It's carved into my brain like that footrace against Wizpig in DKR or the Donkey Kong arcade game for the Rareware coin in DK64.

The battle items in Snowboard Kids were clever and memorable. The parachute missile that would launch racers up in the air and then deploy the parachute so they slowly float back down was such a frustrating item to be hit with. The pans that would hit all opponents was iconic and it was hilarious that you could somehow doge it with invisibility. Even the basic rock dropped on the course was somehow memorable.

Great game. It's heartwarming to know that others still remember it and care about it.

Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store?

Of course. They're typically more convenient than the carts that have been properly returned.

The Korean War played a major part, according to "Why Only Three Countries Bother Building Ships Anymore". https://youtu.be/0Gk61ginOqo