HN user
Does anyone know of any macos transcription apps that allow you to do speech to text live? Eg, the text outputs as you are talking? Older tech like the macos dictation as well as dragon does this, but seems like theres nothing available that uses the new, better models.
Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds).
I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website.
Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a content mill.
Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your contributions to my (and likely others) life
That is very location dependent as you need to transport water to where it's needed. Mining can happen almost anywhere.
Is this even an issue? Presumably without a steer by wire system a human would not be able to turn the wheel this fast. Also the delay looks longer than it actually is because of the slow-mo. Say this is playing at 25% speed and it is delayed by 1/2 a second, that means at regular speed the delay is only 125ms.
I'm not arguing whether the use of electricity is compelling or not.
I'm arguing that the unique energy demand characteristics of bitcoin mining allow it to support building renewable energy projects and balance electricity costs and thus it has effective positive contribution to the environment.
Whether it's used to mine bitcoins or cool a house is irrelevant, except that the demand for cooling a house is location and time sensitive, whereas bitcoin mining is cost sensitive. This flexible consumption gives it unique properties that support deployment of renewables.
Please explain what you mean by "false economy". Is the economy for skins in a game you don't care about "false" because you don't like that game?
Leaving stuff on when you are away is completely different than how bitcoin mining demand response works.
Firstly, at regular electricity prices, bitcoin mining is profitable and it is profitable for the utility to run renewables (which in turn means it is/was profitable to build renewables). When there is substantial demand or low supply, then it is profitable for the utility to pay the bitcoin miners to turn off, because the alternative to import power is more expensive. This in turn makes your electricity cheaper. In addition, the additional steady state demand for power allows for more renewables to be built, which further increases the supply during low supply periods. Your AC does not automatically turn off when this happens.
I am one of those enthusiasts making "strange logic" claims. I've been making this claim well before others but I feel that I keep getting downvoted on them off of people's emotion rather than rational logic.
The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources has altered the environmental impact of additional electricity consumption. Where once any increase in consumption was considered harmful due to its reliance on fossil fuels, the rise of renewables introduces scenarios where the marginal environmental cost of electricity can be beneficial if the demand is flexible.
Bitcoin mining has the potential to act as a load balancer for the electricity grid. By increasing its energy consumption during periods when renewable energy production exceeds demand, and reducing consumption during peak demand periods, Bitcoin mining could help stabilize the grid and make renewable energy generation more economically viable.
Bitcoin mining's demand for electricity is unique in that it is primarily cost-driven. Renewable energy generation capacity is particularly volatile. Bitcoin mining power usage can be flexible and responsive to the availability and cost of electricity.
The ability of Bitcoin mining to consume excess renewable energy when it's available (and potentially at low or negative prices) could improve the financial viability of renewable energy projects by increasing the floor price these new projects can sell electricity at. This can encourage the development of additional renewable energy capacity by providing a reliable demand for their output during otherwise unprofitable periods.
Here's some examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25444985
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26094279
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26811819
Has anyone looked into the theory that SO2 is an "anti-greenhouse" gas and that much of the greenhouse effects of CO2 have been negated by SO2. Essentially SO2 particles stay in the air for a long time and reflects a large spectrum of light so it fails to be absorbed by land or sea/converted to infrared (infrared is primarily what the CO2 reflects).
Recently (since 2010ish but moreso since 2020 in shipping) there has been a global effort to reduce SO2 emissions (eg by installing scrubbers) which has caused the CO2 increase over the last 150 years to actually "take effect" since the SO2 is no longer negating the effects.
I stumbled upon this theory recently and it sounds compelling but am curious if better informed people could shine a light about this.
https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1687535525169930241
https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1688145475289931776
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/07/sea-surface-temperatu...
"Retro Game Mechanics Explained" is exactly what you're looking for for retro games. They talk about things like memory layout, how unintended bugs work, the cpu instruction set, how things happen on the hardware level, etc etc. Highly recommended. https://www.youtube.com/@RGMechEx
Do they deliberately underrate the operational lifetimes of the nasa stuff for publicity reasons? Eg Spirit and Opportunity rovers survived 25x and 60x of their mission lifetime of 90 sols. And now this Ingenuity does 52 flights vs the 1 to 5 flight estimate.
Do they take like the 5th percentile of estimated life or something? Wonder if there is kind of a theory on how overbuilt you want to make things that you can't ever maintain and because of that, things usually end up lasting way longer than expected.
This recently happened to the trust wallet browser extension due to using mersenne twister to generate their private keys. Issue is that this PRNG is not cryptographically secure. I think trust wallet is more popular than coinbase wallet as well.
https://community.trustwallet.com/t/wasm-vulnerability-incid...
I use a chrome extension called Imagus that will load any linked image on mouseover (either instantly or after a configurable delay). The image can be shown as large as your current browser window and it will even load links to albums in such a way where scrolling while mouse-overed or pressing left and right on the keyboard will advance between images.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imagus/immpkjjlgap...
Any preliminary data about her sleep schedule? I was hoping the article would say something about that.
With the proliferation of high wH usb-c power banks (for less than 100 bucks), I don't see the value in getting a computer that adds weight or bulk for battery life. Reason being by default then I get a thin and light laptop, or I can choose to extend my battery life by additionally lugging a power bank (or two) if I want.
Yes, this ad says this computer is thin, but if you compare it to a commodity ultrabook from dell/hp/apple, it looks much thicker.
Interesting, from the article:
Does the fact that an olive oil does not have your seal mean that the olive oil is not authentic?
The answer is emphatically no. According to a study conducted by scientists from the FDA in a study published in 2015 that the risk of purchasing a bottle of adulterated EVOO is low (less than 5%). The scientists randomly sampled 88 bottles of EVOO that they purchased from supermarkets and online stores, and did not find a single instance of adulteration
I wonder where the opposite fact that I hear on the internet that most olive oil is adulterated comes from.
You can use sponsorblock to automatically skip a variety of creator-inserted ads and interaction reminders ("please subscribe/like" etc).
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
The concept of visa/mastercard was also largely unregulated at the time they launched. Take a look at the history of visa article on wikipeida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.#History
Visa was not the first, and other tries to do a credit/charge before them were much worse or limited in scope. This is similar today to what is happening in web3/crypto. If you don't think the ingenuity of humans will get us somewhere productive with these technologies, then I don't know what to say to you.
Quotes from the article about the launch of visa:
In the weeks leading up to the launch of BankAmericard, BofA had saturated Fresno mailboxes with an initial mass mailing (or "drop", as they came to be called) of 65,000 unsolicited credit cards
By March 1959, drops began in San Francisco and Sacramento; by June, BofA was dropping cards in Los Angeles; by October, the entire state of California had been saturated with over 2 million credit cards and BankAmericard was being accepted by 20,000 merchants.[18] However, the program was riddled with problems, as Williams (who had never worked in a bank's loan department) had been too earnest and trusting in his belief in the basic goodness of the bank's customers, and he resigned in December 1959. Twenty-two percent of accounts were delinquent, not the 4% expected, and police departments around the state were confronted by numerous incidents of the brand new crime of credit card fraud.[19] Both politicians and journalists joined the general uproar against Bank of America and its newfangled credit card, especially when it was pointed out that the cardholder agreement held customers liable for all charges, even those resulting from fraud.
The author is just defining "decentralized" based on what he can come up with arguments against. In doing so, he misses some very important properties of this decentralization (that he either doesn't realize or doesn't have arguments for).
To me, web3 is decentralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon.
For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1]
This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involvement or permission of compound itself. For example, there is a "compound" pool on https://curve.fi that allows users to deposit cTokens so that they can earn interest on their stablecoins while also providing liquidity for stablecoin swaps and earning swap fees as well on top. [2] In fact, with this pool, the user can deposit/withdrawal just pure ERC20 USDC instead and curve will deposit/withdrawal that into/from compound on behalf of the user, again, with no involvement of compound at all. (other than interacting with its "immutable" smart contract)
As a sidenote: Note that with web2, much of your data is locked away. Eg, twitter's closed api, gmail marking so many emails from self-hosted as spam, fb everything, American airlines not allowing scraping of a user's point wallet, cc points being non-transferrable, etc etc.
This deposit then gives the user back another ERC20 token "cCrv" that can then be used in other DeFi protocols without the involvement or authorization of curve.
At this point people are talking past each other because "centralization" can be used to refer to many things. The author's is just critiquing a tiny portion of the term decentralization (infrastructure), which I guess he most understands since his day job involves that.
I think it's that you don't notice things that work well. House foundations, light switches, filesystems, silicon manufacturing, water delivery, grocery store logistics, etc etc etc.
These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. It doesn't even occur to people day-to-day that these things can fail.
There was a recent great podcast interview of How I Built This with the goodreads founders. I would strongly recommend listening.
IIRC they talked about the early days, reasons for selling to amazon, being viral before that was a term, growing while being profitable, realizing they got more traffic than the New York Times did, why they thought their site was better than alternatives.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/04/1078415544/goodreads-otis-and...
Have you looked into auditing decentralized finance (defi) protocols? There is currently a huge demand and very low supply of good auditors. I believe there also are very many "anon" auditors in the space, so your past would not be a big problem I don't think.
Here is SEC commissioner Hester Peirce's dissenting opinion:
https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/peirce-blockfi-20220214
Essentially she says that while they did misrepresent the over collateralization, a 100m fine is too much since they did fulfill their end of the loans.
Additionally, she says that the categorization this stuff as securities is not effective. US consumers want interest on their crypto-assets now, but with companies having to jump through complicated SEC hoops this type of product will not be available in the near future (or maybe never available); not because of "customer protection" issues but because of sec over-regulation issues.
We can use storage systems to smooth out supply/demand of electricity.
They have a max capacity. They cannot be steady consumers of electricity for the 95%+ of the time that there is enough electricity to go around.
Mining is unsufficient, because it can't provide energy in the night when the sun is not shining. Storage systems can
I can use the same argument: Storage systems are insufficient, because they can't consume most of the excess generated power to make development of more renewables economically viable. Bitcoin miners can.
Aluminum smelters are typically slow to curb production as the costs of shutting down and restarting capacity are high.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-22/europe-s-...
"I think it's clear that one of the issues facing aluminum is that it is costly to bring down smelting capacity and even more costly to bring it back up again," Harvey said during a virtual presentation at the Bank of America Securities Global Metals, Mining & Steel Conference. "I think it has tended to be a relatively slow process for producers to come to those decisions."
Harvey said each potline at a smelter requires about $25 million to restart, which made it challenging for operators to reach curtailment decisions.
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
They have a max capacity. They cannot be steady consumers of electricity for the 95%+ of the time that there is enough electricity to go around.
The “work” does not need to be done.
That point is up for debate, but that's not the point I'm addressing.
Doing the work cannot have a societal benefit
I'm just pointing out that this use of electricity makes new renewable electricity deployments viable when they otherwise would not be. In that sense, if you think that replacing fossil fuel generation with renewables is valuable then bitcoin mining is valuable in that sense.
Renewables are cheaper already than fossil fuels. Their electricity generation is just not stable enough to replace all of fossil fuels. We can use bitcoin mining to smooth out supply/demand of electricity which allows us to use a higher proportion of renewables in our supply than would otherwise be possible.
I am not aware of any other large consumer of power that can cut power with seconds of notice without economic harm.
Eg: google/facebook datacenters, aluminum smelters, factories, etc.
Points 8-12 about energy consumption are well written, but ignore the fact that the flexibility in which bitcoin mining consumes electricity uniquely allows development of renewables in areas where further development would otherwise be economically non-viable.
In places with a high renewable generation mix, electricity prices are often very volatile, sometimes very cheap and even negative in times of high production and sometimes very expensive when production is low and demand is high. Proof of work mining uniquely only draws electricity when prices are economically viable, only buying electricity when there is excess supply, and can quickly shut down when that situation changes.
You can see this eg: in Texas where ERCOT has signed demand response agreements with many bitcoin mining companies to cut power when demand is high and supply is low (not that they would choose to continue operating anyway given the marginal price of electricity vs the marginal bitcoin production).
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/04/bitcoin-miners-say-theyre-fi...
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/energy/2022/02/04/texas-...
Is it really so dysfunctional there that if this happens to you (manager puts you on PIP upon being notified you're doing an internal transfer) there's no one to talk to to make this right?
Maybe his manager is a piece of shit, but I can't believe there's no one to report to above him that can see this for what it is and make it right?
Sorry for all the questions but:
Generally what percentage of the total supply do you get?
Do you have a lockup period?
Are these primarily defi protocols?
Can you disclose what projects you worked on?
Note when looking at 40% vs 60% of accidents (assuming males and females drive the same amount) the % difference seems small, only 20%, but actually this means males cause 50% more accidents than females do (60/40=1.5).