It's an "all in one" in that it has compute and a keyboard. But the mouse isn't integrated (literally just a wired mouse you lug around with it) and no display. So you can't actually walk it right up to a bench and start using it like a laptop. It has built in storage for your "stuff" but again, it's not fully portable so what else are you going to be carrying with it? Is it supposed to be used by a developer or a technician? And if a technician, why portable and why a non-standard keyboard layout? I haven't even gotten to the Workbench software yet, which seems to be appealing to neither an engineer nor a technician and is a Linux OS that somehow costs more than Windows.

This is silly and it bothers me more than it probably should that they say this "is designed for offices, workshops, labs, and factories" when this doesn't seem like they've spent any time in those environments. I'm just gonna keep shipping Asus Nucs running NixOS to my technician workstations and let my engineers use laptops.

Additionally (and optionally for Tangled use), I'm also hosting my own PDS which is my personal data server. This is the home for my AT proto profile, which contains all of my AT proto activity like Bluesky comments and likes. Tangled does look at the PDS for identity but the code is in the parallel structure of the knot. I suspect this is cause AT proto wasn't built for code so the PDS isn't sufficient for an entire git repository but don't quote me on that.

Finally I'm running a spindle, which is just a CI runner, and that's registered with Tangled very similarly to how a self-hosted GitHub or Gitlab action runner would be.

I used to work in engine development and calibration. There aren't many people who know how to do engine cal and it's incredibly important to get your engine emissions certified to sell in a market like the USA. The problem is that most people who know how to do it work for a car manufacturer (OEM). So when I had that on my LinkedIn I would get pretty regular messages from some consultancy or another offering hundreds of dollars per hour to chat with me about my expertise. Of course I couldn't go talk to a competitor but I'm sure a lot of engineers were happy to make a few hundred bucks chatting with some generic consultant who was writing a general industry report with anonymous data and background info.

Well the customer was usually a competitor or a foreign automaker exploring entering the US market. Everyone who could help them understand the timelines, cost, and process worked for their competitors. So the critical info got passed through consultancies into sanitized anonymized reports; laundering.

Note: I'm not sure whether talking to a consultancy would have violated my employment contract at the time but I never took the calls so I had no reason to look it up. I know that coworkers did and just called it a gray area. I pass no moral judgement one way or another.

A better web UI for the queued jobs on my spindle would be great btw!

Which makes this a good time to remind everyone about the Keep Android Open movement:

https://keepandroidopen.org/

> "Starting in 2027*, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID."

You're arguing against a strawman on your other points since I didn't make a generalization about all cooking and wouldn't have listed sourdough or brisket in the analogy.

I'm not sure if this analogy holds up in the AI software metaphor that the author of the blog post is making.

https://ia.samaltman.com/

That's just not an acceptable modality of software for complex hardware industries. I'm not going to launch a half-decade long engineering project on a subscription software where I rent access to my own design files and logic. You can't access CAD on a plane, in flaky WiFi, or at a remote test facility or site. Until they let me just buy and run their software on my team's computers it's a non-starter.

But there have been entire books written about the fact that right now we have the technology to drastically curtail climate change and yet they're under utilized because of a complicated and murky set of political, social, and systemic reasons. There are a huge numbers of problems for which very good solution plans have been detailed yet the gap is in execution.

The AGI-pilled must think one of two things; either there's an as-yet-undiscovered plan that's both world-changing yet trivial to implement or we'll all worship at the altar of the machine god with such fervor that even if it spits out a relatively obvious and iterative climate change plan the world will eagerly follow it. Both premises seem laughably unlikely to me.

https://tangled.org/tranquil.farm/tranquil-pds

https://docs.tangled.org/knot-self-hosting-guide

https://docs.tangled.org/spindles#self-hosting-guide

edit: TIL HN doesn't support markdown, why does this surprise me every time.

I'm currently shopping for a local LLM setup and between something like the Framework Desktop with 64-128GB of shared RAM or just adding a 3090 or 4090 to my homelab so I'm very curious what hardware is working well for others.

It's a really good drivetrain that was unfortunately made untenable for a long time by a combination of regulation and market forces.

From a pure energy efficiency perspective you can't beat economies of scale. A stationary power plant (even ones that are just big gasoline engines) run at a constant load and RPM so they can be optimized for pure efficiency, they rarely have to start, warm up, and shut down, and they can use larger and more expensive exhaust aftertreatment systems. Most energy conversions grow more efficient with scale and this is no different. The locomotive powertrain works for a handful of reasons but one of them is you can build much more efficient engines that are optimized for a single constant speed and load. But most of the advancements in internal combustion engines over the last 20-30 years don't increase peak efficiency but increase the conditions in which they're efficient. Variable valve timing and lift are probably the most underrated and overpowered technologies that have transformed engines from having one narrow regime of high efficiency to running well over a huge range of the map. But turbocharging, variable intake geometries, 7+ speed transmissions, and mild hybrid systems like belt-starter-generators get honorable mentions here. However we're not talking about anything close to EV-levels of efficiency. I think the cutting edge research engines are running in the mid to high 40s for thermal efficiency (percentage of fuel energy captured as useful work), most passenger car engines probably peak in the mid 30s.

So while there is some efficiency to be gained by a more locomotive-style system it's not as much as you would hope. In the industry that's called a series hybrid system, vs a parallel hybrid system where either ICE or EV power can go to the wheels. The benefits of a series system are more emissions and product features. You can get the full torque and power of an EV, you can start and stop the IC engine in a more emissions optimized way, and and you can filter load spikes to use a small engine that meets average not peak load.

From a more pragmatic perspective, with the energy density of gasoline and other liquid fuels it's probably best to use it in applications for which you just can't use full electrification. Planes are currently the best example of this. It's also worth noting that passenger cars benefit massively from strong hybridization because of the uneven load cycles so that's a technology where you can deploy a gasoline engine but then claw back a lot of the efficiency losses with hybrids. That's not always true, for example boats don't really have a regen cycle so hybridization just doesn't get much.

Edit: another important point is that the "cost" to acquire gasoline is only the very end of the process. The energy has already been gathered, stored, and most of the processing is complete. Our cost (in money and energy) to "make" gasoline is really just gathering it. This is why the comparison to renewables is often a hard sell, it's just apples to oranges. Gasoline started on third base, renewables are batting from the plate. Some of the internal combustion enthusiasts are holding up e-fuels or synthetic fuels as the solution but then we have to pay for the entire energy gathering and processing pipeline and still be using a conversion method that's not at all efficient. It's the worst of both worlds.