Hacker News: butvacuum

New comment by butvacuum in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

butvacuum — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 06:42:07 +0000

good thing the grid cares about long term average real power and not instanaenous reactive power then.

New comment by butvacuum in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

butvacuum — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:12:51 +0000

Alec presented it well- but we don't even need to take his word for it.

The Department of Energy has all the data available, so do a dozen different other private and public institutions. It didn't click for me till I ran some napkin math.

New comment by butvacuum in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

butvacuum — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:07:14 +0000

For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide. Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a square shorter on a side than most people's daily commute?

New comment by butvacuum in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

butvacuum — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:02:37 +0000

did you move the goal post, or erect a new one? either way- residential use is penny ante in terms of water usage. So much so that comparing data center use to residential use without including industrial, commercial, and irrigation can only be in bad faith.

Particularly since usage reports typically present all the numbers in the same chart or grid.

New comment by butvacuum in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

butvacuum — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:34:53 +0000

Horrifically pessimistic numbers for PV (winter in maine with conversion efficencies half what they are now)... comes out to about a 50x50 mile square of panels to generate the entire USA's power demand from the most recent DOE numbers. Ignore that we can have wind, solar, and crops* in the same area. Turns out, btw, crops don't like high noon beating down on them. As a result we can reduce water usage and get nearly the same crop yield if part of the field is covered with panels- at least according to some studies.

New comment by butvacuum in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

butvacuum — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:27:00 +0000

Because we already do. Its why electricity costs money. In my area big consumers and producers already pay through the nose to tie into the grid.

What we _should_ be asking is where all the money we paid for infrastructure and upkeep went for the last two decades of decreasing power usage.

New comment by butvacuum in "ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V SoC with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and Advanced HMI"

butvacuum — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:11:51 +0000

any reason you won't send #2 to a pcbfab? include assembly if that's an issue.

New comment by butvacuum in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

butvacuum — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:29:40 +0000

We can also time shift many of the things we do. Does your fridge need to run between 3-5pm in the heat of summer? or can it make sure its a little cooler to avoid running then? (trivial example, probably not a good one)

New comment by butvacuum in "Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it"

butvacuum — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:27:40 +0000

>Hey mr processor, the cards for transaction numbers x...y are stolen.

New comment by butvacuum in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

butvacuum — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:52:41 +0000

legally speaking.. if you're not sure of the risk- you don't document it.

New comment by butvacuum in "Desk for people who work at home with a cat"

butvacuum — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:29:19 +0000

sometimes its scent too.

New comment by butvacuum in "Asbestos, talc, and The Lancet's 1977 publication"

butvacuum — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:28:28 +0000

Well, afaik, the industry decided to (mostly) stop using Phosphate based cleaners without regulation.

New comment by butvacuum in "Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries"

butvacuum — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:11:37 +0000

'hot dog' belongs in a thesaurus, not a dictionary. It's just a type of sausage.

New comment by butvacuum in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

butvacuum — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:07:19 +0000

Screw over Meta then. Not everybody else.

Meta is the bozo in a panel van with no windows. All The legit porn sites put up Big Blinking Neon Signs.

New comment by butvacuum in "Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation"

butvacuum — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 22:03:43 +0000

Hydrogen systems just don't make sense. Neither do molecular Hydrogen Fuel Cells.

Now, green hydrogen for ammonia, and Ammonia fuel cells? Yes.

New comment by butvacuum in "BarraCUDA Open-source CUDA compiler targeting AMD GPUs"

butvacuum — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:47:08 +0000

you should push to a private working branch- and freqently. But, when merging your changes to a central branch you should squash all the intermediate commits and just provide one commit with the asked for change.

Enshrining "end of day commits", "oh, that didn't work" mistakes, etc is not only demoralizing for the developer(s), but it makes tracing changes all but impossible.

New comment by butvacuum in "BarraCUDA Open-source CUDA compiler targeting AMD GPUs"

butvacuum — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:13:47 +0000

Since when is squashing noisesum commits an AI activity instead of good manners?

New comment by butvacuum in "Ghidra by NSA"

butvacuum — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:25:50 +0000

I wonder if renaming variables to all reference a single movie or book (go through the exe and rename each new variable to the next word or letter in Monty Python's Holy Grail) would do anything.

New comment by butvacuum in "Richard Carrington's first portrait has been found"

butvacuum — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:51:23 +0000

Must have been quite the event.

New comment by butvacuum in "How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?"

butvacuum — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:30:21 +0000

theres a ton of degeneative stuff too that's not strongly age corrilated.